A Close Run Thing

Caithlin looked away. Father O’Gavan’s face went red with anger, and Hervey’s sabre flashed from its scabbard, the point reaching the man’s throat in an instant.

‘For God’s sake, man, take that sword away,’ he gasped, the colour draining from his florid face with the speed that Hervey’s sabre had reached it. His accomplice’s horse nearly threw its rider in the commotion, giving him a convenient pretext not to intervene.

‘You will apologize to this lady for that slur, and to the father here for saying as much in front of him.’

The apologies came at once, though the man almost choked on the words. Hervey shouldered his sabre, and the two galloped out of the village with the vilest threats and curses.

‘I do not like violence, Mr Hervey, but heaven knows it is a fine tool in good hands,’ said the priest.

Caithlin looked him full in the eye. ‘:I thank you, sir; he and his like consider they have rights over any village girl.’

‘You have come on a sad day, to say the very least,’ added the priest. ‘Mother O’Long in there’ — indicating the cottage from which they had just emerged — ‘hasn’t but a few hours for this world, and those two have been serving eviction notices on the village — and this a village of English tenants, too! The man you berated was the agent — Fitzgerald.’

Hervey dismounted. ‘English tenants? I do not understand, Father.’

‘Oh, it is an expression we have. It means the tenants pay their rents on the day they are due — as they do in England, do they not? On some estates there are arrears and duty work and Lord knows what else besides. But this is a regular English village, and the agent has no right to serve notice in that way.’

‘In which case, Father, why does the landlord want to evict?’

‘You would have to go to London to ask him that, I think,’ said Caithlin with a rare note of resentment. ‘His agent — the man you all but sabred,’ she continued, though with less edge, ‘has had the notion for years that this valley would be more profitable if the cottages were cleared and sheep run over it.’

‘Sheep?’ replied Hervey incredulously. ‘But there are farmers in England selling their sheep for all they are worth, anticipating that wool prices will fall now that peace has come. Clearing this valley for sheep is no economy whatever.’

‘I’m sure it’s no better in God’s eyes, either, Mr Hervey,’ added Father O’Gavan, ‘but the landlord seems set on “improvement” and that is that. When the tenancies run out there is nothing in law to stop him.’

‘How long is your father’s tenancy, Caithlin?’ Hervey asked.

‘Twelve months, the same as everyone else’s here. It expires in the new year.’

* * *

It will be so much the harder when you have to draw your sword. Stay detached … All the way back to Cork, Lankester’s words troubled him. He had drawn his sword sooner than he had imagined, and against an agent of the Ascendancy rather than a malcontent. It might have been well if Lankester had been at hand when he reached the barracks, but he was not, and Edmonds’s was instead a counsel of equivocation. The major echoed the captain’s warning, but in terms which expressed little but contempt for the likes of the Kilcrea agent. And, more, he appeared to encourage Hervey to maintain his links with the O’Mahoneys: they needed early intelligence of unrest. And so it was that, in the early hours of the following morning, having lain awake since turning in after watch-setting, there occurred to Hervey a prudent alternative to strife at Kilcrea. He would write to the landlord in England, stating baldly his doubts as to the agent’s integrity, the dubious economy of running sheep, and the benefits, as they had been explained by Dr O’Begley, of bigger smallholdings on longer tenancy agreements.

The letter took him a full two hours to compose, and he sent it the next morning without reference to Edmonds. Nor, indeed, to anyone: soldier he might be, but that did not, in his estimation, preclude his expressing a view on matters other than soldiering. Indeed, had not that been Dr Verey’s premiss, that the need for military aid to the civil power might be obviated by a better understanding of the country?

