The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “Well,” I said, “and why not?,” thinking that I had read his meaning. “Didn’t O’Sullivan write a poem about a spade? Why not a plough?”

  But he moved his shoulders impatiently, the heavy shoulders of a ploughman.

  “The poems are in a box at Judy Conlon’s,” he said. “I would be obliged to you if you would go down to her one of these days and take away the box. She is a decent woman, but it is better that they should rest with a man of learning.”

  And of course I promised him that I would do so, and then once again we had nothing to say. So we passed two hours and a bit more. I sat rooted there. I did not know how to take my leave of him. Once the grating of the window flared suddenly into bright lantern-light, and a dark face peered in at us, and then was gone again.

  “That poor fellow will be up all night unless we give him a chance to rest,” Owen said. “Best now that you get back to Brid and to Timothy.”

  I stood up then but Owen sat where he was, and I put my two arms around him and kissed him. I felt weak and ill, and my eyes filled with tears. Owen put his hand upon my shoulder and held it tight. “A safe road home,” he said to me.

  Friday. To write out all that I have set down above took me much of last night, but I could not have slept, and I thought it well that there should be a record of the last night upon this earth of the poet Owen MacCarthy. As I read it over now, I see that much has been omitted, but what I have set down must suffice.

  I kept my shop closed today. By eight in the morning, the crowds were so thick that they filled Castle Street to the place where it joins High Street. Timothy was still asleep, and Brid and I sat facing each other, with cold cups of tea before us, and our right hands joined. Presently the sounds of drums beating came to us from Castle Street. After a bit the crowd fell silent and then, a few minutes later, it gave a great roar. Brid and I did not look at each other. I made the sign of the cross. Requiescat in pace.

  Tuesday. This day I visited Judy Conlon at her cabin in the Acres of Killala, and she gave to me most readily the box of Owen’s poems. She says that she was most careful to keep it well hidden on the day that the Acres was visited by Fraser’s Fencibles, who burned several of the cabins, although not hers, and behaved in a rude and un-Christian manner to the inhabitants. She is an agreeable person, and seems a decent one despite the sinful life she has led.

  For several miles between Killala and Ballina I had the walls of Lord Glenthorne’s estate for company, most handsome walls of stone cut and dressed. The walls are so high that I could scarcely look over them, but I got a glimpse of that celebrated house, like a fairy-tale castle from some distant land that had been lifted up and floated across the world in the skies to settle down here. Well is he called the Big Lord.

  It was the proper time of day for me to be seeing it, between daylight and dark, with a blue green sky, and the clouds tinted red to be a delight to sailors. What have we ever had to do with their world, set off from us by their high walls of cut stone, their entrance gates guarded by mythological animals cut in stone and marble, hippogriffs, eagles, lions, monkeys, Barbary apes, dragons? Their carriages pass us in the roads, laquered wood polished to catch the sun. Their horsemen and huntsmen crash across our fields in the russet autumn, a thrilling and frightening spectacle, the lords and gentlemen in their scarlet coats, and the ladies in habits of black velvet and green velvet. They pause at country inns for cups of sherry or of whiskey or claret, leaning back on their mounts, their dogs yelping impatiently, the men with red faces and high, arched noses, and voices that bay like their hounds. The huntsman’s horn echoes from hill to hill, and their cries have the mystery of ritual, from a view to a kill.

  But no man living in this land has ever seen the Big Lord, a name to frighten children.

  EPILOGUE

  WINTER, 1798

  THE UNPUBLISHED REFLEXIONS

  OF ARTHUR VINCENT BROOME,

  AUTHOR OF AN IMPARTIAL NARRATIVE

  OF WHAT PASSED AT KILLALA

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1798

  “Does man learn from History?” I once asked a scholarly and sagacious friend. Rather than dismissing the question with the scorn which doubtless it merited, he reflected upon the matter, and said at last, “No, I believe that we do not. But it is possible to learn from historians.” I have upon occasion given thought to this; when, for instance, reading the capacious works of Hume and Gibbon, and the most that I can make of it is this:

  Gibbon gives to us the breadth of the classical world, from the Hellespont to the pillars of Hercules, a vast temple with colonnades and recesses, glowing white marble beneath a blazing Mediterranean sun, and displays to us then its hideous and shameful destruction. How firm a sense do we derive of all its constituent parts, of their intricate relationships! How certain is its destruction, with alien creeds subverting its powers and alien races wearing away its far-flung frontiers. Each cause and reason is locked securely into place. And over all the mighty drama presides the awesome authority of Gibbon’s splendid language, his unimpassioned rationality.

