The Rebels of Ireland (63 page)

Sometimes he wished he had intervened to prevent Conall's birth. It was a foolish idea, no doubt, but was it possible that he could have said something to persuade the boy's father to lead a different life and choose another wife?

There was just one day, it seemed to him, when he might have had the chance to do so. That day, almost twenty years ago, up at Quilca. He'd marked out young Garret Smith at once as a fellow with genius. He'd guessed the young man's anger and his frustration, too. How could an intelligent Catholic boy like that feel any other way? But if only he'd guessed what was in Garret's mind when he'd asked if he knew the Brennans, and then informed him, as he was leaving in the morning, that he'd come to see him at Rathconan. If only he'd known.

What could he have done? Used any influence he had, begged the young man, at least, to follow another course. Anything to prevent him running off after that illiterate girl and making himself part of the worthless Brennan family up at Rathconan. Had he been
able to do that, then Garret Smith would surely not have fallen into his present wretched condition; and Conall—another Conall, of course, perhaps even a finer one—would have been born to a different mother, and under far different family circumstances.

But by the time he'd returned to Rathconan that autumn, he'd found young Garret already there, living with the Brennans, his heart dark with anger and contempt for Nary, who'd sent her away, for Sheridan, the Walshes and all their kind, believing foolishly that up there in a hut in the mountains, he would be somehow a freer, purer man than he would be working for MacGowan the grocer in Dublin. Had it just been a question of living in the mountains, he might have been right. A man might find himself up in the wild and open spaces, or in the great sanctuary of Glendalough. But in a hut with the Brennans? O'Toole didn't think so. Within a year, the slut of a girl had given him a child; then another. Young Smith should have walked out on them all, in the high old way, in O'Toole's opinion. But Garret was too good for that. He'd gone before a priest and married her. After that, he was doomed.

He should have become a hedge schoolmaster. He'd have had to study more, but he had the brain to do it. I'd have helped him, O'Toole thought. But he'd have had to move, since the position in Rathconan was filled and there was no need for another. A local priest had given him some work. But then he had quarrelled with the priest. Was there something in the man that craved his own destruction? It had often seemed to the schoolmaster that there was. For look at the man now. A labourer. A carpenter and carver of images, commissioned but never delivered; a maker of poems never finished; a dreamer of Jacobite dreams that had no chance of becoming real. A drinker. Every year, more of a drinker. A husband of a wife he'd buried now, and whose family, in his heart, he must have come to despise—for they were dirty, lazy, and stupid. A father of children left unkempt, while he talked to them of the Jacobite cause and the shabby way he'd been treated, or cursed them and sank into moroseness.

There had been three daughters that lived. Two, sluts like their mother, in O'Toole's opinion, had married down the valley. The third was a servant in Wicklow. Two little boys had died in infancy. And then, miraculously, had come Conall.

“He'll die like the other boys, I fear,” the priest who'd performed the baptism had said to O'Toole. And most people in Rathconan had thought so, too. He remembered him when he was three—so pale and fragile, with those wonderful green eyes. Such a poetic-looking little fellow that it broke your heart to think how little time he probably had to know life. When his own little granddaughter Deirdre, who was only months younger than the boy, had become his friend, O'Toole had tried gently to discourage her from becoming too close, for fear of the pain it would cause her when the boy died. But he could hardly stop her playing with him, or walking with him hand in hand when he wandered up the mountain to where the sheep were grazing, or sitting beside him on a rock overlooking a pool formed by the mountain stream, sharing her food with him, and talking by the hour.

“What do you talk about, Deirdre?” he had asked her once.

“Oh, everything,” she had answered. “He tells me stories sometimes,” she had added, “about the fish in the stream, and the birds, and the deer in the woods. I do love him so.” And though his heart had sunk, he had not known what to say.

It had been Garret who had brought the boy to him, when Conall was six. Surprisingly, he had even come with the requisite money.

“Teach him,” he had asked O'Toole simply. “Teach him all you know.”

“You could teach him yourself, for the moment,” O'Toole had pointed out, “for nothing.”

“No,” Smith had shot back with sudden vehemence. And then, after a pause: “I'm not fit to teach him.” A terrible admission, but what could the schoolmaster say?

So he had started to teach the boy. And he had been astonished.
The little fellow's memory was astounding. Tell him a thing once, and he remembered it forever. His thought process, O'Toole soon realised, was also entirely out of the ordinary. He would listen quietly, then ask a question that showed he had considered every aspect of the matter already and found the thing that, for the time being, you had thought it simpler to leave out. What delighted O'Toole most, however—and this was a gift that could never be taught—was the boy's use of language: his strange, half-playful formulations which, you suddenly realised, contained an observation that was new yet stunningly accurate. How could he do such a thing at such a tender age? As well ask, how can a bird fly, or a salmon leap?

He also noticed that his young pupil had a busy inner life. There would be days when he seemed moody and preoccupied during the lesson. On these days, often as not, O'Toole would see him afterwards wandering off alone, enjoying some communion with the scene around him that no one could share. By the time the pale little fellow was eight years old, the schoolmaster loved him almost as much as Deirdre did.

If only it had not been for those other days, when Conall would fail to come to the hedge school and word would come that he was sickly; and O'Toole would go to Garret Smith's house and find little Deirdre sitting by his side, feeding Conall broth, or quietly singing to him, while the little boy lay there so pale it seemed as if he might be taken from them within the day.

