The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan Page A

Tim, I’m sorry. I am fair beside myself.” He rubbed the palm of his hand across his eyes. “I was counting on those cattle for the market. I don’t know what I will do now at all.”
    “No offence taken, Sam. ’Tis a sore business.” He sipped at the scalding tea, and added sugar.
    “And now, Sam,” Kate said. “What do you intend to do?”
    “I have about a fifth of the land marked out for pasturage, and ’tis the only way. The both of you know that. And I won’t be the last landlord to do it here, only I had the bad luck to be the first.”
    “You might better have waited, then,” Kate said. “Until you had some company.”
    “Wait wasn’t in it, Kate, the sore way we are in. This bitch of a barony wasn’t built for farming. It is land for cattle.”
    The room was too small for the furniture which had been crowded in, a broad expanse of mahogany table, heavy chairs with wide arms and high, tapestried backs, a sideboard of olive wood. Two smoke-darkened portraits faced each other across the table.
    “You can’t leave it this way,” she said. “With a Whiteboy threat hanging over you if you move.”
    “And those Dublin leeches fastened onto my arse. Do you not think I know that?”
    Across the hall, in the small office, paper bulged from his desk, lay scattered across the table. How could a man have this much land, and yet be so poor? True enough, the land was heavily mortgaged when his father died, and there was no turning back from the road of heavy mortgages. But the road had seemed pleasant once, seven or eight years ago. Those had been good years, after his father’s death and before he married. Liberty Hall, you might as well have called Mount Pleasant, but without extravagance, all considered. Not a rakehelly young man of the barony but had his welcome, and not all of them Protestants by any means, he was no bigot. The two Routledges had their welcome and Tom Bellew and Corny O’Dowd, the old Catholic stock, good mounts for the chase. There were still marks on the hall floor from the time Corny O’Dowd had ridden up and through the door. All that was over now, with black hatred building up again between the creeds.
    “You must stop them now,” Kate said.
    He spilled his tea. “You are as bad as the rest of them. Didn’t my own father tell me that marrying a Papist was like building your house upon mud?” He shifted in his seat. “What in hell was the need to marry you at all, is the question I ask myself every night I can’t sleep.” When they had children, she would be teaching them their beads when he wasn’t watching; it always went that way in this kind of marriage.
    “Then you cannot have often to ask the question.”
    “Well, ma’am,” Fogarty said, “with my best thanks for the tea.”
    “You will sit where you have been bid to sit,” Kate said, “and you will leave when you have been excused.” She leaned towards her husband. “You married this particular Papist because you were besotted by the pleasures of the bed, and you knew a bargain when you saw one.”
    Cooper drew in his breath to answer, but then expelled it. “By God, you are right, Kate. A damned good bargain it was. But I can’t let your bloody Papists—”
    “ My bloody Papists, are they? Do you think that Thomas Treacy would be safe, or George Moore? If Whiteboys are left unpunished, not a landlord will be safe against them.” She rested her hand on the table. “Haven’t you enough sense to puzzle things out? You have a handful of men frightened they will be turned out and maybe some ramblers with no business but mischief. And barring you find yourself an informer you will never find out who they are, not until half the men in the barony have taken the oath, and for you that will be too late. You heard no whispers of this, did you, Tim?”
    “I did not, ma’am. When we turned out Squint O’Malley and flattened the cabin, there was a crowd of them standing in the road to make their moans, but