The Rebels of Ireland (38 page)

The worthy doctor listened avidly to his account of the evening.

“And you saw O'Byrne ride off alone?”

“He'd been talking to Maurice Smith for a long time.”

“Never mind the Smith boy,” cried Pincher excitedly. “He's nothing. Do you not see? O'Byrne's the key. He's connected to Sir Phelim O'Neill, the greatest traitor of them all. And he went straight to the house of Orlando Walsh?”

“There isn't a doubt of it.”

“Then I have him,” shouted Pincher with a glee he did not trouble to conceal. “I can destroy Orlando Walsh.”

All through that December, Orlando Walsh stayed on his estate with his little family, as quiet as a mouse.

There was no question, the winters were colder, now, than they had been when he was a boy; and this year turned out to be the coldest anyone could remember.

As midwinter approached, a howling blizzard swept down from the north. For a day and a night, the snow fell on Fingal until there was more than two feet of it. After that, the storm moved on and the landscape froze.

Some days, the sky was blue and the landscape sparkled. But if the sun melted the surface, the frost turned every drop of water back
to ice. Soon there were icicles, tall as a man, hanging from the eaves of the big barn. By Christmas, Orlando heard that down at Dublin, the River Liffey had ice upon it.

Around the Walsh estate, the countryside was quiet. To the north, there were still stories of Protestant farms being raided. To the south, the Protestants in Dublin Castle sent out parties to burn the property of local Catholics they suspected. “They want to provoke them to rebel,” Orlando explained to Mary, “to prove that Catholics are all traitors.” Meanwhile, the powerful Lord Ormond, the only man of real stature in the government's camp, was reportedly drawing together a military force which he had promised to bring to Dublin.

The morning after Christmas, the gentleman from Swords came by again.

“We're arming our men, Walsh,” he told Orlando. “There's bound to be a fight. Are you joining us?”

“I am not,” Orlando told him.

“Afraid?” The man sneered. “We've already smashed them once.”

“I've no wish to fight Ormond,” Walsh answered simply.

For a start, the great magnate had probably assembled a fighting force to be reckoned with. But as he also pointed out: “Ormond's our best hope.” The mighty head of the Butler dynasty might have sworn to uphold the king's Protestant church, but he was a moderate man with dozens of Catholic relations himself. “We should be talking to him, not fighting him,” Orlando said.

“Everyone else is with us,” the Swords man declared. This was quite untrue. Orlando knew very well that a number of Catholic landowners, including his neighbour Talbot of Malahide, were holding back. Others were allowing younger sons or brothers to go while they themselves stayed cautiously at home. So Walsh made him no further answer and let the man depart.

A few hours later, a dozen fellows arrived at the house. They were
labourers, but not from the locality. Orlando didn't like the look of them but was careful to be polite. The man who was their leader said he was a friar of the Franciscan order. Orlando wasn't sure he believed him, but thought it best not to argue. Having established that this was a devout Catholic house, they were civil enough. When Orlando asked their business, the friar told him they were scouting accommodation and fodder for when O'Neill's army came that way. This was almost certainly a lie. Nonetheless, Orlando brought them inside and fed them, and secretly prayed that they would not wish to stay. Mercifully, they decided to move on. The friar said they were heading north for the territory above Swords. As they departed, he heard one of the men remark: “When we find some Protestants, we'll stretch their necks.”

After this visit, all was quiet.

Maurice Smith gazed down at the scene from the bridge. The Liffey was a remarkable sight. Big sheets of ice covered most of the stream. The sun had made the surface gleam. Children were sliding on the edges, and an enterprising fellow had organised horse-drawn sled rides upstream along the bank.

The first of January. Amongst the Protestants, at least, there was a festive mood. The day before, Ormond and his well-drilled men had marched out across the bridge onto the icy plain of Fingal. Reaching Swords, they had found the untrained brigade gathered by the local Catholic gentry and easily crushed them in a short skirmish. By that evening, Tidy was ringing the great bell of Christ Church to announce the victory, and Doctor Pincher was out in the streets proclaiming that the Protestants in Dublin could take heart at this proof that God was on their side.

