The Rebels of Ireland (119 page)

Mrs. Tidy sighed. But she said nothing.

It was a splendid August day when the royal yacht came in sight. It was not a large vessel, but decidedly handsome, sides painted black and gold, with a tall funnel, and the royal ensign gallantly flying from its masthead in the breeze. Everyone was excited as they saw it appear round the southern point of Dublin Bay.

Queen Victoria and her Consort might well have felt pleasure as they enjoyed that sunlit day. Wisely, their government had not thought it right that they should see the western part of the island, where, it had to be said, their subjects were not yet quite in a fit state to receive them as, doubtless, they would have wished. They had begun their visit in Cork, therefore, where the merchant community had made sure they received a splendid welcome. “Such kind, such loyal people,” the young queen had innocently remarked. Today, they would visit Dublin, and thence to Belfast.

And what a charming prospect the royal couple must have enjoyed as they approached. Having come up from the south, past the lovely, volcanic mountains that graced the Wicklow coastline, and steamed past the high southern point, and Dalkey Island, the whole expanse of the bay would have suddenly opened up before them. By
the shore, starting a few miles down the coast at Bray, they would have noticed another, man-made feature. For every few miles along this part of the coast there was now a small, grey-stone, round tower with gunrests and parapet, standing plump and stately by the shore. Martello towers, they were called, and they had been built there as a defence against invasion by Napoleon the generation before. They continued round the bay, past Howth, up to Malahide, and beyond. There was one at Dalkey, and another, only half a mile farther, at a charming little sandy cove beyond.

The harbour towards which the royal yacht was heading was not the great port of Dublin in the centre of the bay, but a smaller and altogether more elegant place, half mail boat terminal, half resort, that lay just a short way farther into the bay from Dalkey. Dun Laoghaire, this hamlet had once been called—but even though the English had learned that this barbarous-looking Irish name was simply pronounced Dunleery, they had decided to simplify matters and rename it Kingstown.

Apart from the mail packet, there had not been much activity there until the building of a jolly little steam train line out to Dalkey, fifteen years ago, had made the place easily accessible. And now, as well as the broad quay, a big church, and some gentlemen's villas, and pleasant stucco terraces overlooking the sea were starting to give the place a new air of gentility.

Along the quay today, a long temporary pavilion, with a blue and white striped canvas top, stretched out in gracious welcome. Above it, and on every available flagpole, St. George's flags flapped their bright red crosses in the sky. There was a red-coated guard of honour all smartly drawn up, and a brass band playing a patriotic melody to the awaiting crowds.

Just behind the official reception committee stood a company of aristocrats and gentlemen. And amongst these were Lord and Lady Mountwalsh, who, with typical generosity, had told Stephen to accompany them so that he should get a good view of the proceedings.

The Mountwalshes were greatly surprised, therefore, just as the
royal yacht had rounded the point, to see the respectable but flustered figure of Samuel Tidy pushing his way through the crowd towards them.

“Stephen. Stephen Smith,” he called. “You must come at once.”

As Tidy drove his pony and trap briskly along, he explained. He had written to Stephen at Mount Walsh, but the letter had missed Stephen, since he had left for Kildare, where he had been a week before getting to Dublin two days before.

“If you hadn't sent me a note yesterday to say you were in Dublin, and coming down here with Lord Mountwalsh, I shouldn't have known how to find you,” the Quaker explained. “I hope Lord Mountwalsh will forgive my intrusion.”

The two Mountwalshes had behaved with typical grace. “Oh, Stephen, you'll miss the queen,” Lady Mountwalsh had cried, and given him a pitying look. “If he has to go, he has to go,” said William. “But you'd better go quickly, Stephen, because you can't walk out on a monarch, you know. It's not allowed.”

So now they rattled along from Kingstown up to Ballsbridge, over the Grand Canal and up to the Liffey, towards the docks where the steamer to Liverpool was due to leave.

There were several ways to reach America, but the most favoured was to cross to England, and there take the ship to New York or Boston. “I secured Maureen an excellent berth,” Tidy explained, “on a first-rate ship from Liverpool. She'll travel in comfort, insofar as anyone can. And she has money left over when she arrives.” The fact that he and his wife had augmented her savings still further was not something he needed to say. “But I knew you would not wish to let her depart without a word of farewell.”

“No. Of course,” said Stephen.

It was not until they were at the Liffey that Samuel Tidy said what was really in his mind. It came out quite suddenly.

“I must speak plainly with thee, Stephen Smith,” he said, as they
passed Trinity College. “This day decides whether you are a wise man or a great fool.”

“How so?”

“Have you not understood that Maureen Madden loves you?”

“Loves me? She likes me, I think. She is grateful, I know.”

