by Colin Murphy
Two months ago, David Feerick, a young land agent for the Browne estate near Ballinrobe, just five miles to the north, had been brutally gunned down by three men assumed to be extremist nationalists. Thus far no one had been charged with the murder. Incredibly, the wretched Feerick had survived for six weeks, but succumbed to his wounds a few days ago, or so they’d read in The Ballinrobe Chronicle. Feerick was the latest casualty in a long line of land agents, bailiffs and landlords who had fallen victim to agrarian terrorists. The previous spring, her husband had been granted RIC protection for several months after a series of threats, without any major incident.
Boycott threw his cutlery on to the empty plate hard enough to chip it. ‘I’ll not skulk in my own home because a few peasants have said boo!’
‘Honestly, Charles, you’re as stubborn as that horse you bought!’
‘Precisely. But unlike Iron Duke, Parnell and his Land Leaguers will soon discover that Charles Boycott won’t be tamed.’
A fraught silence ensued until Maggie knocked and stepped into the room, eyes down, nervously twisting her hands in front of her.
‘Excuse me, sir. But em, em…’
‘What is it, for heaven’s sake?’ Boycott yelled, the blood still high in his cheeks.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but Mr McHale told me te fetch ye. There’s trouble in the fields.’
‘What trouble?’
‘Pardon me, but I don’t know, sir. He just told me te hurry.’
Boycott heaved an exasperated sigh. ‘What now, in the name of God?’
Lord Erne’s holdings beside Lough Mask amounted to a relatively small fifteen hundred acres, which were farmed by thirty-eight tenants over whom Charles Boycott acted as land agent, responsible for rent collection, enforcing the rules of tenancy and ensuring the general upkeep of the property. But the position he’d taken seven years earlier had also come with the lease of six hundred acres to farm at his will, a substantial acreage which could provide a healthy annual return. It was to this land that he and Weekes now drove their carriage, the rarity of the summer sun blessing the Mayo landscape with warming rays.
They were greeted by the sight of his twelve labourers gathered at the edge of a field of oats. Boycott leapt down before Weekes could bring the carriage to a halt. A murmur among the labourers faded as grim faces turned towards him.
‘What in blazes is going on? Why aren’t you at work?’
Martin Branigan, a broad-chested man of forty with wild black hair, emerged from the group.
‘Captain Boycott,’ he said without any due deference, ‘we want te discuss the terms of our employment.’
‘You what? There are hundreds of acres to be harvested.’ Boycott swept his cane across the panorama of field upon field of ripe golden oats, mangolds and turnips. ‘Get to it immediately!’
‘You heard me.’
‘What are you talking about, Branigan, you insolent lout?’ Boycott asked with incredulity as Weekes joined him at his side.
Branigan bristled at the insulting language and took a step forward. ‘There’ll be not a tap of harvesting done until we get an increase in wages of two to four shillings, relative to age and experience.’
‘How dare you speak to me in that–’
‘What’s more, we demand te be contracted until November the first, not just until the end of the harvest.’
‘You demand!’ Boycott was beside himself with rage. ‘You’re not in a position to demand anything!’
‘Previous years you’ve driven the men like slaves te get the harvest in as quickly as possible so you could pay them less. The ten weeks until November is a reasonable time for twelve men te bring in such a large crop. That’s the deal, take it or leave it. Until then, we’re on strike.’ Branigan threw the scythe he was holding to the ground, turned his back and walked away. The others mimicked his action and Boycott and Weekes stood watching as the men trooped from his fields.
‘You’ll never work in this county again, you treacherous scoundrels!’ Boycott yelled after them, his face near to purple in colour. ‘It’s that Catholic traitor O’Malley put you up to this, isn’t it? If I had my way you’d be flogged for insolence. Come back here immediately and get to work!’
He received no reply but the silence of their backs as they disappeared up the lane.
‘This is the most outrageous, insolent act I’ve witnessed in my entire life. How dare a rabble presume to dictate terms to me!’
