In the Time of Famine

by Michael Grant

  “Emily, I will not permit you to speak to me in that manner. You don’t understand—”

  “I understand perfectly.” Hot tears coursed down her cheeks. “You’re a hypocrite. You lecture me about responsibility and accountability, but clearly you were not responsible. You were not accountable.”

  Somerville, looking very tired, stared into the fire. “Emily, there are things you don’t understand. I’ve done my best to—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more excuses.”

  She turned and ran from the room.

  Astride Shannon, Emily galloped blindly across the fields, jumping hedges, stone walls, fallen tree stumps—anything that stood in her way. She spurred Shannon to make him go faster and faster, almost hoping she’d fall or Shannon would trip and she’d break her neck. Even death would be preferable to being impoverished. But the horse gave out before she could kill either of them. He pulled up short in front of a five-foot stone wall, snorting in protest. She felt his massive chest heaving beneath her and smelled the pungent sweat steaming from his glistening body.

  “I’m sorry, Shannon,” she said, patting his pulsing neck. “I’m sorry….”

  She led him to a stream and, while he drank, she sat under a tree. And the tears came. She wasn’t sure if the tears were for her lost mother or the family’s lost fortunes or for herself. Whatever the reason, the cry had a cathartic effect and when she’d cried herself out, she felt much better. All was not lost, she told herself as she brushed the grass from her dress and remounted Shannon. Her father said they weren’t penniless and she hoped he wasn’t lying to her. But clearly, the estate was in serious financial trouble. In any event, there was nothing she could do about it. And with that realization she felt the unexpected peace of one who has been dreading bad news only to discover that the news is not as bad as not knowing.

  On the way home, she rode across the bleak landscape of Lord Attwood’s fields and counted dozens of tumbled cottages. Farther up the road, she crossed over onto Major Wicker’s land and saw more of the same— barren land, unattended, untilled, and even more abandoned cottages. Attwood and Wicker had talked so causally of tumbled cottages, but now, seeing them, like so many scars on the landscape, she suddenly realized that each of these ruined cottages represented ruined families, ruined lives.

  When she crossed over to the fields of the Somerville estates, there was a marked difference. Not one cottage had been tumbled. She steered Shannon toward a cluster of cottages where a handful of men were quietly talking. When they saw her approaching they scurried away and disappeared into their cottages like so many frightened rabbits.

  Emily stopped in front of one of the cottages that was not much more than a mud hut. “Hello, is anyone home?”

  No one answered, but she could see someone looking out at her from the partially opened door. “Hello! May I ask you a question?”

  “They won’t come out.”

  Emily turned and Michael was standing there.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re afraid of you.”

  “Why should they be afraid of me?”

  “You’re the ruling class.”

  Emily, stung by the sarcasm in his voice, said, “I meant no harm. I just wanted to ask a question.”

  Michael called out, “It’s all right, Pat.”

  The door opened and a big man with flaming red hair stepped out. Six children, no more than a year apart in age, squirted out behind him and pressed against the cottage wall, watching Emily with big shy eyes. Emily was stunned at their emaciated appearance and their clothing, which was literally rags.

  “Ask away,” Michael said.

  Pat Doyle swept the cap off his head and stood silent, apprehensive.

  “The question I had… that is….” With Michael staring at her, and this big man cowering before her as though she held the power of life and death, she suddenly felt like a great fool. “Are you in arrears with your rent?” she blurted out.

  Doyle shot a glance at Michael. Emily saw the look of genuine terror in the man’s eyes and realized she shouldn’t have asked that question. “It’s quite all right,” she said quickly. “I’m not here to collect the rent or anything. I just want to know.”

  “He is,” Michael said. “And so am I. And so is every tenant on your Da’s lands.”

  “I see.”

  The other men had come out of their cottages and one by one had come to stand silent, watching her. The abject fear in their eyes was painful to see. She wanted to run away, but she held her ground. She had to know.

  Pat Doyle said, “Your Da, God bless him, has told us the rent is forgiven till the great hunger is gone.”

  “I see.” He’d answered the question she’d come to ask, but now she wished she’d never asked it. She wished she’d never stopped. She didn’t belong here. She was an intruder--an unwelcomed witness to their misery and degradation.

  “Every day we pray for his long life,” another man added.

  Emily studied the man’s face for a sign of mockery, but saw only genuineness.

  A red-faced farmer stepped out of the group. “The others have not been so kind, young mistress,” he said.

  “And you are, sir?”

  “Padric Leahy.”

  “Who do you mean by the others, Mr. Leahy?”

  “The other landlords,” Michael said. “Rowe, Wicker, Attwood—they’ve all been tumblin’ cottages.”

  Things were beginning to sort themselves out in her head.

  “Thank you.” She nodded to the men and turned Shannon around.

  Michael was suddenly beside her. “Did you get the answers to your questions?”

  “I did,” she answered, stung by the harshness in his tone.

  She started to spur Shannon, but Michael grabbed the bridle. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “What is it?”

  “I was just wonderin’. Why would you shame a man by askin’ if he owed rent?”

