Dark Rosaleen: A Famine Novel

Copyright

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel tells the story of the Irish potato famine of 1845, ‘the Great Hunger’, out of which came the militant rebels who fought to free Ireland from English rule and the man who gave rise to the Fenians. Nothing in these pages, not the people, nor the life they lived, is wholly fictional. Almost all of what I have written happened in real life.

In order to turn history into a novel, an author is obliged to dramatise, to put words into mouths that might never have been spoken, to lay blame that perhaps was not wholly deserved. But little here is exaggerated. There is no need. The truth is appalling enough. If you find descriptions of people, events and their outcome hard to believe, then go to the history books and be convinced.

Sebec Lake

Maine

12 August 1934

It is recorded in the register of the coroner’s office in the County of Limerick that my mother drowned escaping the English in 1848. She was a fine English lady and, at that time, would have been twenty-four years of age. It is also written that the authorities waited a month or more for the sea to return her body but it did not.

I am an old man and her only child and before I die I wish to correct those records in Ireland. For unless I do, the lie will forever remain the truth.

The English did not kill my mother, nor did the sea swallow her up. She is buried on the coast of Maine in a grave I helped dig myself.

Even now, I can hear her story in a voice as clear and as close as when she first told it, speaking in her fine language of a land of savagery and sadness, of a people who suffered for their patience and died from their hunger.

And I cried as a child, although I could not know why. I knew nothing then of hunger, or suffering or dying. Nor even anger.

CHAPTER ONE

The coals were white hot. The face of the child was ringed by flames. Soon it would be engulfed by fire, soon it would die, soon it would be ash. She could do nothing but sit and watch. It was a small gaunt face, cursed by innocence, its eyes full of melancholy. Its image scorched her.

The tip of the flames touched his face but his eyes stared resolutely back. She looked for a name and a place but she dared not reach out, the heat too fierce. It troubled her, she who cared nothing for distant calamities that befell others. Why now was she suffocating? Why now this something she had never felt before, this guilt? What was one death among so many?

Until this moment she had been consumed by her own self-pity, wretched at her father’s selfish ultimatum, furious at his imposition dressed up as duty. Did she care that Irish peasants were hungry because they had lost their potatoes? Why should she waste a moment’s thought on brutes too lazy to feed their litters, too drunk to dig for their own food? How dare they disrupt her life so suddenly and so completely, forcing her headlong into a hostile land she despised, that filthy country of saints and savages they called Ireland?

He had told her so casually. The government, he said, was to provide aid to the Irish and he had been given the authority as Relief Commissioner to oversee its distribution. Soon he must leave for Ireland, and she was obliged to go with him.

The flames licked at her fingers. The heat scorched the skin of her forehead but still she could not move away. Sweat soaked the hair around her temples, the salt from her tears stung her cheeks and stung again as they eased into her cracked lips. Yet she remained close, compelled to share something in those final moments.

She waited for the flames to cremate the last of the image and in that waiting, as a hot poultice slowly draws out pain, so the fire gradually evaporated her anger. She was subdued. She felt only sadness, grief and something more, something she had never before known in all her young and very privileged life. She felt uncertain and afraid.

Kate Macaulay’s life that day changed as abruptly as the weather. The warm, bright early October morning sun had surrendered to a grey afternoon and by the time it was dark, the barometer had dipped further. The wind, stirred from the east and blowing unhindered from the Urals, swept across the North Sea to the Anglian Fens and froze all of Lincolnshire. It shook the house, piled snow against its walls and windows and forced smoke back down the chimneys, blackening the mantelpieces and spreading soot across the rugs.

She had become more furious by the hour. She had argued with her father at breakfast, at lunch and again at dinner. She had refused to eat and, in an attempt to offend him more, had barely touched her supper. Now she was hungry and defeated. She had tried every trick she knew but the cajolery that had won him over so often in the past had failed her. He was deaf to it and instead, addressing her as if he was speaking to one of his junior staff, reminded her of her duty, his duty and the duty of the government, so that it seemed to her that all of England was a slave to duty and that all pleasures and recreation, most especially her own, were to be entirely forfeited in the Queen’s service.

