Sir William was shaken by Moran’s sudden departure and Martineau’s evidence that the quiet and respectful butler had been an agent of the Queen’s enemies. More shocking still was the sudden capture and killing of Captain Shelley. Sir William had not expected it to end that way. It had not been his wish. He knew the man to be a traitor and he would most certainly have been executed for his treachery, but whatever a man’s crime, he was deserving of a fair trial. That was British justice.
He had asked Martineau to find out why the outlaws had not been taken prisoner and who it was who had given the order to fire on the unarmed gang. Martineau assured him he would enquire and report his findings, but as time passed, he made no mention of it again and if Sir William had his own suspicions he did not pursue them. It was eventually agreed that, as Shelley’s desertion and the killings had only a muted response from Whitehall, it was in everyone’s interests to let the matter rest.
It had been a bright and perky April. A warm, still May followed. With their seed potatoes in the ground, women guarded them as jealously as a miser guards his pennies. In the daylight hours they stood like sentinels on their plots to scare away the crows that dared to snatch at a juicy leaf. Their children patrolled the ridges, pulling up the weeds, throwing away the stones and crumbling the soft earth between their fingers so that not a single clod might delay a shoot’s rise. Along the coastline, boys scoured the beaches and brought back baskets of seaweed and worked its goodness into the ground. Their sisters carried handfuls of soot, scraped from the hearths and chimneys of their razed cottages and spread it around the plants to ward off the beetles and worms. There was much labour earnestly given.
In better times it was the tradition to give the priest a fat chicken or a basket of duck eggs that he might bless the fields and sprinkle them with holy water. At planting time they were overly respectful towards him and never failed to attend Mass, crossing themselves a dozen times as they stumbled through the Act of Contrition. Special homage was paid to St Bridget so that she too might bless the little seeds snug in their holes.
April heralded the beginning of the season of mean and hungry months. Now Ireland would again swarm with armies of roaming men searching for food or work, begging, stealing, resting wherever there was a space, crowding into towns and cities, dirty, ragged and hungry, each looking out for himself. And they would all share the same longing for the day when their tubers were big and round in the earth and they could go home again.
In their mind’s eye they could see them ripening, the stout green stems pushing their way up towards the sunlight, the fields glorious in the first blossoming, the dimpled ridges covered in delicate, shallow forests of yellow and white flowers. As they tightened their belts yet another notch, they would tell each other how, come early autumn, they would rip open the ground and gorge themselves.
It was their belief, sacrosanct and taught by their fathers and their fathers before them, that plenty always followed scarcity, that God first punished and then blessed. They had somehow survived a terrible blight and a fearful winter but surely there would now follow a glorious summer and a bumper crop.
In those wandering, hungry months of spring and summer, men were certain of only one thing. This time they must harvest well. They and their families had come through one famished winter. They could not expect to survive a second.
Kate no longer pined for England, not even when she was most depressed. In those first months after arriving in Ireland, her father’s promise that she would go home within a year had been her one salvation, an ever-present consolation and comfort. But now Lincolnshire seemed far away and as foreign as any distant land could be. She was becoming part of the life around her and the more she became engrossed in it, the more she demanded of it. She was content and yet there lingered in her mind a dread of the future, a contradiction that frightened her. She could not explain it, not to herself, not to Keegan.
She visited him now as often as she could. She had promised him that Edward Ogilvie would not take revenge on the village for what she had done. She had said that her visits would keep him and his bullwhip away and this had proved true. The bare little schoolroom had now become more a home for her than her father’s house in Cork and the boys and girls who came every day so quietly and shyly to sit on the stone floor were her new friends.
Eugene’s wounds had healed but the scars rose from his skin in hard white ridges and so they would always remain. He was small, clean and neat in his ways and Keegan had taught him simple words in English. After many days of gentle coaxing and with Keegan’s help translating, Kate persuaded him to talk to her.
He said he did not know how old he was; he thought perhaps eleven. He had thirteen brothers and sisters and he was somewhere in the middle. His mother had died that January. The cottage had been tumbled and with his father away on the road, there was no one strong enough to build a shelter. A stranger had taken the two older girls away and had given him sixpence for each of them. His brothers had gone to an uncle in Galway and he did not expect to ever see them again.
