Bob heard about Connaught first, but saw it last. Nevertheless, he felt he knew something of it. He had heard endless discourse of it during the last thirteen years from his Irish "out-laws," the kin-folk of the late Mary Dolores, most of whom bore the surname of Partry.
Until of late, the Partry clan and their swine, kine, assorted free-ranging poultry, and one bewildered sheep had teemed in a bit of shed in Rotherhithe, which lay across the Thames from Wapping, about a mile downstream of the Tower of London. Teague Partry—one of three Partrys who had, at one time or another, enlisted in the Black Torrent Guards—had often volunteered to stand watch on Develin Tower, the extreme southeastern vertex of the citadel, in spite of the fact that it was sorely exposed to raw weather coming up the River, and detested by all of the other soldiers. The cold wet winds, he claimed, reminded him of Connaught, and from his Develin vantage point he could see all the way downriver to Rotherhithe and keep an eye on his four-legged assets. Teague rhapsodized about Connaught all the time, and did it so convincingly that half the regiment was ready to move there. Bob had taken it with a grain of salt because he knew that Teague had never in his life ventured more than five miles' distance from London Bridge, and was merely repeating tales told to him by his folk. From which Bob had collected, very early, something that it would have benefited the Partrys to know, namely that Ireland was a mentality, and not a physical place.
After the Revolution the Partrys had slaughtered all their livestock, deserted their Regiment, gathered up what money they could, and escaped to Dublin. Several months later, Bob had been shipped to Belfast with the rest of his regiment, and with the Dutch colonel who'd been put in command of it. Now, King William found John Churchill hard enough to trust when he was inside London Wall. He could not possibly bring himself to trust Marlborough (or any other English commander) with an elite regiment on Irish soil, especially when Churchill's former master, James, was only a few marches south, in Dublin. So it was under a Colonel de Zwolle that the King's Own Black Torrent Guards voyaged to Belfast, and under him that they tarried on that island over two winters. When Bob next saw Churchill, he would assure his old chief that he had not missed a thing.
From their point of disembarkation the regiment had marched south for a few days, and then wintered over in a camp at Dundalk, which lay near the border between the part of Ireland called Ulster and the one called Leinster. Out of a full strength of 806 men they suffered casualties of thirty-one dead, thirty-two so disabled that they had to be retired, and many hundreds who were laid low for a time but later got better. Most of these casualties were put down to disease or hunger, a few to accidents and brawls—zero to combat, of which there was none. This was an exceptionally good record.
They were encamped near a Dutch regiment commanded by one of Colonel de Zwolle's old drinking-and hunting-buddies. The Dutch soldiers suffered very little from disease, though they were every bit as cold and hungry. They kept their camp so clean that it was mocked as "the Nunnery" by certain men in Bob's regiment, who espoused a more temperate approach to hygiene. But when English soldiers began dying at a rate of several per day, the Black Torrent Guards finally began to pay some attention to de Zwolle's nagging and to emulate some of the practices of their Dutch neighbors. Coincidentally or not, the number of men sick in bed began to drop not long afterwards. When spring came and the rolls were called, it was found that they had suffered much lighter casualties than other English regiments.
In June 1690, then, William of Orange finally arrived in Ulster as only a King could, viz. with three hundred ships, fifteen thousand troops, hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, more Princes, Dukes, and Bishops than a boat-load of playing-cards and chess-sets, and a lot of Dutch artillery. He marched south, pausing at Dundalk long enough to collect the regiments that had wintered over there, and then invaded Leinster at the head of thirty-six thousand men. He made straight for Dublin, where James Stuart had established his rebel Parliament. King William had a wooden house, designed by one Christopher Wren—that same bloke who was building the new St. Paul's in London. It was ingeniously made so that it could be taken down in sections at a few minutes' notice, transported on wagons, and put back up again wherever William decided to establish his headquarters. Normally he erected it in the midst of his army, which was not at all usual for a campaigning King, and made a good impression on his soldiers.