To quieten and comfort her, he promised that they would not be away from England long and that he expected his work would be over before next year’s summer ended. Then they would return to Lincolnshire or to their house in London, whatever suited her. He would retire from government service and they would travel north together to cousins at their Northumberland estate and perhaps go further still into the Highlands for the shooting. To dry her tears he told her that Irish society was almost as interesting as English society, with country estates as vast and as sumptuous as any she had known. She could have her own mare and she would not want for company. There were many of her own sort there.

Kate was accustomed to being soothed by promises. She had never had to wait long for something she wanted but he was offering nothing she did not already have. She would not be bargained with. She would not be pacified, refusing to believe his promises even though she had never known him break one. Her friends were here in Lincolnshire and London and she was in no mood to seek out new ones for her father’s or even Queen Victoria’s convenience.

She had fought him all day but she had not won a single concession, not even the compromise of a further few months’ stay so that she might enjoy her Christmas and New Year in England. He cared nothing that she would miss the Belvoir Hunt weekend with Colonel Arden-Walker, who had been so generous and so attentive since the last. She would have to send her apologies to the Earl of March for not attending his Goodwood Ball and to Lord Abercrombie, whose night of fancy dress and charades at London’s Ritz so glamorously and entertainingly welcomed in the New Year.

Her year’s social calendar had been painstakingly planned. There was never a weekend when she was not the centre of somebody’s attention, never an evening in the London season that was not filled by one or other of her many adoring young suitors. Now, without warning or apology, it was all to be cancelled. She was being forced to leave behind people who were both dear and necessary to her simply because of something despicable far away. The prospect appalled her and all day she cried tears that for once she had no way of stopping.

In one final attempt that evening she had screamed at her father deliberately in front of the servants, demanding her independence, threatening to leave the house and never return. She was twenty-two years old and she would not let him re-arrange her life. She was not a minor, obliged to do his bidding. She could leave him as she pleased, go wherever she wanted with whoever she chose, even marry if that was her whim. The law was the law and that was what the law allowed. The servants took refuge in the kitchen. They had cosseted her since she was a child and knew well enough her moods and contrariness. But they had never seen her in such a state before and they were all agreed that when her father left for Ireland, he would have no choice but to leave her behind to do as she pleased. They were wrong.

Sir William Macaulay was a long and faithful servant of the Crown. He had served with distinction as Commissariat General of the British Army, had seen action in the Peninsular Campaign, had been with Wellington at Waterloo and had been knighted for devotion to duty during the Canadian Rebellion. As the man in charge of army supplies he was a devoted cheesepare, ready to save a penny wherever a penny could be saved. It made him ideally suited to oversee the distribution of aid to the starving Irish.

He was about to embark on the last great challenge of his career and was concerned with more urgent matters than his young daughter’s hysterical obstinacy. He was a gentle and patient man and loved her more intensely than he had ever had the courage to show. Her tears and tantrums had been painful and made him relive a part of his life that still haunted him, memories that he had for so long been trying to erase, memories of the wife he loved, of the day she had given birth to Kate and that final, fateful day when she had left them both. Even now, all these years on, he could not remember that time without his fists tightening, the muscles of his jaw hardening and a pain in his chest so severe it left him breathless. And he cursed the God that made her go.

That day, he had returned from London after an interview in Whitehall with the austere, pious and powerful Sir Charles Trevelyan, Secretary to the Treasury. Despite a title that suggested he was of a lesser order, he controlled all government expenditure. He was a young and handsome man of rigid integrity, a devout evangelical, impatient, blunt, arrogant, uncompromising. He considered himself to be always on the right side of a question and many of those who dared cross him found their careers blighted soon afterwards. As guardian of the nation’s coffers, his guiding principle was balancing humanity with practical economics. It was he who would steer the course of Ireland now.

