The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “There is good and bad in everything,” MacDonnell said quickly. “Many is the drink that Sam Cooper and I had together in the old days. And now he stood looking at me with a vain smile on his face. Poor Gerry O’Donnell has as much claim to be called gentry. The O’Donnells are the old stock.”

  “One thing is certain,” Elliott said. “Cooper and his friends will not rest here.”

  “Nor those Whiteboys either,” Duggan said. “They are bold, determined lads, would you not say?”

  “They well may be,” Elliott said. “But they are also foolish men. Perhaps they can keep the barony in turmoil for a long time, but they cannot win, because they have no clear sense of what they want. Is it to prevent evictions, or get lower rent, or to pay off old scores? Perhaps they only want violence itself.”

  “Ignorant men, you say,” Duggan said. “Perhaps you know men of learning who would advise them, Mr. Elliott.”

  Elliott nodded. “Advise, that is the word. Not lead them, they have their leaders.”

  “And what advice would they give?”

  “In Wexford,” Elliott said, “the rising was made because the people there joined with the United Irishmen.”

  “And were they not the foolish men, those people in Wexford? When they looked around for the United Men who were to give them arms, they were nowhere to be found. I think, sir, that if a fellow was so wicked as to be a Whiteboy, he would do best to trust to himself and to darkness, and not be relying on the fine promises of gentlemen.”

  “The rising in Wexford was led by a gentleman,” Elliott said. “It was led by Bagenal Harvey.”

  Poor Harvey, Elliott thought. Dragged out of Bagenal Castle by a mob of pikemen and placed, reluctant, at their head, marched bewildered up and down Wexford, half general and half prisoner, bargaining and cajoling for the lives of prisoners, quarrelling with drunken and boastful peasants. It was in peasant dress that he tried at last to escape. Now his head was skewered above Wexford gaol.

  “There was a travelling man who told us about that gentleman,” Duggan said. “He isn’t much of a recommendation.” For the first time, Duggan smiled, showing broken and discoloured teeth.

  “Look here, Malachi,” MacDonnell said suddenly. “I did not bring you together with Mr. Elliott so that you could play the fool with him.”

  “I have been wondering about that,” Duggan said. “Not that it is not pleasant to spend the morning with two gentlemen of the barony.”

  “Nor with me, either. John Moore vouches for Elliott, and I will vouch for John Moore. You know very well why we are talking with you.”

  “Even so,” Duggan said. “You tell me why, Randall.”

  His manner towards MacDonnell, Elliott saw, was far easier and more familiar. It went well beyond his unexpected use of a Christian name. MacDonnell was poised between the two worlds, half gentleman, half prosperous peasant. It did not bother MacDonnell, blunt, affable man, ready for a drink with anyone. But between Elliott and the sly, brutish-seeming Duggan lay a deep, unbridgeable gulf. Bagenal Harvey must have felt the same, as he wandered the Wexford roads with his pikemen.

  “You are a Whiteboy,” MacDonnell said. “One of the Whiteboys of Killala, you call yourself. If the magistrates were less foolish than they are, they would have sent you off to Ballina gaol. And Malcolm Elliott and I are United Irishmen. We have taken their oath. Now there is plain speaking for you.”

  “It is indeed,” Duggan said. “It is indeed, Randall. You were ever a plainspoken man.” He picked up the third, unused tumbler, and filled it with punch. “I used to be the devil for this stuff, when I was a young man. I have not tasted it in ten years.” He held it to the small window’s watery light. “When I got my tongue around a belt of it, there was no stopping me.”

  “I remember that,” MacDonnell said. “You had a strong head for the spirits. Sure, used you not help my own father unload the brandy from the French ships at Kilcummin strand, and there was always a cask or two the less at the final count.”

  “And well your father knew it. He was a generous man without making a show of it as some do.”

  “There will be other ships coming below in Munster,” Elliott said. “But not with brandy.”

  Duggan took a long swallow, and then smacked his lips. “By God, it tastes the same. I had forgotten the taste of it.” He emptied the tumbler on the dirt floor, and replaced it on the table.

  “And when the French land,” Elliott said, “Munster will rise up.”

  “It may,” Duggan said. “But Munster is a long way from Mayo. As far as Wexford.”

