The Rebels of Ireland

  Her father returned early that afternoon. Callan came by about an hour later.

  The news he brought was very simple.

  “I’ve had an offer for this land. A higher rent. I came to see if you cared to match it.”

  “Higher? How much higher?”

  “Nearly double what you’re paying now. Mind you, I should have raised your rent before, but . . .”

  “Double?” Eamonn was dumbfounded. “Impossible. How could anyone afford it?”

  “It’s the farmer who has the rest of the land here. He won’t be living on it, you see. He’ll pull down the cottage and turn all the land over to cereals. He’ll make a small profit, or he wouldn’t have made the offer.”

  “But this is our land. The Maddens have always lived here.”

  “Make me an offer.” Callan seemed very calm. “But you’ll have to come close.” Was this a long-delayed revenge for the Clare election? Possibly. But more likely it was just business.

  “Property has rights, Mr. Callan,” said Eamonn. He indicated his family. “But it also has responsibilities.”

  “Drummond’s dead.”

  “I’ll be needing a little time to think.”

  “You can have a week,” said Callan calmly, and rode away.

  For three days, they went over it from every angle, she and her father. Could they find another tenancy? There were none, for they soon discovered the rent Callan was being offered was being asked by other landlords elsewhere. What if she went out to work, if work could be found? Or what if she ran the holding, and he went to England and sent money home? This she was much against. “The children need their father,” she told him. Nothing seemed to make sense. But Eamonn could not bring himself to accept it. The thought of losing his land was more than he could bear. On the fourth day, she took matters into her own hands and took their little cart down into Ennis.

  They were going to be very happy there. That was what she told the children. And indeed, she had done well.

  The long, three-room cottage was one of the better of some six hundred such dwellings in and around Ennis, and by the time the children came there, she had it spotlessly clean. The mud walls were thick and dry, the thatch was good. And she had persuaded the landlord to accept a rent for the cottage of only forty shillings a year. With the livestock all sold for good prices, Eamonn’s debt was paid off and there was even some cash on hand. The cash came in handy, also, because when they wanted to rent some conacre ground— mock ground, they called it locally—to raise a potato crop to feed themselves, they found they had to pay cash in advance.

  “I never heard of paying in advance before,” Eamonn had grumbled; but that was what the agent could get that year.

  And now all he had to do was to find work.

  In the months that followed, they all came to know the town of Ennis well. The children quite enjoyed being there. The town might be dirty and unkempt, but it was always busy. The little square by the central courthouse was usually full of stalls or hucksters selling all kinds of things. And although nobody ever seemed to want to tidy the place up, improvements were nonetheless visible. A number of public buildings had been added in the last decade. Some of these were rather cheerless, like the new fever hospital. More forbidding, just north of the town, was the dour workhouse for the indigent, which you might have mistaken for a military barracks or a jail. But a rather smart new stone bridge, to celebrate the accession of young Queen Victoria, had improved the route out of the town on one side; and the year they arrived in the town, the whole community, Catholic and Protestant alike, had come to watch the dedication of what, one day, would be a handsome Catholic cathedral to serve the whole area, on a broad site near the newspaper offices.

  Other parts of the town were to be avoided. Just across the street began the warren of alleys that led down to the River Fergus. She had to be very firm with Mary and Caitlin that they must not go down there, for although she had never heard of children coming to any harm, the town’s motley collection of prostitutes hung about in the doorways, and there were beggars who, if drunk or angry, had been known to threaten people with shillelaghs. And, of course, there were the meanest of the cabins along the road where they lived themselves, and where the children were in rags. “You must leave them alone,” she told the children. What else could she say? There were plenty of streets, dingy but respectable, where they could wander. Or there were the open fields outside the town where they could play.

  And it was important that they were known to be respectable. There were about forty families with houses in the surrounding countryside who might be considered local gentry. Most were Protestant, of course, though a few were Catholic. Close to them were the more important merchants with solid houses in the town, the handful of professional men and some others, like Mr. Knox, the owner of the Clare Journal, who were entitled to consideration. When she and her father accompanied Nuala to some of these houses when she went to find work as a servant, she was glad to overhear one of the gentlemen tell his wife: “The Maddens? Respectable farming family. Take her on by all means.” Nuala found work with a merchant in a very decent house near the offices of the Clare Journal, so that she was not even a mile away from her family.

  The same reputation helped her father. Some days he would go out to labour on one of the farms of the local gentry. Or he would walk the few miles south, to the little river port where grain was shipped down to the Shannon estuary. They still had some savings, which she guarded carefully. Sometimes, if a week or two went by without Eamonn working, they had to dip into this little hoard. At other times, they were able to replenish it.

