The old man came in after him. ‘Fior cinn fáilte,’ he said quietly with a bow of the head, indicating a chair near a window which, with the door, was the sole source of light for the room.
‘My father says you are welcome.’
Hervey looked round to see a much younger woman – little more than a girl – standing in the doorway. Her hair was copper-red and as thick as a blackthorn bush. Even in the poor light he could see that her looks and complexion would have been the envy of many a fashionable in St James’s.
‘Caithlin, where is the balsam?’
‘In the stone jar beside the yeast, Mother. I’ll get it,’ replied the girl. Turning to Hervey she smiled. ‘You see, we speak English perfectly well. It is by choice that we speak Gaeilge, though.’
The old woman relinquished the task to her daughter and sat down in a chair near the smoking fire to stir a pot simmering away gently. Hervey now felt it time to say something – anything – for here seemed the very opportunity he had been seeking.
‘I am Lieutenant Hervey of the Sixth Light Dragoons, in Cork,’ he offered.
‘And I am Michael O’Mahoney, sor, and right grateful for saving my horse. This is my wife Brigid and my daughter Caithlin.’
Caithlin O’Mahoney, now crouching at Hervey’s side and smoothing the balsam on his hands, looked up and smiled again. Hers were the only native smiles he had seen since leaving Cork, but such smiles they were – warm, open, full and free, in such contrast to the sullenness of the rest of the village. They did more to soothe the pain in his hands than the balsam. He almost sighed with the ease, but suddenly the dim light by which she worked failed and he turned to see two men filling the doorway as completely as if the door itself had been closed. He braced himself ready to spring up with his sabre. Only when the two moved into the cottage and the light from the window fell on them did he see that they were unarmed – young men in their twenties and with the same thick copper-red hair as Caithlin O’Mahoney. She seemed unperturbed by the scowls on their faces, her own smile scarcely diminished.
‘Fineen, Conor,’ the old woman began roughly, ‘say welcome to this officer. He has saved Finbarre, and burned himself in the bargain.’
They muttered a passable greeting, the scowls remaining but re-directed at their sister.
‘These are my sons, sor,’ explained the old man, ‘two of them anyway.’
‘Good day,’ Hervey said. ‘I am sorry I cannot offer my hand, as you can see.’
Neither son responded, leaving the cottage instead without a word.
‘Forgive the boys’ manners, sor,’ said the old man, discomposed by their exit.
‘Sure they’re mad with themselves that it had to be an outsider who came to your aid, Father – and an Englishman at that. Everything that happens passes them by. I wonder they don’t go to America as they’re always vowing to.’
‘We are at war with America, miss,’ Hervey had said before realizing that ‘we’ might not have been the word the O’Mahoneys would have used.
The old man sighed. ‘Will the English fight everybody, then? Ireland is a peaceable enough place: there’s no cause for fighting,’ he said, handing a cup to Hervey now that Caithlin O’Mahoney had finished with the balsam. ‘Sláinte!’ he said, raising his own.
‘Sláinte!’ replied Hervey – the word was familiar enough from many nights in the Peninsula with Highlanders. He took a sip and knew immediately what it was. The old man winked, and Hervey laughed.
The regiment had returned from Dublin a week later, and after one night in Cork the squadrons had dispersed to their outstations, one troop each at Mallow, Bandon, Tallow and Gort, and three in Limerick, plus smaller detachments in places like Skibbereen, leaving one troop and headquarters in Cork itself. The best part of Munster was thereby covered by light, mobile reinforcements able to support the garrisons of infantry in the major towns, though what threat the native Irish were, from his perception of their condition at Kilcrea, Hervey could scarcely imagine. His own troop remained in Cork, but his initial disappointment at not being sent further west all but disappeared when, some weeks later, Captain Lankester took three months’ home leave, giving him temporary command. ‘I hear you have been riding the countryside,’ Lankester had said to him when handing over. And to Hervey’s reply his troop leader had fixed his gaze and added accusingly: ‘I hope you have not started developing romantic notions about this place. It will be so much the harder when you have to draw your sword. Stay detached, Mr Hervey.’