He sat upright at his desk and, as was his practice, made no effort to acknowledge the presence of the man he had summoned. He made no gesture towards the chair opposite him, so Sir William stood to attention, as he had done all his military life in the presence of superiors.

Trevelyan spoke, as ever, to the point.

‘I waste no time on courtesies, Sir William. I am familiar with your record of public service and know you are more than capable of the employment I am about to charge you with. I break no confidences when I tell you that Prime Minister Peel is alarmed by events in Ireland. It would appear that this year’s potato crop has failed there as it has in England, Scotland and almost every country in Northern Europe. We understand the disease comes from America but it cannot be identified. What we do know is that it is more thoroughly destructive than anything before. You may have read of this?’

‘Yes, Sir Charles. I have read much about it. It is a serious matter.’

‘Serious indeed. Unlike the peasantry in England, the Irish are entirely dependent on their potatoes. It is their entire diet. Monday to Sunday, January to December, they eat nothing else. Without potatoes they starve.’

‘So it appears, sir.’

‘Yes Sir William, it is exactly as it appears. For that reason and with commendably swift decision, the Prime Minister has authorised a Commission to oversee relief and the distribution of food in the affected provinces. You, Sir William, will head it. There is to be no delay. He expects you to sail to Ireland within the week. Your headquarters will be in Cork.’

‘Must it be so soon, sir? A week is no time at all for me to settle my own affairs. To be away for so long without preparation— ’

‘You assume too much. It need not be long. The Prime Minister believes the worst will be over by the summer. It may or may not be. God alone will decide. But be assured of this. We will do what is necessary but no more than that. The Irish peasants are perverse and prefer to beg than borrow; they would rather eat free English food than labour for their own. It would be unjust and unwise to pamper them when our own people are pleading for assistance and I do not intend to transfer famine from one country to another. You understand?’

‘I fully understand, sir. It makes very practical sense.’

‘And one last thing, Sir William, before you go. As I understand it, you no longer have a wife but you have a daughter?’

‘I do, sir. Her name is Kathryn.’

‘Then the Prime Minister would have you take her too. She will need to accompany you on the official functions that, as the Queen’s representative, you will be expected to attend.’

Kate counted the twelve slow chimes of the clock on the landing outside her bedroom door. The house was silent. The wind had dropped. The last of the servants had gone to their attic beds and, in his bedroom, her father had stopped the soft coughing that always ended his day. She looked down at the remains of the fire. The image of the child had been consumed and all that was left was a wedge of paper ash. She watched as bit by bit it was drawn up the chimney to be broken into tiny flakes and scattered across the rooftops on that white winter’s night.

She was exhausted. Her tantrums had won her nothing. On the rug at her feet were the few remaining pages of the Illustrated London News. Her father had slid it under her door, hoping she might be tempted to read something of the land she was about to sail to and the tragedy she was about to witness. In her fury she had stamped on it, ripped it apart, thrown its pages into the flames and stirred the coals to make it burn faster. But she could not touch the drawing of the boy, thin and almost naked, standing defiantly by the bodies of his mother and sisters. His face held her until the fire had finally devoured him.

The room was cold. She shivered but it was not from the chill. Again she felt the same sensation, a surging fear that, despite herself and her shrill threats of defiance, she too was about to become a casualty of Ireland’s Great Hunger.

CHAPTER TWO

Sky and earth were one black sprawling mess. It was raining the first day when they landed in Ireland and it had been raining ever since. Kate had now been in Cork for a month and seven days and she had not yet seen a blue sky or the tip of a mountain or an expanse of sea. It was like living under a vast, dripping shadow, everything saturated by clouds that hung low, still and moody. People told her it might stay that way all winter. They said it cheerily, as if that was how they preferred it to be, curtained off, captive.

She felt so captured. What a perfect prison this Ireland was to her and she was condemned to live in it for as long as its people were hungry. Or perhaps longer. However absurd it seemed to her, the notion kept repeating itself, the fearful conviction that she was about to become entangled in the misery of this land, that its suffering would make her its prisoner.

