Trinity: A Novel of Ireland Page 8

  "By now Kilty was onto MacAdam Rankin's game. In the past he had held us together but this time it was different. Never were people so terror-stricken. Then all hope of staging a rising ended when some treacherous, informing turncoat revealed the locations of our arms. Panic invaded every house. Gombeen men prowled the land and the more desperate threw themselves at their mercy, taking out loans with impossible interest rates, and while others fled to the swollen ranks of the Constabulary, hundreds were crossing to look for work in England."

  *

  The British initiated a series of moves to cool off soaring food prices in Ireland, lifted the protective tariff on corn importation and brought in large shipments of American Indian corn but most of it fell into the hands of speculators.

  Poor laws based on workhouses had been in effect in Ireland for several years to attempt to cope with the chronic unemployment. Although the workhouse was a part of English life it was particularly repugnant to the Irish, whose existence was communal, and presented little more promise than a death sentence.

  Other plans included large-scale public works, mainly the building of roads.

  What was missing was a major policy, a supreme decision for Ireland. In England itself, the nation was in the throes of a social upheaval brought on by an immoral class system riding the waves of the Industrial Revolution.

  So what of it if the Irish were in trouble?

  At best they were considered a quaint folk, a lying, lazy, ignorant, drunken ingrate race certainly unworthy of life on the plane of a civilized Englishman to whom they were disloyal.

  As Ireland's fate was pondered, the colonizers who had squandered the country now exerted every possible pressure to salvage their necks.

  *

  After a long silence, Conor knelt to hear his daddy breathe he had become so quiet.

  "Don't worry," Daddo said, "he's deeply out of it."

  "Aye," Conor said, yawning.

  "Are you too sleepy, yourself?"

  "No. I want to hear it all," Conor said.

  "Then come sit near me like you usually do so I won't have to talk too loud."

  Conor came over the hay on his hands and knees and settled at Daddo's feet.

  "When your great-grandfar Ronan Larkin came to Ballyutogue from Armagh around 1800, England had been fighting wars which had ravaged many of the fields of Europe and the needs of the army were great. Every acre in Ireland was transformed to planting grain, for that was where the money was. In doing so, a great deal of the pastureland was wrecked.

  "After Waterloo, the demand for grain dropped and the estates earned less and less. Huge holdings of the aristocracy fell into ruin. Many of the gentry were living way over their heads and many had contracted enormous gambling debts. The estates were encumbered and mortgaged to the hilt.

  "The MacAdam Rankins and their kind lived from a percentage of their collections and were out to milk every last drop. Ireland's greatest curse has been the landlord, and at the moment of the blight landlordism reached its foulest hour. The issue before the British government was not the survival of the people they had conquered but the survival of the aristocracy they had planted on our soil.”

  "Other than the potato failure, the crops had been good that year and there was plenty of food in the country to feed us all, provided it was allowed to remain in Ireland, but the encumbered gentry had to sell abroad."

  *

  The government adopted a position of laissez-faire . . . business as usual with no official interference.

  Winter looked the croppy dead on with him holding his bins of rotten food. The estate agents sped up rent collections and soon the cattle pens of Londonderry and the other Irish port cities bulged with meat for export to England.

  The deep frosts had made themselves known, first curling leaves, then stripping birch trees and browning the hills. Ballyutogue shivered. It was not until then that Morris Hubble, the Ninth Earl of Foyle, landed in Londonderry.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Hubbles seemed to forget, from one year to the next, that the Irish Sea could be every bit as nasty as the Irish roads. No amount. of charm, wit and attention was able to quell the Countess' nausea. She swooned off the packet and was whisked to Hubble Manor where she retired immediately to her apartment and declared herself indisposed.

  The Earl of Foyle's annual homecoming was a premier event on Inishowen. In addition to the flurry of activity, the usual deluge of social and official invitations and pleas for audiences, this year's tense conditions created more than the normal commotion.

  As he was settling in, sorting things out, and giving Lady Beatrice a chance to recover, young Arthur arrived from Harrow for the holidays with a pair of schoolmates. This would be the time for bucking up the relationship with his son.

  After three daughters, Arthur's late-in-life birth had come as a welcome relief, for the line of the ascendancy was assured. At an early age, the boy showed uncharacteristic fragility for a male Hubble. He was not exactly his father's pride. In fact, Arthur was so much of a disappointment, Lord Morris wondered if he would even be able to carry his own weight in the family regiment later.

  Morris spent a number of years in frustration attempting to instill manliness into his son. The hard games filled with good physical going. As the father pressed harder, the son shrank away, seeking the solace of his mother and sisters. The Earl's harpooning sarcasm only made Arthur retrench further. Before he was eight he stammered and was given to attacks of shortness of breath which increased in intensity when he returned to Hubble Manor and stood before the imposing figure of his father.

  But there would be no more sons. Sobered by this reality, Morris Hubble, who considered himself an enlightened man, tried to make peace. What he desired in a son and what he had been given were two different matters. He began to muffle his roars until they were mere sighs of disgust and controlled burblings. Although signs of outward disenchantment were kept subdued, the boy's lack of physical aggressiveness, his stammering and defensiveness and downright prettiness, never failed to churn the Earl's stomach.