Lankester was, by Hervey’s own reckoning, the most humane of officers, and such an injunction might have given him cause for thought; but, since he would admit not the slightest fanciful attachment to the country, there was, to his mind, no cause. It was true that he had been back to the ruins at Kilcrea. He had learned that it was an old Franciscan house – Father O’Gavan, the priest whom he had met on his second visit to the village, had taken him there one afternoon. Hervey had been to Kilcrea village several times, in fact, and he had begun to learn something of both the language and the people. He had come to know the O’Mahoney sons not as Fineen and Conor but as Finghin and Conchobhar, and not as O’Mahoney but O Mathghamhan. Was this not all useful intelligence (if not of direct then at least of indirect value to the authorities)? Caithlin was a good teacher and had already given him a rudimentary understanding of the language. He learned, too, that the brothers were married, with smallholdings of their own in Kilcrea, tenants in their own right. Too young to have been with Tone’s United Irishmen, Hervey had little doubt that they would have been if given the chance. Neither of them could read or write, unlike their sister, and though they tolerated his presence whenever he came to the village they would not welcome him. Caithlin’s father, on the other hand, had grown positively to relish his visits, and he and Hervey had drunk many cups of poteen together, preceded always by the wink. But Lankester had nothing to concern himself about, Hervey had assured him.
Lord George Irvine, now quite recovered from his wound, had remained the while in Dublin where he filled – in a temporary capacity, it was understood – the appointment of commander-in-chief’s military secretary. Command of the regiment had once more devolved on Joseph Edmonds, who had elected to leave his wife and daughters in Norwich (the speculation in the mess was that gentlemanly lodgings in Cork were beyond his means). By convention, as commanding officer, he ought to have quitted his rooms in the mess and taken even the smallest bachelor establishment in the city. At first he had shown some interest in the apartments being constructed in the old fort at Huggartsland, amid the market gardens on the western edge of the city, but instead he had remained in the barracks, to the increasing discomfort of the few other officers with whom he shared the mess.
Hervey enjoyed his company there more than most, but soon he, too, had reason for disappointment that Edmonds had not set up a family establishment in the city, though this was less to do with the major’s irascibility and more because he had received a reply from Henrietta and his sister to say that they were accepting his invitation to visit. Where, therefore, would he accommodate them – at least, without a hefty bill? Lady George was in Dublin with her husband, so there was no other regimental lady with whom his guests might stay. But then by a following post came another letter from Longleat to say that she and Elizabeth would stay at Lismore, the home of the Cavendish family. Lismore was over thirty miles away, but since there was a troop at Tallow nearby he thought it a good enough plan – not that he knew the Cavendishes in the least, except by reputation. November could be an inhospitable month, Michael O’Mahoney had told him, but it could also provide the best hunting, and he concluded that it would be good that they should have such comfortable lodgings – and in so advantageous a place from which to follow hounds.
The last of the summer was soon gone, and the first cold mornings of autumn brought mists over the city and the countryside. The fields were now empty of crops as well as of labourers, the late wheat and barley having b
een cut and the potatoes on the smallholdings dug. Through such a mist one morning Hervey rode over to Kilcrea for another of Father O’Gavan’s discourses on the history of monastic Ireland. He expected that Caithlin would also be there, as she had been hitherto. She seemed to have more appetite for learning than the whole of the village, the result, no doubt, of the priest’s faithful instruction (despite there being no obvious purpose to which it might ever be put). Hervey had even found his Greek, which was better than the priest’s, being for once sought after. He had come to know the byways well and could find his way to Kilcrea without passing through any settlement larger than a dozen dwellings. That morning, with the mist shrouding everything, he reached there without seeing a soul. The village itself seemed deserted except for another mounted figure in the main street, a rare enough sight. A second man then joined the other, his horse in a lather. As Hervey got closer he saw, and heard, that they were angry.
‘Good morning, Captain,’ said the younger of the two, though twice Hervey’s age at least, a solid-looking man riding an equally solid iron-grey. He wore a green coat and top hat, which he lifted. The other man had the look of a bare-knuckle fighter, and remained silent.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ replied Hervey, touching the peak of his forage cap, ‘but I am a lieutenant not captain,’ he added cautiously, for there was something about these two.
‘What brings you here, Lieutenant?’ the man asked cheerily enough.
‘Visiting friends,’ he replied.