‘Charles, calm yourself. There’s no point repeating the same thing over and over,’ Annie said. She shook her head and looked at Weekes.
‘Annie’s right, Charles. This is getting us nowhere.’
Annie had feared her husband might damage his heart, such was his state of discomposure. The three were seated in the drawing room, where they’d been for over an hour, most of the time spent listening to her husband spitting venom about the Land League, Fr O’Malley and Fenians terrorists.
‘I wish to be alone,’ he snapped.
‘Very well, Charles.’
Annie knew better than to argue. She nodded to Weekes and the pair shuffled silently from the room. Thirty minutes passed before he entered the dining room to where they’d retreated. He began to circumnavigate the table, one arm folded behind his back, the other holding his cane, which tapped the wooden floor as he walked.
‘I’ve come to a decision. And I want you both to do me the courtesy of hearing me out without interruption,’ he said, his voice calm, his tone measured.
Nods of agreement followed.
‘I’ve no doubt that priest, O’Malley, is behind this. He’s been filling their heads with ignis fatuus notions about their social rights. In short, this is blackmail. And as an Englishman and a gentleman, I cannot be seen to submit to blackmail, particularly from a collection of indolent peasants. Were we to kowtow to the likes of the Land League, it would be the thin end of the wedge for all the law-abiding landowners from Kerry to Antrim. What we must do is show the blaggards what steel our class is made of. What we must do, in other words, is bring in the harvest ourselves.’
He slammed the metal tip of the cane against the floor for emphasis. Annie sat with her lips parted, praying she misunderstood his meaning. She glanced at Weekes who wore a similar expression. He nervously pushed his hands into his jacket pockets.
‘Eh, if I may ask, Charles. Who, precisely?’
He looked at them as though the answer should have been apparent and then swept the cane in a high arc to indicate the household. ‘Why, all of us. Myself, of course. You, Weekes. Annie, Madeleine, young William, Maggie, the Loughlin woman, McHale in the stable. Everyone.’
‘Charles, you can’t be serious.’
‘By God I am, woman.’
‘But I wouldn’t have the first notion how to–’
He swept her objections away with his arm as he and strode towards the door. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll teach everyone what to do. Remember, dear, this isn’t just about saving the five hundred pounds of crops, there’s a principle involved. Have everyone assemble at the north field in fifteen minutes.’
‘You mean you want us to work in the fields now?’
‘Let’s make hay while the sun shines, my dear.’
His footfalls echoed along the hallway as Annie sat and closed her eyes against the world.
No further argument would be brooked. He’d hastily pooh-poohed each protest with a wave of his hand and when he’d insisted on the reasonableness of his arguments with a raised voice, Annie knew from experience that further objections would be pointless. So she dutifully succumbed, rounded up the others and brought them to the field. The only concession he made was to submit to Annie’s demand that Mrs Loughlin and Mr McHale be excused as they were both in their sixties.
At the gate to the field, he explained the task ahead to the bemused household. It was not just because of the appalling financial loss they would incur, he explained, but it was their moral obligation to make a stand here today. And so the five
were assigned duties, and after a brief lesson in the use of a scythe, they set about bringing in the harvest. None of them was particularly athletic by nature, their clothes were unsuited to the task and all found the labour backbreaking. Progress was pitifully slow under the warm sun. At three o’clock young Madeleine, sporting unseemly patches of perspiration beneath her armpits, fainted and had to be carried into the kitchen and fed sweetened water. An hour later the same happened to Maggie. William, initially the keenest worker, now complained incessantly of tired arms. Of the women and children, only Annie seemed indefatigable and she continued to swing the scythe until late into the afternoon, before pointing out that they had cleared just a tiny fraction of one of ten fields.
That evening Boycott mulled long and hard as the others bathed, ate and proceeded directly to their beds hours before sunset. He was seated at his writing desk in the drawing room calculating how much of the harvest they might hope to save and the potential financial damage, when Annie walked wearily in and plopped into an armchair.
