Neil Jordan - Ballad of Lord Edward

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

DUBLIN

Dedication

for BJR
who made me do it

The Croppy Boy

So I go back there, and its a year or so after. I have myself snuck aboard the packet by one of the United Men. Amongst the horses, since that was always my job. When the light begins creeping through the grating above, I take a chance and join those clattering heels on deck.

So I see the city again, in the bottle-green glow that always seems to surround it on this rolling approach. The cathedral of masts around the quays, the pale shape of the mountains above them, like a mother, asleep.

The way my own mother slept; I remember. But memory can lie, like any informer.

Why am I here? Im owed money, its true. I want to walk those streets again, also true. But most of all I want to find out who played the Judas to my dead Lieutenant.

The ballast wall is almost finished, beyond the Pigeon House. I take a walk along it, towards Irishtown, Ringsend and the sleeping city.

And when I reach the old familiar places, I realize they have finally decided what he was. A hero, not a fool. A lord, of course. A mystery, a phantom, a figure from a story book thats not been written yet. Ballads sung in dram shops about him, and printed in garlands and chapbooks to be sold in the tanneries, the horse and bully markets. Telling stories of the pitch caps and the rivers of blood and of Vinegar Hill some mountain in Wexford.

Im not sure I like them. I always preferred the gaol bird ones myself: The Kilmainham Minnit, Luke Caffreys Ghost. The Night Afore Larry Was Stretched.

But my Lieutenant died before he was stretched. Of a pistol ball in the stomach, in a cell in Newgate.

I wonder if, like poor Larry, they waked him in clover when they sent him to take a ground sweat.

Im owed money, but with little hope of it. I get in touch with Lawlor, who did the family payments. Lawlor tells me they have scattered like the Wild Geese, they have gone to warmer climes, and that I could chase them for what was owed. If I could find them.

Then I think the grave is worth a visit.

He puts me in touch with McNally, who had the honour to be one of the coffin bearers. Though how he bore it with that leg of his, I find hard to imagine. He has the same stick and theres something comforting about the tapping it makes on the old cobblestones. We walk to Werburgh Street together and push open the door of the empty church and he shows me the vault beneath the chancel where the coffin was laid.

His breath makes strange wraithlike shapes in the cold church air. Hes anxious to go since word was out for anyone associated. Anxiety, everywhere. Its hard to know what would be worse, the croppys revenge or the Kings.

I tell him he can leave.

Its musty in here and lonesome but not as lonesome as in the streets around Soho or the fields in Carolina when I first went on the run.

Then I stand there for what seems eternity and my only company is that ghostly breath that dies when I inhale again.

I remember many things. When my Lieutenant Lord became a citizen and gave away his title, in that room in Paris. When I cut his hair, in the croppy way.

And I suppose I wonder what gives me the right to tell his story. To sing his song. Nothing but what weve seen together. The albatross plunging into the Atlantic, the lace handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of a dead king, hangings in Charleston and Dublin and whippings in Carolina and Kildare. Weve seen Harlequin Friday on the stage at Drury Lane, Dasher Daly as Macheath in Crow Street.

And then I ask myself, who gave Richard Brinsley Sheridan the right to tell the tale of Orezembo?

And the ballad, I realize, will need a title page.

So I take a broken piece of nail from the floor and scrape on the slate covering of what they had told me was the coffin.

LEF

And thats when I know his ballad will be mine too.

FIRST VERSE

Eutaw Forest

I met a fool in the forest. Id later hear him say those words from the regimental stage in Gibraltar and hope that he didnt mean me. That forest was made of potted rubber and banana plants.