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Authors: Thomas Flanagan
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am accounted so. I have a great-grandfather’s phiz to hang on the wall. It isn’t your great lords who have held Mayo for the Crown from the days of Cromwell. It is men like myself and Gibson, and small thanks we ever got for it. When your great lords were off in England, it was men like my great-grandfather fought off the rapparees. It is men like ourselves took Mayo and held it.”
“Let you keep your hold on it, then.”
“How! What in hell is it you want me to do?”
“Go down to Ballintubber and have a word with George Moore, that he will have a word with Dennis Browne. And then turn your yeomen loose on these rogues.”
“My God, what a creature you are for a woman. It is a man you should have been born.”
“A strange creature that would make of me in your bed. It is a woman I am, and fine cause you have to know it. Sure what do I care, Sam, are you gentry or not. If you had grown up as I did, a Papist among Papists, you would have a full belly of such prating, with every O and Mac giving out about how grand they were in the days before Cromwell and how much land they had taken away from them. If you put all that land together, Mayo would stick out into the sea so far that you could stand on Croagh Patrick and see New York. That is all over and done with. What matters now is who has the land and who will keep it. I mean us to keep Mount Pleasant if we have to turn every perch of land into pasture.”
“We shall see, Kate. We shall see. But for the moment I had best get below. It is little Fogarty knows about stonework, much less Paddy Joe.”
“And Paddy Joe will have his ‘Fine day, Captain’ for you, and you will have your ‘It is indeed’ for him, and all the time Paddy Joe could be one of the lads we should be scouring out.”
“Not at all, woman. Are you mad? Paddy Joe’s father had his bit of land from us when my father’s father died. They are not near-strangers, as the O’Malleys were.”
“And do you think that the Whiteboys came from the moon? In Mayo it pays not to be soft.”
“Then I am a lucky man, Kate, for you must be worth millions.”
She sat on the edge of her chair, gripping its arms, her black hair falling loose about her dressing gown. He knew that he was a lucky man indeed. Small need for the excitements of gaming or the hunt when you had a woman like that at home to match tempers with, and a kind of natural genius when it came to the pleasures of the bed. It was an impressive and a frightening mixture, her hardheadedness and her lust. A solid, turbulent marriage.
Cooper opened the double doors which led off the dining room, and walked out onto the terrace, from which he could see, far off, Fogarty and the two Paddy Joes. Kate was right. She knew these people through and through—who better?—and yet, turn as he would, he could find no way to proceed. It might satisfy Kate’s feminine bloodthirstiness to imagine him raging through Killala with fire and sword, at the head of the yeomanry, but this martial fancy bore little relation to the facts. In Wexford, by all reports, General Lake had loosed his troops upon the countryside, but Wexford had been in rebellion and he acted under martial law. It would have done Cooper’s heart good to see these Whiteboys hanged in Castlebar, but he lacked Kate’s ruthlessness. In his inarticulate way, he loved Mayo deeply.
He was not heavily burdened either with imagination or with historical information, but at times he wondered how his lands had first appeared to his great-great-something-or-other-grandfather, a sergeant who had trooped with Ireton. The Papists had risen up, as they were always doing, slaughtering hundreds of settlers and driving out thousands more to perish on the winter roads of Ulster. Cromwell, hard-pressed in England, had taken badly needed time to fall upon Ireland and crush a rebellion which had spread across the island. Shares of Irish land were sold to English companies, and smaller tracts were
“Let you keep your hold on it, then.”
“How! What in hell is it you want me to do?”
“Go down to Ballintubber and have a word with George Moore, that he will have a word with Dennis Browne. And then turn your yeomen loose on these rogues.”
“My God, what a creature you are for a woman. It is a man you should have been born.”
“A strange creature that would make of me in your bed. It is a woman I am, and fine cause you have to know it. Sure what do I care, Sam, are you gentry or not. If you had grown up as I did, a Papist among Papists, you would have a full belly of such prating, with every O and Mac giving out about how grand they were in the days before Cromwell and how much land they had taken away from them. If you put all that land together, Mayo would stick out into the sea so far that you could stand on Croagh Patrick and see New York. That is all over and done with. What matters now is who has the land and who will keep it. I mean us to keep Mount Pleasant if we have to turn every perch of land into pasture.”
“We shall see, Kate. We shall see. But for the moment I had best get below. It is little Fogarty knows about stonework, much less Paddy Joe.”
“And Paddy Joe will have his ‘Fine day, Captain’ for you, and you will have your ‘It is indeed’ for him, and all the time Paddy Joe could be one of the lads we should be scouring out.”
“Not at all, woman. Are you mad? Paddy Joe’s father had his bit of land from us when my father’s father died. They are not near-strangers, as the O’Malleys were.”
“And do you think that the Whiteboys came from the moon? In Mayo it pays not to be soft.”
“Then I am a lucky man, Kate, for you must be worth millions.”
She sat on the edge of her chair, gripping its arms, her black hair falling loose about her dressing gown. He knew that he was a lucky man indeed. Small need for the excitements of gaming or the hunt when you had a woman like that at home to match tempers with, and a kind of natural genius when it came to the pleasures of the bed. It was an impressive and a frightening mixture, her hardheadedness and her lust. A solid, turbulent marriage.
Cooper opened the double doors which led off the dining room, and walked out onto the terrace, from which he could see, far off, Fogarty and the two Paddy Joes. Kate was right. She knew these people through and through—who better?—and yet, turn as he would, he could find no way to proceed. It might satisfy Kate’s feminine bloodthirstiness to imagine him raging through Killala with fire and sword, at the head of the yeomanry, but this martial fancy bore little relation to the facts. In Wexford, by all reports, General Lake had loosed his troops upon the countryside, but Wexford had been in rebellion and he acted under martial law. It would have done Cooper’s heart good to see these Whiteboys hanged in Castlebar, but he lacked Kate’s ruthlessness. In his inarticulate way, he loved Mayo deeply.
He was not heavily burdened either with imagination or with historical information, but at times he wondered how his lands had first appeared to his great-great-something-or-other-grandfather, a sergeant who had trooped with Ireton. The Papists had risen up, as they were always doing, slaughtering hundreds of settlers and driving out thousands more to perish on the winter roads of Ulster. Cromwell, hard-pressed in England, had taken badly needed time to fall upon Ireland and crush a rebellion which had spread across the island. Shares of Irish land were sold to English companies, and smaller tracts were
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