‘For that matter,’ said Sterrin, ‘they have a blacksmith’s son on their committee in America. Look at Mr. Lincoln!’
‘Where is he?’ For a panting moment as they climbed the slopes of Slievenamon, Dominic thought she had seen the President of America amongst the many bronze-faced men whose complexions and accents were so unmistakably American.
The blacksmith clove a path through and they followed him to the summit. Dominic marvelled that there was no condescension in the leaders’ greeting to the blacksmith. All of them bore the stamp of breeding and culture. The American officers were big, stern-looking men with countenances aged too soon as the price of bloody victories in the battlefields of their adopted country.
On the faces of the spectators there was a grim purposefulness that had not been on those who had attended O’Connell’s Monster meetings. These people had lived through an experience that O’Connell’s followers had not known. They had suffered the Great Hunger and they had witnessed the Great Death. Now they were living through the Great Exodus of the evictions that was draining away the life of the nation.
Sterrin recognised the faded Repeal Button in the lapels of many of the older men. But these men were no longer interested in Repeal, only in the ownership of the soil that was their birth’s heritage and their life’s labour, that they now held with less right of tenure than rabbits. They had come to this meeting on Slievenamon Mountain, 15th August 1863, as members of the new Tenant League, hoping to hear of some plan or purpose to help them resist being made beggars, landless and houseless under the government system of eviction.
The speakers were outspoken in their criticism of O’Connell. To Sterrin, born in the reign of the Liberator and nurtured in his Repeal doctrine, they sounded profane. She studied the elegant form and features of Thomas Clark-Lubey, the patriotic son of a Protestant minister; reared in the airs of an ascendency household, prejudiced against Ireland but passionately espousing its cause; noted the arched brows, the bright eyes, gloomy and glorious as a poet’s dream. Dominic listened avidly to the polished sentences shaped by a refined, subtle intellect. Clark-Lubey told the great assembly that Ireland should no longer sit weeping over the tombs of her hopes and her wrongs. He urged them without florid oratory to bestir themselves and waste no further time recounting the centuries of their country’s misgovernment. The remedy lay within themselves. And Dominic, gazing about him, saw to his amazement that the people knew what he meant and were filled with grim assent.
‘Better for men to die as men than as paupers! Can the outcome of any struggle be any worse than to be driven from the families they love? The homes they adore...?’
In some countries such a speech might be the prelude to fame and honour, here it was likely to be a prelude to the gallows.
Dominic was drinking in every word. Sterrin too. These words recalled the terrible evictions from those Kilkenny farmsteads. To her dying day she would never forget the spectacle of the dead boy; of the blood on face and hands, on the cobble-stones and door lintel, where it proclaimed his pitiful struggle for the simple right to shelter in a home.
The writer, Kickham, spoke about the two-fold purpose of the assembly; land rights and leases and fee-simples and other legal terms that Sterrin scarcely understood. He said that the second purpose of their meeting upon this mountain was to declare their resolution of labouring to the death for the liberty of their enslaved country. Kickham had the weapon of the famine. He pointed it down the rich slopes of Slievenamon to the verdant valleys and yellow cornlands of the Golden Vale. He bade his audience look.
Down beneath them the silver waters of the Suir defined the broad golden acres. In that silent moment both men and crops were listening. The warm August wind sent a whispering ripple that only the crops could hear. It was a scene of peace and plenty. Men gazed and remembered the hunger they had known amid its richness. Down there men had died of starvation—in a year when forty-five million pounds worth of food had been produced. The absent landlords had takenpossession of that harvest when the tenants had neither substance nor seed. Now the new landlords were taking possession of their homes!
An American officer with one armless sleeve stepped forward. He spoke of the work of the Fenian movement in America, of the great outdoor gatherings that pledged support to Ireland, to hasten here at the first stir of revolt; to take up arms against England if she went to war against the United States.
He held up a green flag, and when the cheering ceased he told them that when the horse of Captain Thomas Francis Meagher had been shot from beneath him he had jumped to the nearest parapet and pointed with his sword.