For those first five weeks, she had stayed within the house and, for most of the time, within her own rooms. To venture out into the gardens, to inspect the stables and yards would be to admit an interest and she was determined to show none. She ignored the daily respectful formalities from the staff and the curtsies of the chambermaids. She kept silent but, to her outrage, her father was too busily involved in his new task to notice. It was the arrival of the mare he had promised that finally ended her stubborn resistance.

She rode her most afternoons but she could not go far. Her father had pencilled a perimeter on a map of the countryside surrounding Cork and warned her that if she crossed it, he would have her ride with an armed escort. Drenched in Ireland’s autumn, she longed for a dry breeze and a clear horizon. On every ride she searched for higher ground, thinking that if she could climb the tracks that wound up through the mists, she would break through and find blue sky and a little warmth. But the paths were too narrow or strewn with too many boulders and the mare stumbled too often. The sun was always beyond her.

One day, ignoring her father’s orders for the first time, she rode along the banks of Lough Mahon, past Monkstown and Ringaskiddy, searching for a horizon, to see the land fade into nothingness the way it did in the Lincolnshire Fens as the dykes ran the length of the sea. But here, as she stood by the mare’s side, the air was so heavy and the light so grey that she could not see the river’s mouth at Roche’s Point, which they said was only a mile across the water.

High in her saddle, how safely distanced she felt from those who passed below her on the tracks. How poised and perfect she felt herself to be in her trim riding habit as she cantered through their villages. Men dropped their heads in respect, women were careful not to catch her eye and dirty, half-naked children hid behind their mothers’ skirts. And always they were silent, as if to be heard speaking within earshot of her was an insolence. How she loathed the smell of them, the dirt of their bodies, the decay of their lives, their squat mud-and-branch hovels humped together, littered with the rotting debris of human waste.

‘It’s natural Kate, hungry or not, it’s what they prefer. Cuddling their pigs comes as naturally as hugging their wives. Not that they do that often. They show such little love that I wonder they have so many children. Such filthy hags too. God knows what gives them the passion.’

Kate laughed. She had not laughed since she had left England and had been ready to believe she might not again until she returned there. The wind had turned abruptly, it was a warm and sunny winter’s day and she had company. Edward Ogilvie was with her, with her father’s permission. They had ridden all morning, crossing the river at Inishannon, following its meandering course until it met the sea.

She kicked her mare, reined hard and followed him down the steep side of a hill with the sea on either side of them. He pointed to a lighthouse, far off in the distance, painted in red and white stripes, which he said stood on the Old Head of Kinsale. They dismounted, he unfurled a horse blanket and they sat and picnicked on poached salmon and cold beef. She watched a distant rain cloud scudding across the water like a rippling cloth. The breeze was fresh, bringing with it the smell of salt and seaweed. She breathed it in and was happy and thanked her new companion for it.

Edward Ogilvie was young and heavy limbed, a powerfully built young man. The seams of his jacket and breeches were stretched, barely able to contain the muscles within. Long, unkempt ginger hair touched his collar and matched the sideburns he had trimmed to hide the red blotches on his cheeks, birthmarks that were his greatest aggravation.

He was known by his tenants as a ‘Half-Sir,’ he being the son of the landowner, Lord Kinley, whose estate began at Cork and stretched more than fifty miles west towards Bantry Bay. Lord Kinley was an Irish Protestant who had left Ireland on his twenty-sixth birthday and, forty years on, had yet to return, preferring to lavish his income on the splendid, if expensive, aristocratic rituals England alone provided. The estate had since been run by a succession of managers, men whose ability was rated by the amount of rent they collected. But none matched the young Edward, who, in the ten years of his management, had multiplied his father’s income twice over and, as such, was respected by those of his own rank, who did their best to copy him.