  “In the south and in the midlands the United Irish are strong,” Elliott said. “And in Galway and Sligo there are United Men. Not as many, but they are growing. If the whole of the island rises up we can win.”

  “Win what, Mr. Elliott? That is what puzzles me. You are a gentleman and a landlord. What more is it that you want?”

  Elliott hesitated, uncertain how best to answer him. “Freedom,” he said at last.

  “Freedom from what?” Duggan asked, and his puzzlement seemed genuine.

  “From England,” Elliott said. “From a government and a parliament that does England’s bidding.” Freedom from the past, he wanted to add, but that would have made no sense to Duggan.

  “More power to your arm,” Duggan said. “But that means nothing to Mayo. It is the landlords have their heels on our necks here. Sure you have no thought to take the landlords off us. You are landlords yourselves, the two of you.”

  “You can never tell,” MacDonnell said. “In a rebellion you can never tell. They begin as one thing and end as something else.”

  Elliott looked at him sharply. MacDonnell was smiling easily. “There are landlords and there are landlords. Now you take a mean land-grabber of a landlord, like Cooper or like your own man Gibson. A fellow like that might not fare too well in the hurly-burly.”

  Elliott began to speak, and then checked himself. MacDonnell and Duggan were looking closely at each other.

  “In a rebellion,” MacDonnell said, “we would be on the one side, and men like Gibson and Cooper would be on the other. All of them would— Falkiner and Saunders and the rest of them. It would go hard with them if the men of Mayo rose up. Sure what is it the Whiteboys can do but kill cattle and burn crops, and fire off the odd shot from behind a hedge. And you will be scattered in time, make no doubt of that.”

  “Is that how you see it yourself, Mr. Elliott?” Duggan asked.

  MacDonnell put a hand on Elliott’s arm and squeezed it.

  “There is a score of lads on my own land,” MacDonnell said, “who have no time for the Whiteboys, but if I say the word they will take the United oath and I can lead them out. And well you know that. The men on the MacDonnell lands have always followed the MacDonnells. And the same is true with Corny O’Dowd and Tom Bellew. I have taken the United oath, and so have Corny and Tom. We will lift no hand unless the French come, but on that day we will go out onto the road. And the same is true for certain men on the coast, at Westport, whose names you would know.”

  Duggan rubbed a hand across his mop of stiff, wiry hair, but he said nothing.

  “We want your lads, Malachi, and we want you.”

  “I am not a MacDonnell of Ballycastle,” Duggan said. “The Whiteboys are but ignorant poor lads, and I am but one of them. Sure we don’t have leaders at all. It is but a band of ignorant poor lads.”

  “Tell that to your grandmother,” MacDonnell said.

  Duggan laughed, a length of heavy chain dragged up from the deep, heavy-muscled chest.

  “If you take the United oath,” Elliott said, “you must take your lead from the United Men. And we have no interest in houghing cattle or cropping the ears of tithe proctors. It is this island which is our interest, and not a barony in Mayo.”

  “Well now, Mr. Elliott,” Duggan said, “I will tell you what I might be able to do. I will keep my eye skinned for some lads that might be Whiteboys, and I will pass along
to them what you have said, and I will take counsel with them.”

  “We ask no more, Malachi,” MacDonnell said. “We ask no more.” He filled their three glasses. “Now take just a sup of this, for the sake of the bargain.”

  “I will be happy to drink your healths,” Elliott said. “But the oath is the bargain.”

  “You are a gentleman of very stiff ways,” Duggan said. “Like all gentlemen.”

  When they were standing alone by their horses on the hot, dusty road, Elliott said, “I have little use for your Duggan. He is a sly bully.”

  MacDonnell smiled. “He is that. He is as bad-tempered a rogue as can be found in a day’s ride. What did you expect?”

  “Something a bit better than that.”

  MacDonnell spat, and then rubbed his boot absently over the gob. “You had best look somewhere else for it then, Malcolm. That is what we have here. And we could do worse than Duggan, and perhaps we will before this song is sung. Have you never taken a look at those wild creatures from Belmullet, who are no better than pagans? ‘Christ never died for Belmullet,’ is a saying they have in Erris.”

  Elliott smiled. “If He died for Malachi Duggan, He struck a poor bargain.”