‘“Boys,” he cried, through the storm of bullets, “look at that flag and remember Fontenoy—”’
The officer couldn’t go on for cheering. ‘Listen,’ he cried, ‘there was only one insubordinate man that day. A young lad emigrated by eviction from that valley below you. When the colonel ordered him to lower the flag because it was too conspicuous, he said: “No, sir. I’ll never lower it”. A bullet killed him immediately but before the flag could fall from his hand another man sprang to retrieve it. It went from hand to hand as they fell; but not a man in the regiment would lower it.’
Sterrin knew a moment of panic as the great storm of cheers surged across the mountain and went echoing down in the valley round her. Her brother put an arm about her and their two hearts quickened to the same exaltation as they looked at the tall captain holding the green flag in his left hand. Behind him another officer upheld the Stars and Stripes.
Later, as the blacksmith shoed their horse, he told them that the American captain had lost his right arm as he swooped to retrieve the flag when the last of his company fell.
The landau rolled homeward behind the horses’ leisurely clop-clop. Its steady rhythm beat into the day’s fatigue, the heads of brother and sister lolled backwards and forwards till they rested in sleep against the cushions.
It was the sudden silence as wheels and hooves passed over the grass at the crossroads that awakened them.
‘Jove!’ exclaimed Dominic. ‘Are we here already? I must have been asleep. The excitement of the meeting and the long climb tired me.’
‘It wasn’t meant to make people sleep,’ said Sterrin. ‘It impressed me as a—a kind of awakening.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Sterrin,’ said Dominic. ‘Why should people like us become involved? We’ve never evicted. We’ve never rack-rented—’
‘I have,’ said Sterrin in a low voice. ‘I’ll never forget the re-proachful way they looked; all those women and those exhausted children; and that poor little boy. I can’t shut out the sight of him running from me the last time I saw him alive.’ A sob shuddered up and she put her hands over her face.
Dominic was dismayed. Sterrin never gave way to tears. She had always been his strength; the one who had dried his own young tears. He moved over beside her, gently drew down her hands and proffered a handkerchief. He had been feeling just a tiny bit of a fool over that damned duel yesterday. But now by God, he’d like to fight it over again.
The gate lodge-keeper rose stiffly as the landau rounded the bend. He didn’t want to be caught with his ear to the ground like a gossoon. But he was getting a bit hard of hearing and every carriage had its own sound. There was a time when he’d known all the family vehicles by their rumble in the ground before they’d reach the cross. Sterrin returned the handkerchief as they drove in the gates. For want of something more comforting to say, Dominic told her to keep it for another while in case she’d want it again.
That night Dominic fell asleep over his claret. Sterrin stood a moment looking down at the chiselled features, the fair hair that waved softly back. The fragile look stirred a chord of tenderness. The duel had established its strain before the meeting and played on his emotion—both their emotions.
‘Come on, old chap,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you a hand upstairs when I have quenched these damned candles. I wish Mamma would consent to have lamps.’
Upstairs, when they had said good night, Dominic said suddenly, ‘Do you know, Sterrin, that must have been a horrible experience for you, that monster eviction and that poor boy. Sir Jocelyn can’t have been such a nice person as I thought. He was always so jolly decent to me; slipped me a tenner every time. And you seemed to be having such high jinks. And then to be left high and dry without a bean! It’s like bequeathing an insult to a lady; a public accusation from the grave.’ He stopped struggling with a knotted bootlace.
‘Accusation of what?’ Sterrin stooped down. ‘Here, let me help you with that lace.’
‘Do you know,’ he went on, ‘all those chaps today, and those American officers; they all seem to have a sort of dedicated spirit. There’s a terrible antithesis in this business of tens of thousands of Irishmen slaughtering each other in America, the ones in the North against the ones in the South. I suppose it’s a sort of reverberation of all the evils they have suffered here, the famine and the evictions.’ He chucked the other bootlace and made another knot. ‘I keep on thinking of them. The way they placed the flag above their own lives. Being killed didn’t matter as much as keeping the flag afloat. It made me think how little we value our flag, the genuine pre-conquest flag, and what it must have cost our ancestors in blood and valour to earn the right to hoist it over the house. Yet we seem to be detached from all this struggle; sitting smug because we are safe.’