But then, suddenly, two years ago, he had started to get stronger. A year later, he seemed as robust as the other children; soon after that, one of the toughest. And now, he could physically dominate them all. At the same time, O'Toole detected a new toughness in the boy's growing mind. He did not just excel at his lessons; he stormed through them, so that the schoolmaster was often challenged himself to set work that Conall wouldn't find too easy.

Little Deirdre also watched these developments with evident delight. “Isn't he strong?” she would cry. And it seemed to O'Toole that his granddaughter felt she could take a personal responsibility
for Conall's new condition. At the same time, from her looks, and from occasional words that she let fall, her grandfather could guess that she still saw the same, pale little boy that she had loved beneath this new incarnation; and indeed, Conall would still sometimes fall into his strange, melancholic moods, and the two of them would still go off for walks together in the mountain passes.

Deirdre was Conall's only close friend. He was often with the other children, and joined in all their games. But it was clear that he did not share his confidences with them. There were only two other people nowadays to whom he might be close. One, perhaps, thought O'Toole, was himself. In their studies together, master and pupil had developed a degree of intimacy. The other was his father.

O'Toole suspected that Garret Smith had little enough to live for these days but his son. The man's drinking was getting worse, and he looked twenty years older than he actually was; but if it hadn't been for the boy, he'd surely have been far worse. And if this love did not always extend to paying the modest fees for the hedge school on time, he usually managed to make them up sooner or later. In the evenings, when he was sober, he would sometimes spend hours in deep conversation with the boy. O'Toole had often wondered what it was they talked about, and once he had asked Deirdre if she knew. But she didn't. All she knew was that Conall had once told her: “My father and your grandfather are the only two men I truly admire.”

Did the boy know that his father was not held in high regard? The villagers were usually polite about his father to his face. “Your father's a great reader,” they'd say. “He knows many things.” But if, behind his back, they added, “He knows more than he works and less than he drinks,” Conall was beginning to guess it. Once, when a boy was rude about his father, he knocked him down. Though afterwards, when no one could see, he burst into tears. And to Deirdre he sadly remarked: “No one understands him but me.”

So it was only his father and Deirdre that Conall really loved and trusted. And after them, O'Toole considered, I dare say it would be me.

And so now, as Conall kept watch for the hedge school, and the schoolmaster thought of the conversation he'd had the day before, he felt a terrible sense of guilt.

It weighed heavily on his conscience that he might have to betray the boy.

At shortly after noon, Robert Budge, landowner and magistrate, set out from his house to see Garret Smith. When Walter Smith's family had been dispossessed, the Rathconan estate had been offered for sale at a knockdown price. Benjamin Budge had had no desire to return there, but his younger brother, who was made of sterner stuff, had been glad to buy it. The Budges could claim to have been at Rathconan for four generations now.

He hadn't decided what to do about the Smith boy yet. O'Toole wouldn't give any trouble. He'd already seen to that. As for the boy's father…

But the boy could wait. Today he had other business with Garret Smith. It concerned Rathconan House.

If the old chiefs of the place could have seen Rathconan now, they might have been rather surprised. They might even have found it comical. Yet it was like scores of other old houses in Ireland. For, finding the accommodation of the old tower house insufficient, Budge's father had added, across the front of it, a modest, rectangular house, five windows wide. The house was of no particular style, though the plain windows might have been called Georgian. No attempt had been made to alter either the house or the old keep that loomed up behind it, so that they would blend together. The new Rathconan looked like what it was: a house stuck onto the front of an old fort.

But it was where Robert Budge had been born and raised, and he was proud of it.

He'd been only twenty when his father had died, five years ago, leaving him lord and master of the place, and, with a young man's
vanity, he had even considered changing the house's name. He had thought, as some of the grander settlers had done, of calling it Castle Budge, but that seemed overreaching. More reasonable might have been another English formula favoured in Ireland: Budgetown. But that was hardly euphonious. Better-sounding was the Irish version: Ballybudge. In the end, however, considering the fact that the Budges had hardly built the place, and fearing the mockery of the local Irish and his neighbours, he had thought better of it and left the name as it was—Rathconan—to which he liked to add the appellation “House,” to make it sound more like an English manor.

To Robert Budge, Rathconan House was home. True, like all the rest of the Cromwellian settlers, he was still viewed by the native Irish as an unwanted colonist. True, also, that he was proudly English and Protestant. For if the Cromwellian families were not there to uphold the Protestant faith and occupy the confiscated estates of the former Catholic owners, then what was their justification for being in Ireland in the first place? Indeed, his father, a man of far less religious conviction than old Barnaby Budge, had firmly taken his more or less Presbyterian family into the royal Church of Ireland exactly because, as he had put it: “We must all stick together.”

“Always remember,” he had advised Robert shortly before he died, “the good people here have known you all your life, they work your land, and they'll probably call you ‘Your Honour' and give you a daily greeting. But if ever our order breaks down, my son, they'll put a knife between your ribs. And don't you forget it.”

All the same, it was nearly a century since Robert's great-grandfather Barnaby had first come there. And during that time, the Anglo-Irish settlers had evolved to blend, in certain ways, with the surrounding environment. If the men in the Irish Parliament felt themselves treated as a different breed by their compatriots in London, out here in the country, the lesser Anglo-Irish landlords had produced a type that was entirely their own.