Dark Rosaleen by OBE Michael Nicholson Read Free Book Online

could do nothing. I even saw them breaking up sea shells to eat.
    I cannot believe what I saw, even now, all these days on. I can smell their diseased bodies, I can hear their babies croaking like wizened old women. The dying wander among the dead. These people have not eaten properly in five months. I stood and prayed for them as I pray now.
    God help them and do not blame us for all that is happening.
    And pray for me dear Kate.

    John

CHAPTER FOUR
    Moran the butler was a quiet man. Many thought him wise. For half a century he had served in the houses of some of Ireland’s oldest families and his loyalty and attention to his responsibilities were considered impeccable. In the drawing rooms and at the dining tables of the rich and powerful he had listened to them talk of Ireland’s perpetual calamities and knew by heart all their random, brutal remedies. Yet he had stood as still as a statue, awaiting the beckoned call or the snap of a finger, an obedient, discrete and utterly trustworthy servant, seemingly deaf to it all.
    He had been born into service. His mother was a scullery maid to Lord Bessborough, his father was His Lordship’s senior groom. From the cradle Moran had known only his mother’s warmth and love. He was a stranger to the pangs of an empty stomach. As he grew older, he knew little of the world outside the estates. He would listen to the kitchen staff tell of the hunger among the poor but, hearing the contrary from his employers, preferred to believe them. To him, kitchen talk was grossly exaggerated gossip and he reminded the storytellers that among the Irish there was considerable verbal licence. He seemed to care nothing for his country’s ills. Until the day the English hanged the son of his sister, his only nephew, Liam.
    The boy had been a month short of his nineteenth birthday, an innocent in Ireland’s mayhem. He was a simple boy who snared hares for a living, content to pass the time of day with anyone who offered a smile. But he shared a cottage with men who lived very differently, men who lived violently, men prepared to kill for a living. In time they were caught and sentenced to hang and Liam was sentenced with them.
    Outside the walls of Dublin’s Newgate Prison, Moran watched the three climb the steps to the scaffold, the killers shouting their defiance, kicking the air until their last breath. He saw the noose tighten around Liam’s neck, the boy with the guiltless face who was asking why, even as the death hatch opened. And without an answer, dropped to oblivion.
    They would not let Moran bury him in the family grave. The boy’s body was taken back inside the prison walls and flung into a pit of lime with the other two. A month later his mother died of grief and since that day the quiet butler lived only to avenge her. Now he worked for another master within Sir William’s household. As ever, he stood silent and respectful in the hub of government activity where many confidences were freely available and many secrets unguardedly revealed. Now he was the prime source of information for men who were not England’s friends. He knew the risks he was expected to take on their behalf and the penalty of being discovered. But he was unfamiliar with the ways of a man long skilled in the black art and this was his undoing.

    Greville Martineau believed that the world surrounding him was so threatening, so evil, his Church could only be made safe by using the weapons of evil and the strategies of evil men. He believed that Church to be so precious that, like truth itself, it must be protected by a cordon of cunning, lies and deceit.
    When Captain Shelley had left for Skibbereen with his wagons of food, Martineau sent one of his trusted spies with him, under the guise of a wagon master. In time the man reported back all the captain did and said. He made mention of the young man’s distress, his anger at the land agents for demanding rent from paupers, at the corn merchants for profiting