Both Cousin Barbara and his brother arrived at the house in St. Stephen’s Green the next morning, anxious to know how the evening had gone.
“It was magnificent. You really should go to listen to Handel, you know,” he remarked to Barbara.
“A hymn I can sing in church is enough music for me,” she stoutly declared. “Now, none of your nonsense. What about Law?”
“We shall see. But I think,” Fortunatus said honestly, “that he’s hooked. By the by, those girls are exceedingly handsome. The red one I especially admired. That’s Georgiana.”
“And George, which does he prefer?” enquired Terence.
“I haven’t asked. But in the circumstances,” said Fortunatus with perfect reasonableness, “I trust he will like the one who likes him.”
“I like the sound of George and Georgiana,” said Barbara Doyle cheerfully.
“It has symmetry,” Fortunatus agreed. “But whether anything comes of this or not,” he added, “you are both of you to be thanked.” He smiled at his brother. “I shall not forget, my dear brother, that you have repaid any kindness received by so greatly helping me.”
Then they spent a happy twenty minutes going over the whole business, episode by episode, and congratulating each other on their cleverness all over again.
It was only after this that Terence Walsh remarked:
“I’ll tell you who needs help at present far more than any of us, and that is my poor patient MacGowan the grocer. And he told them the whole sad story.
“What will you do?” asked Fortunatus.
“I intend to go, this very day, to visit some Catholic merchants of my acquaintance. I hope that perhaps we can put a small company of merchants together who could save him and his business, which, as I say, could still be very profitable.”
“You should do so,” said Cousin Barbara firmly. “The Catholic merchants quite often stick together.”
“I hope so most sincerely,” answered Terence.
Soon after this, Barbara Doyle had to leave, but Terence remained with Fortunatus a little longer.
“Do you know who else came into my mind as I was leaving MacGowan?” Terence said to his brother after a pause.
“Tell me.”
“Our kinsman, Garret Smith. I wonder where he is, and how he does.”
“By all accounts, when he left Dublin without even completing his apprenticeship, he went up into Wicklow. I consider that he treated you very badly.”
“He was young.”
“He has never made any attempt to see you again, either to apologise or explain.”
“Perhaps he is embarrassed.”
“Put him out of your mind, Terence. Nothing good will ever come of it. You have better things to do.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Terence got up. “I’ve MacGowan to think about today.”
The grocer was worth saving, Fortunatus thought. Garret Smith, probably not.
It would have surprised both men very much if they could have seen their Cousin Barbara at that moment. After leaving the house, she had directed her coachman to drive northwards. After passing Trinity College and the splendid new Parliament building that, with its huge classical façade, almost seemed to suggest that London was commanded from the Irish Parliament, and not the other way round, the coach swung over the bridge across the Liffey and proceeded towards Cow Lane.
Barbara Doyle supported the Protestant Ascendancy and had few dealings with Catholic merchants, but the chance of a profit was always uppermost in her mind. And it’ll be at least a day or two, she judged, before Terence can organise a collection of Catholic merchants to do anything. She always believed in getting in first.
So, a few minutes later, the discouraged grocer was much astonished to find himself accosted by this unlikely and rather frightening saviour.
“Tell me it all,” she ordered, “and we’ll see what we can do.”
She listened carefully as he gave her all the details of his transactions, then announced: “I shall be your partner, and want a third of the profits from now on, but we’ll pay off all your creditors. In six months, the debts will be cancelled. Take it or leave it.”
“I’d take it,” he answered nervously, “but . . .”
“But what?”
“The debt is large. I don’t see how we’ll pay it off.”
Then Barbara Doyle smiled.
“I shall talk to your creditors. We’ll come to an agreement. Who says,” she asked quietly, “that we shall repay it all?”
1744
In the autumn of 1744, George Walsh and Georgiana Law were married—an event that seemed as natural and inevitable as the long peace that Ireland had now enjoyed for nearly a lifetime. Yet a certain anxiety hung over the proceedings, as if a wicked witch had been spotted in the distance, making her way towards the wedding feast.
“The French are coming.” That was the rumour.