“You do not realise, then, that you are loved? You have not seen what should be obvious to any man with half an eye, that for the last year at least, and perhaps much longer, she has suffered all the pain of a passion unrequited?”

“No. What makes you suppose this is so?”

“It has been plain enough to myself and Mrs. Tidy since the spring of last year. And two weeks ago, to my wife, upon some gentle questioning, she confessed the same. So there is the matter. I put it plainly before you. Have you any tender feelings towards her?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Would you consider making her your wife?”

“My wife?”

“You have a good position now. You are not ambitious for fortune. You have known what it is to suffer and to be grateful for life. Why have you never considered her? We cannot understand it. For there is no better thing in all the world—I speak from experience—than to have at one's side a woman who is loving and tender.”

“This comes a little suddenly, Tidy. She has never said anything.”

“Of course she has not. How could she? And you have done nothing yourself to encourage her. Quite the reverse. So I ask you plainly—is it really your wish that the woman who secretly loves you should now sail to America and never see you again?”

“I should have to consider the matter.”

“The ship sails in less than an hour,” said Tidy bluntly, and then said no more. He did not often speak so much, and he never meddled in the affairs of others; but his conscience had told him that he should take matters into his own hands, even at this late date, and he was glad that he had.

They had already crossed the Liffey. They were bowling towards the place where the cross-channel steamers left for Liverpool.

As they drew near, it was a dreary picture that met their eyes. There was the usual mess of barrels and crates, bustling porters and carters, loitering passengers and sailors on the quay where the ships were tied up. But there was also another, sadder, sight.

For the traffic in humans between Ireland and England was not a simple one. The majority of those at the dock were those who were leaving. The more fortunate would take ship to America, either in the relative comfort purchased to Maureen Madden, or in miserable steerage accommodation which might, or might not, prove healthy and safe enough during the long voyage. The less fortunate, not having the wherewithal to go to America, would sail no farther than Liverpool, and drift into the poorer parts of that huge port or one of the other industrial cities of England, where they might hope to find manual labour.

But there was another class nowadays, and it was a large one. For the Famine had produced a great army of the starving and the sick. And these wretched folk, having managed to make the crossing to Liverpool, had not remained there. For when the English authorities had looked at them and seen what they were—men and women too weak to work, and carrying disease—they had told the ship-masters: “Take them back. We cannot admit them here.” And so back they would come, to their native land, and stand on the dock, helplessly, having neither place to rest, nor chance of escape. It happened every day.

There were about two hundred of these folk at the dockside now.

Ignoring them, Tidy pulled up near the steamer but behind a pile of crates, so that they should not be seen. He glanced at Stephen.

Stephen sat where he was. He did not speak. He did not move. He sat there for several minutes.

Then he started to move. Tidy looked at him.

“What will you do?”

“I shall fetch her.”

Tidy put out his hand and took Stephen by the arm.

“You are sure? For her sake, you cannot change your mind. She has suffered enough.”

“I am sure.” Stephen smiled. “Truly, I am sure.”

“I shall come with thee,” said the Quaker.

So they went up the gangplank onto the little steamer, and on the deck they found Maureen, who had been looking out across the Liffey and had not seen them coming. And having not much time, Stephen went up to her and, after a few words expressing the tenderness of his feelings for her and the realization that he could not allow her to depart forever without acquainting her of those feelings, asked her gently if she would be his wife. And she stared at him, almost blankly at first, not knowing whether she had comprehended. So he said it again. And still she stared, very pale, almost numb. And Tidy smiled and said: “It's all right.” But still she said nothing.

What could she say? For a time, in the comfortable Tidy house, she had felt a sense of healing and of warmth. She had felt ready to live again, and she had even dared to hope. But that had been weeks ago. Since then, something had quietly died within her again.

Then Stephen said that he was sorry that he should have asked her at such a moment when she would wish to have time to consider. And perhaps she might like to consider the matter on her way to Liverpool, and, if it was possible, give him her answer before the ship sailed to America; and that he would gladly await her decision in Liverpool.

Maureen said, very quietly, “I do not know,” as if in a daze. But she did not mean that she did not know if she loved him, or whether she desired to marry him. She meant that she did not know if he truly wished it, or even, if he did, whether she—after so much time and so much pain—a woman of thirty now, who had never been kissed and lost all that she'd loved, could make him a wife.

Somewhere on the ship, a bell was rung and a voice cried out that those not sailing should soon disembark.

Then Tidy placed his arm around her and said to her:

“Come. You have nothing to lose.”

Had she not? She could not tell.

“Come, Maureen, it will be all right.”

So, her heart beginning to tremble suddenly so that, unable to help it, she started to shake, and held between the two of them, she let Stephen and Tidy lead her down the gangplank and off the ship.

