A Close Run Thing

‘From whom?’

‘Som’dy from t’cathedral,’ Johnson replied with a shrug.

And Canon Verey’s invitation to dine the instant he arrived in Cork was curiously insistent: Hervey would have found it hard to ignore even had he other duties to attend to. Johnson was therefore dispatched with a note announcing his officer’s arrival and intention to join him for dinner at six that evening, an hour that seemed a reasonable compromise between the older and newer fashions, in the absence of information as to which prevailed in Cork.

The canonry was a more modest establishment than Hervey had expected. It was a fine enough house, in a new terrace in Dean’s Yard, but small by comparison with one in an English close. Canon Verey himself was a tall, spare and somewhat austere-looking man in his fifties, a Hebrew scholar and a bachelor. Hervey knew of the scholarship from John Keble but guessed his celibacy within minutes of entering the house, for its walls were lined with books in an entirely haphazard manner and lacked any sign of a feminine hand, either present or past.

There were two other guests. One was about the same age as the canon, though shorter, bald, a little round, with a ready smile and a Dublin accent — which Hervey recognized from having heard so much of it in the Peninsular army. This Dublin man was the chapter clerk, a Trinity College attorney called Nugent. The second guest was altogether less genial. Perhaps a little younger, small-framed and with a full head of black hair, he gave Hervey a searching look as they shook hands. ‘Dr O’Begley, here, is my physician, when he is not at his infirmary,’ Canon Verey explained.

Proceedings before dinner were uncommonly brisk. They drank but one glass of sherry apiece (giving, thereby, the lie to Hervey’s notion that Ireland would put even his own mess to the test), and then dinner was announced by the same maid who had answered the door. This same girl then served them dinner itself, which began with a cold, but palatable, soup of shellfish and potato. Scarcely had Hervey lifted his spoon, however, but that Dr Verey began the serious business of the evening: ‘Mr Keble writes that you are a thinking soldier, Mr Hervey.’

‘I hope I am that, sir, but it is nothing remarkable.’

‘A thinking soldier nothing remarkable, Mr Hervey?’ enquired Dr O’Begley, with the faint suggestion of a challenge in his tone.

‘I saw many in the Peninsula,’ said Hervey cautiously.

‘Then, that is where they have all been!’ replied the physician drily.

‘You must not mind Dr O’Begley,’ said Nugent with a smile. ‘He has nothing against soldiers as such, just English ones! And, indeed, they do not even have to be soldiers!’

‘Mr Hervey,’ continued Canon Verey, feigning not to notice the exchanges, ‘my purpose in inviting you here is to explain something of the complexities of this country. You are a junior officer, of that I am aware, but even one officer who understands something of the country will be a beginning; and it may be that you will be minded to pass on some of that understanding to your fellow officers. ‘I have little enough opportunity to do so. Indeed, I would not in the ordinary course of events have made your acquaintance, other than after morning prayer on a Sunday perhaps. The garrison keeps itself very much to itself, except for the hunting field. Mr Keble’s introduction is therefore most felicitous.’

Hervey felt disinclined to take offence. He had somehow expected to be preached at this evening, and Dr Verey’s manner, though grave, fell well short of being sanctimonious. In any case, the notion of discovering something of the country other than the received prejudices of the Ascendancy engaged him not a little. But therein lay an assumption surely. For was not Dr Verey the apotheosis of that Ascendancy, the sub-dean of a cathedral of its alien church? Might this evening not be, in spite of John Keble’s best intentions, no more than a protracted sermon to its greater glory? He sighed inwardly, resigned to the ordeal. But to what purpose might these other strange birds be present?

‘Even after so many years in this country I have an incomplete understanding,’ Dr Verey explained. ‘Nugent here is a formidable historian, a Trinity College man. O’Begley is, too — or, rather, he is a formidable historian but not a Trinity College man.’

‘No, indeed I am not a Trinity College man, Mr Hervey,’ began the doctor testily, ‘though that is neither by my own choice nor through any insufficiency of learning, merely by chance of religion.’

