The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Escapade! For God’s sake, George! Men are being seized up across the province and hanged from roadside gallows. Men whose crime was taking part in an insurrection which I helped to organise.”

  “That is most certainly true. It would be cruel of me to come to you with false hopes. After the Wexford rising, they hanged Colclough and Bagenal Harvey, and they were both gentlemen. Gentlemen of a sort, at any rate. Protestant squireens. Harvey was a barrister and well connected. If the government lay hands on Wolfe Tone, he will certainly be hanged, and small loss to the world.”

  “I am no different from them,” John said. “No different from Malcolm Elliott.”

  “You are mistaken there,” Moore said. “You are different. You are my brother, and I have friends in London. Friends in high places. Our first task is to get you out of Castlebar and into some safer place of confinement. I am troubled by the atmosphere here. It is that of the drumhead court-martial. When the Protestant gentlemen of Mayo return to their estates, they will have blood in their eyes.”

  “No different from them,” John said, nodding again towards the gibbet.

  “Are you certain that you wish to join them? My influence in these parts is a trifle diminished at present, but I can readily secure a swift trial for you, and you may be certain of its outcome. Do you wish to be hanged this week?”

  “That is a cruel baiting, George. It is not worthy of you.” He turned his head. “No man wants to die.”

  “Some do,” Moore said. “I am happy that you are not one of them.”

  “I am a fit object for your irony,” John said. “It is an art which I have never cultivated.”

  “Even to get you out of here and into a prison in the south will be difficult. There, I think, we must rely upon the good offices of Dennis Browne, when he has returned to Mayo. I trust that will be soon.”

  “From Galway?”

  “He went from Galway to Dublin. You may count upon Dennis to move in the direction of power. It is an instinct of the Brownes. As a family they have always been most successful.”

  “You are a peculiar chap, George. You preach the virtues of prudence, and yet you use the word successful almost as a slur. Such a man as Dennis Browne should have all your admiration.”

  “At the moment he has all my hope, and should have yours as well. He is High Sheriff of Mayo. If anyone can get you out of this place, it is Dennis Browne.”

  “Why should he? He is more likely to want me hanged. The rebels seized Westport and drove him off to Galway.”

  “You may be right. But I will talk to him. He is a Browne, after all, and we are Moores. We go back a long way together, the Moores and the Brownes. There are ties of blood between us.”

  “They will matter little to him in what will be his present mood.”

  “Let us see,” Moore said. “I have made something of a study of Dennis Browne, and so did our father. The Brownes manage Mayo. They are an adroit family.”

  “Successful. Adroit. Your irony is a marvellous instrument, George.” Suddenly he smiled at his brother. “Even in this wretched place we fence with one another.”

  Moore returned the smile. They were linked by the years, by love, by old quarrels and reconciliations.

  “Have you still heard naught from Thomas Treacy?” John asked. “Or Ellen?”

  “No,” Moore said, more gently. “They are behind the rebel lines. But they are safe enough now, and shall be in the future. I am certain of that.”

  “Certain,” John echoed incredulously. “What will happen, do you imagine, when the army moves upon Killala? It will be destroyed by fire and sword.”

  “Fire and sword, no less. Those novels you used to read have furnished you with a rich storehouse of literary phrases. Tom Treacy is a loyal subject of the Crown. No harm will befall him, or Ellen, or Bridge-end House.”

  “Loyal subject of the Crown is itself a fair literary term, would you not say?”

  The brothers continued to smile at one another. John was neatly shaved for each visit, and the golden hair, cropped short in the republican fashion, was brushed carefully back from the high, pale forehead. Now, looking straight into the dark blue eyes, indistinct in the cell’s gloom, Moore felt the mingled aches of sadness and love. More son than brother, most cherished of their father’s dreams, child of his old age. Moore heard the sound of hooves, John’s shout of joy as he cleared a wall. He saw John and Ellen sitting together by lamplight, John’s eyes glowing, words tumbling from him. Moore Hall would one day be his. No more.

  The shouts of children floated through the window. Beneath the gibbet, staring up into the blackened faces.

