The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  In 1759, however, the Lord Glenthorne who was father to the present earl determined to move to Mayo. The eccentricity which had secretly been nurturing itself among the Glenthornes had burst into flower in this pear-shaped original, a lover of boys and sopranos and a patron of the arts. His decision was regarded by his Cheshire neighbours as but a further instance of his frivolousness, and for once a welcome one. He had spent years flitting about the courts of Italy, trailed by portraitists, blackamoor pages in turbans, and a pathetic, hard-visaged wife. Now, so Cheshire reasoned, he had snapped the final cords and was adrift towards space. But in his mind’s eye he had seen a mansion, immense, exquisite, and chaste, and placed within a natural setting of wild and picturesque grandeur.

  Eight years were devoted to the creation of Glenthorne Castle. Niebuhr, the great German architect, took up residence with the agent and spent six months pacing the ground upon which he proposed to build. He held to his eye a glass of his own design, which composed into an optical symmetry the hills and bogland and estuary at which he peered. Then stonemasons were imported from England and ornamental plasterers from Italy. Lord Glenthorne in London, with Niebuhr’s detailed drawings in hand, commissioned from Parisian craftsmen the furnishings and hangings for each of the many rooms. Some thirty families were cleared from the land upon which were laid down the gardens and walks, the artificial lake and waterfall, and the two mazes.

  And yet it was not the triumph for which he had hoped. It did not eclipse, in magnificence or folly, the other great mansions of the day, Santry Court near Dublin, Castletown and Carton in Kildare, Russborough in Wicklow, and a score of others. Its unique advantage was its remote location, for most of its rivals lay within the civilised pale. Travellers through the wastes of Mayo responded to it with awe and stupefaction. That it existed for the sole pleasure of one person added to its air of the uncanny, the ensorcelled. For the Countess, after enduring Mayo for eight months, returned to England, taking with her their son, the present lord. Her husband was left alone, to take his solitary walks through his ordered labyrinths, tripping, near-sighted, over his peacocks. For Glenthorne, too, the pleasures of his palace faded after a few years, and he departed for Italy to rejoin a former lover, now a youthful bishop.

  The effect of Glenthorne Castle upon his hundreds of peasants was complex and profound. Song and legend had told them of their own majestic, vanquished princes and chieftains. Beyond those, more ancient still, were the kings and heroes of the sagas, and, beyond even those, rose up gigantic wraiths, the gods of the old religion, dwelling within the wealth and splendour of light itself. But Glenthorne Castle suggested to them an absolute power of existence such as no O’Neill or O’Connor had ever possessed. It was an image by which their imaginations grasped historical and political actuality. Alien and enigmatic, the absent Big Lord had at last revealed his limitless and capricious will. Of the Big Lord himself, nothing at first was known save his high walls and colonnades, his lakes and waterfall, but these sufficed. The brief years of his residence in Mayo had endowed him with the characteristics of a legendary being, exotic and remote. What in Cheshire had been judged the eccentricities of an effeminate aristocrat seemed to Mayo eyes the manners of a splendid, grotesque sovereign. Few enough saw him, but the servants carried tales.

  The Big Lord now was his son, and he too remained invisible. A quiet man, evangelical in his religion and Whiggish in his politics, he divided his year between Cheshire and London. He entertained but two deep passions, a detestation of the African slave trade and a hatred of his father’s memory. That Glenthorne Castle was a wonder to behold he did not doubt, but he chose not to look upon it. It had been the crowning folly of his father’s life, a sybaritic life wasted upon fripperies and base sins. In nightmares he beheld it with horrid clarity, like a scene from Vathek, blanched towers soaring upwards, naked serfs crouching by the iron gates. The very word Irish was repellent to him. When he heard himself described as “an Irish landlord” he was torn between embarrassment and incredulity. He chastised himself as a nabob, drawing his wealth not from brown Hindoo or black African, but from the white slaves of a neighbouring island. The thought was unbearable.