The man’s eyes narrowed.
‘Then, you must be well out of your way. Shall we point you back to the high road?’
‘No, thank you. This is Kilcrea, is it not?’
At that moment Caithlin O’Mahoney emerged from a cottage with Father O’Gavan. She smiled, the same warm smile that greeted him each time he came.
‘Ah, Lieutenant, now I see your purpose here right enough. You find the Cork ladies less obliging,’ leered the younger man.
‘But ye’ll find it hard to crack her pipkin with the priest forever around!’ laughed the older one.
Caithlin looked away. Father O’Gavan’s face went red with anger, and Hervey’s sabre flashed from its scabbard, the point reaching the man’s throat in an instant.
‘For God’s sake, man, take that sword away,’ he gasped, the colour draining from his florid face with the speed that Hervey’s sabre had reached it. His accomplice’s horse nearly threw its rider in the commotion, giving him a convenient pretext not to intervene.
‘You will apologize to this lady for that slur, and to the father here for saying as much in front of him.’
The apologies came at once, though the man almost choked on the words. Hervey shouldered his sabre, and the two galloped out of the village with the vilest threats and curses.
‘I do not like violence, Mr Hervey, but heaven knows it is a fine tool in good hands,’ said the priest.
Caithlin looked him full in the eye. ‘I thank you, sir; he and his like consider they have rights over any village girl.’
‘You have come on a sad day, to say the very least,’ added the priest. ‘Mother O’Long in there’ – indicating the cottage from which they had just emerged – ‘hasn’t but a few hours for this world, and those two have been serving eviction notices on the village – and this a village of English tenants, too! The man you berated was the agent – Fitzgerald.’
Hervey dismounted. ‘English tenants? I do not understand, Father.’
‘Oh, it is an expression we have. It means the tenants pay their rents on the day they are due – as they do in England, do they not? On some estates there are arrears and duty work and Lord knows what else besides. But this is a regular English village, and the agent has no right to serve notice in that way.’
‘In which case, Father, why does the landlord want to evict?’
‘You would have to go to London to ask him that, I think,’ said Caithlin with a rare note of resentment. ‘His agent – the man you all but sabred,’ she continued, though with less edge, ‘has had the notion for years that this valley would be more profitable if the cottages were cleared and sheep run over it.’
‘Sheep?’ replied Hervey incredulously. ‘But there are farmers in England selling their sheep for all they are worth, anticipating that wool prices will fall now that peace has come. Clearing this valley for sheep is no economy whatever.’
‘I’m sure it’s no better in God’s eyes, either, Mr Hervey,’ added Father O’Gavan, ‘but the landlord seems set on “improvement” and that is that. When the tenancies run out there is nothing in law to stop him.’
‘How long is your father’s tenancy, Caithlin?’ Hervey asked.
‘Twelve months, the same as everyone else’s here. It expires in the new year.’
It will be so much the harder when you have to draw your sword. Stay detached … All the way back to Cork, Lankester’s words troubled him. He had drawn his sword sooner than he had imagined, and against an agent of the Ascendancy rather than a malcontent. It might have been well if Lankester had been at hand when he reached the barracks, but he was not, and Edmonds’s was instead a counsel of equivocation. The major echoed the captain’s warning, but in terms which expressed little but contempt for the likes of the Kilcrea agent. And, more, he appeared to encourage Hervey to maintain his links with the O’Mahoneys: they needed early intelligence of unrest. And so it was that, in the early hours of the following morning, having lain awake since turning in after watch-setting, there occurred to Hervey a prudent alternative to strife at Kilcrea. He would write to the landlord in England, stating baldly his doubts as to the agent’s integrity, the dubious economy of running sheep, and the benefits, as they had been explained by Dr O’Begley, of bigger smallholdings on longer tenancy agreements.
The letter took him a full two hours to compose, and he sent it the next morning without reference to Edmonds. Nor, indeed, to anyone: soldier he might be, but that did not, in his estimation, preclude his expressing a view on matters other than soldiering. Indeed, had not that been Dr Verey’s premiss, that the need for military aid to the civil power might be obviated by a better understanding of the country?