  Here, we think, is the chief civil drama of human history, in which tens and hundreds of thousands played their parts, but a drama compelled by the human mind to yield up its uttermost secrets. Great was Rome and catastrophic was its fall, but great too is the energy of the historian’s mind, the cool deliberation of his judgement.

  But then! We put the volume upon the table, and go out for a stroll in the garden or to visit a sick parishioner or perhaps only to pare our nails, and doubt seeps in, a Gothic tribe at the frontier. Perhaps it had not been like that at all. Perhaps all had been chaos, chance, ill-luck, perhaps even Providence, perhaps the ancients were indeed punished for their sins, as was once believed. Perhaps Gibbon is but a master magician, a sorcerer of language, a Simon Magus of stately paragraphs. Perhaps it is not Rome that we have seen, but Gibbon’s imagination bestowed capriciously upon the past rather than upon mountaintop or sunset or ruined abbey or other Romantic flummery. And the past remains therefore unknowable, shrouded in shadow, an appalling sprawl of buildings, dead men, battles, unconnected, mute, half recorded. Perhaps we learn nothing from history, and the historian teaches us only that we are ignorant.

  I know myself to be vain and affected when I bring Gibbon to mind as I turn the pages of my own poor narrative. Against the enormous fall of a mighty empire, I set a squabble in a remote province, a ragbag army of peasants, files of yeomen and militia, ploughboys hanged from crossroads gallows. And the chronicler is but my poor self, a confused clergyman with an indifferent education, a lover of comfort and civility and buttered toast. How confident and false now sounds to me my opening chapter, where I would be the Gibbon of Mayo, setting forth the contending parties upon the eve of conflict, the several social classes, the topography, the weathers. How false have I not been even to my own partial and fragmentary recollections! Truth was ever my beacon in my task of composition, and I sought to present to my reader a description of all that was done, without fallacious colouring, together with an account of my own feelings, both at the time and in retrospect. Yet now my words lie dead upon the page, like blackened hulls upon the sands.

  Now, in memory, I see Ferdy O’Donnell sitting in my kitchen. He stares at me. He is unshaven, and his eyes, from lack of sleep, are sunk in their sockets. His hand rests upon the table, a square, broad hand with thick knuckles. Close to it, a cup half filled with tea. It is late evening, the light is thin, the far corners of the room are in shadow. Neither of us speaks. Men are shouting in the street outside. At last he raises his hand, then drops it again to the table. I have a vivid recollection of the scene, and yet it lacks significance, a random memory. But what if the mysterious truth is locked within such moments? Memory urges them upon us, implores us to ponder them. A hopeless message.

  The hour that O’Donnell and I sat there together has been scrubbed away. The rising itself has been washed from town and fields by a hundred rains. But each day I pass in the street men w
ho held me prisoner. Once I watched them from study window, lounging against rain-streaked walls. Memories as vivid as mine must be locked within their skulls, torches flaring across black corridors of time. We greet each other civilly. Perhaps in their cabins they talk of the fighting, and younger men listen, as though to tales of heroic battle. Certainly the rebellion has not been forgotten in the houses of the gentry. They will over the years construct their twin mythologies, compounded of facts and fables and pride. In my own narrative, I sought to set down only the truth. Perhaps the greatest vanity was mine. Memory challenges and mocks me.