  The Glenthorne estates, he determined, should at least have the benefit of a wise and prudent stewardship. Towards that end, and after careful reflexion and enquiry, he selected as his agent Andrew Creighton, Glasgow born but Cambridge educated. One wing of Glenthorne Castle was made into a residence for Creighton and his family, and he was given a salary suitable to his attainments. He also received two percent of the annual revenues of the estate. Lord Glenthorne’s only instruction to him was that he should take as his model the good steward in the New Testament. It was his task to manage the lands and goods which had been entrusted to him, to look to the well-being of the peasants and the livestock, and to deal with all men in a candid and forthright manner. Glenthorne had chosen well, for Creighton found in the sprawling, chaotic lands a challenge both to his skill and to his conscience.

  His first task was to determine the exact extent and condition of the estates, the terms upon which small portions of it had been leased away, the complex network of document, claim, and custom by which the lands had been stitched across the county. As he had anticipated, this carried him into a series of lawsuits with the smaller landlords, but all of them were settled to his satisfaction. He had next to take a census of the human and animal population, and this was no simple task, for his predecessor had fallen into the slovenly ways of the countryside. For some forty years, the remote boglands and mountain wastes had harboured squatters. His predecessor, following local custom, had exacted no rent from these wretches. Creighton was uncertain as to how they should be dealt with, but he wished at least to know their numbers and their names. He spent weeks on this task, a pale, blunt-featured man dressed in sober brown, riding broken mountain paths. Behind him rode an Irish-speaking bailiff. The squatters fled at the sound of hoofbeats, entire families scrambling up the sides of high hills.

  When the task was completed, he transferred the information to a large and intricately coded map which he hung in his office. This had once been the smaller of the castle’s two music rooms, and the map faced a painting of the Judgement of Paris, executed in eighteenth-century court dress, after the manner of Watteau, by one of Lord Glenthorne’s protégés. For the first year of his stewardship, Creighton spent most of his time in this office, acquiring a mastery over the details of the estate as they presently existed. This task, however, was but the preliminary to a far larger one, that of bringing order out of chaos.

  Creighton was a student of the new science of scientific husbandry and agriculture. He had published pamphlets on the subject and was in correspondence with the other authorities. It was for this reason, joined to his zeal and his probity of character, that Glenthorne had chosen him. His intention was to determine in what manner the estates might ideally be ordered, and then to impose that order upon them. It was clear to him from the first that the total population upon the estates was too large, and the size of the existing farms too small, for efficient farming. Moreover, little serious thought had been given to the question of what crops were best suited to particular sections. Elsewhere in Ireland, methods of reclaiming bogland were being explored, but not in Mayo.

  Creighton knew that the plough of his logic was driving through hills and athwart the contours, and this troubled him deeply, for he was a humane man. Firmer and more rational principles could be imposed upon Glenthorne lands by a stroke of his pen. His signature on an order of ejectment could sweep from their holdings scores of those peasants who hailed him as he rode past them, whose music floated to him, faintly, from the cabins. But this he could not quite bring himself to do, and he was troubled by his reluctance. It prevented him from performing his duty and discharging his pledge to make the estate into a model of sober and profitable industry. The life of this barbarous society offended his morals: the peasants seemed fond of filth, were lazy, drank to excess,
were sunk in their superstitions, gabbled in an uncouth tongue, quarrelled and fought at fairs. And yet they were a community in which men and women loved and worked, married and had children; they were bound to each and to their soil. To root them up would be a monstrous cruelty.

  He temporised. He conducted business on the usual lines, but with a zeal and an intelligence lacking in his predecessors. During each year of his stewardship, the revenues rose slightly. Yet these revenues were never more than a quarter of what the lands might have been made to yield, and, knowing this, he knew that he sinned, that he served his master badly. Once a year he submitted to Lord Glenthorne an account of that stewardship, detailed and meticulously honest, together with a candid admission of his various humane inefficiencies. Glenthorne responded, each year, in a letter of civil and bland generalities, sympathetic and faintly unctuous. Creighton had hoped, each year, for a rebuke from England, a peremptory insistence that the land be forced to yield its maximum profit. The demand was never made. In time, Creighton came to regard the Big Lord much as the peasants did, as a distant, inscrutable creature whose ways were fathomless. His torn conscience gave him no peace.