‘Why didn’t you go with them?’ Kate asked.
‘I sat with mother.’
‘But you said she was dead.’
‘No one to bury her.’
‘You stayed with her? By her body?’
‘Yes.’ He began to speak in Irish and looked to Keegan to translate. ‘I sat four days with my mother to keep the dogs and rats away. I went back and gathered as much straw from the thatch as I could carry and covered her. I set it on fire and when it was cool I collected her bones from the ash, put them in a sack and buried them in a hole in the churchyard under the roots of the big tree. There is no cross but I know the place. I go to speak to her every Sunday. She knows I am there.’
Kate listened and wept. But it was all past for him. There was no longer any sorrow in remembering. He put his arm around her. She was no longer a stranger.
On every journey to the school she brought something from Cork. Fruit, pies, slates and crayons, picture books and always the Bible. She brought a Hessian rug to give warmth to the schoolroom floor, pinned cloth to the single window to counter the draught and set a brass oil lamp on the floor, taken from her own bedroom. It was now so welcoming and cosy that Keegan protested that his problem was not persuading the children to come to class but getting them to leave.
Except for Eugene, none of the children spoke English and it was Keegan’s suggestion that Kate should teach them. He said it would not be a problem and it was not. She had seldom to repeat a lesson or speak an English word more than twice for them to repeat it correctly. They, in turn, would stand at Keegan’s beckoning and recite in Irish, telling stories of the great feats of courage and sacrifice in Ireland’s history. Kate did not understand a word but she clapped her applause and kissed their cheeks.
Whenever she spoke to them individually, the girls bent their knees in a curtsy and the boys stared resolutely at the floor. Keegan lifted the head of one.
‘This is Declan. He walks three miles here every morning and three miles back every night. And you see that he is barefoot. That’s how keen he is. He never misses a day, whatever the weather.’
He touched the head of the next in line, taller and older than the rest.
‘Young Kevin here has a limp. He wasn’t born with it. Show Miss Kate your legs, Kevin. Don’t be shy now.’
The boy slowly and neatly rolled up his tattered trousers. The calf of his left leg was badly scarred. The right leg had been broken and had not set properly. It was twisted and a knot of bone pushed out the skin just below the knee.
‘The tumbling gangs came into his village a year ago. It’s a ruin now. The agent must have been expecting trouble because he rode in with armed men. So there were no protests, not even when they began taking away the few cows and pigs. The villagers went down on their knees imploring the agent to leave them their animals. But they went, the women weeping and the men mute. What could they do? How could they fight men with guns at their shoulders? So they watched as everything they owned was taken from them. But Kevin here followed the gang and ran among the cows and pigs, shouting and screaming and waving his arms, like an army of banshees. With all the blather the animals turned and ran back the way they came, straight into the village, straight back into their pens. The agent, in his rage, rode his horse at Kevin, trampled him twice over. They thought he was dead. But he is a fighter and here he is and a good fellow too.’
‘Did the villagers keep their stock?’ Kate asked.
‘No! The landlord himself came back a fortnight later with thirty soldiers and there wasn’t a Kevin to oppose them. They took the lot and set fire to whatever was left.’
‘So he was almost killed for nothing.’
‘No, Kate. Not for nothing. He did what no man twice his age and size dared to do. He’ll not be forgotten for that.’
Kate brought Eugene a present. She had searched for it in Cork and had found a handsome edition, bound in brown Morocco leather with its title, The Children’s Encyclopaedia, embossed in gold leaf. It was three inches thick and one thousand eight hundred pages long, beginning with ‘Abu Simbel’ and ending with ‘Zulu’. There were entries about strange happenings in Tibet, the life of a crab and many beautifully coloured lithographs, including Queen Victoria’s coronation, each picture protected within a thin sheaf of tissue paper. Inside the cover Kate had written: ‘From Kate. To my good and learned friend Eugene.’
It was heavy and he took it carefully as if it was made of the most delicate porcelain. He sat down by the corner of the hearth stroking it gently, hesitantly, as if he expected it to disintegrate on touch, caressing it in his lap, the guardian of a precious jewel. Now he would know the source of knowledge, the beginning of all learning. Inside its cover was everything that made a boy a man and that man full of the world of wisdom. It was all his for the taking. He had only to open it.