  Well, at least Arthur showed a keen mind and he seemed to do well in school. As the only son, he was the sole heir and born to the title of Viscount Coleraine. Adopting distance as the most sensible way to exist, Morris was grateful that Arthur had come home with friends. The annual "getting-to-know-one-another father and son frolics" could be kept to a bare minimum.

  The residential wing of Hubble Manor began to fill with the staggered arrival of three daughters, their husbands and a half dozen grandchildren. The young ladies had married astutely. Although the Hubble gentry had been established on Inishowen for two hundred and fifty odd years, Lord Morris and all his predecessors considered the earldom a parcel of English land and his own identity totally English. They were there to carry on responsibilities in a place that was not quite a colony, but not quite not a colony. Ulster, the seat of their wealth and power, came in for little personal loyalty, for it remained an alien land and Ireland an alien planet. Keeping England's presence in Ulster was what mattered and two of his daughters were meticulously united with their own kind in the game of self-perpetuation. Beatrice had carefully managed to keep them from straying off to the lure of the British court.

  In the case of the middle daughter, Lady Beverly, a clever marriage had been effected with a wealthy family of Ulster Scots who had risen dramatically through linen mills in Belfast. In England, Beverly's in-laws might have been considered a comedown, but out here, alliances with the Scottish element were not treated as that much of a drop in caste. The Industrial Revolution was creating vast new fortunes and one had to consider the realities of the time as well as the reality of their physical separation from the motherland. Given a few years, Beverly's husband would attain knighthood and, with proper guidance, a peerage was not out of the question.

  The arrival of her daughters and grandchildren was just the antidote Lady Beatrice needed to gossip her way out of confinement.

&
nbsp; *

  Morris Hubble had been elevated from Viscount Coleraine to Earl of Foyle a dozen years earlier, inheriting an estate sagging under debts incurred by his father's gambling and obscene expenditures on women. The old Earl passed on, basking in the Indies in the arms of an extremely young, beautiful, black mistress. He had lived in supreme style and died from an unmentionable disease, the pain of which had been removed by a heavenly veil of opium.

  One of Morris Hubble's first moves had been to oust Owen Rankin from the top estate position, replacing him with his younger brother, MacAdam, a brain of the first order. It permanently embittered Owen, who seemed permanently embittered to begin with. The move changed the earldom's fortunes dramatically.

  Lord Morris continued on to become the first of his line to adopt the new principles in dealing with his tenants. The O'Neills and their traditional allies, whose ancient lands were taken to carve out the earldom, had remained the most belligerent clan in Ireland. This condition was worsened by the isolation of the earldom on Inishowen. Croppy violence had been a way of life and was clearly demonstrated when Kilty Larkin ran two thousand head of Rubble cattle into Lough Foyle. Showing the whip seemed to make little impression on the croppy. Peasant reform had swept Europe in the backwash of the French Revolution with some "of its messages finally seeping through to the British Isles. As an age of reason dawned, Lord Morris chose negotiation and won considerable respect plus an era of peace by his agreement to pay the tenants' tithe Actually, MacAdam Rankin got the entire tithe amount back through subtly manipulated rate raises.

  Although he endowed MacAdam with greater responsibility as time passed, he continued to control his affairs scrupulously. Despite their close association, the Earl kept aloof, demanding stringent protocol. It was his lordship's custom to consult with no one except MacAdam, usually in homecoming sessions that lasted many hours.

  As their marathon meeting wore on, Lord Morris made his way steadily and unruffled through the massive ledgers, looking up now and then for a question whose answer was invariably on the end of the manager's tongue.

  Morris seemed blended into the great library, which was divided into stunning ranks of volumes eternally at attention. Volumes which had been bound and tooled by two generations of craftsmen imported from Florence, who lived and worked on the estate for that sole purpose. The reputation of the library was that of the greatest single place of enlightenment in the cultural desert that existed clear down to the boundary of Dublin.

  Behind the severely polished rosewood pedestal desk, he was framed by a bay window bearing the Hubble coat of arms in stained glass depicting the Red Hand of Ulster and a three-headed mythical blue griffin emblazoned with the Latinized motto: "One More Charge for the Glory of the King." At the opposite end of the forty-seven-foot hall hung an immense oil of Ireland's Britannic liberator, King William of Orange, a work of the court artist of the period, Sir Godfrey Kneller. In keeping with Ulster tradition, he had replaced Queen Mary with a white steed. The painting had been miraculously salvaged when a wing of the original castle was razed during one of the peasant risings.

  Though in his late fifties, the Earl still showed the figure of a young fusilier officer attired in a dandy frock coat of striped Valencia worn over a vest of Chinese silk. His sturdy, shapely legs were embraced by white leather breeches, and his hair, without a speck of gray, was a mass of curls to the top of his collar length with sideburns trimmed at lip level. The only sign of oncoming years was the eyeglass brought up into play to read some of the more finely written papers.

  By contrast, MacAdam Rankin was a small, nippy man in unpressed bulky kerseymere leaning to the Scottish austerity.

