The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Behind his gold-encircled spectacles, his eyes were large and flat, a blue light as the heavens. I was taken aback by his enthusiasm. He held out his hand again, and this time placed it upon my arm, lightly. I felt it there, soft, like a branch from the garden, bare of leaf.

  “There is much that could be done,” I said. “Life there must surely be as hard as it is anywhere in the world.” His words should have exhilarated me, filled me with a wild hope, but they did not. I felt confused and apprehensive. His mild, shielded eyes stirred a faint fear.

  “I will find the proper man,” he said. “I would not know how to go about the task.” His grip tightened upon me. “Savages clinging to mountain wastes, uncounted, unnumbered, nameless. They must go. The estate must be reduced to its proper population. There must be fewer farms and larger ones. There must be a maximum yield. There are ways of providing for this. If the rents are raised, there will be an incentive for the industrious ones. They are not hopeless, they are the children of God, as you and I are.”

  “They must go?” I asked. My words fell flat upon my ears. “They must go? What do you mean?”

  “Grain and cattle,” he said, as if he had not heard me. “Sheep-walks. It has been said that Ireland can become England’s granary. There have been books and pamphlets upon the subject. Arthur Young. A man named Edgeworth.”

  “There is nowhere for them to go,” I said. I pulled my arm free. “Why else would they live in hovels? You must surely learn more about the country. It is urgent that you do so. You could place them under a sentence of death.”

  “There are other mountains,” he said. “Other bogs. Let them find them.” He rubbed his hand, as though I had bruised it. “They are my lands, you know. I intend to improve them. I bear them no ill will. They rose up in rebellion and they murdered but I bear them no ill will. They are children. Disobedient.”

  I had a sudden, sharp recollection of the Glenthorne demesne, the endless walls of dressed stone, a vista stretching as far as the eye could see, the Italianate castle, mysterious in its loneliness and its exotic beauty. I saw Creighton bending over his model of the estate, a near-sighted, fussy man. He was shaking his head.

  He walked away from me towards the window, and then turned.

  “I am certain that you will not misunderstand me, Mr. Broome. You see how I live. My wants are simple. The wealth is drawn off from that unfortunate country by those who live in wanton riotousness, in sinfulness. Misery yields up marbles and brocades. I am not an orthodox Christian, but my will to do good is very powerful. I have spoken to you of the blackened children of London, the slaves chained like animals in ships. There are others. Girls are compelled to sell their bodies upon the streets, in vile cribs. Girls of twelve and thirteen. By their mothers. Little boys, to satisfy unnatural lusts. It is all one, a seamless garment of greed and cruel pleasures. I will use my wealth for good, to free souls from slavery that they may seek salvation.”

  He stood with his back to the thin sun of a winter afternoon. His pale hair seemed translucent, an aureole.

  “Surely, then,” I said, “you would not want to bring more misery upon those who depend upon you for their very existence. You do not know them, but they depend upon you utterly.” They spoke of him as the Big Lord.

  “There are laws,” he said. “Laws of supply and demand, of property, of the market-place, laws of commodities. I did not make them. I must have wealth if I am to do good, much wealth if I am to do much good. There will be schoolhouses there, model villages. We shall reclaim the bogs. You will be there to see it. I envy you.”

  “I pray that I will not see it,” I said. “Most earnestly do I pray.” And I then said, though more to myself than to him, “They will never know why. They will be swept from their hovels and they will never know why. I could not describe this room to them, they would not understand your words.”

  “A foolish title,” he said. “The Big Lord. Beware vanity.”

  I took my leave of him, but he did not reply, though he was staring at me. I looked again at the map. From that distance, it seemed a cluster of random lines, straight and curving, clumps of brown ink. I could not see the dots, encoded habitations. He spoke to me as my hand touched the door.

  “If you see a sweep, you should give a shilling to him. I keep them in my pocket for the purpose. But you must be sly. If the master sees you, he will take it from him later.”

  In the hall, the maidservant stopped me, a hand again upon my arm. “Is he excited, sir?” she asked.

  “Excited? He is animated. Is that what you mean?”