  In the privacy of his office he began to indulge a phantasy which claimed a greater hold upon him than he realised. It began simply enough. In a blank ledger book he began a kind of memoir describing the estates as they would flourish under proper scientific management. He went on from there to make sketches of the model farms he longed to create, the chapels and schoolhouses he hoped to build. Then, one October evening, he cleared the long library table which ran almost the length of one wall, and began the construction of the ideal Glenthorne estate in miniature, developing, over the four years of evenings which he devoted to the task, considerable ingenuity and a certain small degree of artistry. It was a plaything of the imagination, a different kind of sin. Now, the task completed, he could loom over it like Gulliver, admiring lakes made of bits of mirror.

  Creighton had no notion of the figure he cut, riding the roads with dropped reins, spectacles perched on the end of his snub nose, making endless notes in a leather memorandum book, dismounting to crumble a few grains of corn between his fingers or to order the deepening of a trench. To the small landlords he was a canting, sanctimonious tradesman who had been miscast in a gentleman’s role. To the peasants, he was a bloodless petty tyrant, harsh-voiced and unsmiling. The census with which he had begun his career set the seal upon his reputation. “I will have the name of every one of them,” he was rumoured to have said, “whether he lives in cabin, barn, or stable.” When MacCarthy, newly come to Killala, heard the story, he dubbed him “King Herod.” And “Herod” Creighton he remained, to gentleman and peasant alike. Most would have laughed at his troubled conscience, had they known of it.

  The one man in whom he could confide was Broome. He visited him one evening, to pour out his troubled feelings, and was astonished when Broome, leaping from his chair, seized his hand and wrung it. For Broome, too, felt that he had failed in his duty, that Killala had rejected his ministry. The two men sat together, late into the night, each describing the hopes which he had brought to Mayo, the agony with which he had watched them sink into the bogs. They met often after that, and at last became conspirators, for when Creighton once announced his intention to quit the agency, Broome dissuaded him, reminding him of the fate which might thereafter befall the peasants. And yet Creighton’s consciousness of guilt continued to press upon him, the guilt of a man who has betrayed his talents.

  On the night of August 15 he was working late in the office. He heard distant noises, a confusion of voices, the shattering of glass, and two sharp cracks like musket explosions. He leaped up, but from the office windows saw only blackness. He lit a lantern and carried it into the hall, paused to shout downstairs to the servants, and then ran outside. Far off, a glow appeared in two windows of the unused right wing which balanced his. He raced along one wide sweep of colonnade, through an arcade, and then down the other colonnade. His lantern illuminated Roman statues set into niches, sculpted togas and upflung arms. As he ran, he shouted. The drapery behind two tall, shattered windows was aflame. By its light, he saw figures tumbling out the door. They paused, at some distance from the house, and yelled at him. He could not understand them. Then they disappeared into the darkness. He heard footsteps behind him, and turned to see Hendricks, the house steward, carrying a pistol.

  The entrance door had been smashed in. They went inside together, cautiously, and then, walking more rapidly, went first down a long corridor and then one at a right angle to it, coming at last to an open door beyond which flames glowed. Working together, they ripped down the drapery and smothered the fire. Then they looked around them. They were in the gun room.

  The previous Lord Glenthorne had been neither a sportsman nor a soldier, but he had been an avid collector of firearms, as of much else. These had lined two walls in their glass cases, muskets and fowling pieces, cases of duelling pistols of exquisite French and Swiss design. The cases had been broken open and emptied of their contents. Nothing remained save an assortment of weapons of grotesque shape and exotic origins, antique arquebuses and muskets of Turkish or Oriental shape. These lay strewn on the parquetry.

