Dark Rosaleen

I am indebted to my lifetime friend Robin O'Connor for his patient labouring through the first proofs. To Billy Patterson, a meticulous and humorous second filter; to John Conway of University College Cork and Senan Seclan and his eye for the smallest error; to Dr Paul Rouse of University College Dublin for checking the historical accuracy; and to Ronan Colgan who had the good sense to commission
Dark Rosaleen
.

I was inspired by two of Ireland's greatest writers of the famine, Liam Flaherty and Walter Macken. I am indebted to the historians, among them Cecil Woodham-Smith, Christine Kinealy, Tim Pat Coogan and Treveylan's biographers Jennifer Hart and Robin Haines. First-person accounts written at the time include Gerald Keegan's
Famine Diary
, Asenath Nicholson's
Annals of the Famine in Ireland
, Robert Whyte's
Famine Ship Diary
and the writings of the Quaker James Hake Tuke.

This novel tells the story of the Irish potato famine of 1845, ‘the Great Hunger', out of which came the militant rebels who fought to free Ireland from English rule and the man who gave rise to the Fenians. Nothing in these pages, not the people, nor the life they lived, is wholly fictional. Almost all of what I have written happened in real life.

In order to turn history into a novel, an author is obliged to dramatise, to put words into mouths that might never have been spoken, to lay blame that perhaps was not wholly deserved. But little here is exaggerated. There is no need. The truth is appalling enough. If you find descriptions of people, events and their outcome hard to believe, then go to the history books and be convinced.

Sebec Lake

Maine

12 August 1934

It is recorded in the register of the coroner's office in the County of Limerick that my mother drowned escaping the English in 1848. She was a fine English lady and, at that time, would have been twenty-four years of age. It is also written that the authorities waited a month or more for the sea to return her body but it did not.

I am an old man and her only child and before I die I wish to correct those records in Ireland. For unless I do, the lie will forever remain the truth.

The English did not kill my mother, nor did the sea swallow her up. She is buried on the coast of Maine in a grave I helped dig myself.

Even now, I can hear her story in a voice as clear and as close as when she first told it, speaking in her fine language of a land of savagery and sadness, of a people who suffered for their patience and died from their hunger.

And I cried as a child, although I could not know why. I knew nothing then of hunger, or suffering or dying. Nor even anger.

The coals were white hot. The face of the child was ringed by flames. Soon it would be engulfed by fire, soon it would die, soon it would be ash. She could do nothing but sit and watch. It was a small gaunt face, cursed by innocence, its eyes full of melancholy. Its image scorched her.

The tip of the flames touched his face but his eyes stared resolutely back. She looked for a name and a place but she dared not reach out, the heat too fierce. It troubled her, she who cared nothing for distant calamities that befell others. Why now was she suffocating? Why now this something she had never felt before, this guilt? What was one death among so many?

Until this moment she had been consumed by her own self-pity, wretched at her father's selfish ultimatum, furious at his imposition dressed up as duty. Did she care that Irish peasants were hungry because they had lost their potatoes? Why should she waste a moment's thought on brutes too lazy to feed their litters, too drunk to dig for their own food? How dare they disrupt her life so suddenly and so completely, forcing her headlong into a hostile land she despised, that filthy country of saints and savages they called Ireland?

He had told her so casually. The government, he said, was to provide aid to the Irish and he had been given the authority as Relief Commissioner to oversee its distribution. Soon he must leave for Ireland, and she was obliged to go with him.

The flames licked at her fingers. The heat scorched the skin of her forehead but still she could not move away. Sweat soaked the hair around her temples, the salt from her tears stung her cheeks and stung again as they eased into her cracked lips. Yet she remained close, compelled to share something in those final moments.

She waited for the flames to cremate the last of the image and in that waiting, as a hot poultice slowly draws out pain, so the fire gradually evaporated her anger. She was subdued. She felt only sadness, grief and something more, something she had never before known in all her young and very privileged life. She felt uncertain and afraid.

Kate Macaulay's life that day changed as abruptly as the weather. The warm, bright early October morning sun had surrendered to a grey afternoon and by the time it was dark, the barometer had dipped further. The wind, stirred from the east and blowing unhindered from the Urals, swept across the North Sea to the Anglian Fens and froze all of Lincolnshire. It shook the house, piled snow against its walls and windows and forced smoke back down the chimneys, blackening the mantelpieces and spreading soot across the rugs.

