The Rebels of Ireland (62 page)

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 keeping 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?