James Stuart had been spoiling for a fight for a year and a half. He marched north from Dublin at the head of twenty-five thousand men and, after some preliminary maneuvering, set up a position on the south bank of the river called Boyne.
The next day, William was reconnoitering the north bank in person, looking for crossing-places, when a Jacobite cannonball hit him on the shoulder and knocked him off his horse. Jacobites on the opposite bank saw it happen, and saw a vaguely king-shaped object being carried away in haste by agitated Protestants.
What they could not see, from that side of the Boyne, was that the cannonball was a spent ricochet that had glanced off William's shoulder and dealt him no serious harm. They made the wholly reasonable assumption that William the Usurper was dead and reported as much up the chain of command.
The next day William launched a diversionary attack across the Boyne not far from where he had been hit. He waited for James to move his main force that way, then crossed the river in force elsewhere. The first to mount this main attack were William's best and favorite soldiers, the Dutch Blue Guards. But they were followed closely by several companies of the King's Own Black Torrent Guards, a plum job that never would have been afforded them if they'd been under the command of Marlborough. De Zwolle had spent the winter plying his superiors with brandy and sending letters to London; that probably explained how Bob and his men were given such a splendid opportunity to have their heads hacked off in a bog. They crossed the Boyne, at any rate, and formed up on the south bank, and withstood several Jacobite cavalry charges. This was not an easy thing to do. They did it in direct view of King William, who had found a vantage point on the north bank from which to observe his beloved Blues.
The captain of Bob's company was killed very early and so Bob had to assume effective command of threescore men for the rest of the day. This had very little effect on anything. Whether or not their captain was alive, Bob's job was to get his men to believe that they really were safer standing together as a unit, as opposed to throwing their muskets down and diving into the river. Far be it from Bob to think about his company's or his regiment's reputation at Court.
If he had thought about it, he might have counseled his men to break and run instead.
That night the King came to their camp to tell them what fine fellows he thought they were. Now the Irish Army had simply vanished; the only evidence they'd been present at the Boyne was the thousands of pikes and muskets they had thrown down on the ground, the better to outrun their pursuers. King William's host had climbed up out of the river-valley and spread out across churned and trampled pastures between the hamlet of Donore and the village of Duleek—places that, like færies, were spoken of, by Irishmen, as if they really existed, but that could not actually be seen. As they went they harvested the dropped weapons, hugging bristly faggots of them to their chests and finally letting them drop in clanking heaps when they decided to set up camp.
As their baggage had not caught up with them, they spent the night in the open, and as there were no trees hereabouts they used the captured weapons for firewood. They were not worth keeping as weapons—a fact that was obvious to Bob, but tended to be ignored by those who espoused the view that the Irish had thrown them down out of cowardice. Bob found flintlocks without flint, muskets with cracked barrels, pikes that could be snapped over the knee.
A few hours after nightfall, anyway, they received their King. He had suffered an asthma attack while fording the river and was still wheezing piteously—which evidently hurt, because of the cannonball injury—so he tended to speak in very short sentences. He was sitting
askew on a tired horse. He spoke in Dutch to de Zwolle and then in English to the company captains and to Bob. He did not look at them, however; he was very close to falling asleep in the saddle, and could not tear his eyes away from the musket-bonfires.
What he said was that, with regiments such as his own Black Torrent Guards, he could not only take Ireland but Flanders, too, and fight all the way to Paris.
Bob stayed up late gazing into the fire, which was slowly devolving into a red tangle of melted gun-barrels, and pondered some of the longer-term implications of the King's statement. Overall, the notion was somewhat troubling. On the other hand, an invasion of France might afford him an opportunity to seek out Miss Abigail Frome.
The next day they left the field pimpled with smoking twists of blackened iron and marched south to Dublin. James Stuart had already run off to France. Protestants were running wild, looting Catholic homes. Bob ventured into a certain quarter where Protestants were more apt to behave themselves, if indeed they went there at all. He found Teague Partry sitting on a stoop smoking a clay pipe and gravely observing the bums of passing milk-maids, as if nothing much had happened recently. But the right side of his face was flushed red, as if sunburnt, and pocked with recent wounds that all appeared to have radiated from a common center.