  Hendricks lighted candles. The air was acrid. As they walked from case to case, still without speaking, servants came into the room, timid and curious. Shaking his head, too dazed and startled to grasp what he was seeing, Creighton gave Hendricks orders to post a guard, and to have the wreckage attended to. Then he left the room, and walked back towards his own quarters.

  Once again the lantern jogged past marble togas, heads of white marble. The night air was chill. He paused. Mayo stretched away from him into the night. Close at hand, the cold, empty faces of ancient consuls and generals. Creighton shivered, caught between puzzlement and annoyance.

  “This is a very bad business, sir,” Hendricks said, walking towards him.

  “It is worse than that,” Creighton said.

  “Until now,” Hendricks said, “the ruffians felt no need for firearms. Putting together the muskets and the blunderbusses and the pistols, they must have made off with more than seventy.”

  “Yes,” Creighton said. “I never counted them. Who would think to count them, outlandish weapons from the Lord knows where.”

  “There is something else that troubles me, sir. They went down two corridors of doors without touching a one of them.” Hendricks was a merchant’s younger son. He had the harsh accent of East Sligo. A faint burr reminded Creighton of his own Glasgow. “They knew what they wanted and they knew where to find it. And what that likely means is that they were told by a servant or a former servant. This is very different from the kind of deviltry they have been up to.”

  They stood without speaking, their faces illuminated by the flickering lantern. Then Creighton said, “We are isolated here, Hendricks. Tomorrow we must gather a score or so of the most reliable peasants and organise a patrol.”

  “The reliable peasants, Mr. Creighton. I wonder which ones you have in mind.”

  “I know,” Creighton said. The fingers of his free hand pulled at his cheek.

  Two of the young maids came tripping up to them, dancing with an excitement that masked itself as concern.

  “Please, sir. They left a tree standing against the hall door of the main block.”

  It was a pine, some nine feet in height, and it stood propped against the door, as though it had left its plantation, strolled along the garden paths, and then climbed the steep flight of steps. It seemed tired now, and stood as if waiting to be let in. It was as alien, as meaningless as the Roman statues. Absently, Creighton fingered its needles.

  “It must be a mark they leave,” Hendricks said. “Whiteboys and Defenders are always up to that kind of nonsense.”

  Creighton shook his head. “Perhaps. Have one of the groundsmen attend to it in the morning. And make a note of it. I planted those firs as a windbrake.”

  “What else could i
t be if not Whiteboys?” Hendricks said.

  “The tree of liberty,” Creighton said. “They were everywhere in Wexford and Carlow during the insurrection, and now they have been appearing in Longford.”

  “What in God’s name is a tree of liberty?” Hendricks said. “ ’Tis Whiteboy nonsense.”

  “They carried boughs from fir trees into battle with them,” Creighton said. He turned away, and carefully climbed down the stairs. “It is the emblem of the United Irishmen.”

  Hendricks was behind him. “You cannot be serious, sir. There are no United Men in Mayo.”

  “So we thought,” Creighton said. “We must organise a patrol. I will ride into Killala tomorrow and talk with Cooper. But we cannot depend on those fellows. We must be prepared to defend ourselves.”

  “There are no weapons left on the estate but a few fowling pieces,” Hendricks said. “And those heathen muskets or whatever they are. Sure matters were bad enough before in Mayo.”

  “It is late,” Creighton said. “There is nothing to be done tonight.”

  “Here, sir,” Hendricks said, handing him the pistol. “You had best keep this with you. It is primed.”

  Creighton took it awkwardly. “It is seldom indeed that I have had occasion to hold one of these,” he said.

  “Or myself,” Hendricks said. “Good night, sir.”

  After they parted, Hendricks made his way back to the gun room. His fingers, in his jacket pocket, were curled around the butt of a short-barrelled pistol designed by Wodgson of London. The butt was of ebony wood with inlays of silver filigree. He had long admired it, and when he entered the gun room with the other United Men he went straight to its cabinet and smashed the glass. He had barely had time to circle back in order to join Creighton.

  In his office, Creighton reread a letter which he had received several days before, but had set aside as unimportant.