Maurice had been standing there for some time when he noticed the little cortege enter the bridge from the northern end. Five riders, heavily muffled against the cold. As they came closer, he saw that their covered heads were encrusted with ice, suggesting that
they had made a long journey across the snows. He wondered who they were. On reaching the bridge, they had slowed their horses to a walk. As they brushed by, he observed that the rider in the centre was a woman. Her face was half covered, but it looked familiar. She caught sight of him and seemed to give a start, but they were already past when he realised that it was Elena.

Her grandfather was not one of the party. He was sure of it. So he called out: “Elena.”

If she had ridden on, he would have understood that she needed to be discreet. But instead, after a momentary pause, she pulled up, and the men accompanying her did the same. He ran over and came level with her. He was excited.

As she turned to look down at him, she unwrapped the black scarf that had covered the lower part of her face. Though flushed from the cold, her face looked strangely pallid and drawn, as though she had suddenly grown older. She gazed down at him, stonily, saying nothing.

“So your grandfather has changed his mind,” he said, and smiled. She continued to smile at him. “I mean, you are in Dublin.” He stopped, fell silent. At last she spoke.

“My grandfather is dead.” Her voice was cold, as if he were a stranger.

“Dead?”

“Yes. Dead. A party of your friends came,” she said bitterly. “They were led by a priest.”

“A priest?”

“Priest, friar.” She shrugged contemptuously. “What does it matter? One of your unholy orders. They came to steal. They started looting. They even took my mother's locket. Tore it from my neck. My grandfather protested and they killed him. In front of me. I was lucky they did not kill me, too. Or worse.”

“But this is terrible.” He felt the blood draining from his face as he remembered the advice he had given her, assuring her she was safe.

“Yes. It is terrible.” He heard the pain in her voice; but in her
eyes he saw only rage and contempt. He gazed at her helplessly. She seemed to be another person. The sensuous girl he knew had gone. There was not a trace of her. In her place was a young woman who was looking at him with loathing. “It is true, what they say,” she went on with a cold fury. “You Catholics are not just ungodly. You are animals. Cut open a papist and you will find the devil.”

She let the words fall. They lay there between them, worse than a curse. For a moment, he was too shocked to reply.

“Elena,” he pleaded. “I am as shocked as you by what has happened…”

She did not let him continue.

“I do not wish to hear what you feel. Do not come near me again, you dirty papist.” She kicked her horse into a trot, but as she left him behind, she cried out the word a final time: “Papist.”

When the grey-bearded merchant arrived at the house late in January and asked to speak with Orlando Walsh, he was politely shown into the hall. And until he was within two feet of him, Orlando himself did not realise who it was.

“I have come to say farewell,” explained Lawrence.

The situation for the Jesuit had been getting worse by the day. The political situation was in a state of great confusion. In England, King Charles and his Parliament had reached a point of complete rupture. The king had left London; Parliament was effectively ruling the capital. Across the water in Ireland, Lord Ormond continued to keep military order for the government in the region around Dublin—but whether the government now meant king, Parliament, or both, nobody was sure. In Dublin itself, the Protestant authorities were behaving as if the city were under siege. The gates were guarded. No strangers were allowed in without permission. “Even you couldn't get in now, Brother,” Lawrence told him, “because you're a Catholic.” As for his own position, he explained, Pincher had been agitating constantly at the castle. “Any day, he'll
have me arrested. I grew my beard for ten days and slipped out in disguise.”

“We can hide you,” Orlando offered at once, but Lawrence shook his head.

“No, Brother. You and your family shall not be put in danger on my account. In any case, I have a boat waiting for me at Clontarf. I'm going abroad.”

“You're leaving forever?”

“Not exactly.” He paused. “Sir Phelim is a good man, Orlando. But he is not the military commander that we need now, and he'd be the first to say it. There is, however, another O'Neill who has just the qualifications, if he will come.”

“You mean Owen Roe O'Neill?”

“I do.”

Of all the princes of Ireland who had risen to high command in the great Catholic armies of the continent, none was more famous than this scion of the house of the old High Kings. The nephew of the Earl of Tyrone himself, rumour said that he had been privy to the plans to take Dublin Castle the previous autumn. But a man living the princely life of a great European general still needed some inducement before he would leave all that to risk life and fortune in a rebellion, even in the sacred land of his fathers. If he did decide to come, however, neither his kinsman Sir Phelim, nor anyone else in the Catholic cause, would hesitate in yielding him command.