‘Chance of persuasion, Doctor — we are all of one religion surely.’

‘Persuasion it is, then, Canon,’ he replied briskly.

‘Indeed, I would go further and say that we are all of one faith.’

‘Canon, this is not the night for divinity, if you please.’ O’Begley was becoming impatient, and Dr Verey bowed. ‘The Penal Laws, Mr Hervey,’ he continued. ‘They are ameliorated but not gone — as ye surely know — and they were a damned sight more severe in my youth. It was America or France to study my medicine: a Catholic was denied such learning here. And when came I home, for mercy’s sake, I might not, under penalty of said laws, own a horse worth more than five pounds! Can you credit that, Mr Hervey? Catholics were not allowed to own a horse worth more than five pounds! You are a cavalryman; that ought to amuse you!’

Hervey tried to imagine the military necessity of such a limitation, but could not conceive of any that might be represented to the doctor with any credibility. ‘We had Catholic officers in the army in Spain,’ he tried.

‘Any senior ones?’ rasped O’Begley.

Justification of the Penal Laws was the least of his concerns, however, for it suddenly occurred to him that Canon Verey might be no more a loyal instrument of the Ascendancy than was his irascible guest. And if the sub- dean of Cork were some kind of latter-day nonjuror, then it might be less an evening of tedium and rather more of sedition.

He need not have worried. Canon Verey followed Dr O’Begley’s intemperance with an uncontentious chronology of the Norman and earlier English settlements, most of which was, in any case, vaguely familiar from his Shrewsbury days. But then came Cromwell to the story, and Nugent and O’Begley began to relate, alternately, what Hervey had never before heard referred to as ‘the War of the Two Kings’. The canon’s method, as well as his purpose, was now clear: O’Begley was to be the champion of the Catholic explication, and Nugent of the other. Yet he guessed, from the ease at which these three men were in each other’s company, that there would at some stage of the evening be a reconciliation of opposing views, a denouement to which he might therefore look forward keenly, though he would listen intently meanwhile to the unfolding of the history.

A large salmon, which Dr Verey was proud to reveal he had himself netted the day before on the Kenmare, came and went during the recounting of the War of the Two Kings, as did some fine hock. By the time the narrative reached the battle of the Boyne — the only occasion on which, it seemed, the two kings actually confronted each other in the field — the chapter clerk and the physician had thoroughly warmed to their subject.

Hervey had begun a tally of the grievances as soon as it had become apparent that such listings were to be made. O’Begley’s list included the Ulster plantation, Cromwell’s sack of Drogheda and Wexford, the forcible transportations to Connacht, and the martyrdom of Oliver Plunket. Nugent’s was equally compelling, the 1641 massacre in Ulster, and Tyrconnel’s confiscations of 1687, seemingly every bit as bloody and incomprehensible. But, in respect of the crucial question of where loyalties lay now, Hervey had received no answer nor yet could he suppose there might be one in the face of this welter of contradictory evidence.

A mutton pudding had also come and gone, and some good burgundy. Candles had been lit, then new ones brought in, and the maid had been dismissed for the night. The house martins had long since gone to their nests in the eaves, and only owls and bats made any intrusion on the conversation. Canon Verey now raised the question of loyalty which remained. ‘The question is: was Ireland loyal during the late war with France?’ he insisted.

He did not address it directly to the doctor, however. Rather he offered it as might a don to his seminar. Again, Hervey thought it had the ring of well-rehearsed disputation, for O’Begley did not immediately respond, leaving Nugent to speak to it first.

‘Have you heard of Wolfe Tone and the Society of United Irishmen, Mr Hervey?’

‘Imperfectly,’ was his prudent and honest reply.

‘Well, permit me to remind you …’

And Hervey was indeed reminded — and at length — of the strange, convoluted history of that nationalist rebellion. But the account was ultimately more perplexing than enlightening. Such, it seemed, was the canon’s