The Golden Ocean. Patrick O’Brian

it’s there is the evil side of racing. Did his Reverence never tell you how wicked it is to gamble? And do I not tell you it is foolish as well, and I the best judge of a horse in the County Galway, if not in the whole of Connaught, whatever Cormac O’Neil may say. No: it is a fine and laudable sight, the glorious creatures, and then there is the piping and the dancing; but the betting and the wickedness—there’s folly for you, and under his Reverence’s command there will be none of it; nor any truck with the thimble-riggers and the common coney-catchers. And while I have it in my mind I will warn you against the pick-pockets that swarm at the fair. You must keep your hands in your pockets, or they will certainly steal the teeth out of your head. Indeed, they may do so even then, for there was a man from Dungannon who had the wig snatched from his poll in the hurly-burly by the winning-post, and he holding his pockets with might and main; which I had from his aunt in Dungannon itself: so if you have any money or valuable thing upon you at all, give it to me and I will carry it in the purse, God shield us from harm. For you cannot conceive of their wickedness.’

      ‘God between us and evil,’ they said, and Peter handed him a thick cart-wheel of a crown piece which had been trundling round the family for several years, going from John to William to Sophia to Rachel to Dermot to Hugh to Laetitia; and Peter had it now from William, it being given to each on his birthday by the previous holder and kept for the next, a treasured possession, too valuable ever to spend yet giving a most agreeable feeling of wealth, rare in a country clergyman’s family; and Liam pulled up the purse by the string round his neck—the purse where the few hard-saved guineas for the journey lay warm and bright in their leather bag—and put the crown piece in. He looked at Sean, who avoided his eye, and then at Peter again. ‘There are your buckles,’ he said.

      ‘Faith, so there are,’ cried Peter, clapping his hand to his throat. ‘But come, Liam,’ he said, after a moment’s thought, ‘they’ll not be stealing the buckles off my shoes or my breeches, I’m sure, for they are only cut steel. But will I give you the one from my stock?’

      ‘A fig for the glass bauble: but your shoe-buckles look like silver almost, and you had best take them off. And the ones from your knees.’

      ‘Sure, Liam, I won’t. How can I go into Derrynacaol—which is like Nineveh that great city, no doubt, from all that you tell me—to meet Mr FitzGerald without a buckle at all?’

      ‘They will steal the ears off a rat.’

      ‘Well, they may steal the coat off my back, but I’ll not go into Derrynacaol naked for all that. And so I defy them, Liam.’

      ‘Prudence, Mr Peter, is—’ began Liam, but at this moment they reached the gentle top of the round green hill and there below them lay the green plain all open to the watery sun, and the shining river far below.

      ‘There it is,’ cried Liam, pointing away to a dark mass in the middle distance, where the haze of smoke drifted over the houses. ‘There’s Derrynacaol.’

      ‘That?’ asked Peter.

      ‘It’s a little small place, so it is,’ said Sean.

      ‘It’s a village, is it?’ cried Liam in a passion. ‘It’s a huddle of cabins, is it? A claddach, perhaps? Are there no eyes in your head to see the pompous great steeple and the elegant courthouse? Though it is true,’ he said more coolly, ‘that not much of it shows from here. But there, look now, on the other side of the river—do you see in the bow of the river?—that great round of green half the size of America. Well, that is the race-course alone!’

      ‘Is it, then?’ cried Peter, astonished.

      ‘It is, too,’ replied Liam, appeased, ‘and the best race-course in Heaven is scarcely more handsome or vast.’

      ‘Oh, it’s I’ll be there first,’ cried Sean, slipping down and starting to run.

      Sean was the best runner for twenty parishes—and it was said in Ballynasaggart that if he desired a change in his victuals he had but to run at full speed to catch a snipe in the one hand and a cock in the other—and he took a great start on them. He was quite out of view for a while, although they travelled on briskly: there were some people on the road now, which was a change after the bare and mountainy country, and they were all hurrying, pressing forward with their faces towards Derrynacaol; there were donkey-carts and horsemen and nearer the town many people on foot, but never a hint of Sean did they see until they were close to the very door of the inn. He had put on the shoes well outside the town, not to disgrace his company; but they were the family shoes of a numerous clan or sept whose members differed much in size, and although they increased Sean’s outward glory they added nothing to his comfort at all and the last half-mile had flayed the hide off his spirit as he minced along on tip-toe. Indeed he was so reduced that he was glad to hobble into the stable, and all the while Peter was changing he lay on a heap of straw with his feet in the air while a compassionate ostler from Tuam pumped a jet of cool water over them.

      This changing was Liam’s idea, and he insisted upon it although Peter was boiling to be at the fair. ‘It may very well be that you will meet with Mr FitzGerald,’ he said, ‘and you would not wish us all to be shamed with your old frieze coat: besides, there are the lords and the gentry from all the country and their ladies like peacocks for glory—it will never do to show like a scrub.’

      As he spoke he unpacked, spreading Peter’s best coat and polishing the buttons on his sleeve, breathing heavily to make them shine: so Peter made the best of it and when it was over he was glad he had done it, for not only was Liam’s satisfaction plain on his face—and it is always pleasant to please your own people—but for his own part he felt more confident and worldly: and indeed he was a creditable figure to come from an isolated parsonage at the remotest edge of the poorest diocese in the western world. His long-skirted blue coat (handed down from Cousin Spencer), his embroidered waistcoat and his buff breeches (William’s by rights, but pressed into his Majesty’s service for the occasion) were all the product of devoted cutting-down and needling and threading at home, but they looked quite as if they had come from a tailor’s hands; and his gay waistcoat, which represented seven months of loving toil on the part of Laetitia, was finer than any tailor could have produced, particularly as her affectionate zeal had carried the pattern as far as his shoulder-blades, whereas embroidery usually stops at one’s ribs. And as for his linen, that had been grown and retted and spun and woven and tented and bleached entirely at home, and Solomon had no finer linen than that of Ballynasaggart, nor finer lace (if Solomon ever wore lace, which is doubtful indeed) than that which came from the bobbins and pins of Pegeen Ban to hang in a spidery web at Peter’s throat and his wrists.

      ‘Your mother would be proud,’ said Liam, tying Peter’s hair in the black ribbon behind.

      ‘But fine clothes are a vanity,’ said Peter, looking with furtive approval into the glass.

      ‘Sure it’s the coat that makes the man,’ replied Liam, holding his head on one side. ‘Why you might be the son of a bishop, or at least of a dean. I’m glad now that I did not take the buckles away, so I am.’

      ‘Ah, the buckles,’ said Peter, putting his hand to his throat. ‘I wish you may not be right about the thieves at the fair.’

      ‘Pooh,’ said Liam, ‘they’ll not take that thing, for sure. Why will you wear it at all, the green glass?’ He peered at the kind of a buckle in Peter’s stock: it was there more by way of an ornament in his jabot than a thing of utility, and Liam thought it looked incorrect.

      ‘Mother Connell gave it me for a luck-bringer,’ said Peter, with an obstinate look.

      ‘The old dark creature,’ cried Liam. ‘She should be burnt on a faggot.’

      ‘She should not,’ cried Peter.

      ‘Yes she should,’ said Liam. ‘The witch.’

      Peter made no reply for the moment, while he thought about the old strange yellow-faced woman who lived in a desolate cabin beyond the round tower by the sea: in a curious way they were friends; sometimes he brought her fish from the sea,