A Close Run Thing (24 page)

Hervey looked more than a little surprised, but easily the master of Johnson’s pronunciation. ‘What, with a woman from the town?’

‘No,’ replied the groom as he continued brushing. ‘With that blackie in the band.’

‘Great heavens!’ said Hervey, abashed, ‘I had no idea that—’

‘And who do ye think the general is in these parts?’ added Johnson before Hervey could elaborate on the extent of his surprise.

‘I have no idea.’

‘General Slade!’

‘Oh!’ he groaned, before checking himself in front of a subordinate – and then quite forgetting himself. ‘Oh, that is very ill news indeed.’

They talked for an hour or more. But only when
Hervey
said that he must go to find lodgings in the city did Johnson remember that there were rooms ready for him in the mess – he had a key, and there was an invitation to dinner waiting there, too.

‘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 shell-fish 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 non-juror, 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 intention; for, as if this were indeed a Trinity College tutorial, he now embarked on a summing-up which, if not exactly the denouement Hervey had been anticipating, in its way began to explain why these three men might share – more or less amicably – a table. ‘You see, Mr Hervey, it is wholly illusive to regard the troubles here as unbridled religious animosity. To begin with, the label “Catholic” is as misleading as is “Protestant”.
Which
Catholics, ask yourself always – the Normans, the Old English, the later recusants or the native Celts? Nor would you expect me to own that
my
church is Protestant – at least, that is, it is not akin to those dissenters who take it upon themselves to claim that mantle. No, the troubles here are at heart a conflict between an often weak and corrupt land-owning class and a peasantry in, for the most part, abject poverty. Indeed, it is almost a tyranny. The guilt of the landlords’ coreligionists is largely by association only. I am tarred with the same brush as the worst rackrenter simply because my faith is the same as his, although I am ashamed that he should pretend to the same, for,
indeed
, my church was conceived in Catholicism – but that is another matter. And O’Begley here is likewise suspected by the Ascendancy because he shares the declaratory faith of the most murderous Whiteboy, though he, too, would be appalled to share the altar rail with such a wretch. Understand this, Mr Hervey, and you may begin to serve the king wisely – God bless him.’

So scholarly and humane a summary deserved – to Hervey’s mind – a respectful silence by return, but he felt a greater need to make some acknowledgement, to express some appreciation of the erudition. Prompt and unqualified endorsement he thought wanting in aptness, however, so there was indeed a respectful silence while the three worthy historians sipped their port, eyes elsewhere but on him. ‘One more thing, Dr Verey,’ he enquired, after several sips of his own. ‘This “rackrenting” – what is it precisely?’

The canon looked at the doctor, who began by shaking his head. ‘Put very simply, Mr Hervey, it is the greed of the landlords – absentees often enough – in stretching the rents to the utmost value of the land. The tenant has no margin therefore either to improve his smallholding or to insure for a year when crops fail. The tenancies are for the most part on short leases, too, and when they expire the landlord jacks up the rent again, knowing the wretched tenant will agree to anything to avoid eviction.’

‘The problem is not always directly with the landlord,’ added Nugent, aspiring less than enthusiastically
to
some balance. ‘Those not resident rely on agents, many of whom are short-termers and downright unscrupulous. Some of the tenancies are in truth sub-lettings, too, the middlemen taking the marginal yield.’

There was another moment’s pause, and then Dr Verey made a minor prophecy. ‘You will come across its worst effects soon enough, Mr Hervey: families by the roadside evicted without a thought for their well-being, either physical or spiritual. And there is no Speenhamland system here: they will starve without the private charity of their neighbours – who will be in no condition to assist them – or that of their church, which has nothing. They will not seek or accept ours for the most part, either. Your own namesake, Lord Hervey, bishop of Derry – a distant relative, I understand – was assiduous in arguing the Catholics’ case, and indeed used much of his own wealth to improve their condition. He is fondly remembered still in those parts, but even he was able to effect only the most modest relief.’

‘A
very
distant relative,’ confirmed Hervey.

And finally Dr O’Begley added his advice – and with just a suggestion of warmth, it seemed to Hervey. ‘You must read a novel called
Castle Rackrent
. You may know of it? It is full of truth. Indeed, it should be, since it recounts the events on the neighbouring estates to the author’s father in County Longford at the turn of the century: Miss Maria Edgeworth is the author – a quite remarkable work for so young a lady. She has written more lately, and still it is the same.’

‘I now seem to have a veritable
list
of lady novelists,’ replied Hervey ruefully as they rose to begin their leave-taking.

Pulling the oil-lamp at his bedside closer in order to begin reading
Castle Rackrent
, which Dr Verey had pressed on him as he had left that same evening, Hervey felt a sense of purpose that had been wanting since Toulouse, a deficiency made worse by the confusion of feelings that was his attachment for Henrietta Lindsay. He desired keenly to understand this place, a country he was already beginning to think might be as alien as Spain or France. But another book had been pressed on him, too (on leaving Horningsham), and he had made a promise to read it sooner rather than later. He put down Miss Edgeworth’s novel and picked up Miss Austen’s instead, trying to remember which passage Henrietta had urged on him – something about Meryton, chapter six or seven? He opened the red-leather volume and began to read, though with little enthusiasm. It seemed full of talk of getting a rich husband (and Styles was certainly
that
), and a good deal of London, of St James’s (where he had observed as much that was vacuous as fine), and of superior society and the like, but nothing that suggested any explanation of her remarks at the henge. He began chapter seven, now yawning and struggling hard to keep his eyes from closing: he had had little enough sleep during the crossing, and Miss Austen’s was not a voice that commanded them to remain open.