She had become more furious by the hour. She had argued with her father at breakfast, at lunch and again at dinner. She had refused to eat and, in an attempt to offend him more, had barely touched her supper. Now she was hungry and defeated. She had tried every trick she knew but the cajolery that had won him over so often in the past had failed her. He was deaf to it and instead, addressing her as if he was speaking to one of his junior staff, reminded her of her duty, his duty and the duty of the government, so that it seemed to her that all of England was a slave to duty and that all pleasures and recreation, most especially her own, were to be entirely forfeited in the Queen's service.

To quieten and comfort her, he promised that they would not be away from England long and that he expected his work would be over before next year's summer ended. Then they would return to Lincolnshire or to their house in London, whatever suited her. He would retire from government service and they would travel north together to cousins at their Northumberland estate and perhaps go further still into the Highlands for the shooting. To dry her tears he told her that Irish society was almost as interesting as English society, with country estates as vast and as sumptuous as any she had known. She could have her own mare and she would not want for company. There were many of her own sort there.

Kate was accustomed to being soothed by promises. She had never had to wait long for something she wanted but he was offering nothing she did not already have. She would not be bargained with. She would not be pacified, refusing to believe his promises even though she had never known him break one. Her friends were here in Lincolnshire and London and she was in no mood to seek out new ones for her father's or even Queen Victoria's convenience.

She had fought him all day but she had not won a single concession, not even the compromise of a further few months' stay so that she might enjoy her Christmas and New Year in England. He cared nothing that she would miss the Belvoir Hunt weekend with Colonel Arden-Walker, who had been so generous and so attentive since the last. She would have to send her apologies to the Earl of March for not attending his Goodwood Ball and to Lord Abercrombie, whose night of fancy dress and charades at London's Ritz so glamorously and entertainingly welcomed in the New Year.

Her year's social calendar had been painstakingly planned. There was never a weekend when she was not the centre of somebody's attention, never an evening in the London season that was not filled by one or other of her many adoring young suitors. Now, without warning or apology, it was all to be cancelled. She was being forced to leave behind people who were both dear and necessary to her simply because of something despicable far away. The prospect appalled her and all day she cried tears that for once she had no way of stopping.

In one final attempt that evening she had screamed at her father deliberately in front of the servants, demanding her independence, threatening to leave the house and never return. She was twenty-two years old and she would not let him re-arrange her life. She was not a minor, obliged to do his bidding. She could leave him as she pleased, go wherever she wanted with whoever she chose, even marry if that was her whim. The law was the law and that was what the law allowed. The servants took refuge in the kitchen. They had cosseted her since she was a child and knew well enough her moods and contrariness. But they had never seen her in such a state before and they were all agreed that when her father left for Ireland, he would have no choice but to leave her behind to do as she pleased. They were wrong.

Sir William Macaulay was a long and faithful servant of the Crown. He had served with distinction as Commissariat General of the British Army, had seen action in the Peninsular Campaign, had been with Wellington at Waterloo and had been knighted for devotion to duty during the Canadian Rebellion. As the man in charge of army supplies he was a devoted cheesepare, ready to save a penny wherever a penny could be saved. It made him ideally suited to oversee the distribution of aid to the starving Irish.

He was about to embark on the last great challenge of his career and was concerned with more urgent matters than his young daughter's hysterical obstinacy. He was a gentle and patient man and loved her more intensely than he had ever had the courage to show. Her tears and tantrums had been painful and made him relive a part of his life that still haunted him, memories that he had for so long been trying to erase, memories of the wife he loved, of the day she had given birth to Kate and that final, fateful day when she had left them both. Even now, all these years on, he could not remember that time without his fists tightening, the muscles of his jaw hardening and a pain in his chest so severe it left him breathless. And he cursed the God that made her go.

That day, he had returned from London after an interview in Whitehall with the austere, pious and powerful Sir Charles Trevelyan, Secretary to the Treasury. Despite a title that suggested he was of a lesser order, he controlled all government expenditure. He was a young and handsome man of rigid integrity, a devout evangelical, impatient, blunt, arrogant, uncompromising. He considered himself to be always on the right side of a question and many of those who dared cross him found their careers blighted soon afterwards. As guardian of the nation's coffers, his guiding principle was balancing humanity with practical economics. It was he who would steer the course of Ireland now.