The Rebels of Ireland (53 page)

Fortunatus remembered the family at that time very well. Maurice's son Thomas had been philosophical, but his grandson Michael—a boy a few years younger than himself—had not taken it well, becoming bitter and withdrawn. The Walshes had done all they could to help. After all, Fortunatus remembered, old Maurice was actually my father's first cousin. But Thomas had died, Michael had been resentful, and the two families had drifted apart. Michael had clung to a heroic picture of his family's role and of the character of King James, and always swore that the Stuart king, or his son, would return and restore the Catholic faith to Ireland.

The Jacobite cause, as this longing for the Stuarts was called, might not have been entirely hopeless. When the unpopular German, George of Hanover, had come to the English throne, there were many who wanted to have the son of King James back instead.
There were even scattered risings. But they soon fizzled out, and nobody rose for the Stuart Pretender in Ireland. Soon after that, Michael Smith had lapsed into disappointment and drink. Two years later, he was penniless and dead.

But he had left a little son. And it was young Garret Smith that Terence had determined to help. He had found lodgings for the boy and his mother—modest certainly, but cleaner than the ones they'd had before—in Saint Michan's parish on the north side of the Liffey. At his special request, the priest there had ensured that the boy received some education. Then, a few years ago, he had made the necessary payments for the boy to be apprenticed to a respectable grocer in the parish. And once a month, without fail, he would bring the young man to dine with his wife and children in the friendly comfort of their family home in the hope that, in due course, when he had set himself up in business and found a sensible wife, young Smith might follow a similar, if more modest, path himself. In short, he had done everything that a kindly member of the Walsh family might be expected to do.

It was hard to say exactly when the trouble had begun. He had not taken the boy's scrapes or his brushes with authority too seriously. “It's just a young man's devilment,” he would say genially. More problematic had been the day when his wife had found Garret teaching their children to be Jacobites.

“I'll not have him bringing trouble of that kind into this house,” she had protested to her husband. And it was only after much pleading, and the promise that young Garret should never be left alone with their children, that Terence had been able to bring him to the house again. “He shall not come here while you are away in France,” she had declared.

During the last year, there had been some complaints from his master the grocer, as well. Terence had encouraged the good grocer to take a firm hand.

“I must confess that I'm concerned,” he told Fortunatus. “I shall be away a month, and there's really no one to keep an eye on him,
or take charge if there should be any trouble. But I feel that I'm taking advantage of your good nature in turning to you.”

“The young man is just as much my kinsman as yours,” his brother pointed out. “I'm probably at fault for having done nothing for him before.” He smiled. “I'm sure I can handle him.” Fortunatus prided himself on his ability to manage people.

“I may tell his master, and the priest, that you will act for me in my absence, then?” Terence said with great relief.

“I shall go to see both those gentlemen myself. Set your mind at rest.” Fortunatus put his hand on his brother's shoulder. “And now,” he continued cheerfully, “we are about to enjoy a dinner with our brother Masons at that excellent tavern in Bride Street. And since I intend to consume at least three bottles of claret, I shall expect you to carry me home.”

The sun was already high the next morning when the servant girl drew back the long curtains. Fortunatus blinked, and wished that he had not. The sunlight hurt his eyes.

“Will you close them again, for the love of God?” he groaned hoarsely. His throat was a desert, his head a cavern of pain. “Too much claret,” he said shakily to the girl.

“We heard Your Honour singing when your brother brought you home last night,” she answered amiably. “You have visitors, Sir,” she continued, “waiting below.”

“I have? Send them away.”

“We can't, Sir. It's Mrs. Doyle.”

She was waiting for him in the front parlour. Like all the houses on St. Stephen's Green, the main rooms were very tall, and like most Irish houses, sparsely furnished. The hanging on one wall, and the dark and clumsy little portrait of his father on another, did little to
add cosiness to what might otherwise have been mistaken for the stately anteroom or a public Roman mausoleum.

She made no comment upon his haggard appearance as he gazed at her with hollowed eyes and wondered why it was, even on the best of days, that his cousin Barbara made him nervous.

It was getting on for two centuries since his ancestor Richard had married the Doyle heiress. How many generations had passed since then? Six or seven, he supposed. But the families had always kept on close terms. “Our Doyle cousins were uncommonly good to me and to your grandfather,” Donatus had always told him. If the Walshes were generous to relations less well-placed than themselves, they prided themselves on remembering favours received as well. And Barbara Doyle was not only the widow of one of these kinsmen, but she had been born a Doyle herself; so she was a kinswoman on two counts. “Cousin Barbara,” the whole family called her. When her husband had suddenly died, leaving her with a young family, they had been there at once to support her, and she recognized the fact. Anyone less in need of support, Fortunatus considered, it would be hard to imagine.

God knows what she was worth. She'd been left a rich woman, and she'd made herself richer. Every year, as a new terrace of houses would spring up in Dublin somewhere, you could be sure that Barbara Doyle owned one of them. Indeed, she owned the very house they were in now, since Fortunatus rented it from her. He wondered nervously why she had come.