Teague bought him a mug of beer (it being Teague's turn to do this) and explained to him that James's foreign cavalry regiments had panicked first and, finding their escape route blocked by the Irish infantry, had opened fire on them to clear the way. He put it to Bob that Irishmen had it in them to fight effectively when they were not being massacred by Continental cavaliers who were supposed to be on their side, and (pointing significantly to his face) when they were provided with guns that projected musket-balls instead of blowing up in their faces. Bob agreed that it was so.
Later the bulk of William's army marched west across the island, out of Leinster and into the southern realm of Munster. They laid siege to Limerick, which was one of the few places in Ireland that had proper fortifications, and could serve as the venue for a proper military engagement. Unfortunately, the Irish had little use for proper military engagements. William's Dutch cannons blasted a hole in the city wall; Bob rushed in at the head of his company and got conked in the head by a bottle hurled at him from the top of a ruin by a massive hag in a wimple, screaming something at him in Gaelic. Bob, who knew nothing about his father, or his mother's father, had long been preoccupied by the suspicion that he might be partly, or even largely, Irish, and while he lay unconscious on the rubble of the shattered wall of Limerick, he had a strange dream concerning the nun who had thrown the bottle—the import of it was that she was his great-aunt or something, scolding him for everything bad he had ever done.
His skull was merely dented, but his scalp was nearly taken off, and had to be sewed back on by a barber-surgeon who advised him to grow his hair back again as soon as he could; "And for god's sake get a wife before you go bald, or women and children will run away from you screaming!" He was only trying to be cheerful, but Bob growled at him that he had already found his true love, and that scars on his pate were the least of his concerns.
The Earl of Marlborough finally got leave from the distracted King to sail across to Munster. He took the cities of Cork and Kinsale, but he did it without the help of his Black Torrent Guards. Then he went home to spent a comfortable winter in London while Bob and the regiment remained encamped outside of Limerick, fending off occasional sorties by the Irish cavalry, and keeping up a running, sporadic battle with bands of armed peasants who styled themselves "rapparees."
The rapparees actually did have firearms that worked, and had learned to strip them down into their parts in seconds. The locks they kept in their pockets, the barrels they corked shut and hid in sloughs or streams, the stocks they thrust into wood-piles, or anywhere else a bare stick might go unnoticed. So what appeared to be a crew of half-naked peat-cutters or a congregation strolling to Mass could scatter into the waste at a word or a gesture, and reconstitute itself an hour later as a band of heavily armed marauders.
Because of the rapparees there were few places on the island, outside of Ulster, where Englishmen could feel safe in groups of less than an infantry company. But one of those places was the south bank of the river Shannon just downstream of Limerick. As the winter eased, and the hair grew back over his wound, Bob began to go there by himself and sit under a solitary tree overlooking the river and smoke his pipe and brood. The reading of books was not available to him. He'd lost his interest in whoring. He had heard his men's stories, jokes, and songs so many times he could not suffer them any more. Drink made him feel poorly, and card-playing was pointless. He suffered, in other words, from a want of things that he could do to pass the time.
So he sat under his brooding-tree and gazed across the wide river Shannon. Like all the other rivers of the British Isles, it had a long estuary leading in from the sea to a port (Limerick in this case) that had been built where the river first became narrow enough to be bridged. The Shannon was the boundary between Munster and Connaught, and so by looking across it Bob could gaze into that land of legend so highly spoken of by the Partrys. From here Connaught looked like the rest of Ireland. But what did he know?
