The next day William launched a diversionary attack across the Boyne not far from where he had been hit. He waited for James to move his main force that way, then crossed the river in force elsewhere. The first to mount this main attack were William's best and favorite soldiers, the Dutch Blue Guards. But they were followed closely by several companies of the King's Own Black Torrent Guards, a plum job that never would have been afforded them if they'd been under the command of Marlborough. De Zwolle had spent the winter plying his superiors with brandy and sending letters to London; that probably explained how Bob and his men were given such a splendid opportunity to have their heads hacked off in a bog. They crossed the Boyne, at any rate, and formed up on the south bank, and withstood several Jacobite cavalry charges. This was not an easy thing to do. They did it in direct view of King William, who had found a vantage point on the north bank from which to observe his beloved Blues.
The captain of Bob's company was killed very early and so Bob had to assume effective command of threescore men for the rest of the day. This had very little effect on anything. Whether or not their captain was alive, Bob's job was to get his men to believe that they really were safer standing together as a unit, as opposed to throwing their muskets down and diving into the river. Far be it from Bob to think about his company's or his regiment's reputation at Court.
If he had thought about it, he might have counseled his men to break and run instead.
That night the King came to their camp to tell them what fine fellows he thought they were. Now the Irish Army had simply vanished; the only evidence they'd been present at the Boyne was the thousands of pikes and muskets they had thrown down on the ground, the better to outrun their pursuers. King William's host had climbed up out of the river-valley and spread out across churned and trampled pastures between the hamlet of Donore and the village of Duleek—places that, like færies, were spoken of, by Irishmen, as if they really existed, but that could not actually be seen. As they went they harvested the dropped weapons, hugging bristly faggots of them to their chests and finally letting them drop in clanking heaps when they decided to set up camp.
As their baggage had not caught up with them, they spent the night in the open, and as there were no trees hereabouts they used the captured weapons for firewood. They were not worth keeping as weapons—a fact that was obvious to Bob, but tended to be ignored by those who espoused the view that the Irish had thrown them down out of cowardice. Bob found flintlocks without flint, muskets with cracked barrels, pikes that could be snapped over the knee.
A few hours after nightfall, anyway, they received their King. He had suffered an asthma attack while fording the river and was still wheezing piteously—which evidently hurt, because of the cannonball injury—so he tended to speak in very short sentences. He was sitting askew on a tired horse. He spoke in Dutch to de Zwolle and then in English to the company captains and to Bob. He did not look at them, however; he was very close to falling asleep in the saddle, and could not tear his eyes away from the musket-bonfires.
What he said was that, with regiments such as his own Black Torrent Guards, he could not only take Ireland but Flanders, too, and fight all the way to Paris.
Bob stayed up late gazing into the fire, which was slowly devolving into a red tangle of melted gun-barrels, and pondered some of the longer-term implications of the King's statement. Overall, the notion was somewhat troubling. On the other hand, an invasion of France might afford him an opportunity to seek out Miss Abigail Frome.
The next day they left the field pimpled with smoking twists of blackened iron and marched south to Dublin. James Stuart had already run off to France. Protestants were running wild, looting Catholic homes. Bob ventured into a certain quarter where Protestants were more apt to behave themselves, if indeed they went there at all. He found Teague Partry sitting on a stoop smoking a clay pipe and gravely observing the bums of passing milk-maids, as if nothing much had happened recently. But the right side of his face was flushed red, as if sunburnt, and pocked with recent wounds that all appeared to have radiated from a common center.
Teague bought him a mug of beer (it being Teague's turn to do this) and explained to him that James's foreign cavalry regiments had panicked first and, finding their escape route blocked by the Irish infantry, had opened fire on them to clear the way. He put it to Bob that Irishmen had it in them to fight effectively when they were not being massacred by Continental cavaliers who were supposed to be on their side, and (pointing significantly to his face) when they were provided with guns that projected musket-balls instead of blowing up in their faces. Bob agreed that it was so.
Later the bulk of William's army marched west across the island, out of Leinster and into the southern realm of Munster. They laid siege to Limerick, which was one of the few places in Ireland that had proper fortifications, and could serve as the venue for a proper military engagement. Unfortunately, the Irish had little use for proper military engagements. William's Dutch cannons blasted a hole in the city wall; Bob rushed in at the head of his company and got conked in the head by a bottle hurled at him from the top of a ruin by a massive hag in a wimple, screaming something at him in Gaelic. Bob, who knew nothing about his father, or his mother's father, had long been preoccupied by the suspicion that he might be partly, or even largely, Irish, and while he lay unconscious on the rubble of the shattered wall of Limerick, he had a strange dream concerning the nun who had thrown the bottle—the import of it was that she was his great-aunt or something, scolding him for everything bad he had ever done.
His skull was merely dented, but his scalp was nearly taken off, and had to be sewed back on by a barber-surgeon who advised him to grow his hair back again as soon as he could; "And for god's sake get a wife before you go bald, or women and children will run away from you screaming!" He was only trying to be cheerful, but Bob growled at him that he had already found his true love, and that scars on his pate were the least of his concerns.
The Earl of Marlborough finally got leave from the distracted King to sail across to Munster. He took the cities of Cork and Kinsale, but he did it without the help of his Black Torrent Guards. Then he went home to spent a comfortable winter in London while Bob and the regiment remained encamped outside of Limerick, fending off occasional sorties by the Irish cavalry, and keeping up a running, sporadic battle with bands of armed peasants who styled themselves "rapparees."
The rapparees actually did have firearms that worked, and had learned to strip them down into their parts in seconds. The locks they kept in their pockets, the barrels they corked shut and hid in sloughs or streams, the stocks they thrust into wood-piles, or anywhere else a bare stick might go unnoticed. So what appeared to be a crew of half-naked peat-cutters or a congregation strolling to Mass could scatter into the waste at a word or a gesture, and reconstitute itself an hour later as a band of heavily armed marauders.
Because of the rapparees there were few places on the island, outside of Ulster, where Englishmen could feel safe in groups of less than an infantry company. But one of those places was the south bank of the river Shannon just downstream of Limerick. As the winter eased, and the hair grew back over his wound, Bob began to go there by himself and sit under a solitary tree overlooking the river and smoke his pipe and brood. The reading of books was not available to him. He'd lost his interest in whoring. He had heard his men's stories, jokes, and songs so many times he could not suffer them any more. Drink made him feel poorly, and card-playing was pointless. He suffered, in other words, from a want of things that he could do to pass the time.
So he sat under his brooding-tree and gazed across the wide river Shannon. Like all the other rivers of the British Isles, it had a long estuary leading in from the sea to a port (Limerick in this case) that had been built where the river first became narrow enough to be bridged. The Shannon was the boundary between Munster and Connaught, and so by looking across it Bob could gaze into that land of legend so highly spoken of by the Partrys. From here Connaught looked like the rest of Ireland. But what did he know?