  And so the new pattern of their lives became established. She kept house, took little Daniel for walks and played with him. She made Mary and Caitlin do lessons with her so that they could at least read and write. Once a week, Nuala came home and shared her wages with them. She was turning into a pretty young woman, with a slim body and fine blue eyes. It was obvious that her father was proud of her. She had a lively sense of humour, too, and made them laugh with stories she had heard about the goings-on in the town. Once, when she had secretly saved up her wages for a few weeks, she took the whole family to see a magician who came and performed at the courthouse, which also did service as the town theatre and concert hall. Mary and Caitlin were thrilled. Maureen would have liked to hear from Norah in England and William in America. She wrote to Norah at the only address she had, but received no reply. No letter had ever come from William. “He’ll write when he has good news to tell,” her father assured her. If the younger children ever asked, she assured them: “They’re both doing well.”

  The next spring and summer brought more damp weather. People who had not stored their potatoes carefully enough found that some of them had rotted in the damp. There was also a rash of evictions in the county, as agents like Callan looked for more profitable tenants. Many people complained they couldn’t get any mock ground to grow potatoes. One landowner, an absentee named Wyndham, donated a hundred and fifty acres to the community for free plots. “Mind you,” her father remarked, “he owns thirty-seven thousand acres in Clare, while he lives comfortably in England, so he can afford it. On the other hand,” he added, “it must be said that he has helped. Not one of our local gentry has done anything at all.”

  That autumn, one unpleasant incident occurred. Mr. Callan came by. He didn’t trouble to get down from his horse, but spoke to Eamonn in front of the cottage. Maureen was at his side.

  “Would you have been visiting your old place?” the agent enquired. And when Eamonn said that he hadn’t: “Can you prove it?” The farmer who had pulled down their old house and taken over all the Madden fields had received a visitation. Hands unknown had set fire to a clamp of turf and laid out a grave in the middle of his land, as a warning. Such gestures were not unusual in cases of dispossession, though they seldom resulted in anything. “So I thought of you,” Callan said.

  “You can think again,” replied Eamonn evenly. “
But tell me this: are there other people whose land he has now taken over?”

  “Yes. Several. He’s a good farmer,” the agent added cruelly.

  “You had better think of them, too. I have not been near the place.” He did not add that he preferred not to go up that way because the memory was too painful to him.

  “I shall. But you’re on my list,” Callan replied.

  “What worries me,” her father confessed to Maureen after the agent had gone, “is that he’ll ruin my reputation.”

  It did not appear that Callan had done so, but such was the steady trickle of similar men into Ennis over the following months, good, able-bodied farmers who could not afford the ever-increasing rents, that it was harder and harder to find work. Most of the time Eamonn managed, but during the following spring and the early summer of 1845, Maureen noticed with some concern that the little stock of money she conserved was gradually dwindling, and seldom, if ever, being replenished.

  But she carried on with a cheerful face. Mary and Caitlin seemed to have formed themselves into a team. They were always up to some mischief. She would pretend to be angry, but secretly rejoice in their high spirits. “You’re two skinny little urchins, and I’m ashamed of you,” she would tell them as they ran off, laughing, to catch a fish in the river or play a prank upon some luckless neighbour. As for little Daniel, he was a sweet-natured fellow, with his father’s blue eyes and a mop of light brown hair. She had carefully found him three or four playmates nearby, and she delighted in taking him with her wherever she went. Most people thought she was his mother.

  The summer passed uneventfully. In August, they lifted the potatoes on their ground and were able to lay in a good store that would see them through until December. The main crop would be harvested in October, and by the start of September, people were talking of a bumper crop. In the middle of the month, the Clare Journal reported a few cases of potato decay. But this might have been camp storage. It was not until the last day of the month that her father returned home, looking concerned. “Some of the farmers coming into Ennis are talking about a blight,” he told Maureen, and he went straight out to their ground to check. “They seem to be all right,” he said when he came back.

  It was mid-October when Caroline Doyle told Stephen that she was going to marry someone else. At first, he couldn’t believe it.

  “Who is he?”

  “A professor. A man of science.”

  “A scientist? This is a great mistake. Scientists are terribly dull.”

  “I don’t find him so.”

  “You’d have done better to marry me.”

  “I don’t think so, Stephen. I’m sorry.”

  He and Caroline had been getting along famously. He had not proposed—it had been too soon for that—but there was an understanding between them. He was sure of it. The trouble, he thought, had been O’Connell.

  Although the Liberator had called off the monster meeting at Clontarf, the Tory government had still not been satisfied. “He’s gone too far,” they said. “This will lead to an insurrection.” And they put him in jail. He had stayed there six months, until the British Law Lords had overturned the conviction. During that time, O’Connell had wanted Stephen to attend to all kinds of affairs in London, and Stephen had seen little of Caroline, therefore. He had continued to court her after his return. But he had not been able to see her as often as he would have liked, for there was always political business of one kind or another to take care of.

  “I might have loved him,” she explained to William Mountwalsh, “and he’d have loved me, I dare say, but only when he had the time.”

  “You think him lacking in affection?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered, “but he thinks chiefly of himself.” She smiled. “It is childlike, sometimes, which is lovable. But . . . not enough.”

  The scientist had been a friend of William’s brother; he was a gentleman of thirty-five, with a particular interest in astronomy. She had met him on a visit to Parsonstown, the estate of a talented family, which had been ennobled with the title of Rosse. Lord Rosse was a notable astronomer himself.