A month passed without his venturing south or west of the city, for the Tallow troop was hard-pressed mounting smuggler-patrols around Youghal, and Hervey’s troop had been sent to assist them. It had been a relief in one respect; for, having sent the letter, there was little that would be served by his presence in Kilcrea. It had been a profitable relief, too, for the troop had won a Revenue bounty for apprehending, alive, six Bretons and taking their luggerful of Calvados, though one or two casks had been unaccountably written off in the process. But, if there had been nothing to be directly served by his visiting Kilcrea, he found himself nevertheless strangely fretful for want of the company of both Father O’Gavan and Caithlin, and the books which he had asked John Keble to send for her — a lexicon, Chapman’s Homer and a Greek New Testament — lay unopened in his room in Cork’s barracks.

With the arrival at Youghal of additional Excise men, the troop returned to Cork on the eve of the anniversary of Trafalgar in the expectation of celebrating that providential victory the next day, but Edmonds warned them instead to be ready at six the following morning to ride to Ballinhassig to assist the Bench in serving writs.

‘In heaven’s name, sir,’ Hervey protested, ‘writs on whom? And why the whole troop?’

‘Because a troop is what the justices have requested, and since the chairman of the bench of magistrates hereabouts is on close acquaintance with General Slade, so he informs me, I see no reason to demur. Stand down whom you please, but not fewer than fifty men to Ballinhassig.’

‘Whom are the writs to be served on?’

‘I do not know and I do not care. And nor should you. With luck they will be served on idle beggars who’d sooner shoot as look at you. In all probability, though, they’ll be served on decent God-fearing souls who are in some evil rent-trap; but there is nothing that you or I can do about it, and it will be as well that you start out there tomorrow morning thinking thus! This is not the time for walking Spanish, Matthew!’

Later that evening Hervey sat alone in his room. There was no certainty that the evictions would touch on any at Kilcrea: indeed (as he understood it), Kilcrea was under the jurisdiction of Ballincollig. But the possibility was enough to disquiet him, and there was not a soul in whom he might confide his misgivings. Edmonds had said his piece, there was not another officer of the Sixth within forty miles, and even Canon Verey was away in Dublin. He might with advantage have engaged the wisdom of Serjeant Strange, but his principles would not permit him to unburden himself on the very man in whom he would have to place so much trust the next day. And as for Armstrong … But at least he might engage himself in some purposeful activity. So, in the absence of any troop officers, he passed his instructions direct to Strange (again acting as troop serjeant-major): ‘Muster in marching order at five forty-five, then,’ were his last words at evening stables before retiring to his rooms to write to Horningsham and to Oxford.

By the time he began putting pen to paper, his uncertainties had become a ghastly premonition. If not Kilcrea, then it would be somewhere — somewhere that conscience and duty would confront each other. Or, rather, duty would confront duty, for which might be the truer duty — to the civil power, or to simple justice? (He knew well enough that justice was not always the same as the law.) How might he neatly render unto Caesar?

To John Keble he wrote his thoughts, freely and without reserve. To Elizabeth he penned but a precis of the difficulties — in the abstract — which the military faced in aid of the civil power. And to Henrietta he wrote of the country and the people, a letter which, to his mind, would tell nothing of his turmoil, though to a reader of her percipience the intensity of his prose could tell nothing other.

When at length he finished the letters, near to midnight, he found that, though his limbs were weary, his mind raced, and the notion of retiring to bed was impossible. And so he took Castle Rackrent from his writing-desk, where it had lain unopened since he had brought it from Canon Verey’s, and turned to its preface. He began reading with no great enthusiasm, hoping merely for some distraction from his concerns for the morrow, but in this respect it was a lamentable choice. ‘To those who are totally unacquainted with Ireland, the following Memoirs will perhaps be scarcely intelligible, or probably they may appear perfectly incredible,’ he read, and he wondered how acquainted with Ireland he had a right to claim. ‘When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency on … her former existence.’ He read it a second time, scarcely believing what he had read the first. But that was indeed what it said. Now, Miss Edgeworth, he would be the first to own, possessed an immeasurably greater acquaintance with the country than did he, but ‘good-humoured complacency’? In the circumstances it seemed a most singular proposition. He put down the book with a sigh: perhaps it was to be, as the author warned, scarcely