The Rebels of Ireland (64 page)

His own father had exemplified the breed. He'd lived almost all his life at Rathconan and knew all its ways. He spoke English with
a pronounced Irish intonation, and he treated many of the details of his life, including his children's education, with a certain fine carelessness. In this he had been joined by his wife, who came from a similar family with identical views.

Some Anglo-Irish families, of course, sent their sons to Oxford, Cambridge, or Trinity College in Dublin. But not the Budges. Basic education the children were given, boys and girls, but much more was considered superfluous.

“My father had a whistle which he would blow to summon his dogs,” Robert would cheerfully tell his friends. “But if he blew two blasts, that meant he wanted me.” When his mother had caught his sister reading a book when she could have been healthily out of doors, she had locked her in a dark closet for two hours and told her she'd give her a whipping if she caught her behaving like that again. The Budge children were brought up to be strong, to run estates, and, if need be, to fight. In their love of the open air, the Budges had something in common with the Irish chiefs who had gone before them. It would have surprised them to know that they were less educated.

It was a matter of education that had caused him to speak to O'Toole so firmly.

Robert Budge was only twenty-five, but he was often treated like an older man. Perhaps it was his large, imposing presence, but as the owner of Rathconan, he was considered a useful local man by the authorities, and a year ago he had been made a magistrate. So long as he could stay in the country at Rathconan, he was glad to cut a bold figure in this local world, and he had recently been a guest at several houses in Counties Wexford and Kildare to look out for a suitable wife; he had also been to Dublin a few times, so that the people at the Castle and the Parliament should know his face.

His reason for visiting Dublin the previous week had been to obtain the latest news on the threat of invasion from France. The garrisons at Wicklow and Wexford were all in readiness, he knew very well. And he was impressed with the numbers of smart, red-coated
troops with their muskets that he saw in the handsome streets of the capital. Like every other magistrate, he had been on the lookout for suspicious characters or signs of sedition at Rathconan, but he couldn't honestly say that he'd found any—a pity really, as he'd have been glad to have something to bring himself to the attention of the authorities.

He hadn't learned anything particularly new in Dublin about the threat from overseas, but towards the end of his visit, he had gained one quite interesting piece of information. He'd been standing in a group of similar fellows around the Member of Parliament Fortunatus Walsh when he'd heard it.

“There's a growing feeling,” Walsh had told them, “that something has to be done about our education of Catholics. The hedge schools are everywhere, as we all know, but our own Church of Ireland has made only the most pitiful attempts to challenge them. We've started Protestant Charter Schools for poor children in some parishes, but as we all know, they have attracted few pupils.”

“The Catholic families won't send their children to them,” someone remarked.

“Exactly. But there are some in the government who are recommending that a new method be tried. Take some promising young Catholic children from other areas, and place them, away from home, in the better Charter Schools.”

“So they become Protestants?”

“That is the hope, certainly. I am not sure it would work, but the idea is to help the gradual spread of Protestantism that our penal system and our Church of Ireland have so far entirely failed to accomplish.”

“An interesting idea,” said Budge, not because he thought so, but so that Fortunatus would take note of him.

“Well, Mr. Budge,” Walsh smiled, “if you have any candidates for such a project, you will find at least some at the Castle who will be grateful to you.”

Budge had said nothing, but he had made further enquiries in
Dublin, visited a school, and pondered the matter all the way back to Rathconan.

If he were to do such a thing, there was only one possible candidate.

“I'm thinking of sending young Conall Smith,” he had told O'Toole. “And,” he had given the schoolmaster a careful look, “I shall be expecting your support.”

“But…” O'Toole was about to say, “He's my best pupil,” then remembered that this would be admitting the existence of the hedge school. “Why would I support such a thing?”

“You know very well that he's practically an orphan. His father's not fit to look after him.”

“But he's still his father. And he has family besides.”

“The Brennans? Fit guardians for a boy of such intelligence?”

Since O'Toole's opinion of the Brennans was, if anything, even lower than the landlord's, the schoolmaster found it difficult to say anything to this.

“But to force a boy away from his family and into a Protestant school at such a time,” O'Toole said carefully, “would create bad feeling.”

“Is that a threat?” Budge gazed at him evenly.

“It isn't. But I believe it's the truth,” O'Toole said frankly.

“That is why,” Budge answered with equal care, “I am counting upon your support. Your word carries influence here. As much as if you were the priest.”

It was a curious fact that in villages all over Ireland, the Protestant landlords often relied upon the Catholic priests to help them keep order. Not that the priests were happy about it. If they were unlicensed, however, the landlords could always have them expelled; and even if they were entirely legal, any sedition or trouble—which was never going to do their parishioners any good anyway—could always be imputed to their influence and lay them open to prosecution. By and large, therefore, the priests encouraged their flocks to stay out of trouble.

Up in Rathconan, where the nearest priest lived some miles away, O'Toole, as the most educated man, had a similar influence. His own religious convictions were not strong, but he dutifully taught his pupils their catechism and gave them a good grounding in the Catholic religion. The priest would soon have made life difficult for him if he didn't.

“And the penalties for teaching a hedge school,” Budge added, “as we both know, are severe.”

There was the threat, delivered quietly, well understood.

If the hedge schools were everywhere, they were still illegal; and if the magistrate chose to find the hedge school and prosecute the master, O'Toole could be in serious trouble. In theory, he could even be transported to the American colonies.

“Are you decided upon this?” O'Toole asked.

“No. But I am thinking about it.”