A month passed without his venturing south or west of the city, for the Tallow troop was hard-pressed mounting smuggler-patrols around Youghal, and Hervey’s troop had been sent to assist them. It had been a relief in one respect; for, having sent the letter, there was little that would be served by his presence in Kilcrea. It had been a profitable relief, too, for the troop had won a Revenue bounty for apprehending, alive, six Bretons and taking their luggerful of Calvados, though one or two casks had been unaccountably written off in the process. But, if there had been nothing to be directly served by his visiting Kilcrea, he found himself nevertheless strangely fretful for want of the company of both Father O’Gavan and Caithlin, and the books which he had asked John Keble to send for her – a lexicon, Chapman’s Homer and a Greek New Testament – lay unopened in his room in Cork’s barracks.
With the arrival at Youghal of additional Excise men, the troop returned to Cork on the eve of the anniversary of Trafalgar in the expectation of celebrating that providential victory the next day, but Edmonds warned them instead to be ready at six the following morning to ride to Ballinhassig to assist the Bench in serving writs.
‘In heaven’s name, sir,’ Hervey protested, ‘writs on whom? And why the whole troop?’
‘Because a troop is what the justices have requested, and since the chairman of the bench of magistrates hereabouts is on close acquaintance with General Slade, so he informs me, I see no reason to demur. Stand down whom you please, but not fewer than fifty men to Ballinhassig.’
‘Whom are the writs to be served on?’
‘I do not know and I do not care. And nor should you. With luck they will be served on idle beggars who’d sooner shoot as look at you. In all probability, though, they’ll be served on decent God-fearing souls who are in some evil rent-trap; but there is nothin
g that you or I can do about it, and it will be as well that you start out there tomorrow morning thinking thus! This is not the time for walking Spanish, Matthew!’
Later that evening Hervey sat alone in his room. There was no certainty that the evictions would touch on any at Kilcrea: indeed (as he understood it), Kilcrea was under the jurisdiction of Ballincollig. But the possibility was enough to disquiet him, and there was not a soul in whom he might confide his misgivings. Edmonds had said his piece, there was not another officer of the Sixth within forty miles, and even Canon Verey was away in Dublin. He might with advantage have engaged the wisdom of Serjeant Strange, but his principles would not permit him to unburden himself on the very man in whom he would have to place so much trust the next day. And as for Armstrong … But at least he might engage himself in some purposeful activity. So, in the absence of any troop officers, he passed his instructions direct to Strange (again acting as troop serjeant-major): ‘Muster in marching order at five forty-five, then,’ were his last words at evening stables before retiring to his rooms to write to Horningsham and to Oxford.
By the time he began putting pen to paper, his uncertainties had become a ghastly premonition. If not Kilcrea, then it would be somewhere – somewhere that conscience and duty would confront each other. Or, rather, duty would confront duty, for which might be the truer duty – to the civil power, or to simple justice? (He knew well enough that justice was not always the same as the law.) How might he neatly render unto Caesar?
To John Keble he wrote his thoughts, freely and without reserve. To Elizabeth he penned but a précis of the difficulties – in the abstract – which the military faced in aid of the civil power. And to Henrietta he wrote of the country and the people, a letter which, to his mind, would tell nothing of his turmoil, though to a reader of her percipience the intensity of his prose could tell nothing other.
When at length he finished the letters, near to midnight, he found that, though his limbs were weary, his mind raced, and the notion of retiring to bed was impossible. And so he took Castle Rackrent from his writing-desk, where it had lain unopened since he had brought it from Canon Verey’s, and turned to its preface. He began reading with no great enthusiasm, hoping merely for some distraction from his concerns for the morrow, but in this respect it was a lamentable choice. ‘To those who are totally unacquainted with Ireland, the following Memoirs will perhaps be scarcely intelligible, or probably they may appear perfectly incredible,’ he read, and he wondered how acquainted with Ireland he had a right to claim. ‘When Ireland loses her identity by a union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency on … her former existence.’ He read it a second time, scarcely believing what he had read the first. But that was indeed what it said. Now, Miss Edgeworth, he would be the first to own, possessed an immeasurably greater acquaintance with the country than did he, but ‘good-humoured complacency’? In the circumstances it seemed a most singular proposition. He put down the book with a sigh: perhaps it was to be, as the author warned, scarcely intelligible.
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