  “Is there any news of our army?” John asked. “Have you heard anything?”

  “It is your army, perhaps,” Moore said. “Certainly it is not mine. I have heard many rumours, but nothing certain. It will be over in a week. You understand that, do you not? The government has thrown a net around them and the net will be pulled tight.”

  “Yes,” John said. “It is all over now. All but the killing.”

  “All but that.”

  “That does not bother you?”

  “One day it will. When I have time. After you are safely out of the country. I detest killings, whether by rebels or redcoats or Paris mobs.”

  In his library, the piles of notes were neatly stacked, his sources ranged on shelves close to his moving hand: speeches, journals, pamphlets. His hand, caught within a bowl of light in the dark room, moved evenly from line to line, darted outwards to the ink bottle. The pen, a bird’s wing, drew up black nectar.

  “I am as guilty as those who will be killed,” John said. “Who could be more guilty?”

  “Those without friends,” Moore said. “It always comes down to that, John. Power and money. Who knew that better than our father? He was most instructive on that subject.”

  “He loved me too much to lecture me,” John said.

  In late afternoon, side by side, the stiff-backed old man and the boy walked down the long avenue, hands loosely clasped. Moore, quiet and grave, watched from the window.

  “He loved you,” Moore agreed. “He loved us both, but you were his darling. I knew another side of him, John. He could be a hard, grasping man. He had to be. It was a bad century for us, but he flourished in it. Power is everything, he would tell me, power and money.”

  “He never spoke of them to me,” John said. “He told me about Spain. Orange trees, the laces and stiff brocades of the women, sunlight.”

  Moore bent towards the floor, picked up his hat, and carefully dusted the brim.

  “I will be back on Thursday,” he said.

  He stood up and shrugged into shape the shoulders of his coat. Then he put on the hat, settling the stiff brim evenly across his forehead. “Are they still treating you properly?”

  “Yes,” John said. “I have no reason to complain. To which of our friends should I be grateful for that?”

  “To King George, no less. Or rather, to his head stamped upon crowns and half-crowns.”

  “Money and power,” John said. “You should have been a schoolmaster, George. You never tire of offering me lessons.”

  “You have been less ready to accept them,” Moore said. “Good God!” he said suddenly. “I hate to see you here, John. We will try everything. Something is bound to work.”

  “It did not work for me. I tried to free this unfortunate country, and now I am here.”

  To free his country. His mind was stuffed with phrases from novels, gestures from plays, stale secondhand rhetoric of the liberty-mongers. But Moore remembered his voice, laughing, carried across a meadow, a boy on a tall horse.

  “I am most truly sorry that I caused you this pain, George. We make an odd pair of brothers, but I hold you deep in my affection.”

  He stood stiff but uncertain, like the words he used. A splash of watery sunlight fell across his face; thin light, no motes danced in it. More son than brother. Moore ached with grief and love. He longed to fling
his arms around his brother. A young colt escaped from its pasture, he had plunged down dark, twisting roads. Then, exhausted, uncomprehending, he had been brought to bay. Father and young, spoiled son, Moore had watched them from the window, unmoving. He did not move now. His legs, heavy as stone pillars, held him where he stood.

  “Until Thursday,” he said, and rapped on the iron door.

  “The time crawls damned slow in here, George. Will you bring me some books?”

  “Novels?” Moore asked.

  Save for the stretch of rebel land from Killala Bay westwards, the roads of northern Mayo were open. Companies of regulars and yeomen patrolled them, but displayed no wish to halt gentlemen wearing fine brown coats, brushed hats, boots of fine polished leather. Moore could ride wherever he chose. In early evening, his mind soothed by a day spent at his writing table, he would ride down the avenue and through the gates, massive stone gateposts crowned with eagles, claws clutching rough globes larger than cannonballs. Burned big houses looked down upon him from the crests of hills; their owners had not returned to claim the ruins.