Hastily, he urged her to his best armchair—for her comfort, no doubt, but chiefly because she wasn't quite so infernal sitting down as standing up. Even her little son John, whom she had brought with her for some reason, was quickly offered a silk-covered stool.

Yet even if she was richer than he was, she was still only the widow of a merchant, whereas the Walshes, since time out of mind, belonged to the landed gentry. So why was he afraid of her?

Perhaps it was her physical presence. She was large, stout in leg
and body, and undoubtedly weighed more than he did. In the enduring fashion of the Restoration, she wore a low-busted dress, from which her breasts swelled out mightily. Her hair was thick and black, her face was round, her cheeks a blotchy red. But it was her basilisk-brown, cold-staring eyes that always disconcerted him. Sometimes, under their bellicose glare, he would even find himself stuttering.

“Well, Cousin Barbara,” he said with a forced smile, “what can I do for you?”

“Now that you're in Parliament,” she answered firmly, “a good deal.”

And his heart sank.

If it hadn't been for the seat in Parliament, he probably wouldn't have rented the house. Usually, a country gentleman would rent a Dublin house for the social winter season if he had a son or daughter to marry off—and Walsh had no children of that age at present—or if he had parliamentary business to attend to. Having got his seat, Fortunatus, who was usually careful with his money, had decided that if he was going to do the thing, he'd do it in style. So he had taken a big house on fashionable St. Stephen's Green. But it had cost him dear, for rents in the best parts of Dublin were scarcely less than those in London, and he was paying Mrs. Doyle the princely sum of a hundred pounds a year—which was almost more than he could really afford.

Barbara Doyle fixed Fortunatus with a baleful gaze. Then she made her announcement.

“It's time,” she said, “that Ireland stood up to the English.”

There was hardly a person in Dublin who would have disagreed.

For if the English Parliament wanted the Irish kept safely under Protestant rule, that did not mean that they were interested in the welfare of the rulers. They weren't.

After all, Ireland was a place apart. True, many of Cromwell's English followers had obtained Irish land. But often they had sold it, taken their profits, and returned to England. Some of the largest Eng
lish landowners held huge tracts there now, but engaged middlemen to extort the highest rents they could and remit the money to England, where these great men preferred to live as absentees. As for the Protestants who actually lived in Ireland—and their number was large—even the new arrivals had mostly been there a couple of generations now, and time and distance had bred forgetfulness. The English wished them well, of course, so long as they weren't a nuisance.

“But these Irish colonists need to be kept in their place,” the English judged. Even back in the days of Charles II, the English Parliament had found it needful to restrict Ireland's time-honoured exports of beef, for an obvious cause: “Their beef competes with our own.” During the reign of King William, it had also been necessary to embargo the Irish wool trade for the same excellent reason. And when Ireland's almost entirely Protestant gentry and merchant class had protested, the Parliament men in England knew what to think: “There's something about that damned island that makes people disloyal.”

Indeed, a few years later, the English Parliament had been obliged to remind the Protestant Irish Parliament somewhat firmly, “The troops you have raised and paid for are by no means to be considered under your control.” And just a couple of years ago, King George had even had to promulgate a Declaratory Act to remind them, once and for all, that London could and probably would override any decision or legal judgement they made.

“We are loyal to the king and his established Church,” the Irish Parliament concluded, “yet we are regarded as inferior subjects.” They were exactly right.

The Catholics, though affected by anything that damaged the island's trade, were not really part of the quarrel. They had their own problems to worry about. It was the Protestant ruling class, the Ascendancy—the Anglo-Irish as they were starting to be called—who felt so badly used by London. Why, even the best-paid government jobs, the sinecures, the best-endowed livings for the clergy—the expected perquisites of government in that genial age—were being
given to men sent over from England. “Why should it be only the second-rate jobs that are left for our own boys?” the Irish gentry wanted to know. And if the oppressed Catholic peasants hated the absentee landlords and their grasping middlemen, the Ascendancy often disliked them almost as much. “This rent money flooding out of the country to the absentees is stealing away Ireland's wealth,” they complained. The amounts that left were not in fact large enough to do serious damage, but both Barbara Doyle and Fortunatus Walsh were convinced they did.

The final insult, however, had just occurred this very year.

“What are you going to do,” Mrs. Walsh demanded, “about those damned copper coins?”

It has always been the prerogative of rulers, in all countries and in all political systems, to look after their mistresses. King George of England, naturally wishing to do something for his mistress, the Countess of Kendal, had had the happy thought of giving her a patent to mint copper halfpence and farthings for Ireland. The gift of such a license to a charming royal friend was such a normal thing that nobody had even thought about it twice. She in turn, not being in that business, had very sensibly sold the patent to a reputable ironmaster named Wood. And now Wood's copper change had arrived in Ireland.

“Why should we take these cursed, clipped coins in Dublin?” Barbara Doyle fixed Fortunatus with a bellicose eye.

In fact, when Walsh had inspected some of Wood's coins, it had seemed to him that their quality was perfectly sound, but he did not say so now.