‘Charles, I don’t think we can continue. We’re not cut out to do this kind of work.’
He turned and shook his head, then tugged at the tip of his beard, which she knew to be a sign of uncertainty. It gave her a glimmer of hope that her husband might abandon his futile salvo in the direction of the Land League, for she was certain that this lay behind his action. Soon after the mass meeting in Irishtown in April of the previous year, Parnell, Davitt and others had formed the Irish National Land League. Each day since, they’d grown in strength, held larger and larger meetings, and had mass support, especially in the west of Ireland. And although her husband blustered about the futility of their speeches of defiance, she knew he felt deeply threatened.
‘We must carry on. The financial loss if we lose the entire harvest is incalculable.’ He waved paper covered in scribbled calculations at her. ‘And the principle–’
She suddenly felt the bile rise in her throat. ‘Oh Charles, please don’t lecture me anymore about the principle. I’m simply too tired!’ She rose again and strode from the room, slamming the door behind her.
Annie went first to William’s room, and found him lying diagonally across the bed, the blankets and sheets kicked into a tangle about his feet. Sonorous snores escaped his open mouth, so loud it was hard to credit they came from an eleven-year-old. She smiled, despite her weariness of body and mind, and gently pulled the coverings up to his chin, kissed him on the forehead and slipped from the room.
Madeleine was similarly in the depths of an exhausted slumber and Annie sat by her bed a few moments stroking her hair, studying her face. Although Madeleine and her own daughter, Mary, bore little immediate resemblance to each other, the subtle curves about her niece’s eyes were an undoubted shared trait, as was their laughter, the kind of nuances of character that she imagined only a mother could identify.
She was suddenly gripped by a deep melancholy and a need to escape her niece’s room. She bent and kissed Madeleine lightly and hurried to her own bedroom. She washed and quickly changed into her night things before slipping between the welcome coolness of the sheets. She lay there, conscious of the aches in her body that she knew would soon heal and the pain in her heart that never would.
Dear Arthur, she thought, ten years dead. How she wished he could visit them now, lightening their hearts with his charm and humour, and relieving her burden with his insight and his sensitivity, as he had done on so many occasions during those early years of her marriage.
She had grown strong, as Arthur predicted, and learned to love her husband despite himself. She had found the strength to stand her ground, although a woman’s position in society only permitted so much latitude in such matters. And, of course, it was so utterly draining to try to counter Charles’s belligerence and intolerance on a daily basis that she often found it made life easier to grant him his way, as had happened that very day.
And his character had mellowed somewhat, at least for a number of years.Once, soon after Mary had been born, she had been shocked when unbeknown to her he had entered their chamber as she was breast-feeding the infant. His silent observation of her with her breast exposed had not been the source of her shock, however; rather it was the compliment that he had bestowed upon her, telling her that she was one of God’s most beautiful creatures. She’d looked up in silence, taken aback, lips parted, and then he’d become embarrassed, muttered apologies and stomped away. How she wished she could have seized that moment, gone to him, embraced him, rewarded him for the effort it had surely taken to say those few words.
And she had been pretty then, beautiful even, coal-black hair and a perfect complexion, a blushing smile and shy, hazel-green eyes. To hear an acknowledgement of her prettiness from her husband, a man of incredible reserve, was priceless to her, especially as she’d never heard it repeated in the twenty-four years since that day. Yet he hadn’t been so restrained in his compliments to his daughter over the years and that had compensated her a great deal.
Mary had slowly grown strong though Annie’s nurturing and attention, and quickly developed a voice whose loudness and insistence was surely an inheritance from her father. And the child found a way into his heart that she herself had only glimpsed.
She had encouraged it at every opportunity. In those first few weeks, taking him unawares, she would press the infant into his arms. His discomfort was evident, his smile set directly atop a grimace that threatened to break through at any moment. Annie usually had the sense that he found the smell of the child offensive, whereas she relished each of her odours – her skin, her warm breath, and even those normally unpleasant to the human nose, they were just another part of her daughter’s being. Given the trauma of her birth, Mary was a miracle indeed. But despite his distaste for Mary’s bodily functions, she noted that he became increasingly reluctant to return the child to her arms.