Of course, rumours of invasion were hardly new. In the never-ending rivalries between the European powers, Britain was now in league with France’s enemies, and naturally, therefore, the French would be tempted to invade Ireland to annoy the English. Such was the way of the world in the eighteenth century. But now another rumour was growing. The heir to the lost Stuart crown, a vain young man whom the Scots liked to call Bonnie Prince Charlie—and whom the French had been protecting for years—was planning to come to Scotland to claim his birthright. A Jacobite rising in Scotland and a French invasion of Ireland: it was exactly the combination the London government dreaded.
For once, even the unflappable Duke of Devonshire was rattled. Orders flew. The troops in the Irish garrisons were to be readied. Any suspicious characters were to be reported. Any suspect priests were to be rounded up. And all Ireland waited. Would the threatening clouds on the horizon disperse, as they had always done in the decades before? Or would they gather together into a single dark mass and come racing across the sea towards the Irish shore?
O’Toole rested his back against the wall and felt the sun on his face. There were a dozen children sitting on the grass in front of him. He handed over the book—Caesar’s Wars, in Latin—to one of the boys.
“Construe.”
The boy began. He wasn’t bad. But after a minute or two, he floundered. O’Toole winced.
“No. Anybody?” Another boy offered. “Worse.” Silence. “Conall.” Reluctantly, the boy answered. “Very good.”
The dark, tousle-haired boy with the wide-set green eyes never offered unless he was asked. O’Toole didn’t blame him. While the others were all on the grass, Conall Smith had perched himself on a small, flat outcrop of grey stone. Any attempt by one of the others, whatever their size, to dislodge him from that spot and they would have been sent sprawling, because nowadays young Conall was unusually strong. But it embarrassed him that he always had the answer to the master’s questions when his friends did not, and sometimes he would pretend he couldn’t answer, and O’Toole would stare at him, knowing very well that he knew, and finally shrug his shoulders and move on.
O’Toole loved the boy almost as much as he loved his own granddaughter. That was what made today’s lesson so difficult.
The hedge school. Sometimes it was, indeed, a master and a few children huddled behind a hedge, or in a hidden clearing in the trees, or in a peasant’s cottage—or, in this case, behind a stone wall with a delightful view down from the Wicklow Mountains towards the Irish sea. The hedge school was illegal, of course, because giving an education to Catholic children was illegal. But they were all over the country, hundreds of them.
It was soon after his visit to Quilca, almost twenty years ago, that O’Toole had become the hedge schoolmaster at Rathconan. He was considered a good master, but not one of the very best. For although his knowledge of the classical languages, of English, and of history and geography was excellent, his knowledge of philosophy was only moderate, and his mathematics no more than adequate. And it was mathematics, above all, that the native Irish prized: arithmetic for ke
eping accounts; geometry for surveying and even astronomy. The best hedge schoolmaster mathematicians would proudly write “Philomath” after their names. One old man he’d met, named O’Brien, had a reputation for mathematics that spread even to Italy, and he was known all over Ireland as The Great O’Brien. Such was the illegal education system for Catholics all over Ireland.
If O’Toole was only a moderate mathematician, he had other strengths. His poetry and music had brought him a reputation, if not quite on a level with blind Carolan, as an important figure all the same. When his pupils translated from Latin, they had to give their version first in Irish, then in English. He even taught them a good deal of English law, since it would be useful to them. Already, he had produced three pupils who were making their way successfully in the merchant communities of Dublin and Wicklow, and another who had gone to France to study for the priesthood—not a bad record, he considered, for a little village up in the mountains.
Not that all his pupils did so well. With the Brennans, for instance, he found he could do practically nothing. But he must try. He sighed.
“Conall. Go and stand on watch.”
As long as the little school kept out of sight, Budge generally left it alone. But as the local landlord and magistrate, he would sometimes ride out and see if he could spot their proceedings—of which he strongly disapproved—and if he caught sight of them, there would certainly be trouble. Like most hedge schools, therefore, when O’Toole taught, he usually posted a watch.
“Now then, Patrick,” he said, as kindly as he could, to the eldest of the Brennan boys, “let me hear you read.”
As the boy stumbled his way through a simple passage—O’Toole had sent Conall off to watch so that he would not have to listen to this painful process—the master could only marvel: how was it possible that young Conall Smith, the child with a mind as fine as, perhaps finer than, his own, could be half a Brennan?
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 hou
se 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.”