The Year of the French

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Authors: Thomas Flanagan
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Historical, War & Military
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measured out to pay the soldiers. In this manner, Sergeant Joshua Cooper, a London locksmith, had come to Mayo, had come into possession of lands earned not by the sword of worldly conquest but by Christ’s chastising sword, carried into the wilderness to avenge His slaughtered saints. Surrounded by a sullen and defeated people, sunk in savagery and hating the light, he had claimed his acres and held them.
    The chain of generations bound together Sergeant Cooper of London and Captain Cooper of Mount Pleasant. But who in that chain had first come to accept the land as truly his, ratified by claims stronger than those inscribed upon legal documents? Which of them had been the first to shrug off the locksmith’s shop and think himself a gentleman, no mere owner of Mount Pleasant but its master as well? Perhaps Joshua’s son Jonathan, who in 1690 had raised his company to serve King Billy at the Boyne and Aughrim and Limerick, who rode home to Mount Pleasant and defended it for five years against the sporadic sallies of the rapparees, the swordsmen, masterless now, of the defeated James Stuart. It was Jonathan who had built the present house, and who had given it its name. Heavy shutters, with loopholes for firelocks, still testified to the dangers of the rapparee times, but the name itself, Mount Pleasant, suggested that he had discovered more in Mayo than bogland and murder. Joshua and Jonathan, the successive founders of Cooper’s line, faced each other from the walls of the dining room, grim-faced Roundhead and thick-necked Williamite with a dab of lace under the chin, gentility’s first sign, a white rash. The Biblical sound of their names pleased Cooper; it was almost, of itself, a claim to ownership, Mayo their Canaan.
    By the time of Cooper’s grandfather, ivy had begun to climb the walls of what had been built as a fortified farmhouse. Within, the rooms had become cluttered with heavy sideboards and beds, purchased in Dublin and shipped around the coast to Killala. The grandfather boasted that in his boyhood, Carolan, the great blind harper, had once played in the drawing room, composing for the occasion his “Planxty Squire Cooper.” Marriages had shaped Mount Pleasant as a knot in the network of Protestant proprietorship which history had cast across Mayo. There was no longer need for the loopholed shutters, and Joshua and Jonathan had become patriarchal legends. The land was Cooper’s now. It owned him. Once, far off in the brown bog of the past, it had been owned by an O’Donnell family. A young hillside farmer on Cooper’s land, Ferdy O’Donnell, had once shown him a valueless curiosity, a parchment which recorded the fact in faded ink the colour of old, dried blood.
    Moore Hall, June 17
    A wide, handsome house built with blocks of pale grey limestone, it rose four storeys high, facing gentle, tree-shaded Lough Carra. It was a new house, less than ten years old, and had been built by an earlier George Moore, father of the present owner, upon his return from a Spanish exile. In the 1750s, harassed by the penal laws against Catholics, he had emigrated to Spain, vowing to make or mar his fortune. He went to work in a counting house, and a few years later married the daughter of another Irish émigré. By the 1780s he was one of the powerful merchants of Alicante, the owner of vineyards and of a fleet of ships which traded between Spain and the coastal cities of Galway, Westport, and Killala. The same vessels also conducted a less open and more profitable trade, smuggling brandy and laces, satins, and silks to the lonely beaches of Connaught. Portraits of Moore and his wife, dressed for the court of Spain, hung in Moore Hall.
    But he had been half-Spanicised, and from the first he planned to return to Mayo. He took care that his two sons, George and John, were educated in England, under the guidance of Catholic tutors. And he took equal care to visit Ireland in 1780, when, under the terms of the Act of

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