Young Garret seemed in better spirits. Though Walsh was not aware of it, Garret too had received a parting word, not from Sheridan, but from Tidy. The Dean’s factotum had skilfully waylaid him by the corner of the house where no one should see them.
“Well, young Smith, you’ve been thrown out on your ear, haven’t you?” he said nastily.
“I suppose I have,” said Garret.
“This isn’t a place for the likes of you,” Tidy continued, “sitting down at table with the quality. You don’t belong in the company of the gintry, and you never will.”
“I go where I’m asked,” Garret replied reasonably. “It’s rudeness to refuse hospitality, you know.” To this, Tidy made only a sound in the back of his throat as though he were about to spit. “Anyway,” said Garret, “Art O’Toole was welcome here, and he isn’t gintry, I should think.”
Since Tidy privately had no use for O’Toole either, he confined himself to silence; but something in his look suggested that, as a performer, O’Toole belonged in the servant class.
“Don’t give yourself airs and talk back to your betters,” he replied. “You should have been whipped last night, and thrown out into the stable yard where you belong. Now, get along with you.”
“Thank you,” said Garret.
As Garret rode beside him on the road south, Fortunatus wondered what his destiny would be. Would he settle down quietly as a grocer in Dublin? Would he get in trouble with the law? Would he do something entirely different and surprise them all? And what, after all, had he made of the last two days’ events? After they had gone a mile or so, he ventured to remark:
“I’m sorry you fell out with Dean Swift. He is a great man, you know.”
“Of course he is,” said Garret obligingly. “I admire Swift.”
“Indeed?” Fortunatus was surprised.
“At least he’s honest.” They rode on a few more paces. “It’s you and Sheridan,” he resumed cheerfully, “that I despise entirely.”
“Ah,” said Fortunatus.
But if Garret Smith did not even glance at him to see how he received this insult, it was because he did not really care. He had already made up his mind what he was going to do.
GEORGIANA
1742
THE TRAP WAS SET.
As he walked swiftly across the bridge towards the north bank of the Liffey, Doctor Terence Walsh smiled to himself. He was glad to be useful to his kindly brother—assuming, of course, that the trap worked, and snared its prey. But the thing had been so carefully and cunningly devised that, in his own estimation, there was a very sporting chance it would. Like cattle raiders from old Ireland, Fortunatus and he would lead the prize home together, and the family would rightly applaud.
The Walsh brothers were going to trap a young lady. The trap was set for that evening.
It was a fine April morning. As usual, whenever he could, Terence liked to walk. Though middle-aged, his wiry body might have belonged to a younger man; there was a spring in his step, and his eyes were still keen as a falcon’s. He gave a smile and a nod to each of the people who greeted him as he strode along—for he was a popular fellow—but he didn’t stop to talk, as he was going about his business.
He couldn’t remember when MacGowan the grocer had last complained of any ill health, so when one of the grocer’s many children arrived at his door to say that his father was poorly, Terence had sent the child back with the assurance that he’d be there within the hour.
Approaching the house and entering the yard, he noticed that the place seemed strangely quiet. He was met at the door by Mac-Gowan’s wife. He observed that she looked pale and that there were hollow rings around her eyes. She murmured something he didn’t catch, and motioned him towards the fire.
The grocer was slumped in a chair. His face was ashen, his spine bent as if he were a little old man. He’d lost so much weight that his clothes hung on him like rags. As he looked up at Terence, his eye seemed full of pain and hopelessness.
The previous summer, Terence had been down in Munster. In the winter of 1740–41, there had been a terrible winter all over Ireland, and there had been widespread crop failures every season since. The failures varied by region, however. The area around Dublin had not suffered much, and supplies had been maintained in the capital; but Munster had been very badly hit. He had been shocked by the state of the countryside, where the poorer folk were literally starving. As always at such times, it was the elderly and the infants who were being carried off, but the numbers were large. He had never seen a famine before, and the memory of the people he encountered in the villages through which he passed had haunted him ever since. Many of them had looked as MacGowan did now.
But it was surely not starvation that was affecting the Dublin grocer.
“Have you any pain?” he asked.
“Just in my back, Doctor.” MacGowan indicated the hollow between his shoulder blades. “Just a dull pain, but it keeps coming on.”
Had the poor devil a wasting sickness of some kind, or was he declining towards a crisis?
“Are you short of breath?”
“Not really.”
“No other pains? Do you sleep?”
“He does not,” broke in his wife. “He tosses and turns all night, and then he’ll sit like this for hours. He hardly moves.” There was both concern and a trace of anger in her voice. “He hardly attends to his business.”
Over the years, within the limits imposed upon his profession by the almost complete lack of any medical science, Terence Walsh had become a good doctor. The reason for this was that he had the two most important qualities for a general practitioner in any age: a knowledge of human nature, and a sense of his patient’s health that came from intuition—for he rightly believed that a doctor without intuition is useless.
“And how is your business, Mr. MacGowan?” he asked.
“Well enough.”
His wife, however, was shaking her head.
“It was that shipment of wine, Doctor. He was well enough before that.”