  MacDonnell shouted with delight, and put his hard hand on Elliott’s shoulder. “You are a terrible blasphemous Protestant, by Jesus.”

  “You do well enough yourself,” Elliott said, still smiling.

  There had been a time, seven or eight years ago, when he and MacDonnell were two of a kind, best riders in the hunt, drinking together at the races, the last two to leave a party in the streaky dawn. Before Dublin, before London. Now he saw MacDonnell as a man whose world was bounded by his horizon, bay and flat fields and distant mountains. Belmullet was the far edge of his world, like the empty white spaces on an explorer’s map.

  “A pair of right fools we must be,” MacDonnell said. “Landlords bargaining with Whiteboys. We will be lucky to get out of this without ropes around our necks. There were landlords hanged in Wexford. Bagenal Harvey was a landlord and so was Grogan.”

  “You have the right of it there,” Elliott said, the smile leaving his lips. “There is fair chance of hanging.”

  “I gave young Johnny Moore an easy answer, if you take my meaning. Neither yes nor no. But by Jesus, when they carted those lads off to Ballina it made up my mind for me. It is us or them, I said to myself, and I won’t see that matter settled without a fight. The time is long past when a little shit like Sam Cooper can ride up and down the barony acting like the Grand Turk.”

  “Well now,” Elliott said. “Whiteboys. This county has always taken a hard line with Whiteboys. Twenty years ago those lads would have accounted themselves fortunate to reach Ballina alive.”

  “By God, they would,” MacDonnell said. “In my daddy’s time, or yours. But that was long since. And there is still not enough justice in this island to fill a parson’s hat. Your Frenchmen may bring us some, along with their muskets and their soldiers.”

  “Yes,” Elliott said. “Perhaps.”

  “And perhaps not?” MacDonnell asked quickly. “You are a peculiar sort of a rebel, Malcolm Elliott. A reluctant rebel. It is encouragement that you should be pouring on my head and not doubt.”

  “Ach,” Elliott said. “Pay no attention to me, Randall. I have known for three years or more that there was no hope for this country but through rebellion. No hope at all. I have no doubts on that score. But God did not build me for a rebel. It is as though I am acting against my own nature.”

  “You are in a sorry state, then, and you have my pity. When I stood on Steeple Hill and watched the carts moving off, and the women screeching and running down the road after them, I said to myself, By God, Randall, to hell with it, and when the Frenchmen land in the south, I will raise Mayo. And I can do that, by God. Myself and yourself and Corny O’Dowd and Tom Bellew, and Duggan with his Whiteboys if they will throw in with us. And when I thought that, it was as if I had taken a naggin of whiskey. It was as if I had won the Castlebar race. Sweet Jesus, I said to myself, and I wanted to throw my hat into the air. By the blood of Mary ever virgin, we will be the cocks of the walk. We will rule Mayo.”

  “Listen to yourself,” Elliott said, smiling again. “You are a blaspheming, idolatrous Papist. And you understand as little about this rebellion as you do about the works of Plato.”

  “I understand it far better than you do, I think,” MacDonnell said. He put a foot in the stirrup and swung gracefully to the saddle. “We will rule Mayo.” He touched his crop to his hat, and rode off towards the north road.

  But Elliott rode south, towards Ballina, where the Killala lads lay in gaol, towards Moat House. Far to his left, the distant Ox Mountains rose into blue haze. His road skirted the slow-moving Moy, a good river for salmon. He had fished it as a boy, bent pin and skewered worm dangling from string. It was his world, as much as it was MacDonnell’s, but he was not at home in it any longer. In Dublin he had hungered for it, first at Trinity and then in his lodgings near King’s Inn. He could remember then each bend of the river, the look of every sky, the feel of autumn paths beneath his boots. A gull, wheeling grey wings in the blue and silver Dublin sky would carry him there in an instant, and he would see the river emptying into Killala Bay, smell the brackish waters of the bay. Now it was farmland, dull horizon, flat and tasteless air. To raise his spirits, he struggled without success to recapture his memories of the scene which stretched before him.

  Killala, August 8

  “You have the sense of it grand, Ferdy,” MacCarthy said. “But it is a great poem that we have on our hands here, and not a lease or a bill of sale. Now let us go after it again.”