  She was a girl, but strongly built. Her muscular arms pressed against the black fabric of her sleeves. There was beginning of a double chin above a thick throat, a faint dark down upon her upper lip. Her eyes were alert and intelligent.

  “Yes, sir. I think so. Excited.”

  From behind the closed door his voice carried to us in short, nervous bursts of speech. I could not make out the words.

  “Is he often excited?” I asked her.

  “He becomes excited,” she said, “but after a while he grows quiet and unhappy. He goes to bed then. I keep brandy at his bedside, but he seldom takes it.”

  And yet none of Glenthorne’s ambitious and dreadful plans have been put into practice. Perhaps it was a passing fancy, or perhaps upon reflexion he concluded that the task was too formidable, or perhaps other, weightier matters pressed themselves upon his attention. To the peasants he remains the Big Lord, remote, unimaginable, motiveless. Perhaps they are right. In the event, he appointed an agent recommended to him by Dennis Browne, a Limerick man named Chute who had managed an extensive estate near Askeaton. The peasants think of him as grasping and tyrannous, but he seems to me decent enough, a rider to hounds and an occasional churchgoer. He manages the Glenthorne lands skilfully if lazily, and evictions are infrequent. He has made no efforts to reclaim the bogs or to establish schools.

  He sends his quarterly reports to Glenthorne, who replies with a series of shrewd questions and remarks upon particulars, and then proceeds to a homily upon the responsibilities of landlords and their agents. Several times, the homily has been extended to many pages of spidery script and has branched out upon other matters, the conditions necessary for salvation and the temptations which great wealth carries in its wake. Chute has pressed me for my impressions of Glenthorne, but I cannot trust myself to do justice to these. “Will he ever visit the estate?” he asks. “No, I am quite certain that he will not. It has melancholy associations.”’ “It is an extraordinary situation,” Chute says; “whenever he chooses he may overturn my methods.” “Let us pray that he does not,” I say.

  I believe that Glenthorne is mad, the unobtrusive madness which rubs along agreeably enough with the rest of the world and is accounted eccentricity or even saintliness. And yet the policies which he sketched out for me in his excited manner have also been brought forward by the lucid intelligences of our age, progressive and forward-looking men. Would not Mr. Malthus applaud so vigorous a determination to adjust population to land? Glenthorne is the absent centre of our Mayo world and the estate is his tarnished Eden. Like the Lord of Creation, he is everywhere and nowhere, centre and circumference. What right have I to think of him as mad? Many men speak to themselves behind closed doors. I have done so myself.

  When Nicholas and I were children we received as the Christmas gift of our uncle a hollow glass globe within which rested a village—tiny houses and shops and a steepled church, a river with a bridge across it, a pond. When we shook it, the village would vanish within a snowstorm. White flecks would fill the globe. Then, slowly, the globe would clear, snow would drift down upon houses and pond, and at last there would be only the village, always the same but always looking slightly different, because we had not the wits to keep every part of it firm in our memories. When I held the globe, I felt like Almighty God—sky, village, storm of snow lay within my two cupped hands. But it was imprudent of our uncle to give the one gift to two sm
all boys. One day we fell to quarrelling over it, and it slipped between our hands and fell to the floor and shattered. We poked at the bits with our fingers, and our grief ebbed. It had been nothing, a toymaker’s trick—bits of mirror for river and pond, pieces of coloured wood, a white powder.

  So too, perhaps, the map upon Glenthorne’s wall, Chute’s quarterly reports, the model of the estate which stretched across Creighton’s table. Ingenious toys. Mayo is its own world, affirming a reality of tree and stone, river and mountain. I hear its music now, as once, when first I came here, I could not. A footfall upon frozen earth, the belling of hounds upon an autumn morning, the cry of a curlew, the scraping of a fiddle, lowing of cattle, voices beneath my window—when sounds, random but familiar, fall into place within the mind, they become a music. I would be lonely now without that music.