In fact, Budge was still uncertain. Did his conscience trouble him about taking the boy from his father? He wasn't sure that it did. He hesitated to cause bad feeling in the area at such an uncertain time politically—O'Toole was right to warn him about that. And while he had no doubt that the Smith boy, of whose talents he was aware, would be welcomed as a promising pupil, he also had another minor concern. What if the boy, bright though he was, should turn out badly like his father? That would reflect poorly upon himself. He meant to weigh the matter for a few more days before he finally decided.

“My conscience troubles me,” the schoolmaster said quietly.

“It shouldn't. I am right, you know.”

“I am troubled, but not for the reason you think.”

Now what, the landlord wondered, did he mean by that?

As he strolled towards Garret Smith's small dwelling, he passed several others. They were all mostly the same—low, stone-built cabins with turf roofs. Some had only two rooms, one of which was often shared with the livestock; but most of the inhabitants of Rathconan had a low-ceilinged room with a fire and some wooden
furniture—a table, benches, and stools—together with one or two other rooms. Some even had a bed, though nobody would have thought twice about sleeping on straw. Their fires, in which they burned wood or turf, sometimes had a rudimentary chimney, but usually, the rooms filled with smoke until it escaped under the eaves. To the eyes of English visitors, these low and narrow shacks seemed to be filthy and degraded—although they observed that the women and barefooted children who emerged from them were surprisingly clean. But they would have observed more accurately had they realised that the conditions before them were simply those which had been prevalent in much of Europe through the Middle Ages. To Budge, the dwellings didn't look especially mean. He knew places a lot worse.

He passed the house of Dermot O'Byrne. God knows how many O'Byrnes there were in the Wicklow region, but he felt sure that even if he met them all, he'd still like Dermot the least.

For a start, he never paid his rent.

It was not unusual in Ireland for rents to go unpaid. The fault lay mainly with the English settler landlords who had continued to demand rents that were far too high. To keep what they could of their native land, the Irish would agree to pay and then inevitably fall short. Some landlords blamed the primitive agricultural methods of the island. Down in Dublin, some well-meaning gentlemen had formed a society to raise Irish standards to those of England, where, it was true, farms had recently become far more productive. Budge had heard of some interesting experiments with new crop rotations up in County Meath. But the basic problem stemmed from the settlers' original fear and greed, and they had no one but themselves to blame.

Up here at Rathconan, however, the situation was different. “My grandfather Barnaby,” his father had told him, “undoubtedly demanded rents that were too high. But I've lowered them all, and you'll find our tenants mostly pay.” Not Dermot O'Byrne, though. He would promise anything, with expressions of loyal emotion so
fulsome and insincere as to be insulting. Excuses would follow, and finally, long overdue and delivered grudgingly, just enough of the rent to keep Budge from throwing him off the land. “The truth is,” his father had once remarked, “he doesn't think he should be paying us anything at all.”

Robert Budge sighed. He would never like Dermot O'Byrne.

And now there was Garret Smith's house, just ahead of him.

If his ancestor Barnaby Budge had considered the Irish slow and unreliable—if many gentlemen in London believed that now—the Budges had been in Ireland far too many generations to hold such foolish notions themselves. If an Irish craftsman said he would come to work on the door of your house, you did not necessarily ask him to name the day. He would come upon a day that seemed good to him, but he would come, and the work would be well done.

So when Robert Budge had agreed with Garret Smith that the latter would make him a new front door to his house—which was demonstrably in need of it—and when Smith had taken careful measurements and stated that he would return with the door, and fit the same, Budge expected after six weeks that the work would be in progress. When he had gently reminded Smith of this, the latter had agreed, and assured him that he'd have it soon. Another six weeks later, another reminder had been given. Thereafter, plain questions. “Where's my door?” Six months had now passed, and Budge had had enough.

He arrived at the house.

It was a pity that, there being no particular work to occupy them that afternoon, two of Rathconan's older inhabitants should have come to join Garret Smith and that, early though it was, all three of them had been drinking for some time—Garret Smith more than the others. They were sitting at the single table in his cottage.

As he quite often did when the drink began to hit him, Smith had reverted to the subject of the Jacobite cause and had given it as
his opinion that if, as the government seemed to fear, the French came, and Bonnie Prince Charlie raised an army of Scots, Ireland might see a return of the Stuarts and of Catholicism before the year was out.

“So you say.” Fergal Brennan had heard all this before. He had been impressed by the education and the fervent politics of the young man who had married his little sister twenty years ago, but the years had passed and nothing much had come of Smith and his fine words.

Dermot O'Byrne, however, nodded in agreement.

“And when that day comes,” he said darkly, “it will be myself back in Rathconan, where I've the right to be, and Budge with his throat slit.”

Fergal Brennan sighed. In a century and a half, the resentment of Dermot's branch of the huge O'Byrne family against the ruling chiefs at Rathconan had never abated. They still believed, in some way, this inheritance should have been their own. With Dermot, it was an article of faith. But it irritated Fergal that because of this nonsense O'Byrne seemed to imagine he was superior to the Brennans.

“The O'Byrnes of Rathconan flew away with the Wild Geese,” he said quietly. “It's they who'll be lords here, if they ever return. It's he,” he indicated Garret Smith, “who has more of a right to it than you.” It was not much spoken of, but perfectly known in the village, that the forbears of Garret Smith had briefly owned Rathconan—and also that, albeit illegitimately, the blood of the O'Byrne chiefs flowed in their veins. “His family paid for it with good money, too,” he added mischievously, “which wouldn't have been the case with your family, I believe.”