‘Eugene has a surprise for you, Kate.’
A fortnight had passed since the boy’s surprise present and Keegan had asked her to come early to the school.
‘He’s been working at it every hour God’s given him. He even persuaded the priest to give him an altar candle so that he could read by it at night. He’s been a pest and I’ve lost sleep myself but by heaven, he’s done it.’
‘Done what?’ she asked.
‘I should tell you but I cannot. Or do I mean I can tell you but I shouldn’t? Anyway, you will know soon enough. It’s his surprise for you, to thank you for his book. From the moment you gave it to him it hasn’t left his hands. I’ll wager that if you asked him what was on page one thousand and one, he’d reel it off word-perfect. He’s told me more about Tibetan monks than I’ve room for!’
The big black kettle over the peat fire began to boil. Kate pulled the rug closer to the hearth and waited. Every day here now was happier than the last and for the first time in her life she thanked God for it.
Keegan handed her a mug. ‘I will call him. He’s waiting not far off and nervous too. But for such a little lad I think he’s brave with it.’
Kate held Keegan’s hand. ‘Tell me what to expect?’
‘It’s a poem, yet another Irish poem. But this one is special and a dangerous one too, although you’ll find that hard to believe. It’s been banned by the English, forbidden because they think its rebellious. You might think it is but it’s really more a lament about Ireland’s anguish and yearning and we’re famous enough for that, are we not? But the English think it’s a call to arms and if you’re caught with a copy of it or even reciting it, you can reckon the worst will happen.’
‘For reading a poem?’
‘Yes! For a poem. Such are the times, Kate. Such is the canker of fear.’
‘Then he mustn’t do it, not for me. I won’t have him do it … I won’t listen. You mustn’t let him.’
‘It’s not my choice, Kate. Nor is it in me to stop him. He’s doing it for you and for all of us. It’s just because it is forbidden that makes it so valuable and his little contribution so precious. Do you not understand?’
She nodded and said nothing. Keegan went to the door and called out his name.
He came in slowly, clasping the encyclopaedia to his chest. How thin he was, how pale. Again she wondered, as she had so often recently, whether he was the boy of her dreams, the boy in the fire. But it was not his face. They were not his eyes.
‘A poem for you, Miss Kate.’ He said it in a whisper, looking at his feet. ‘It is Irish but Mr Keegan helped me put it in English. Not all of it because it is very long. It is called “My Dark Rosaleen”.’
‘Go on, Eugene,’ she said. ‘I’m proud that you have done this for me. It is a wonderful gift.’
He looked up, his face flushed with colour. Then he closed his eyes tight and began:
‘I could scale the blue air
I could plough the high hills
I could kneel all night in prayer
To heal your many ills
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen
The Erne shall run with blood,
The earth will rock beneath our tread
And flames wrap hill and wood
And gun-peal and slogan-cry wake many a glen serene
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My Dark Rosaleen.’
Old Tom Keegan was long and thin, much taller than his son. When he was not crouched with the rheumatism that had tormented him all his life, he would, in the presence of strangers, and despite the pain, make the effort to square his shoulders and stand straight. He had a full head of white hair and a lovely dignity. He was self-taught, a teacher since he was sixteen, and almost blind now from a lifetime of reading forbidden tracts in the half light.
On bright days he could see clearly enough to tend his few roods of potatoes and the small patch of flowering herbs that sat prettily either side of the front door of his cottage. All his life he had worked longer hours than the sun itself, never allowing it to rise before him and waiting for it sink out of sight before he considered his day to be over.
He had built his cottage on land he rented at thirty-five shillings a quarter. He was known as a lifer and as long as he paid his rent, his landlord could not remove him. The cottage was low and squat with thick walls and a thatched roof and, unlike any other nearby, it had a small window with a single pane of glass, a prized possession given to him by his father on his wedding day.
On the day Tom Keegan married his Mary, they vowed that they would build their house of stone. They were strong and young with no fear of the future and wanted their first home to be their last, sturdy like them and destined to live a long life like them. For a full year, they gathered stones from the mountain and when they began building it, they dug two feet deep to give it a firm foundation.
