The Year of the French Read Free Page B

Cooper and his tinpot yeomen. Protestant shopkeepers and tithe proctors. What was happening away off in Wexford or in Ulster is no matter here.”
    “There were thousands of them risen up in rebellion,” said MacCarthy. “All of the County Wexford, and all of Carlow and all of Wicklow and parts of Kilkenny. They tried to fight their way out of Wexford. They were going to bring their rebellion to all of Ireland. They went this way and that way, but there were English soldiers on all the roads. And when they could think of nowhere else to go, they climbed a hill and waited for the English cannon to blow them to pieces.”
    Beyond the power of his imagination. The roads of Wexford clotted with people, their pikes a winter forest against the horizon. Priests rode in their van. Faction fighters drove them against yeomen and militia. They prodded cattle before them into battle. He heard again the words of the travelling man: “There were great encampments of the people on the plains and along the rivers. They captured town after town, Camolin and Wexford and Enniscorthy. They burned Enniscorthy.” Only two months ago. All over now.
    “The people of Wexford were fools,” Duggan said. “Captain Cooper will satisfy me. And after him, Gibson.”
    “Gibson is your own landlord, is he not?” MacCarthy said. “I thought that you would find time for Gibson.”
    “Then Gibson,” Hennessey agreed. “But after him the agent for the Big Lord. By God, I hate that Creighton. He is the worst tyrant in Tyrawley.”
    “He does as he is bid,” MacCarthy said. “The Big Lord off in London sends him a letter of instructions. That is how it is done.”
    “I will send him a letter, by God,” Duggan said. “The Whiteboys of Killala will send him a letter.”
    “So that is to be the way of it,” MacCarthy said, “and then a fourth and then a fifth. You have a great budget of work for me there.”
    “You will be safe enough, Owen,” Hennessey said. “We will all be safe enough. There will be five hundred Whiteboys in Tyrawley.”
    “It will not stop at the bounds of this barony,” Duggan said. “There are men I know in Erris, and across the Moy in Sligo.”
    “We are not fools,” Quigley said. “We have met with this fellow and that fellow. And we have made out an oath.”
    “To be sure you have,” MacCarthy said. “An oath is a Whiteboy’s first order of business. The more mouth-filling the better.” Seventeen seventy-nine, a barn close to Tralee in Kerry, and MacCarthy just turned eighteen. Frightened, boastful faces gathered around a candle. He would burn away parts of his past if he could, all the nights of the Whiteboys’ moon. Fellows with blackened faces, white smocks pulled over their coarse frieze, baggy stockings peeping underneath, creeping across wet fields towards cattle. The night air a sudden jangle of bellows and shouts.
    “We are not fools,” Duggan said. “We know how to do this.”
    “You do, to be sure,” MacCarthy said, draining his glass again. “You are grand fellows. It was well worth my long ramble northwards from Kerry to meet such grand fellows.”
    “Corn and oats will bring good money to the landlords,” Hennessey said, “but cattle will bring better. The landlords will give farm after farm to the cattle, as Cooper gave them the farm of the O’Malleys.”
    The landlords had no choice and the people had no choice and the magistrates would have no choice but to hunt them down and hang them. It was like a proposition in Euclid, straight lines driving towards a point. That is what happened twenty years before, in Kerry and in West Cork. He had seen Whiteboys drink their victories in chapel yards, and he had seen them swing at the rope’s end. What of me, he thought; have I a choice?
    “We did not bring you here so that you could argue with us, MacCarthy,” Duggan said. A question answered.
    “No more do I want arguments,” MacCarthy said. He took Quigley’s jug of ill-tasting