Dark Rosaleen (13 page)

Sir William held Trevelyan's letter in his hand. ‘I tell you, Martineau. I would resign this hour, this very moment, if I was not afraid of being branded a coward.'

‘We need stricter control, sir. More soldiers.'

‘Damn it! It's not more soldiers we need but more food. We need to open the depots and give out the grain. Why do we store it when they're starving? Have you heard the song they are singing out there? D'you know what they're saying? Look at it man … Look at it. I have it here.'

He shuffled through papers on his desk and handed Martineau a pamphlet. It had been scattered in the streets for everyone to read and recite out loud if they dared.

There's a proud array of soldiers.

What do they at your door?

Why, they guard our master's granaries

From the thin hands of the poor.

Martineau slowly crumpled the sheet of paper into a ball, rolled it tighter between the palms of his hands and threw it into the fire. He stood and watched it burn.

‘With respect, Sir William, you make too much of trivia. People are too weakened by the winter famine to be a threat to anyone but themselves. When the summer ends, men you consider a danger now will be hurrying back to their hovels to grub out their potatoes and looking to sire more children. They are no threat to us, nor can they ever be.'

But the ever-calculating Dr Martineau was wrong. The calendar should have warned him. There were still three months to September when the potatoes would be lifted. Three more months of hunger. In the spring, men had been promised employment. It was now late June. Week on week they had searched for work and there was none. They had been promised food from the Commission's depots yet these remained closed. Reports of the continued suffering got little attention or sympathy in London. Instead, they were received with incredulity, exasperation and some ridicule. The Duke of Norfolk, in a letter to
The London Times
, suggested that as there was an apparent shortage of potatoes, the Irish poor should be encouraged to eat curry powder mixed with water.

Sir Charles Trevelyan had a more practical alternative. Ireland should be made to pay its own way out of its calamity. A memorandum meant only to be circulated within his own department was published in
The
Times
. It was Treveylan at his most emphatic and uncompromising.

Enough English money has been spent on the Irish. The Exchequer will not be pillaged further. It cannot cure the blight. It has not stemmed the hunger. It is possible to have heard the tale of sorrow too often. Let us be clear. The property of Ireland must support the poverty of Ireland. If the Irish once discover they can get free government money, they will lie such as the world has never known. That said, let it be done.

At the outset of the blight, Prime Minister Peel, as part of his emergency plan to stave off the famine, had repealed the Corn Laws which enabled American grain to be freely imported to Ireland. Associations were formed there to raise charitable money to pay for it and a Board of Works was established to create employment so that the destitute could earn enough to feed themselves.

Grand projects were announced. New roads would be built. New canals dug. New agriculture would be introduced to end the Irish dependence on their potato. Government money would be lent to finance the schemes, repayable at an interest of three per cent.

But it was Peel's undoing. Unpopular in the country, he was soon forced to resign by enemies of Ireland from within his own party. He was succeeded by Lord John Russell, who considered all his predecessor's measures expensive blunders and immediately instructed Trevelyan to dismantle what Peel had put together. He gave Trevelyan carte blanche to do as he pleased and as director of famine relief he became its dictator overnight. Trevelyan's power was now absolute. Life and death hung on his lips.

He immediately published a Treasury report which pleased both Parliament and landlords alike. He demanded that those employed on public works should be paid the minimum that would keep them alive. He considered ten pence a day too much. If bad weather prevented men from working they should only be given a half day's pay. If those who applied for relief owned even a quarter of an acre of land, they must sell it or forfeit their claim for assistance.

Corruption became rife. Tickets, necessary for a labourer to work, were bought by profiteers. Landlords bribed officials to allocate the cheap labour to their estates. Those paid to supervise the schemes were not qualified to do so. Work could not start because there were no surveyors and without surveys the engineers stood idle. Where there was work, men were not paid because the pay clerks had run off with the money. The destitute were being promised a fair wage for a fair day's work but among the hundreds of thousands who queued were women, widows and their children, unfit for manual labour. One magistrate in County Sligo reported:

It was melancholy in the extreme to see women and girls labouring in the gangs. They were employed not only in digging with spade and pick but also in carrying loads of earth and turf on their backs and breaking stones like men. Their poor neglected children crouched in groups in the sheltered corners of the line.

Works that began did not finish and hordes of sullen, emaciated men marched from one site to the next only to find that too was abandoned. Some carried guns and knives and violence was widespread. Desperate men fought each other, man against man, gang against gang. In Waterford they broke into the supervisor's house, carried him to the site and threatened to kill him if work did not begin. They beat him until he was dead. It changed nothing.

When the employment list was closed abruptly on work at Clare Abbey in Clare, the supervisor was shot and wounded. The site was closed and a thousand men with empty pockets were out on the road again.

The agricultural scheme to end Irish dependence on the potato collapsed just as miserably. Men were offered their ten pennies a day to harvest wheat, oats and barley on the landlords' estates. Thousands queued with their hoes and scythes in hand. But there was no work because there was no money to pay them and the grain, ripe and ready to harvest, was falling wasted to the ground. Trevelyan had decreed that Ireland would pay its own way of out its tragedy. By his hand, it could not.

The tumbling continued apace. The estates were now being cleared ever more ruthlessly. In five days, one hundred and forty cottages were razed to the ground in Moyarta. Another hundred in Carrigaholt. In two months, over one thousand cottages from Mayo to Wicklow, from Donegal to Kerry, were destroyed by the tumbling gangs and over fifteen thousand people sent into the wild to find protection in the ditches and woods and makeshift
scalpeens
, primitive shelters of branches and leaves. Drawings depicting their misery now regularly appeared in English newspapers and weekly magazines, even though their editorials expressed little or no sympathy. The calamity was presented as a simple economic equation, devoid of all humanity.