  Emily felt herself redden. “I didn’t mean to shame anyone.”

  “Well you did all the same. You shamed them and scared the life out of them in the bargain. These men owe two years’ rent. They’re not proud of that. They may be poor, but they have their pride and they don’t like to be reminded that they’ve not paid their just debts.”

  Emily felt the anger rising at his supercilious tone, “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “My God, woman. Do you not know the power you have over them? Your Da can turn them off the land with a scratch of a pen. And a man without a bit of land is a dead man.”

  There he was, being a patronizing fool again. “You don’t seem afraid or shamed,” she snapped.

  “I don’t scare easily and besides, I’m doing the best I can. What else can I do?”

  “You can let go of my horse,” she said evenly.

  Michael released the reins and patted Shannon’s neck. He looked up at her and the blue sky reflecting off his eyes made them even bluer. He knew he was acting the fool again. How could she know the power she had over them, real or imagined? He had no right to talk to her like that. “Your Da is a good man,” he said, trying in his own way to make amends.

  “I’ll be sure and tell him you approve.”

  Emily spurred Shannon and galloped off.

  Michael stood in the clearing, silently cursing himself. He’d done it again. He’d wanted to tell her what it was like for him and the others. How they were truly grateful to Lord Somerville for what he was doing. But it didn’t come out the way he meant it to and once again he was left feeling the proper eejit.

  As Emily rode home, she couldn’t get the sight of those tumbled cottages out of her mind. And she kept hearing what Doyle and Leahy—and even that maddening Michael had said. They loved her father. No, love was too strong a word. They didn’t love him. But they certainly respected him.

  To Emily, her father had always been—at least since he’d sent her away—an unfeeling autocrat who even now was trying to control
her life. But perhaps he hadn’t always been that way. From time to time she recalled dim memories of a man who smiled a lot, a man who played with her, a man who read her bedtime stories. But she could never be sure if those memories were real or just memories she wanted to believe were real. Nevertheless, she had learned something about him today that she’d not known—or perhaps not permitted herself to know. Her father was a generous, compassionate man.

  Emily found him working in the rose garden. He stood up abruptly when he saw her approaching and wiped his hands on his apron.

  Emily stood there, silent, awkward. Then, she took off her sapphire ring and held it out to her father. “I want to help.”

  Somerville took the ring and examined it. “Your mother gave you this ring just before she died. It was her grandmother’s. He took her hand and slipped it back on her finger. “You keep it, Emily. To remind you of your mother.”

  Emily felt a constriction in her throat. When she could finally speak, she said, “Will we be all right, Father?”

  Somerville nodded. “We will. Once the next harvest is in, the country will be right as rain.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  Emily studied the ring, sparkling in the bright sun. She looked up at her father. She hadn’t permitted herself to really look at him since she’d come back. His face was scored with deep lines. He looked old, tired. But beneath that weariness was the man she remembered. The bushy eyebrows, now gray; the long aquiline nose, the firm chin.

  And suddenly she knew. Those childhood memories were real.

  Emily threw her arms around her father, buried her face in his chest and wept.

  “I’m so sorry, Father…”

  Somerville blinked back tears and swallowed hard. “Welcome home, Emily.”

  Chapter Twenty

  August 1847

  Ministry of the Treasury

  “I have seen women and children covered in filthy rags gleaning fields in a futile search for a bit of turnip,” Dr. Playfair said, his voice quaking with emotion. “I have seen dead bodies in various states of decay along the roadside. I have seen with my own eyes, Mr. Trevelyan, barren and untilled fields because there is no money to buy seed. The country, I tell you, is all lost and gone. This famine is an evil upon the land.”

  Dr. Playfair, weary from an arduous three-day journey from Dublin, sat across the conference table from Trevelyan. He hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in a fortnight, his face was pale and drawn, and he’d lost weight. The strain of working day and night and trying to get through to the merciless Trevelyan was taking its toll on his old body.

  Dr. Kane and Mr. Lindley sat to either side of Playfair in silence. By tacit agreement Playfair had become their spokesman. At this moment both men were glad they were not the recipients of that cold stare which Trevelyan was bringing to bear on Playfair. Dr. Playfair had tried to give Trevelyan a sense of the horrific conditions in Ireland, but judging from Trevelyan’s implacable expression, he hadn’t succeeded.

  Trevelyan studied a well-manicured fingernail. “The real evil with which we have to content, my dear Playfair, is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. Dependency on charity,” he continued in his irritating, clipped voice, “must not be made an agreeable mode of life. Quite frankly, I find it astonishing that the Irish haven’t discovered an alternative to their potato crop. Instead, they have become even more ungrateful and rebellious.”

  Playfair, reddening at the intransigency of the man, rummaged through a stack of papers in his briefcase and pulled out a folder.

  “This is a report from the Surgeon General at Dublin Castle.” The paper shook in his hand as he read from it. “Reports are coming in from the west of Ireland that the people are eating nettles and weeds and—”

  “My dear Playfair, I cannot and will not undercut the grain merchants and upset all their calculations.”

  “In the name of God how can you talk of profit when so many are starving?”