 

RISING

1891

 

I
T BEGAN
, though he, Fintan, could not have foreseen the consequences, in the high, secret places in the Wicklow Mountains where the little streams gather and run down, like the River Liffey itself, into the wider world.

He did not know—as fathers often do not know—what influence he had upon the boy. But then, with his feelings for the place and the memories he had, how could he not pass them on?

He was a long-legged man, with a dark, hanging moustache and thinning hair that rose in brave spiralling curls from his head. He loved to put the boy on his shoulders and stride up into the mountains. And always he'd be telling him things. He couldn't help it. A year ago he'd taken Willy to Glendalough. God knows what the boy had understood. He'd only been six. “In my grandfather's day,” Fintan had told him, “this was a strange sort of a place, all grown over, with a pagan reputation. ‘There were junketings at Glendalough on midsummer nights that cannot be spoken of,' he used to say. Until the priests put a stop to it, you know.” Willy noted a certain wistful
ness in his father's voice, even though its significance was unknown to him. Fintan had shown Willy the two lakes and the hermitage of St. Kevin and the monastery buildings with their round tower. “When I was young,” he explained, “it was Sir William Wilde, the eminent surgeon from Dublin, that used to bring parties of people up here. But there was nothing of the pagan about him. He was all for uncovering the ruins and restoring the place. A distinguished old gentleman. He had a long white beard. And it's his son Oscar, the writer, that's made such a name for himself in London now with his plays.” For if Fintan O'Byrne was not an educated man, he was a great reader of newspapers, and it was often surprising what he knew.

His grandmother was one of the numerous descendants of Patrick Walsh and Brigid, so he was aware that the blood of Walsh and Smith, as well as O'Byrne, ran in his veins. He was especially proud of being an O'Byrne however, for two reasons. The first was that, by tradition, he took it as a given that the estate of Rathconan, by rights, belonged to his family.

The second concerned his great-grandfather, Finn O'Byrne. For about a dozen years after Emmet's rebellion, Finn had returned to Rathconan with his family. It had been known that he'd had some part in Emmet's noble undertaking, but in the safety of his old age, when Finn had let people know that it was he who had killed the infamous Lord Mountwalsh, he had naturally become something of a local celebrity. Fintan himself had always been a law-abiding man, but he was certainly proud that his ancestors should include such a noble and heroic revolutionary as Finn O'Byrne.

But if he brought up his family to be proud of the area to which they belonged, and their place in it, there was one figure he insisted that they revere.

“Haven't I stood beside him in a mountain stream, just the two of us, like ancient Irishmen, panning for gold, to make a ring for Katherine O'Shea?” he would cry with pained emotion.

Parnell. Parnell the patriot. Parnell the leader, whose beloved home of Avondale lay only a few miles down beyond Glendalough.

And what was the word the boy would hear again and again—and with good reason—whenever that blessed name was said? “Betrayed, boy. Betrayed by his own. Betrayed by the priests as well, it has to be said. Betrayed.”

“What else could the priests do,” his mother would protest, “with him a known adulterer? They could hardly condone it.” His mother's role was to ensure that religion was respected in the house. Willy understood. “It was the British that betrayed him. Murderers that they are.”

Her own mother had lost all her family in the Famine before she came to County Wicklow. And she had brought up her daughter to know that it was the English policy of deliberate murder that had done it.

But it was a single day, in October, that Willy would remember best.

“Come, Willy,” said his father, “we'll go up to the big house and see Mrs. Budge.” He smiled. “She won't eat you.”

Willy was not so sure.

The return of Rose Budge to Rathconan that summer had been the subject of much curiosity. Though her father had left her the estate some years before, she hadn't been seen there for almost twenty years. Her husband, Colonel Browne, was scarcely remembered at all, though Willy had heard his father describe him once. “A great gentleman he was. And a hunting man. There wasn't a fence he wouldn't take. And a scholar too, I believe.”

This last was true. It was really a tragedy that the Colonel and Rose had never had any children, for the Colonel was not only a fair mathematician, but an excellent linguist who had studied the cultures of India, to which his military service had taken him. Rose had never been brought up to be anything but the wife of an Irish landowner or military man; but having no children, she had perforce to join in her husband's interests or find herself rather lonely.
And Colonel Browne, being a kindly man, shared as much with her as he could, without over-taxing her intelligence. As a result, her imagination had become like some large store room in an oriental bazaar, containing a random selection of exotic objects. And it was with all these memories of oriental customs, and huge Indian skies that, upon the untimely death of the Colonel earlier that year, she had returned—middle-aged, but still the same strong, rangy figure she had been in her youth—to take up residence, as the last of the Budges, at her ancestral home.

Willy and his father were shown into the library.

Though it had two windows and a fireplace, it was not a large room, and had never contained more than a modicum of books; but it had to be said that to enter it now was to be impressed.