  I remain an alien here, and will be so always. Without malice, Mayo excludes me. It is an old land, and hugs its secrets. At evening, if the weather is good, I walk down the street of grey, drab buildings until at last the bay is in sight, its waters sluggish, gunmetal in colour, or the colour of a tarnished pike. The distant hills are low, crouched like animals. When I pass cowherd or fisherman, we nod, exchange greetings in our different tongues. Their faces are not mine, large-boned, long of lip, coarse, matted hair. Then I will turn and walk back to my residence, where tea will be awaiting me before the fire. Heavy curtains will be drawn, to hold back the limitless silences of the Mayo night. We know parts of a world only, parts of a history, shards, bits of broken pottery.

  FROM THE DIARY OF SEAN MACKENNA,

  SUMMER, 1790

  July 2. To Killala yesterday, astride a gentle horse lent to me by Robinson the farrier, to receive bolts of linen from Sligo which were waiting for me at the quay. It was a lovely day, the kind of morning that Owen and the other poets write about, the meadows green and the hedgerows glistening. It wanted but a maiden to walk towards me across the meadows and it would be the proper beginning for a poem, but it is only to poets that maidens come. And to those fellows they come all too often, is my own opinion of the matter, for many of those poems are wearisome things, if the truth be told.

  For part of the journey I had the company of a pedlar from Athlone, a talkative, harmless fellow with a carbuncle the size of a baby’s fist. He had much to tell me about Athlone, but little that was of interest and nothing at all that is worth recording here. In a field beyond a cross we spied a Norman keep, and I decided to take a closer look at it, for I have a great curiosity about such things. At the boreen I parted company with the pedlar, without much regret, for his company was not worth the price of his chatter. Athlone was the centre of his world, although he was a travelled man and should have known better. Certain towns have that effect upon the mind; Sligo is one such and Ennis is a third.

  But close to, there was little to say in the keep’s favour. The far side had fallen in. I tried to imagine how it had looked centuries before, but I could not. We are cut off from those ancient days as if divided by the deep ocean. It was but a byre now, and served its purpose. Then I saw that far beyond the keep, hidden from the main road by a plantation, stood a big house. I walked closer, and as I approached the entrance gate I saw that the house had been destroyed by fire. It was but a gutted shell, with the windows staring at me. Above the door was an ornate seal of some sort, scorched black by flames. Through the doorway I could see an entrance hall burned bare of wood and plaster, its brick and stone blackened. It was an ugly, crippled giant, its shame shielded by the plantation.

  When I got back onto the main road I met a drover, and asked him what place it was. “Fountain Hall,” he said. “It is a shocking wreck,” I said. “It is,” he said, “but there is good stone in it.” “How was it burned?” I asked him. “It was burned last year,” he said, “in the time of the French.” “Was it the French burned it?” “I wouldn’t know.” he said, “most likely it was.” “Go to God,” I said, “you have been living all your life in the shadow of that thing, but you don’t know what happened to it last year.” He beat the switch he was carrying against his leg and studied me. At last he said, “There are some who say that it was burned by the local people. There was terrible destruction between here and Killala. There was a man called General Duggan.” General Duggan, indeed; in a few years’ time they will all have been generals. “Whose house was it?” I asked him. “They are a family called Morrison. They fled off to Sligo and from there to England or to Dublin. ’Tis said that they will never come back. They are terrible tyrants.”

  He was a young man and heavyset, with sloping shoulders and long arms like Owen’s. I wondered what he had himself been busy at in the summer of ’ninety-eight.

  “If you have an interest in such matters,” he said, “they will show you the strand where the French landed. Kilcummin strand, it is called. There were three great ships with masts so tall that you could not see the tops of them and on the tallest mast of all was an eagle called King Lewis. That eagle went all the way with them into the midlands, but on the night before the battle the eagle flew off and the battle was lost.”

  “That eagle was a wise bird,” I said. He stared at me for a moment and then grinned. “By God, it was,” he said. “And for all the good it did,” I said, “it might never have happened. The French and the ships and all the rest of it.” “I would not say that,” he said; “they burned Fountain Hall. They drove out the Morrisons.” It is an ill wind, as the proverb in English has it.