  In the weeks and months after our deliverance from captivity, I was made aware of how deep had been the distress of my beloved Eliza. In our months of danger and anxiety, she was my certain source of strength, the firm rock of my existence. I have perhaps been remiss not to have incorporated into my narrative instances of her many acts of kindness, the example of Christian fortitude which she placed before those who shared our imprisonment. She has no gift for memorable phrase, has much humour but little of what the world terms wit. And yet, the dangers past, she communicated to me her troubled spirit, not in words, but by a manner too subdued, a distracted air. More than once I came upon her at the drawing-room windows, seated, looking out fixedly upon the narrow, empty street. And I would know that she was remembering that street filled with shouting men, remembering that men had died most horribly beneath those windows.

  Accordingly, I resolved, with a swiftness seldom granted to me, that we should spend the Christmas season in Derbyshire, at the home of my brother Nicholas. We had spent in that house the first Christmas of our life together, and she holds it in much affection. I knew also the power of an English Christmas as a restorative. Some there are who affect to mock it, calling it a pagan winter festival but ill disguised, yet it has always seemed to me deeply Christian, an affirmation of the warmth of love and sympathy in the very chill of December. Eliza agreed most readily, as, to be sure, she does with all my plans and projects. I cannot recall that she has ever opposed me in anything which I have ever proposed, or disobeyed any just order which I have given. A most Christian woman.

  We took the mail coach from Castlebar to Dublin, and were accompanied for part of the journey by a body of dragoons, handsome, heavy-shouldered men under the command of a young captain with a small-boned, gentle face. The coach was waiting for us outside the courthouse, a drab vehicle, unlike its splendid English counterpart, save for the shining, yellow-painted wheels. As we walked towards it, we had suddenly a glimpse into the yard, so sudden that I had no time to warn Eliza, and she looked for a moment without comprehending, and then buried her face in her hands. Five forms hung from a gibbet, shapeless and black, their overcoats of tar frozen and glistening. Mr. Comfort, the captain of dragoons, helped me place Eliza in the coach, and then turned to face me.

  “When they hang men in this country, they make no mistake about it,” he said.

  “It is horrible,” I said. “Horrible. And in a Christian land.”

  “Some question about that,” he said with a grin.

  “They are Christian,” I said, “and their souls demand the Christian burial of their bones.”

  “That is Duggan there,” he said, pointing towards the form on the left end. “I would hesitate to call that one a proper pagan, much less a Christian. In Killala—”

  “I know what he did in Killala,” I said quickly.

  “Of course, sir. I had forgotten. Another Killala man there, next to him. A schoolmaster. A hulking brute, was he not? Look at the size of him.”

  Once he stood before me in my library, talking about Gil Blas and the roads of Munster. And once his voice drifted in song from the open door of the barn, where he stood among servants, his arm around a maiden’s waist. An ugly sack of guts and bones, chained and tarred. I turned and climbed into the coach.

  The coach rolled through the wasted county. Below us, the yellow wheels spun merrily. Dogs ran from cabins to yelp at us, and old people stood at their doors. Cattle watched us, motionless in the fields. We passed a row of burned cabins, roofless, doors like rotting mouths. Two crossroads were marked by empty gallows, maimed crosses of smooth wood, raw and weather-stained. But the land itself was wrapped in the soft Irish winter. Blue hills, distant beyond fields, the pale blue sky as wide as eternity, clouds touched with silver, quiet rivers. A world brought to perfection, marred by the violence of man.

  Our Derbyshire Christmas was all that I had expected of it and more, and the greatest of my Christmas gifts was the brightness which returned to Eliza’s eyes and face. All of that season’s cheer was welcome to us—the Yule log, the holly, the waits who gathered outside the windows to sing, the bowls of hot, spiced wine. It was a snowy Christmas. I took many walks through a countryside which had been familiar to me from childhood—for here I had been born—but now mantled in white. No other countryside could have offered a more vivid contrast to the one which I had left. Our village was a proper village, and our inn a proper inn with its warm, snug, and well-appointed taproom.

  And Nicholas is a proper English squire. He could sit for his portrait by artist or novelist, the very type of his excellent species. He has also, alas, a mind circumscribed by the boundary line of his county. If I had returned to him from a mission to Tartary, I could not have seemed a more exotic traveller. And yet he had no desire to learn from me. Rather, he wished to give me instruction, as though all of the British interest in Ireland were vested in my poor person, and he the Voice of England.