  “I have told you more than once, Dr. Playfair, the Irish exaggerate. And exaggeration is apparently contagious. Even clear-thinking men such as yourselves appear to be prone to the disease.”

  Playfair trembled with rage. “I do not exaggerate, sir. It is well for some to sit here in England, well fed and secure in their homes, and judge an impoverished people across the Irish Sea.”

  Kane put a restraining hand on Playfair’s arm and shot him a warning glace. It would not do to insult the secretary. “Mr. Trevelyan,” Kane said, in a more conciliatory tone, “we have just come from Ireland. Believe me, no words can describe the horrors that are being visited upon that godforsaken country.”

  Trevelyan shifted to a more conciliatory tone as well. “Things are not right in Ireland, I know. Nevertheless, we must take care not to create in the peasant a habit of dependence on government. I remind you again, gentlemen, it is the landlord’s responsibility to provide relief to the poor, not the Crown’s. It is the landlords who must accept their responsibility to feed the poor and destitute.”

  Playfair waved the document in the air. “Mr. Trevelyan, if you will just listen to what the Surgeon General says about—”

  Trevelyan stopped him with a wave of the hand. “I have a meeting with Lord Russell this afternoon. I believe we may have an answer to the Irish question once and for all.”

  “But the report—”

  “Be so kind as to put your findings in writing and submit them to me.” Trevelyan stood up. “Thank you, gentlemen.”

  He walked out, leaving the three men sitting in stunned frustration.

  September 1847

  Somerville Manor

  Lord Attwood’s pink jowls shook with fury. “Are they mad?”

  Wicker pounded his fist into his open palm. “The government expects us to pay the entire cost of running the Public Works?”

  Rowe, pale and sweating profusely, gulped his sherry, too stunned to speak.

  Lord Somerville studied the document that he’d just received from the Treasury Office outlining the provisions of the new Labor Rate Act. In the dry language of the bureaucracy it spelled out how the government—or more precisely the landlords—would deal with the continuing famine.

  “I don’t understand,” Rowe said, when he was finally able to catch his breath. “The government paid the entire cost of administrating the Board Of Works the first year.”

  “But they only paid half the second year,” Attwood said in disgust. “We should have seen this coming.”

  Somerville tossed the document onto his desk. “According to the London Times, Parliament has rebelled at the huge sums expended—squandered said the editorial page. The editorial also questions why Parliament should continue to subsidize profligate landlords and lazy Irish peasants when they will not lift a finger to help themselves.”

  “And so,” Attwood concluded, “the upshot is that the entire cost of maintaining the Public Works will be shifted from the government to us.”

  “The expense of maintaining these Public Works without government assistance will be enormous,” Rowe whispered, eyes wide with fright as he contemplated the specter of bankruptcy. “Where in the name of God are we to get the money?”

  “There are provisions for loans,” Somerville said.

  “At three and a half percent,” Attwood snapped.

  Without asking permission, Wicker poured himself another sherry with a shaking hand. “It’s usurious, I say.”

  “It’s preposterous,” Rowe agreed. “I’m on the verge of ruin.”

  “It is preposterous,” Attwood agreed. Then his eyes narrowed and what passed for a smile crossed his thin lips. “But there is a provision in the law that may be to our advantage.”

  “And what provision is that?” Rowe asked, hoping for some respite from this draconian edict.

  “The law states that any tenant working more than a quarter of an acre of land is not eligible for relief from the Workhouse
.” When he saw the puzzled expression on Rowe’s face, he explained further. “Don’t you get it, man? If he can’t get relief from the Workhouse and he can’t pay his rent, what is he to do?”

  Rowe nodded, finally getting Lord Attwood’s drift. “I see. We use this provision as a wedge to drive the tenants off the land.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then the answer is to step up evictions,” Wicker said with great conviction.

  Somerville slammed his glass down on the table. He’d been listening to these fools patiently, but his forbearance was at an end. “For God’s sake, we have some responsibility to our tenants. We can’t just drive them off the land like so many crows.”

  “The only responsibility I have is to my own estates,” Lord Attwood said, thrusting a bony finger at Somerville. “These people occupy my land at my pleasure. As long as they produce, I confer a favor upon them. If they can no longer produce, they go. It’s as simple as that.”

  “But where are they to go?” Somerville asked in frustration.

  “To hell or Connaught,” Attwood shouted, echoing the words of Oliver Cromwell, 17th century England’s most infamous persecutor of the Irish.

  Wicker and Rowe nodded in vigorous agreement.

  Shannon reared up, nostrils flaring, eyes wide, and kicked at Kincaid. The gombeen man dropped the reins and half ran, half fell out of the stall. Enraged, he looked for something he could use to punish the impudent animal and found an axe handle. “I’ll show you who’s master here, me boyo—”

  Suddenly, the axe handle was wrenched from his grasp. As he turned to see who would dare do such a thing, Michael rammed the handle into Kincaid’s stomach. The gombeen man sunk to his knees gasping for air.

  “How dare you assault my person,” he hissed. “That horse is my property and I’ll do with it as I please.”