  Four imperial cane trunks sat alongside the desk containing the necessary books and records. After the last ledger had been scrutinized, the two men stared at each other in forlorn silence interrupted only by the clinking of their spoons in their teacups. The sparkle of the stained glass was diffused in- graying light. Lord Morris snapped open his tiny jeweled snuffbox and indulged.

  "What caused it?" he asked at last.

  MacAdam shifted his aching back and shrugged.

  "The Peel Commission says it's a fungus of sorts. There have been potato failures in America and on the Continent in the past several years but nothing like this. My own theory is that germs that caused it must have done their breeding due to the heavy rains before harvest."

  Morris tapped his fist on the desk with repetitious futility, then popped from his chair and literally flung himself into the bay window seat glaring glumly to the outside.

  "It's like an armed camp," he said with annoyance.

  "It's always like an armed camp in one form or another," Rankin answered, likewise rising for a stretch and wiping his reddened eyes.

  "I had come to hope that bloodshed on Inishowen was a thing of the past."

  "The good Lord knows you've done more than your share to prevent it."

  Lord Morris paced, hands clasped behind him. He traversed the length of the library, settling before the mantel and the portrait of King Billy.

  "I hope your lordship realizes I felt bound to increase our police forces as a precaution."

  "Yes, but are we able to trust the Constabulary? They're over ninety per cent Catholic."

  "They'll do as they're ordered," MacAdam snapped. "Besides, with conditions as they are, any one of them would sing on his mother for a few shillings. The proof is that we've uncovered most of their hidden arms through informers. We'll have no risings from Kilty Larkin this time."

  As the two men edged closer to the heart of the situation, they eased into a more comfortable seating arrangement about the fireplace, now measuring each new probe with a stab of anxiety for that awesome decision that lay just ahead. Rankin praised God the ports remained open to allow them to sell to England and ventured that over half the estates in Ulster would have gone under, otherwise.

  "What is the latest on government plans?" Lord Morns asked. "I mean, concerning the tenants."

  "Road building. If you can get them to work, mind you. If you can get them to work. There's talk of soup kitchens."

  "Well, just how hungry do you suspect they are going to get, Mr. Rankin?"

  "M'lord, my experience is that they've probably stolen enough of the crops and have them hidden in the hills."

  "But what if real hunger becomes widespread?"

  "I say that's the government's responsibility."

  "Mr. Rankin, in the bundle of petitions, didn't I come across one asking for permission to fish the lough between Carrowkeel and Drung?"

  MacAdam had hoped the document would be passed over without notice. Blotches of red cropped up on those parts of his face not hidden by hair. Lord Morris was up off the sofa standing below William of Orange so that both of them seemed to be inquiring. "Well?" Lord Morris said.

  "I cannot recommend it," the agent answered.

  "Not even in the event of a severe food shortage?"

  "M'lord, we've villages of loyal Protestants planted there for two hundred years for the very purpose of protecting the estate's fishing rights."

  "Is there not enough to go around in the event of a severe food shortage, Mr. Rankin?"

  "Not at the expense of loyal subjects."

  "I think I see your point but this is apt to become a crisis, perhaps a total emergency."

  As MacAdam Rankin arose, the very nature of the man underwent a change from docile servant to a man suddenly clothed in righteous rage. The eyes of him watered as he spewed forth and punctuated the air with an angry pudgy forefinger. "These folk have inhabited an island for two thousand years. Two thousand years with no tradition as sailors, nor boat builders nor explorers, nor fishermen. They were here a thousand years piling stones on top of each other without mortar before we showed them how. My own maternal forefathers were planted here on Inishowen to preach the true gospel and teach the King's language. But they rejected the true God, choosing instead to hide in caves and carry on their he
athen rituals! God knows we tried to convert them but they rejected our Lord! You cannot make men of character out of pure sloth!"

  The piercing of his voice suddenly boomeranged back to his own ears and he stopped, catching sorely needed breath and somewhat astounded at his own outburst.

  "What we have here, Mr. Rankin, might well be a matter of life and death."

  "It is a matter of life and death, m'lord. Theirs or ours. If we allow these people to go down to Lough Foyle and build fishing villages, we'll never get rid of them. They'll continue to breed like flies so that in ten years the lough will be played out, just like the land is played out now."

  MacAdam retraced the entire length of the library to the fourth of the trunks, which had remained locked, and he opened it, unfolding a large familiar map and spreading it on the desk. Lord Morris knew it instantly as a plot map of the confusing run dale leases of the Catholic tenants. It was different in that large areas had been shaded with a darker color.

  "The solution lies in a single word, the same as we've talked of for years," MacAdam said, "and the word is 'consolidation." If we can remove the tenants in these shaded areas it would mean immediate conversion of several thousand acres of poor cropland into rich pastureland, unburdened with mouths to feed except those of the cattle. No tithe wars, no risings, no rent collections, no moon shining no idolatry. Just pastureland and thousands upon thousands of head of cattle plumping up for a ready market in England."

  Without further word Lord Morris knew the rest of the trunk contained eviction orders requiring only his signature. His face saddened and he sank behind his desk. "What about those people?" he rasped, pointing to the trunk.