  “It is intolerable, brother, intolerable that you should permit the populace of that wretched island to conspire and band together in open disloyalty and armed treason. Are there not laws, an army, militia, yeomanry? And yet you permit the island to explode.”

  “I myself did not, brother,” I replied. “I have described my parish to you. I have the care of a few hundred souls, cast away in a remote part of the island, surrounded by untold thousands of miserable wretches.”

  “Untold thousands? Where? In Mayo? I don’t believe you. What is the population of the island?”

  “No one knows. Millions, certainly. There is much dispute upon the point.”

  “Much dispute? Why should it be a matter for dispute? Mayo has its landlords, and each landlord has his tenants. Let the landlords count up the tenants, add the totals, and there you have the population. Good God!”

  “No, no,” I said. “There are tenants and subtenants and sub-subtenants and drifting men. There are mountain wastes with hundreds of Gaelic-speaking wretches clinging to the sides, and there are wretches clinging to the sides of bogs. Entire communities. Now, in winter, there are families of beggars upon every road, a pathetic spectacle. I assure you, Nicholas, it is not like England at all.”

  We were seated in his library, as he chose to call a combination of office and tackroom, with a few dozen books gathering dust upon shelves. We were facing a blazing log fire, and comforting ourselves with madeira and biscuits. Nicholas’s broad, sturdy legs were stretched towards the fire. He was not angry, not even very interested. It was his manner.

  “Laziness,” he said. “Laziness and Popery and treason. The curses of Ireland. The landlords are as bad as the rest of them. I’ve seen them in London, gambling away their rents. And I have heard them, with brogues that you would need a carving knife to cut. Expect people like that to govern properly? I don’t.”

  “They may not be governing much longer,” I said. “In Dublin and London all the talk is of a union of the two kingdoms.”

  “There is a fine Christmas present,” Nicholas said. “An island swarming with beggars dropped into our lap. You were mad to take up your task there. Look at your poor wife, harried out of her wits by savages. And in the end we had to settle things for you, send over good English lads to die in your pestilent bogs. Always the same. Cromwell had to go over, and William after him. There is treason in that air; it is bred into men’s bones. What did the rebels want?”

  �
�They could not even speak English, most of them. The King was a word to them, they did not know where England was. They have their own language, music, customs.”

  “What did they want?”

  “I do not believe that they knew. They followed a banner of green silk. They had prophecies and superstitions. There were stories that a hero would come from France to save them. They may have had him confused with the Young Pretender. They were punished most dreadfully. There are gallows from one end of Mayo to the other. They are a leaderless people.”

  “Let them bide at home, and no harm will come to them. Let them heed their landlords. Let them look to the great houses.”

  It was no use. I looked out the window at the snow-covered landscape. The village rooftops were visible. I thought of the village inn, curtains at the windows, prints on the wall, rows of pewter tankards. And then I remembered Castlebar High Street, a mean laneway straggling towards courthouse and gaolhouse, toward gibbeted bodies. Memory carried me northwards from Castlebar, a vault of sky arching towards blue mountains. I saw the beggars on the road. I remembered a barn at nightfall, the sound of fiddles, feet on the hard-packed earth. I saw the army of the Gael swarming into Killala, ragged, unshaven, boisterous in an unknown and barbarous tongue. It was no use.

  No one, it would appear, knows how many Irish there are, and few care to know. This I discovered with the assistance of William Clifford, the vicar of Nicholas’s church, a young man of scholarly bent and of decent family, near-sighted and with a companionable stoop. Several evenings did I spend in his modest but well-appointed house, refreshed by his gentle good spirits and those of his wife. He knew as little of Ireland as did Nicholas, but he possessed a fund of Christian sympathy and a small library. As to the population of Ireland, he believed that I might find what I sought in a book which had been published in that very year of 1798, and he pressed it upon me, commending it as a salutary Christian response to Rousseau and Godwin, reminding us of the inevitably melancholy nature of our earthly existence.