  Killala is a most uncouth village, and listless as well, with none of the bustle you will find in Castlebar and no fine buildings. Mean shops are clustered about the estuary, and beyond the sea is grey. I attended to my business and then for Owen’s sake had two tumblers of whiskey at the Wolf Dog, of which he had often spoken to me. It is not a proper tavern at all, of the sort that may be found in Castlebar, but a cabin where labourers and fishermen drink, and yet he had told me that it was a place for a quiet and pleasant evening. He was a labourer’s son when all is said, for all the splendour of his fancy and the radiant embellishment of his verses. He could be at ease in such company, with never a thought for his art or for his standing as a man of learning.

  It was late in the afternoon that I left Killala, passing as I rode up the street Mr. Broome, the Protestant clergyman, a small plump man of middle years, with well-made clothes worn carelessly, his neckbands askew, and a shovel hat perched awkwardly upon an old-fashioned wig. He walked rapidly with a light step, almost a skip, and with his hands clasped behind his back. Although he does not know me, he said “Good evening” most readily. I was tempted to begin a conversation with him, but did not know if he would welcome it. It is a lonely enough life of it he must have, with most of his parishioners living upon estates distant from the town.

  Nothing worthy of record during my return to Castlebar, which I reached at nightfall. The soldiers have for months been gone from Mayo, save for the garrison here in the town, and they are but memories now, like the French. As I rode past Stoballs Hill in the darkness, I attempted to imagine what the great battle there had been like, the drums and bright banners and cannon shot and shouting. I could not. I told myself that the battle already lay with the Norman keep upon the far shore of that sea which separates past from present. But that is not true, there is no such sea, it is but a trick of speech. All are bound together under God, mountain, and bog, the shattered fortress and the grassy pasturelands of death, the drover’s eagle that took wing upon the eve of battle, memory, history, and fable. A trick of speech and of the blackness of night, when we are separated from one another and from the visible world. It is in the brightness of the morning air, as the poets tell us, that hope and memory walk towards us across meadows, radiant as a girl in her first beauty.

  July 3. The linen which I brought back with me from Killala is badly bleached, and I will think carefully before I have further dealings with Johnston of Sligo.

  FINIS

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
r />   The Narrators

  Broome, Arthur Vincent. Clergyman of the Established Church in Killala, County Mayo.

  Elliott, Judith. Wife to Malcolm.

  Elliott, Malcolm. Master of “The Moat,” Ballina, County Mayo. Solicitor. Member of the Society of United Irishmen.

  MacKenna, Sean. Schoolmaster and draper in Castlebar, County Mayo.

  Wyndham, Harold. Aide to Lord Cornwallis.

  The Characters

  Barrett, Patrick. An officer of the rebel forces in Killala.

  Broome, Eliza. Wife to Arthur Vincent.

  Broome, Nicholas. Gentleman of Derbyshire. Brother to Arthur Vincent.

  Browne, Dennis. Master of “Woodlands,” Newport, County Mayo. Member of Parliament for Mayo. High Sheriff of Mayo. Brother to Lord Altamont (later the Marquis of Sligo).

  Browne, Sarah. Niece to Dennis.

  Conlon, Judy. Farmer’s widow in Killala. Woman to Owen MacCarthy.

  Cooper, Kate. Wife to Samuel. Daughter to Mick Mahony, grazier.

  Cooper, Captain Samuel. Master of “Mount Pleasant,” Killala. Commander of the Killala Yeomanry.

  Cornwallis, Charles, Marquis. Viceroy of Ireland. Commander in chief of British forces in Ireland.

  Crauford, Colonel John. British commander of dragoons.

  Creighton, Andrew. Agent to Lord Glenthorne, Marquis of Tyrawley.

  Cumiskey. Physician in Carrick, County Leitrim. Prisoner after battle of Ballinamuck.

  Dennistoun, Hans. Gentleman-farmer of Granard, County Longford. Member of the Society of United Irishmen. Commander of rebel forces in the midlands.

  Duignan, Anthony. A “prophecy man” wandering through County Mayo in September.