‘Safe!’ hooted Sterrin, ‘we’re nearly out of the door.’
‘Oh, surely not?’
‘Didn’t you see the billet Maurice brought last night?’ She yawned and stretched. ‘We’re never but a step away from the auctioneer’s hammer. Go to bed, dear Dominic. At least tonight we know we have a roof over our heads.’ And tomorrow, she thought, I will find out more about the Fenians.
54
Through the blue cloud of smoke that had settled across the frozen plains, Captain Thomas O’Carroll saw a sea of brave, green nosegays. Wave after wave of green sprigs like offshoots of the boughs of peace that had made a moving forest of human beings marching peacefully to Tara. But the wearers of these nosegays were not marching to Tara; nor to Peace. It was the Irish Brigade swinging up towards the Confederate position on the high ridge west of Fredericksburg.
Behind him, Thomas heard his men muttering, ‘By God, we’re for it. They are Meagher’s men!’ And then, from beyond the stone wall where Thomas’s men were waiting a voice rang out. Thomas had heard that voice for the first time as he sat on the carriage outside Conciliation Hall just before the Blight. ‘Abhor the sword?’ Meagher had said. ‘Stigmatise the sword? No, my Lord, for at its blow and in the crimson of its quivering glance a giant nation sprang up from the waters of the Atlantic—’ And now, before him at Mayre’s Heights in Fredericksburg, sword in hand, at the head of the Irish Brigade of the Union Army, was Meagher of the Sword.
‘It’s Greek to Greek today, boys!’ cried that orator of revolution. Thomas, recalling his Euripides, groaned, ‘In Greece, alas, how ill things ordered are!’ And he led his men to give battle against the hero of his youth; to lower the flag of the land that had given succour and asylum to millions of his countrymen.
Waves of Irish charged forward, many to meet their fellow countrymen, man to man, eye to eye, bayonet to bayonet. One of Thomas’s officers, Lieutenant Hubert De Lacey, suddenly found himself face to face with Tim Lonergan, who was carrying the green flag of Meagher’s gallant Irish troops.
In spite of the tumult, the noise, the men falling all around, Hubert recognised the flag-bearer instantly and shouted, ‘Tim Lonergan.’ The wounded Federal did not recognise his boyhood’s companion, matured and unfamiliar in the Confederate uniform. But there was no doubt as to the identity of the Captain who rushed with revolver levelled to give Tim the coup de grâce. Uniform did not confuse this identity. It sharpened the sense of familiarity. For Tim had seen this young man in another uniform, the blue-grey with royal blue facings and gilt buttons, the servant’s livery of the O’Carrolls. The Captain lowered his gun as the wounded Tim gasped out the nameless name of his servitude.
Hubert De Lacey, half kneeling, watched the trail of blood as Tim Lonergan staggered back to his base, colours dipping and swaying, but never falling from his grasp. There came to him in that unlikely place the memory of young Tim Lonergan beckoning him mysteriously up a steep path that led to that rare find, a sparrow-hawk’s nest. High above, two fierce eyes had singled out a prey and swooped. Backwards and forwards a curlew twisted in the sparrow-hawk’s grip; but its tender breast was ripped off neatly as though done with a knife, a bayonet. The rest of its body was left untouched and a faint trail of beads of blood led towards the nest. Hubert had felt the same squeamish feeling that he felt as he watched the trail of blood that marked Tim Lonergan’s staggered dash back to his regiment.
*
‘But he held on to the flag. Every time it dipped to the ground it came up again with a fresh splodge of blood,’ he said to Captain O’Carroll in the field hospital where they both lay wounded, prisoners of the Federal Army. Irishmen from both sides, the wounded, the captured, lay about them in the crowded tent. From every state, from every city, town and village, from the forests they had cleared; from the hills and plains and prairies that their toil and industry had created; from the mine, from the desk, wherever the Irish were, they obeyed the summons of their adopted country. North or South, they had not paused to argue the righteousness of the cause. They had acted as they felt; with the community with which they lived. The Irish of the South standing with the state to which they felt they owed their first allegiance; each side of the line loving America; each fighting with two-fold purpose, the claim of the country of their adoption and the honour of the country of their birth.