For a start, the room was stiflingly hot. Though it was a warm October day outside, the windows were all tightly closed, and the fire was well stoked. The curtains had been almost drawn together, so that each window now appeared as a bright slit, through which the sunlight came like a knife. She must have taken a meal in there, for Willy's senses were affronted by the spicy, sweet, unfamiliar smell of curry, which permeated the air and made him feel slightly dizzy. On one wall there now hung a picture of an Indian temple under an orange sky which, it seemed, must also have smelled of curry. And in front of some empty bookshelves, in a black frame, there was a sepia photograph of an oriental wall carving of such startling eroticism that, if there was any chance the boy might have understood it, his father would have been obliged to cover his eyes. But it was not at the photograph, but at the figure of Mrs. Budge, that Willy was staring in alarm.

She was sitting upright in a wooden-backed chair, wearing a long, dark red gown and a turban.

Why she had started to wear this strange headgear was known only to herself. She had made it one afternoon in September, put it on her head, looked in the glass and, presumably, liked what she saw: for she had been wearing it ever since.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Budge,” said Fintan.

There had been some uncertainty, when she first arrived back, as to what she should be called. As the Colonel's widow, she was, of course, Mrs. Browne. But when the oldest member of the household, Mrs. Brennan, who had been cook to her father, tentatively called her by that name, the lady of the house had looked thoughtful and remarked, “I was always Rose Budge, when I was here before.” And when, as an experiment, the cook called her “Mrs. Budge” the next time, she received a nod which seemed to indicate approval. So it was always “Mrs. Budge” now, which served as a gentle reminder that the family were still the masters of Rathconan.

And did she mean to keep the place? It seemed so. For when Mrs. Brennan enquired, “Will you be staying here a while, do you think, Mrs. Budge?” she had received the firmest of replies.

“Where else would I stay but at Rathconan, where my family has been for two hundred and fifty years?”

She looked at her tenant now, and asked him politely enough what he wanted.

“It's about my land, Mrs. Budge,” he said. “We've been tenants on it as long as the Budge family has been here.”

“And you've more now, I think, than was ever the case before,” she remarked with a nod.

If the Famine had taken lives—and over a million had died—it was the larger process the blight had set in motion that had really changed the face of Ireland—eviction. In the years of the Famine and those that followed, the evictions had continued at a staggering pace. In the west of course, but in most parts of Ireland also, not tens but hundreds of thousands of families had been pushed out of their small, subdivided, and unprofitable holdings. Clusters of cottages, each with an acre or two, had been pulled down and put under plough or returned to pasture. In some areas, entire populations had receded, like an ebbing tide, from the land. Sometimes, large landholdings were left untenanted, or let to shrewd-eyed graziers. Often, the more successful tenants gained larger farms. An individual
tenant was far more likely to be farming fifteen, thirty, or more acres, nowadays. And the new generation had learned a terrible lesson: the farm would not be subdivided now; it would pass on intact, to a son who, like as not had married later than his father had, and whose brothers would have to go out and make their own way in the world.

In a way, it might almost be said that the English, who had always dreamed of populating Ireland with sturdy yeoman farmers, had got their wish—except for two differences: these family holdings were not English Protestant, but Irish Catholic farms; and with the memory of the Famine always hanging like a great cloud of anguish over the land, the farmers desired only to secure their hold upon their farms and, as soon as God granted, to see the usurping English landlords depart from them, never to return.

The case of Fintan O'Byrne was of this kind. The clearances at Rathconan had not been wholesale like those in the west, but Mrs. Budge's father had cleared out the subdivided holdings, and Fintan's father had been one of the beneficiaries. The potato fields that had extended up the ancient hillside had been returned to grazing pasture now—though you could see their outlines clearly—and Fintan was tenant of dozens of acres, where his relations before the Famine had survived on little patches. In short, Rathconan had returned to something more like its traditional state, when Fintan's ancestors had grazed their cattle upon the mountain slopes. And if Fintan had his way, the ownership of the land would soon return to him as well.

“It's my security I have in mind,” he said.

“You're a good tenant, I know,” she answered. “And there are no Captain Boycotts here.”

It was forty years since the Tenants League had started to agitate for tenants' rights in Ireland. Great men had taken the tenants' side. In England, Gladstone, the powerful leader of the Liberal party, successors to the Whigs, had designed new laws to give them some protection. Most important of all, Parnell had been their champion. But progress had been slow. When, fifteen years ago, a new potato
blight had started another wave of evictions—not without some violence—Parnell had given his famous order. Do not speak, he told the Irish, to any man who evicts his tenants; have no dealings with them, let them be isolated. “Shun them,” he commanded, “like a leper of old.” Captain Boycott, an agent responsible for numerous evictions, had been especially singled out. Since then, tenants had gained some further protections, but still not enough.