  He tried to imagine Moore Hall destroyed by fire, indistinct figures carrying torches through the night, flames licking from room to room, the heavy yellow draperies of the dining room afire, his books burning like kindling, flames rushing towards rosewood tables and cabinets shipped from London. On a wall, the painting of his father and mother in Spanish court dress, carried here from Alicante, the richly textured gown alien to his mother’s pale northern face, background of black and sullen red. Red flame crept towards it across the buckling floor. Moore Hall, a gutted shell facing Lough Carra, great square eyes of shattered windows. In time, ivy would spread across the shell. Not yet.

  At evening, herdsmen drove home their cows, lightly slapping their flanks with wands of hazelwood. Barefoot, legs daubed with dung, they walked beside their slow, patient beasts. Seeing Moore, they nodded gravely. His own herdsmen, perhaps. He knew well his tenants and subtenants, by face, name, character, size and location of farm, names and figures in an account book. But these herdsmen, mud cabin and a quarter-acre of lazybed potatoes—who knew their names, their families, their needs? No gutted shell would mark their passing. Their cabins, ill-thatched lumps of mud and stone, lay scattered across the country, by bogland and scrawny mountain. They lived below history, and there they died—Teague, Patrick, Michael.

  But history, Moore’s element, lay all around him, in gaol cell, on gibbets, burned houses, soldiers on the roads. A few miles from Moore Hall stood the ruined abbey of Ballintubber, unroofed and smashed by the Cromwellians. At nightfall he rode there, pushed open the crude door fastened there by piety in penal days, and walked along the broken stones to the bare altar. The slender stone windows had been marvellously carved; his fingers moved across intricate detail. He knelt beside a tomb, and by the last light studied the figures carved upon it, saints and angels, their faces battered off by troopers who detested idolatry, but their bodies still draped in long robes of medieval stone. Whose tomb did they guard? Forgotten now, unless some tattered manuscript preserved a record. They too had slipped below history.

  History was not objects, mere shells of the past, hieroglyphic whorls. It was perceived relationship, patterns formed by passion and power. It dwelled with Cornwallis and Buonaparte in the field, with Pitt and Fox upon the floor of the Commons, with Saint-Simon ferreting out the secrets of Versailles, absurd courtier-pedant measuring influence by inches. His father had spoken to him of power but to John of oranges, for each the appropriate gift. Gifts refused. For John had flung away his orange, his future, and Moore was himself but a student of power, a connoisseur of action, unpractised in the management of men, his irony a shield against experience. History was a trooper’s heavy sword-hilt, smashing the carved heads of saint and angel, weighty with certainty.

  He would ride back to Moore Hall, pale blocks of Portland stone raised up by an old man’s remorseless will, returned exile, coffers heavy with the gold sweated from the vineyard of an alien land, from sun-splashed Spanish hills. Here in Mayo, blue lake, red bogland, the silences of meadow and pasture, he had set the seal of his will, paced out his demesne with architect and mason trotting beside him. Here at night he took his ease upon the balcony, wineglass in hand, staring across the lake. Remembering what? In the end, history was memory. History was his father.

  The Moat, Ballina, Early September

  But at The Moat, Malcolm Elliott’s estate outside Ballina, beside the dull waters of the Moy, unharvested fields stretched towards the river. The Moat was one of several scattered estates which lay within a neutral ground between the army, garrisoned within the town, and the rebels in Killala. Cavalry patrols would sweep northwards, intent, it would seem, upon some duty, clatter of hooves and sunlight glinting from sabre, then return a few hours later, the riders relaxed and joking, save perhaps for the straight-backed young officer. Judith watched them from her drawing-room window, her feelings torn. In England’s uniform, they were at once her kinsmen and her enemies. Somewhere, in the north or in the midlands, men in that uniform were hunting Malcolm. But at night, small groups of rebels, three or four at a time, would slip down from the hills to visit in one of the cabins. She never saw them. In the morning the cook, Mrs. Hennessey, would tell her of them.

  “They should talk to me,” Judith would say, standing in the cluttered, slovenly kitchen, frustrated and helpless. “Their cause is my own. I am Malcolm Elliott’s wife. They must know that.”

  “God forbid that they should come to this house,” Mrs. Hennessey would answer, resting floury hands on hipbones covered by shapeless black skirt. “A pack of frightened vagabones looking for whiskey. When the soldiers catch them, they will be strung up by the heels.”