  It was only when he lost her that Stephen realised how much he wanted Caroline. A week after their parting, he wrote a series of poems about her, with more passion than talent. After that, he became rather depressed. It was at the start of December, believing that Stephen needed a change of scene, that the Liberator sent him— upon the pretext that he wanted Stephen to help his cousin edit some political essays—to stay with Charles O’Connell in Ennis.

  Stephen had heard there was some trouble with the potato crop. Charles O’Connell, a smaller, darker version of the great man, and always full of information, explained the situation when he arrived.

  “The west of Ireland is more affected than other parts. Nearly half the crop has been lost in Clare, and Ennis has been hit the worst. But the trouble strikes unevenly. Even here in County Clare, some places have escaped entirely.”

  “Is it a blight?”

  “Probably. Or too much dampness. Some of the potatoes seemed all right when they came out of the ground, and then went rotten afterwards. Here in Ennis, we think we may need some help from Dublin in the spring.” He shrugged. “These things happen in Clare from time to time.”

  A couple of days later, Stephen heard a somewhat different view when the owner of the Clare Journal came to dinner. Mr. Knox was a Protestant Tory and looked like a dour Presbyterian minister. But his family had owned the newspaper for several generations and was well liked in the area.

  “The local gentry are useless, and the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin is a complacent ass,” Knox announced firmly. “Yesterday, I saw six cartloads of grain on their way to the docks. For export. It shouldn’t be allowed. By March at latest, we’ll be needing all the food we can lay hands on.”

  “But what about the farmers?” asked Charles. “They have to sell their grain.”

  “Of course they do. So give them the price they’d get from the merchants at the dock. And do it now. Otherwise, in the spring, you’ll be paying for imported grain, and by then the shortages will be driving all grain prices up even further.”

  “Some people say there won’t be any shortages.”

  “They are fools.”

  “What is the nature of this blight?” asked Stephen.

  “There is a man called Doctor Evens who has written that it is a fungus,” replied Knox. “But truthfully, Mr. Smith, no one knows.”

  However, as Stephen came from Dublin and had political contacts, the newspaper owner seemed anxious to get his views across to him. The day after the dinner, Stephen and his host worked on the essays together. But the day after that, Knox called for Stephen in his pony and trap, and gave him a tour of the area.

  “This shortage is also an opportunity, you know,” he told Stephen, as they drove out of Ennis. “Look at these people.” He gestured to the cottages and cabins by the roadside. “Able-bodied men looking for work. What are they going to do when their small stocks of potato are gone? They’ll have no money to buy food.”

  “What’s to be done?”

  “Employ them. Pay them wages. It’s what they want. Make them productive.”

  “Is there anything for them to do?”

  “My dear Sir. You have been here several days and you ask that? There is everything to do. I shall show you.” You had to admire Mr. Knox’s vigorous mind. “Some of the roadway here, as you can see, has been improved. The new stone bridge we have just crossed is excellent. But we badly need a new road from Ennis to Quin. Let it be built. And there is the River Fergus. At present, all the grain, butter, and livestock sold at Ennis market is taken by barge, at needless extra expense, down to the docks a few miles to the south. The river could perfectly well be made navigable up to Ennis, and new docks be built there, to the great benefit of the town.”

  “You are full of ideas.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Smith. These are all existing proposals of years’ standing. But
they are not acted upon. Did you know that plans are already drawn up for a new courthouse to be built? The old one needs so much repair it would be better to start over again. That’s another useful project waiting only to be done. The new Catholic cathedral—the land was given by a Protestant, you know—needs to be completed. That is not a public work, I grant you, but private subscriptions might be raised. My favourite project, however, lies up this way.” And after they had driven northwards some distance, he stopped the trap at a bend in the road and gestured to the landscape before them. “There, Sir,” he said triumphantly, “what do you think of that?”

  As Stephen gazed northwards, he saw nothing but a desolate marshland and swamp. It seemed to stretch for miles. In the December light, it looked bleak and infinitely sad.

  “That?”

  “The slough of despond, you might think,” said Knox. “Yet under it lies Paradise.”

  “You mean you want to drain it?”

  “Precisely. The land under that marsh, Mr. Smith, is very rich. Almost corcass. A huge resource. You could grow enough grain there to feed the whole of Ennis.” He sighed. “What I see there, Mr. Smith, is an emblem for Ireland itself: a country of wasted resources.”

  “Our land is rich,” agreed Stephen.

  “And our people. The Irishman, Sir, is quick, intelligent, and hardworking. English prejudice has him as slow and lazy, but that is a base calumny. The truth is the opposite. Yet what have we here in Clare? Human resources, as unused as this swamp, and as needlessly miserable.”

  “I assume you’ll use your newspaper, Mr. Knox, to press for these things,” remarked Stephen, as they drove back into Ennis later.

  “I have written to the Dublin authorities in person, as well as promulgating these views in print, Mr. Smith,” Knox replied, “and I shall never give up.”