Terence gazed at the grocer thoughtfully.
“Mrs. MacGowan,” he said, “I shall need two small cups, and then I shall need to be left alone with the patient.”
When this was done, Terence produced from inside his coat a small silver hip flask.
“Brandy, MacGowan,” he remarked. And he poured some into each cup. “I’ll have some, too.” He watched while the grocer swallowed his, and took a sip himself. “Now,” he said quietly, “why don’t you tell me all about it?”
It did not take long for Doctor Walsh to concur in Mrs. Mac-Gowan’s diagnosis. The cause of the grocer’s condition, almost certainly, was a cargo of wine.
In a way, the grocer’s problems were the result of his success. His business had always been sound, and as the years went by, he had been able to expand his activities. He had enlarged the size of his market stall. He had engaged in some modest wholesale activities, buying in quantities of grain, flour, and butter from the region’s farmers and selling these commodities on to other traders. In these activities, his being a Catholic was an advantage, for just as Catholic tradesmen in Dublin employed fellow Catholics to work for them, the Catholic farmers in the region preferred to do business with other Catholics. He had built up quite an extensive network. With his older children all apprenticed to other tradesmen, or set up on their own account, and with his younger children helping him in the grocery business, MacGowan in his fifties was a vigorous man on the verge of entering that coterie of grocers whose names appeared amongst the merchant fraternity of the city.
Indeed, he had calculated, if he invested all the money he had on hand in one big shipment, a valuable cargo of the kind the city’s leading merchants handled any day of the week, he would be able to take that step. And then he had made one fatal error. Having proved his competence in one business, he had been tempted to go into another he did not know. He had invested his entire capital, and half as much again that he’d borr
owed, in a shipload of wine.
It had come from Bordeaux, through a merchant in Galway. The price was good—too good. Had he consulted any of the wine merchants in Dublin, they’d have told him not to deal with the Galway man or the Bordeaux shipper. But because he was poaching business where he didn’t belong, he had kept his activities dark. He’d paid for the wine; the ship had delivered; the wine was undrinkable; and the Galway man was nowhere to be found.
His capital was gone. He owed a large debt. He’d been able to get some credit from his usual suppliers and continued to trade. But no matter what he did, the weight of his debt was like an incubus upon his back that could not be shifted and that was crushing the life out of him. As the weeks passed, he could see no end in sight. No matter what he did, he could not seem to lessen the debt. It was going to destroy him. Worse. After pressing him down into the ground, it would leave a great pit into which his poor family would fall as well. He could not bear to think of it. He sagged. He lost the will to do anything.
And if no remedy is found, thought Terence Walsh, this man will either waste away or suffer a crisis and drop dead. The question was, what could be done?
The wretchedness of the thing, he considered, was that if it weren’t for his debt, the grocer had an excellent business. He might not have enjoyed being a merchant himself when he was young, but he knew enough thoroughly to understand how MacGowan was situated. Not only had the man a large stall and any number of loyal customers, but thanks to the farmers who were his suppliers, he was in an excellent position to take advantage of the opportunities offered when food supplies were short and prices high. Indeed, he considered, this would be an excellent time for him to expand, rather than contract, his trade. If the debt were smaller, and I didn’t have my own family to look after, he thought, I might take a chance and make him a loan myself.
“I can promise nothing, but do not give up hope,” he told the grocer. “I do not think your debt is as hopeless as you suppose, and I shall call again in a few days. In the meantime, you are to eat, to take a glass of brandy each day, and to walk to Christ Church and back each day. I shall tell your wife to make sure you perform each of these. Then we shall see.” And having given these instructions to Mrs. MacGowan with some emphasis, he went upon his way.
It would be the first time that he had set out to cure a patient’s illness by raising money, but he looked forward to the challenge. He liked MacGowan, and if he possibly could, he was determined to save him.
It was as he reached the end of the street and glanced back towards the grocer’s house that the memory of another person he had tried to help, long ago, came into his mind. It was a very long time since he had arranged for young Garret Smith to be an apprentice there; almost twenty years since the young man had suddenly disappeared out of Dublin. God knows what had become of him now.
The evening sky was pink. The carriages had poured out their passengers by the precincts of Christ Church, and the fashionable world of Dublin was flowing, like a glittering stream, down to the handsome structure of the Music Hall, which now stood squarely on one side of the old medieval thoroughfare of Fishshamble Street. As they reached its wide doors, it might have been noticed that the ladies had omitted to put in the hoops that would normally have caused their skirts to balloon out like so many beribboned battleships, and the gentlemen had put off the jewelled swords which were the mark of their order. These reductions had been made at the special request of the stewards of the Musical Society, since the audience was so large that they could never have been packed in otherwise.
Inside, it was a brilliant scene. The Music Hall seemed to be lit by ten thousand candles. At one end, upon a dais, sat the combined choirs of Christ Church and Saint Patrick’s Cathedrals—the most powerful chorus to be found in Dublin. As the nobility and gentry came in to find their allotted places, members of every great family could be seen: Fitzgeralds and Butlers, Boyles and Ponsonbys, bishops, deans, judges, gentry, and even the greatest merchants. Seven hundred people had been issued tickets—even more than had filled the hall for the triumphant rehearsal five days before.