When King William had come over before the Battle of the Boyne he had brought fresh recruits to replace the ones who had sickened and died over the winter, but not enough of the sort Bob favored. Bob had however managed to recruit half a dozen English Protestants who had never actually been to England. They had grown up on various farms in Ireland that their fathers or grandfathers, who had been Cromwell-soldiers, had taken away from Gaelic Catholics. But the various revolutions of the last decades had turned their families into Vagabonds of an extraordinarily hard and dour cast, roaming around Eire in search of organized violence. Bob knew how to talk to men like that, and so they had spread the word among themselves and gravitated toward the King's Own Black Torrent Guards, and continued to gravitate still.
After the Battle of the Boyne, a Protestant wool-merchant of Dublin (who had grown wealthy from the fact that the Irish were not allowed to sell their wool overseas except through England) had donated some portion of his lootings to buy these new recruits weapons and uniforms, and they had formed a company. So the Black Torrent Guards were now a slightly oversized regiment, with 14 companies instead of 13, and a nominal strength of 868 men.
One day Bob reached his brooding-tree and turned around to discover that he had been followed out by Tom Allgreave and Oliver Good, two of the original Phanatiques he'd recruited last year in Dundalk. They were a quarter of a mile behind him, exchanging the lead position every few steps, as if egging each other on. Each of them had a sword dangling from his belt, part of the motley collection of brought and stolen weaponry that had been showered upon the Fourteenth Company by that wool-merchant.
To give great long blades to such boys was dangerous. Fortunately the boys knew it, or anyway had found out as much, over the course of the winter, by slashing each other in what were meant to be playful exchanges. By the time Tom and Oliver drew within hailing-distance of Bob, he had guessed why they had come: They required instruction in sword-fighting. Normally this was considered a pastime of effete courtiers, a pointless, useless, out-moded affectation; in a word, idle. But among common folk, especially older ones who remembered Cromwell, the lore of the spadroon continued to circulate. Word had apparently got round to Tom and Oliver that Bob knew something of the practice. Those boys were unreconstructed Puritans who had nothing to do all winter long, as drinking, gambling, and whoring were ruled out on religious grounds. One could pray for only so many hours a day. It was not possible to practice marksmanship because powder and balls were strictly rationed. So it was not clear to Bob whether they had decided to take up the practice of sword-fighting because they genuinely cared about it, or because there was literally nothing else for them to do.
It did not matter either way, as Bob was idle, too. And so as T
om and Oliver got to within a horseshoe-throw of his brooding-tree, Bob knocked the ashes out of his pipe, stood up, reached around himself, and drew out his spadroon. The Puritans were thrilled. "You'll want to stand sideways, as you make a narrower target that way, and it gets your sword-arm that much closer to the other bloke," Bob said. He raised the sword up until its guard was touching his nose, the blade pointing vertically into the air. "This is a sort of salute, and do not on any account mistake it for some foppish affectation, as it says to any man who stands before you, ‘I mean to engage in swordplay with you, do not just stand there and be hit, but either defend yourself, or else retire.' "
Tom and Oliver now nearly killed themselves getting their weapons unsheathed, and then nearly killed each other getting them into the salute position. "Oliver, what you have in your hand is a rapier, and I do not know the method of its use as well as I do that of the spadroon," Bob said, "but anyway we shall try to make shift with the tools at hand."
Thus did Bob open up a new defencing academy on the south bank of the river Shannon. It became popular very quickly and then just as quickly collapsed to some half a dozen men who were genuinely interested in the subject. After a month they were joined by Monsieur LaMotte, a Huguenot cavalry captain who happened to spy them as he was riding by one day. He was expert with a cavalry saber, which was a somewhat similar weapon to the spadroon, but he had also studied the rapier, and so he was at last able to give Oliver some instruction in what to do with his weapon. In general, cavalry officers (who tended to be Persons of Quality) would never fraternize thusly with common foot-soldiers, but the Huguenots were an exceeding queer lot. Many were common Frenchmen whose families had grown wealthy in trade and then been kicked out of France. Now they were in Ireland, gaining some small revenge by teaching the defencing tricks of the Continental nobility to savage Anglo-Irish Puritans.
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