For all that year they lived in a hole in the ground, roofed with turf, washing in the stream, and making love hidden in the heather. When they were not building, they were breaking the ground around them until they had a plot soft and tame enough to plant their first potatoes.
But young Mary Keegan died three months after she had moved into her new home, the morning her only son was born. Thereafter Tom lived a lonely, loveless life, unable to watch his infant son grow without the agony of knowing the sacrifice that had given him life. At first he wanted to move from the valley, away from the house whose every stone, so carefully laid, was a reminder of a day with her. Yet to leave would be to abandon her in her shallow grave beyond the potato patch. The cottage was her shrine and as long as he remained, so then would she. And the son she died for would be raised in her image, kind and good and gentle.
It was the first day of June and old Keegan’s eightieth birthday. His son had asked Kate to join them to celebrate the day and she had been overjoyed at the invitation. He closed the school and together they rode the ten miles cross-country to surprise him, carrying a cake and a jar of honey Kate had taken from the cook’s pantry.
Since that day she visited him every week and brought rations in her saddlebags. Salted herrings from Cork market, packets of Twankey Tea, twists of tobacco, candles and cheese and a sweet-smelling oil for his lamp. He spent his days preparing for her, fretting whenever she was a few minutes late, not wanting to lose a minute of her company. He would grumble when it was time for her to leave, complaining that he was forced to live a hermit’s life, when, until the moment she entered his life, that was what he had always preferred. When she left, he would stand at his doorway listening to the sound of her horse long after he had lost sight of it. Then he would sit by his hearth and recall every morsel of their day’s conversation, savouring his favourite parts of it, repeating them out loud many times.
Much time was spent preparing for her arrival. He would press his only pair of tweed trousers under the mattress the night before. His only pair of shoes, brown brogues bought in Cork for his wedding, were brought out of their wrapping and polished with spit and candlewax, caressed in his lap like the old friends he considered them to be. And although it was now many sizes too large, he wore the stiff white paper collar that had sat untouched in its box since the day of his wife’s burial.
Kate loved his cottage. It smelt fresh with herbs. The stone floor was smoothed and polished by half a century and more of human tramping and shone like marble. The chimney breast was made of woven chestnut staves, plastered with mud and whitewashed with lime. His rosary hung from a peg above the hearth and by it was an enamel locket containing a band of Mary’s red hair. Beside the hearth was his rocking chair and on the opposite wall his cot, its joints bound together by strips of willow bark. On a three-legged stool by its side was his Bible, worn by hands and curled by age.
It was a warm day but a square of peat smouldered in the hearth. Tom’s fire was never out. He and Kate sat facing each other either side of it. Sunlight edged in through the tiny window, highlighting the freckles on his face. He had an audience and was content.
As they talked, he would hold her hand firm in his and hold it long, squeezing it as he spoke, as if special words needed emphasis.
‘Have you ever wondered, Miss Kathryn, why it is I keep a fire on a summer’s day?’ She sensed mischief in his voice.
‘I have, Tom, and you are going to tell me why.’
‘It’s to keep the evil spirits away. They can smell a cold chimney even out there in the bogs where they hide and it takes a mighty powerful spell to get rid of them because once they’re inside they can do dreadful harm.’
‘And what kind of spell is that?’ she asked, not knowing whether she was expected to share his humour, nor even certain there was humour to be shared.
‘Have you never seen how mothers protect their newborns from the banshees? How they put an iron poker over the cot and sprinkle salt on the floor around it?’
‘Must I believe this?’
‘Believe it or not, it’s what they believe and that’s what they do. You see, sometimes a fairy child is born deformed …’
‘Tom!’
‘Deformed, I say! The fairies give it to the banshees to sneak into the newborn’s cot and swap it for a human child.’
‘And what must you do with a poker and salt?’ She said it with a smile.
‘Miss Kathryn! You should know that a fairy cannot lift iron and will never cross salt. Salt and poker and the child is safe. They dare not touch it.’
‘And tell me, Tom, where do the fairies come from? Or is that a secret?’
‘From the black lake of Lough Gur, east of Limerick. Least, so I’m told. Mind you, Rí na Sideog, the king of the fairies, can be found anywhere you need him. Like God himself.’
Again she protested.