They were all inside when the party of the Lord Lieutenant made its entrance, coming last, as befitted the royal representative. And upon seeing the stately duke, the whole place burst into applause— not only out of respect for his office and person, but because it was he and his magnificent patronage that had brought the renowned composer to Dublin in the first place, as a result of which it was the beau monde of Dublin, rather than of London, who were now to hear the first performance of what was already being hailed as the composer’s greatest work.
They had come to hear Handel present his new oratorio: The Messiah.
So magnificent and so joyous was the scene that it would have been a churlish spirit indeed who could not forget, at least for the evening, that there was anybody starving in Ireland. But as Fortunatus awaited this encounter with the sublime, his face was anxious. He had paid a good deal of money for his seats. His wife was beside him; so was his son George. And so was a gentleman he knew slightly named Grey. But the next five seats in the row remained empty. People were still moving about, taking their places. He dared not look round.
The trap was set. But where the devil was the quarry?
Terence had started it all, one evening three months ago, when he had looked up at Fortunatus as they were sitting with a bottle of claret between them in the parlour and remarked:
“I heard of something that might interest you the other day. Do you know Doctor Grogan?”
“Slightly.”
“Well, he has not as many patients as I, but he does well, and he’s not a bad fellow. And he was telling me that he visits a family named Law.”
“Henry Law?”
“The same. You know him?”
“He’s a linen merchant from Belfast. That’s all I know about him.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. He lives quietly and attends to his business. But there is more than that. Grogan has overheard things when in the house, and he has made enquiries. He’s a most enquiring man, Grogan.” He paused for effect. “Henry Law is one of the richest men in Dublin.”
“The devil he is. And?”
“He has daughters. No son.”
“I see. Heiresses.”
“Better. There are three: Anna, Lydia, and Georgiana. But Lydia is sickly, and Grogan gives me his assurance that she won’t last more than a year or two. So the entire fortune will be split equally between her sisters.”
“You are thinking of George?”
“I am.”
“He is still only twenty.”
“Georgiana is sixteen. By the time she is eighteen . . .”
“And we should get in before the competition, you mean.” Fortunatus considered the matter. His son George was a handsome and intelligent boy. He seemed to be easygoing. People liked him. But Fortunatus was a good enough judge of character to see where his son’s interests lay. His other son, William, would be perfectly happy running the family estate in Fingal. When he’d brought William into the splendid new Parliament building that now looked down upon College Green, William was well-mannered enough, but Fortunatus could tell that he was bored. Not so George. His broad-set eyes took in everything. He didn’t just listen to the speeches; it was clear to his father that he was carefully studying each speaker’s style. “I should like to come here,” he told his father after his first visit. And he would ask searching questions about the leading politicians, and their families, and who held power over whom. “I can give you a start, George,” Fortunatus had told him frankly, “but if you want to make a figure in the world, then you must find a rich wife.”
“What religion are the Laws?” Fortunatus now enquired.
“The family was Presbyterian. But after he came to Dublin, Henry Law joined the Church of Ireland.”
“I should not like,” he said slowly, “to be seen to be fortune-hunting.”
“You must not. It would destroy your c
hances.”
“You have a plan in mind?”
“Perhaps. But first, there are things that you should know.”
Barbara Doyle had been delighted to oblige. Apart from the fact that her hair was grey now, it was remarkable how little she had changed. And Fortunatus had been in high favour with Cousin Barbara for many years now, ever since the affair of Wood’s copper coins.
It hadn’t been his speeches in Parliament; those had been excellent but useless, since the English government had refused, on this matter, to take any notice of Dublin’s opinion. But then Swift’s printed attacks had begun.
The Drapier’s Letters had come out over a period of months. They were anonymous, but everyone knew that Dean Swift was the author. Who else could have written such magnificent, excoriating prose, so laced with irony? By the time Swift had done, the government of England had been made to look contemptible, and being no less vain than any other political men, Swift’s ridicule proved more than they could bear. The coins were withdrawn. The Irish were triumphant. Having told Cousin Barbara that the whole business had been his idea, hatched with Swift up in County Cavan, Walsh had experienced a moment of near panic when, chancing to meet Barbara outside the Parliament building, he had seen Dean Swift emerge from Trinity College and come straight towards them. Mrs. Doyle hadn’t hesitated to accost him.
“I hear that it was my cousin Fortunatus who put you up to those Drapier’s Letters,” she challenged him.
“Indeed?” The Dean looked at her, and then stared at Fortunatus. He’s remembering young Smith’s impertinence at Quilca, thought Walsh with a sinking heart, and he’ll deny me. He imagined his rent doubling. But whether it was the sight of his anxious face, or just his own good nature, the author of Gulliver’s Travels decided to be merciful. “I wrote them only after his persuasion,” he confirmed—which, strictly speaking, was not even a lie. It was good enough for Cousin Barbara, anyway. She’d beamed at Fortunatus, and never given him any trouble since.