The surplus, unwanted population must be disposed of, swept from the soil. If a million people were to die in the famine it could only benefit Ireland. It is doing it far more thoroughly than any government legislation.

It was an opinion many of their readers found persuasive and morally digestible. Ireland was too small an island to accommodate the Irish. It was dangerously overburdened by the weight of human stock.
Ipso facto
, the Irish must be reduced in numbers.

Like most Irishmen, Sir Robert Fitzgerald assumed that the dual calamities of blight and hunger were as natural as Ireland's long seasons of rain. Throughout his long life they had come and then departed, leaving Ireland unchanged, each new generation attempting to repair the damage done by the old. He was famous for his generosity, which took many by surprise, because he was both a landlord and a Protestant. He was a distant relation of the Duke of Leinster, Ireland's premier nobleman, and he had inherited a large estate which bordered both banks of the river Blackwater to Cappoquin.

Unlike most Irishmen of his standing, he helped the poor whenever he could, providing work when additional labour was not needed, cancelling the debts of those he knew could never pay. He milled his own wheat and during the months of hunger had provided a daily ration of soup from his own kitchen to the many who had nothing. What he had he shared and whenever angry men cursed the cruelty and greed of the landowners, they would touch their caps and say, ‘The Lord excepting the good Sir Robert.'

He was standing in front of a large boiling cauldron, stirring his soup, dressed in a long leather apron and almost hidden in clouds of steam. He was a broad, well-built man with a head of curly grey hair, a red face and a moustache that hung either side of his mouth.

‘They say that soup can nourish a man. But I doubt it does as well as a bowl of lumpers. That's what makes Irishmen strong. D'you know, Kate, we are taller than most of the English, and a damn sight stronger. Braver too, I shouldn't wonder. Why, half the British Army is made up of us. And who was it who beat Napoleon? Another Irishman, Wellington himself, born over there in County Meath.'

Sir Robert was short on introductions. Kate had been given a warm, wet handshake and told to sit between the twins, Robin and Una. Sir Robert threw handfuls of meat and vegetables into the cauldron that hung over an open fire in the centre of his cobbled courtyard. Ireland's politics was Sir Robert's obsession. When he was young, his heart had been full of reform and good intent but he had long since grown accustomed to the perpetual suffering of the poor and the indifference and cynicism that smothered them.

‘Look at this,' he shouted at them through the steam. ‘They've sent me a recipe for soup. It's from your father's office, Kate. I see that it's printed in London and concocted by a fellow called Alexis Soyer. They've sent a French soup-maker and savoury inventor who's never set foot in Ireland so that for a trifling sum he can feed Paddy. They say he cooks for a London club but God knows he must have been hallucinating when he devised this one. Read it – go on, read it!'

Before Kate could take the piece of paper from him, he read it out himself.

‘A handful of beef cuts, some dripping, two onions ... Two, mind you ... Not two dozen ... A handful of flour and some pearl barley. Then – and here's the rub – you mix it with a hundred gallons of water. One bloody hundred! I thought they'd added too many noughts, but they haven't. Christ almighty! I don't know what size our Monsieur Soyer is but he could pass comfortably between the bars of my front gates after a month of that rubbish. It's not so much soup for the poor as poor soup. The government's even sending the stupid fellow to Dublin to build a kitchen to serve the stuff. It's a damned disgrace! Tell your father that, Kate, a disgrace. It'll run through them like water, which is all it is.'

‘Isn't something better than nothing, Father?' Robin ventured.

‘Nonsense, boy. You should know that filling famine-bloated bodies with water soup will do more harm than good. Must I tell you that? He might just as well serve them up river sand.'

‘What are we to believe, Father? Who are we to believe?' Una asked him.

‘There's nothing and no one we can believe, not if it is coming from London. They're all lying and fussing about and doing nothing that matters, and the few people who are trying are hitting their heads against a tree. Look at the Quakers. They have more charity and sense than fat-bellied landowners but they're mistrusted because they're not the Pope's people. The priests are telling their flocks that to take anything from a Protestant is to take from the Devil. They're even putting it about that the Quakers deliberately serve meat in their soups on a Friday so the Catholics can't eat it.'

‘They're also saying that Catholics must renounce their faith to get any food at all,' Una said.

Sir Robert thumped the side of the cauldron with his ladle. ‘What rubbish! Have them leave their Church for soup? Never! It'll take more mischief than that to make a souper out of an O'Sullivan. Can you believe it? The stupidity of blind bigots who think that men can be bought with a bowlful of broth. Mind you, if the government thought they could get away with it they'd try it. Such is their conceit. I'll wager that Monsieur Soyer will soon be back to his London kitchen with his dripping pans and sauce pots and good riddance to him.'

Kate sat between Robin and Una on the terrace. Beyond them was the Irish Sea. The flagstones were still warm to the touch after the day's heat. Behind them the sun was about to sink into the other hemisphere. The sky was orange and its glow spread across the shimmering surface of the sea like fire across oil. Beyond the horizon was the Welsh coast and St David's Head and behind the Welsh mountains were the lowlands of England. It was not a day's sailing away, but it might just as well have been on the other side of the world, so foreign did England now seem to Kate. There were moments when she did not care whether she ever saw it again, she who had so fiercely resisted leaving.