‘Listen, Miss Kathryn. Listen and believe. To the people, the fairy king is just like God. It is their faith twice over, and it’s only a thin line that divides the two. When one lets them down they turn to the other. I’ve talked to them both myself all my life. Mind you, I must have a faint voice because neither has shown the slightest interest in listening.’
He took the kettle from its hook over the fire and filled the teapot.
‘My mother was of the Church and never missed a Mass until the day she died. But when she was troubled, she would go up the hillside by the side of us here, and talk for hours with Rí na Sideog until she was peaceful again inside. She would take him flowers and little presents of herbs. We all knew and nobody said but when she passed on, we went to the top, and by the small lake up there she had built a little shrine on a rock and there were all her bits and pieces, untouched, just as she’d left them all those years. So you see, it does no good to laugh at people who believe these things for it gives them much comfort and there’s precious little of it to spare nowadays.’
Tom Keegan was a keen chronicler of Irish history and Irish affairs and he would talk of Brian Boru, king of all Ireland eight hundred years ago, as if he had been on familiar terms with him. He referred to past and present-day politicians by their Christian names, giving the impression they too were old acquaintances. He was steeped in history and although he might search for hours for a lost pipe or a tray of seeds, events and names from centuries ago were imprinted indelibly in his mind. He could effortlessly repeat the names of every Irish hero and every English blackguard and made sure that every child he taught could do the same.
He had been schoolmaster for the children from the hills and valleys all his working life and in the early days it had been a dangerous profession. He knew of men who were no longer in Ireland because they too had been teachers in the time when the English had forbidden the schooling of Catholic children. He had been forced to teach his flock in secret wherever he could, sometimes even under cover of the hedgerows.
‘We called ourselves hedgers, Miss Kathryn. It was a nasty game and a dangerous one to play. If I’d been caught, I’d not be here today. The magistrates sent the police to search for us but we were always warned and we would scatter and wait for them to pass. If you were caught you were liable to five years or transportation. Only the Protestant children got proper schooling. It wasn’t until the emancipation that we dared come out into the open. The day it was declared, twenty-five years ago, I opened my own school and here I’ve stayed.’ He said nothing for a while, gazing into the past within the hearth. Then, ‘What is to become of us, Miss Kathryn? You and me? The English and the Irish? How is it to end? Will we always be at each other’s throats, two islands and only a fair day’s sailing between them?’
‘Perhaps it’s because you are so close that we fear you.’
‘Yes!’ said the old man. ‘I can understand that.’
Kate paused, not certain she should say more. Then, ‘I have always been taught to believe that Ireland is England’s enemy and that good fortune for one was bad for the other. My father says that England’s difficulties are Ireland’s opportunities and that in every crisis you have always helped our enemies.’
‘And your father is right. But you English have since made friends of your enemies. So why not us? Why possess us all these centuries? Why all these years of vengeance?’
‘Perhaps this famine will change things.’
‘Maybe, Miss Kathryn. But for better or for worse?’
‘I have seen and heard so much since I came to Ireland, so many terrible things, but I wonder if it is all England’s fault. Is it to blame for the blight?’
The old man thumped the arm of his chair and took the pipe from his mouth. In his sudden anger, colour left his cheeks, droplets of water trickled from his eyes.
‘Don’t blame the English for that. They’re rightly accused of many dreadful things but don’t lay this on them. What has happened this year and all the years past has been the will of God and not even the English can deter God in His doing. The blight is His punishment for our waste and our indolence. I am old enough to remember those years of plenty … Yes, I can … when we had too many potatoes to eat. We would leave them in the ground to rot or if we had a handcart and the gumption to pull it, we carried them to the market. As a boy I could stand all day at the pitch and not even give them away. On the way home I’d empty the lot into a ditch, for they were not even worth the price of the sacks. Then when the next year’s crop failed we knew it was God’s retribution. A wilful waste makes a woeful want, that’s what we would say and that’s the reason for it. The blight and the hunger is His punishment and only He can right it. And in the meantime we must trust the English to keep us alive.’
The old man sank back in his chair, his temper fading. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘if keeping us alive is the government’s intention, it is being painfully slow. It sends soldiers and we need food instead of Fusiliers. But forgive me. This is not polite, nor is it fair to you, Miss Kathryn. We need not spoil our little party with Ireland’s many problems. All my life I’ve lived with them. Mind you, when I was a young man I thought we could do something to change it.’