Awkward with the helpless infant, he was to prove at ease with the walking child. As Mary’s steps had grown longer and steadier, he had set about tutoring her on her place in the world. Annie had taken her own steps to ensure some balance was brought to this venture, as she had no intention of allowing her sole offspring to develop into the peremptory character that she had married. Charles would on occasion allow the stumbling tot to accompany him about the estate, witness to his shrill commands or flights of temper. Annie had schooled her differently, urging compassion and honesty, albeit in terms a child could grasp. She could recall times when she would hear her husband one moment yelling at some employee and in the next whispering nonsense talk to his daughter. At such times she considered that he was indeed capable of love, but it was conditional. To earn his love, Annie or his daughter must freely embrace his behaviour.
By the time she was six, he had succeeded in indoctrinating one small aspect of his character into Mary with absolute success, and it was one to which Annie had no great objection. That was his love of horses. Mary had been able to ride a small pony when little more than waist high. In those days, father and daughter had been inseparable. When the requirements of her schooling had inevitably come along, Annie insisted that she be sent away to boarding school as she wanted to make sure Mary had the opportunity to spend time in the company of others her own age. After Mary left, Charles had been disconsolate for weeks and had unburdened his temper on her and the tenants.
As Mary had grown, so had Annie’s awareness of Charles’s approach to running the estate. It was true that he often returned to the house in the evening in the foulest of moods, giving voice to expressions of contempt for his labourers or tenants, but in those early years, Annie assumed that this was merely the way of business. Yet she had little meaningful knowledge of the tenants’ lives, of the precariousness of their existence or of the added burdens that, as she would subsequently discover, her own husband frequently placed upon them. When she reflected later from the comforting, judicious sanctuary of middle age, she had existed in a shell of naivety, perhaps deliberately so. It was e
asier to live in ignorance, not to discomfit her mind with craggy, prodding thoughts.
When Mary departed for boarding school, Charles’s temperament had regressed, laughter only ever creasing his face when it was in celebration of another’s misfortune. With each year he’d become increasingly detached, distancing himself from almost all friendships, even those of family. She subsequently learned that for his tenants and labourers there were fines for snapping the handle of a scythe, for collecting dead branches from his fields or for crossing his land without permission. Every petty sin against Boycott’s law was penalised with venom. And, of course, there were evictions – wailing, clamorous and often unjust – and it disturbed her that he seemed utterly indifferent to the suffering these terrible events wrought. But it wasn’t a woman’s place to become involved in such things. Yet she still felt an unbridled shame.
And then Mary had returned home a young woman and Annie’s heart had swelled with the hope that Charles would mellow again under her influence. And her hopes appeared justified as his love for his daughter seemed as great as ever, and Annie glimpsed again those elusive smiles on his face. But it was not to last. For Mary was no longer a child and the irony of it all was that a wilfulness she had inherited from her father would ultimately play no small part in driving them apart forever.
In late 1873 the carriage bearing Her Majesty’s Royal Mail trundled up the rise to Corrymore House and Charles was handed a letter bearing the Earl of Erne’s seal. He’d announced with rising excitement the offer to take up the position at Lough Mask Estate. It was the opportunity he’d always craved, he’d said. It was a much larger estate, with better land, a fine house, more prestige, more money. And the opportunity to flee the memory of his daughter, Annie secretly thought.
Annie had been reluctant to leave the place she had spent most of her adult life, and to which she was still deeply connected emotionally, not least because of Mary. But she had reluctantly acknowledged that the new position would serve his ambition and their futures well. Their new life and fortunes awaited them across the hills to the east. In Charles’s mind the greater the remove in time and place from the memory of Mary, the better. Annie had silently taken quite the opposite view, that those events would haunt their every deed until their dying day.