  They sat together at the low, rough table in O’Donnell’s kitchen, the open book of Ovid between them, its binding loose and its leaves discoloured.

  “We will take it again,” he said patiently. “Inde per immensum ventis . . .” The words echoed within his skull, sounds ripe and potent as the clanging of bells.

  Inde per immensum ventis discordibus actus

  nunc huc, nunc illuc exemplo nubis aquosae

  fertur et ex alto seductas aethere longe

  despectat terras totumque supervolat orbem.

  He moved his eyes down the familiar page. The artful heathen, what man could match him! But my God, the language that had been given him, resourceful and muscular. There was no task to which it could not be set. It stretched across the page in coils of easy power.

  “Perseus is making his way through the air, through the heavens themselves, and soon the whole world will lie stretched out before him. He is carried through immense stretches of air, the poet tells us, first this way and then that, like the mist itself. And as he looks down, the whole world is spread before him, or what they thought was the world, the poor heathens. He didn’t see this place at all. ’Tis like the seabirds as you can watch them from Downpatrick Head with their great wings, so high that with their little eyes they can see from Galway to Donegal. But free though they seem to us, the winds are their masters, and toss them about any way they choose. Keep the seabirds at Downpatrick at the back of your mind like a picture, and then have another try at it.”

  But O’Donnell placed his hard, heavy hand upon the page, blotting out the words. A black cloud fell upon the great southern sea.

  “Ach, Owen. It was kindness itself for you to come here with your books, but I cannot put my mind to Perseus or to seabirds. Not with poor Gerry in gaol with those other fellows.”

  “ ’Tis hard for you, Ferdy, and far harder for Gerry. But you will have a long wait of it until the assizes.”

  “Sure the two of us know what will happen then,” O’Donnell said. He pushed away the copy of Ovid. “I am a peaceable man, but if I could get my two hands around Paudge Nally’s throat, I would squeeze the life from him. I would so. He will swear Gerry’s life away with that lying throat.”

  MacCarthy, who had no words for him, closed the book, and patted the loose pages into pl
ace. As daylight was fading, Perseus came to rest upon the border of the world, far to the west, where the sea spread out its waters, and the thousand flocks and thousand herds of Atlas wandered at their sweet will across grassy plains.

  “This was the year we were to get a bit ahead of the rent,” O’Donnell said, “with the harvest as fine as it will be, God willing. Maire and Gerry and I were talking of it not long ago at this table. O God, Owen, they are likely to hang him at the end of all this. Do you think that yourself?”

  “Ach, sure, Ferdy, the assizes are a long way off, and God is good. A lot could happen between now and then.” But there was nothing more certain, not with Paudge Nally to stand up in Castlebar court, with his hand on the Protestant Bible.

  “I declare to God, Owen. If I heard this night that the French had landed, I would find a pike and go join them. I would so.”

  “You would not be alone. I stopped at the tavern in Kilcummin and I heard that said. And the men who said it were not Whiteboys, to my best knowledge. Ach, by now they may be. That was an hour ago. Quigley is swearing them in at a great rate, and it is the same in Killala. Sam Cooper and his yeomen are great recruiting sergeants for the Whiteboys. Cooper and Duggan! A fine pair of ignorant bloody ruffians.”

  O’Donnell sighed. “Sam Cooper. Did you ever hear it said that Mount Pleasant was once O’Donnell land? ’Tis true. There is a great bloody parchment in the chest that says so. It goes back to the days of the Stuarts. My father was always giving out about it when he had a drop taken.”

  “There are parchments like that in chests across the length and breadth of Ireland,” MacCarthy said, “and ’tis best to let them rot away and not think of them. It is Cromwell’s crew that rule the roost, and Cromwell was a long time ago. There was an old man in Fermoy in County Cork. He had an entire oaken box of charters and deeds and the like, and he living in a hovel. He would drive you mad with his boasting, but he couldn’t rub two shillings together.”

  “ ’Tis not boasting I am at,” O’Donnell said. “But it has driven me mad these past days to think of Cooper lording over us and sending off poor Gerry. It was in the middle of the night they came, and they burst in with Maire not decent. Cooper is the man. Paudge Nally is but a monkey perched on Cooper’s shoulder.”