He poked the peat ashes with his walking stick.
‘A handful of wet straw on a fire can set up such a cloud of smoke that it obliterates the stars and that’s how it was with us then. So much smoke but no fire, so much talk of doing but nothing done. We had our chance once, Miss Kathryn,’ he said it quietly. ‘At Clontarf we had our chance and we lost it to good common sense. Least that was O’Connell’s excuse.’
‘He is a sick man,’ Kate said. ‘My father says he is finished.’
‘Oh, yes! He is dying. We all are. And when he’s gone there’ll be no one to take his place. When his heart stops, so will Ireland’s.’
She waited for him to speak again. The only sound was the hissing of the peat. She thought he was dozing but he was not. He was lost again in his past and, like O’Connell’s, it had been a lifetime of trying and losing. The past was despair. He was O’Connell’s age and had once shared in the man’s fury and ambition, as every Irishman had. But now the fury was spent and the great ambition withered.
The sun travelled away from the window, the room darkened, and with it, the old man’s mood. He seemed smaller, fragile and when he spoke again, his voice was faint.
‘Forgive me, Miss Kathryn. I am an old man drifting backwards and O’Connell’s name put me in another time and another place when we talked of defiance and rebellion. Yet here we are, all these years on and nothing has changed. The soldiers wear much the same uniforms, fire with better muskets and still we pay our rents to the same masters.’
‘Tell me of O’Connell,’ said Kate.
‘We used to call him “Swaggering Dan” because of the way he walked and talked. Such a figure of a man and with a voice that could charm the Devil into Paradise. It was said that he was the yeast in a mass of Irish dough. That was often used to describe him and it was right. When he spoke at his meetings, there was a hush. It was as if he could play tunes on the spines of people, like the great fiddler he was. He promised we would get our Parliament back, the one Pitt stole from us all those years ago. The English called it a union but it was nothing of the sort. They said it was marriage but it was more like a brutal rape. We were dragged to the altar. O’Connell spent his life working for a repeal, to break from the Union and get us back our Parliament and let us govern ourselves. Whenever he called a meeting, thousands – many, many thousands – came to listen. I went to one at Tara and there was such a crowd that the English surrounded us with what we thought was their entire army. But the only disturbance that day was somebody overturning the gingerbread stand. Not a fist was lifted. There was no drink, you see. Can you imagine all those thousands of Irishmen and no whiskey? He had his chance at Clontarf and that’s where his legend ended.’
‘What was Clontarf?’ she asked.
‘It was the test, his biggest ever meeting, a monster. I remember it was a Sunday. I thought it wrong to hold it on the Sabbath, but I went all the same. Clontarf was near Dublin, in a special field, the very place where eight hundred years ago our own King Boru defeated the Norsemen and drove them into the sea. Men knew the significance of that and thought O’Connell had chosen it because he had made his plan and the big day had come at last. He expected tens of thousands but they say there was nearly a million men there and every last one of them ready to march on Dublin Castle and pull down the Union flag. The English were prepared for it but it didn’t matter. It was our hour. We needed only a nod from Swaggering Dan. But he failed us. He was always the man of lovely words, always preaching that the power of talk did more than a charge of gunpowder. But at that moment, the very moment it mattered, he couldn’t bring himself to do the dirty deed. He said there were British warships in the harbour and that their cannons would blow every man among us to smithereens. Ireland, he said, would be a field of blood. So he told us all to go home and wait until another day. And go home we did.’
‘Why?’ asked Kate. ‘A million men could easily have beaten the soldiers.’
The old man shook his head, the glimmer of a flame in the hearth dancing on his face. ‘Because Swaggering Dan said he didn’t want a drop of Irish blood spilt. As if a man’s liberty has ever been won for less. So go home, he said, and we did, like sheep to their pens. And the English laughed.’
Tom Keegan raised himself forward in his chair and held out both hands to the fire as if in prayer. ‘And to think we flocked after him like dogs in heat. We should have kept him in the Derry bogs where he was spawned. O’Connell is dying now and soon he’ll be in heaven. But the saints will mock him there, yes, they will. He lived a hero’s life but Clontarf branded him a coward.’