  “They are brave men fighting for their country.”

  “Brave men, is it? Much you know about it, ma’am. Sure they are the same cowardly skulkers who were roaming the county two weeks ago, burning people’s houses down about their ears and hauling away chairs and silk gowns and plate silver. There are families sitting down tonight in Ballygawley cabins to eat their spuds from bone china. Fighting for their country indeed. Fighting for their neighbours’ goods is more like it.”

  Mrs. Hennessey had her own friends, two Ballina widows who would walk out from town two afternoons a week to sit and talk with her at the deal table by the kitchen fire, drinking endless cups of strong brown tea. The events of the day were for them an endless source of scandalised gossip. They deplored all parties equally, rebels, yeomen, redcoats. All had violated the pattern of life, all acted upon the promptings of unfathomble, primordial iniquity. The rebels were vagabones and thieves, the soldiers brutal savages. The two old women were horrified and delighted. They left in time to be back in Ballina before dark. Once Judith encountered them on the avenue. She smiled and they made awkward curtseys, without looking into her face. She was alone.

  At night, in the small office which Malcolm used as a library, she sat with head bent towards green-globed lamp, turning pages of the books which they had read together, in London and then at The Moat—Émile and La Nouvelle Héloise, Paine’s Rights of Man, Volney’s Les Ruines. A cargo of eloquence, crated and corded and shipped to Mayo. Watercolours of a new world, luminous and airy. But Mayo was old, dark, tenaciously holding its mysteries—three old women, like the fates, like Macbeth’s witches, huddled by the fire in a room otherwise without comfort, draughty, the floor paved with uneven flags and dirtied by potato peelings. She would fall asleep for an hour, the book falling from her hand. Waking, in the small room, night pressing upon the window, the fire dead, she would sit quietly, reluctant to move. Rousseau, laureate of loneliness, would be lying at her feet. Somewhere distant, Malcolm was caught up in unimaginable events, the stuff of fiction, marching armies, battles, triumphs, a republic. As though a book had swallowed him.

  She carried the lamp with her to bed, resting it on the dressing table. In her loose nightdress, hair unbound, she stared a
t her reflexion. Grey eyes, small oval face, it returned the stare from the depthless surface of the tarnished mirror. Dark land, a dark sea divided her from her London home. One night she brought with her the French translation of Gulliver’s Travels and, opening it, the letter to her husband from the Society of United Irishmen fell to the floor. She read it perched upon the side of the bed, bending forward to catch the light. A summons from the distant world of books, ideas, principles, it had taken him from the estate, away from her. The ringing phrases stirred her feelings now, but faintly, like music heard across a river. She carefully folded the letter and replaced it in the book. Little men and big men, Doctor Johnson had said of the book, dismissing it.

  To the left of The Moat and two miles distant stood Derrybawn, Sir Talbot Parson’s house. Empty, one of the ravaged houses. Its tall, graceful windows, opening upon an ornamental garden, had been ripped from their casings. All through a long afternoon, a small army of men and women had carried out into the garden furnishings, hangings, crockery, paintings, casks of whiskey and wine, gowns and coats, chairs, tables, beds. Torn books, ripped paintings still lay strewn in the garden, protected by an Artemis in white marble. To the right of The Moat, at Cloverdale, lived Mrs. Hendricks, widow of a member for Mayo, a tall, imperious woman, red-cheeked, nose like a cutlass. Judith, lonely for company, visited her once but was driven away. Mrs. Hendricks’s voice, maddened and vindictive, followed her down the avenue. “Rebel! Slut of a rebel’s wife! Whore!” There were no other county neighbours.

  The stable boy was gone. Like Malcolm, he was off with the rebels. She remembered him with affection. His name was Teague, a short, stumpy-legged boy, round head balanced on thick neck, ready smile, a shock of yellow hair. One horse remained; the others had been commandeered by the French. She saddled it one morning, and rode westwards, toward Lough Conn. A clear September day, puffs of cloud, a lark high in the air. Away from The Moat, freed from her thoughts and memories, her spirits rose.