They knew him as a great horseman, hunter and renowned boxer. In Dublin on his twenty-first birthday, he had won a hundred guineas in one fight and that same night, for a wager of half as much again, drank three bottles of whiskey without seeming to take a breath. When things went well for him and he was among his own peers, he was considered a likeable fellow. But among the ranks below, among the thousands of tenants and labourers on the estate, he was feared and loathed. He was a bully with a vicious and barely controllable temper. Anger was always his first refuge.

On his father’s land he had no time for rules that were not of his own making, nor any law that did not place the landlord’s interests paramount. Nor would he countenance any discussion about a tenant’s rights, as they were considered to have none. Those who disagreed suffered his own justice at the end of a bullwhip, which he used often, accurately and with terrible effect. From its stock to its tip, it was eight feet long and tied to its end were six small chamois leather pouches loaded with buckshot. Edward Ogilvie’s bullwhip was law and there were many men, women and even children whose bodies were scarred defying it.

Following the customary exchange of letters of introduction, he had presented himself to Sir William offering to act as Kate’s riding escort. She readily accepted, relieved to listen to another’s conversation after months of her own company. She found him no more or less dull than the dozens of his kind she had known in Lincolnshire and London. She had heard nothing of his cruelty because there was no one to tell her of it except those who had suffered, and they were ever silent.

He had tempted her with a thimbleful of whiskey. It was new to her and she could feel it swirling and rising through her body. She was content to lay back on the thick horse blanket and listen to the surf breaking on the beach below. His chin shone with beef fat.

‘You’ll discover, Kate, that there are three Ps to the Irish problem: population, priests and potatoes. If we could rid ourselves of them all, and empty this cursed land, we could make it worth a living. Leave it to them and it will remain a stinking bog and a hive of Popish mischief.’

‘Edward, why are they so dependent on the potato? Father says they are hungry because of the blight but the crops have been ruined in England and Scotland and France too, I’m told. Why is it so bad here?’

He bit into his beef and wiped the grease from his lips.

‘The Irish are always hungry. They’re always screaming that there’s a famine here, a famine there, just so they can scramble for free handouts. It comes natural to them because they are scoundrels and wasters and always after something for nothing. Let me tell you, Kate, it’s not our food they need but a little order, not more English corn but a few more English Fusiliers.’

‘They seem to expect charity as if it was a right,’ she said.

‘And we farmers have none. Nor should we. We own the land and these peasants must pay us to live on it. That’s the rub, Kate. They will always find excuses not to. They’ll blame their favourite saint or not enough rain for their barley or too much rain for their oats. Then they plead poverty. But I make them pay their gale even if it’s with a pike up their backsides.’

‘What is a gale, Edward?’

‘It’s what we call the rent they owe us. They’re supposed to pay it every six months but few of them can ever make it. The trick is to leave it hanging, let them owe it, leave it in arrears. That way they are in continual debt. It’s called the hanging gale and it means I can throw them out whenever I like and there’s not a magistrate who can defy me. That’s the law. Pay the gale or get out. That’s the landlord’s right, a sacred right to deal with our property as we choose.’

Kate turned onto her stomach and looked out to the sweep of country across the bay. The clouds made a sudden opening for the sun. The sky was brightening and in the clean sharp light she could see how neat and tidy the land was, the slowly rising hills, their smooth humps dipping into gentle valleys and, here and there, sprawling bundles of woodland. The slopes had been crafted into terraces by labouring hands over many centuries, line upon line of them, like a vast regiment of graves, the potato mounds, now putrefied by the blight. Yet the land looked lovely in its every shade of green and brown, with rocks scattered across it, bleached by the sun and salt air. It was all so rich and lush, so properly tied together.

Ogilvie took another swig of whiskey.

‘You ask why the peasant loves his potato. It’s because it gives him so much spare time. That’s why it is called the lazy crop. He banks them up in spring and then has all summer to drink and sire another child or two. What he needs is more labour to tire him and send him back to his cabin panting. Then we might see more industry and fewer babies.’

He laughed loudly at his wit again. Saliva dribbled from his lips, glistened on his chin, fell and settled on his waistcoat. He pulled himself across the blanket,