‘It was when he discarded the bough of peace that he learned how to cling to the bloodstained flag of war,’ said Captain O’Carroll. Lieutenant De Lacey turned quickly.
‘Did you know him?’ For Hubert had never associated that tall, broad-shouldered officer in the grey uniform with the blue liveried youth who used to hold little Sterrin O’Carroll’s pony on a leading rein when she came to visit his sister Bunzy.
Thomas lay on the straw with his hands behind his head and thought back through the years to the night when he had been posted in the darkness to turn back the men who came marching to Clontarf; every one armed with the bough of peace. He could see, despite its dust mask, the hurt, angry look on Tim Lonergan’s face as he cast the futile peace bough from him and turned for home. O’Connell’s peaceful caution had spared Tim for the death storm at Mayre’s Heights at Fredericksburg!
‘I knew the parent bough of the green sprig that he wore.’ Hubert was surprised at the unusual grimness in the voice of the debonair captain. ‘A thousand green sprigs,’ it went on, ‘on a thousand bodies on the glory of another country’s battlefield.’
Just then, a huge soldier in Federal uniform walked into the tent bearing a Southern soldier in his arms. Thomas thought of Milo of Crotona bearing the bronze statue of himself through the stadium to the Altis. It was John Holohan, the Chicago millionaire, from Upper Kilsheelin. His burden protested noisily that he needed no help from any damned Yankee. He proved it by sinking to the floor when he was put on his feet.
John Holohan picked him up and, placed him on the straw next to Thomas, without a sign of recognition, and walked away without acknowledging the ‘God Save You John’, that Thomas gave him in Gaelic.
Later, Private Holohan came and squatted beside Thomas. ‘I want to speak to you,’ he said in gruff Gaelic. He spoke for a quarter of an hour about a task he had in mind for Thomas, a complicated mission which, if Thomas undertook it, could gain him freedom. ‘Yes,’ Big John concluded. ‘For that purpose you will be set free.’
The Confederate Captain looked up lazily at the millionaire soldier in the Federal uniform. ‘For that purpose,’ he repeated, ‘merely to convert the British Army to Fenianism; get British soldiers to support the Iris
h? Are you quite sure you have no other little commission that you would like me to take on, en route? You would not like me to break my journey and slip up to Russia to endeavour to make a Fenian out of the Czar? The British Army in Ireland! You are not asking much! A rebel in Ireland is a felon of the lowest degree; fit only for hanging. Hogging or deportation—or all three. A rebel in America is a gallant Southern gentleman.’
‘You ought to know.’ John’s face had gone grim again. ‘You chose to become one of them. Why, it beats me to think.’
Thomas replied that it beat him, also, to think of being asked to go to Ireland to help free it from British thraldom, ‘while over here you try your damndest to trample the liberties of a people fighting for their independence; fighting, like the Irish at home, against complete extermination.’
‘Will you go?’
‘If I do not, since I may not continue to slaughter my fellow countrymen, I suppose the alternative is to be held prisoner? And you, I suppose, will continue in the holy cause of the slaves who are better fed and housed than Irish peasants.’
‘Will you go?’ asked John grimly. ‘Will it make a difference if I tell you Sir Jocelyn has been murdered and Sterrin is ill. I had it from my mother last week.’
Thomas did not answer. Sterrin’s husband dead?
‘Will you go?’ John asked for the third time.
YES, the answer roared through his brain. I’ll go now; to my little white love! He even made a movement of his wounded foot. Pain brought reasoning. He moistened his lips. They were suddenly parched; for water; for the touch of vivid soft lips that glowed from a bridal veil?
‘Give me time,’ he said.
‘Time!’ John Holohan almost spat the word. ‘They are too fond of time in the old country. That’s not the way to get things done over here.’
‘No?’ Thomas smiled mockingly to cover the thudding of his heart. ‘Has this great Union discovered some other element?’
The Big Wind Page 67