The Princes of Ireland

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “They might be as happy as we are,” said his wife sweetly, as if answering his thoughts.

  Would Tidy really find the warmth, the tenderness, the generosity of spirit that he had known? Children, relations, friends, and now even this glum young fellow and his silly girl—his wife drew them all into the circle of kindness that she had made of their home. He shook his head and laughed.

  “You are involved in this, too, you know.” He gave his wife’s shoulder a little squeeze. “Cecily Baker must be made to understand that she may never repeat her behaviour. She must be a model citizen. If she transgresses again,” he gave his wife a hard look, “it would hurt my reputation and my ability to help my own family. So please be certain that she means to reform.” He turned to Tidy. “I can’t promise you anything, but I’ll speak for you.” And now he gave the young man an even sterner look. “If you marry this girl, be sure you can keep her in order. Or I shall cease to be your friend.”

  Tidy promised gratefully that he would do so; and kindly Dame Doyle went in person to see Cecily the very next day.

  Spring passed uneventfully for the Walsh family. It was during the summer that Margaret noticed that her husband was worried.

  One reason for this was obvious. The spring weather had been fine enough, but the summer had turned into a disaster. Cloudy days, cold winds, drizzle; she couldn’t remember a worse summer; and it was already clear that the harvest would be ruined. Everyone looked gloomy. It would be a poor year for the Walsh estate.

  It was during July that she guessed there was something else on his mind. She could always tell when he was worried: he had a little trick of locking his fingers together and staring down at them. But she knew it was best to wait for him to tell her about it, and about a week before the festival of Lughnasa, he did so.

  “I’ve to go down into Munster shortly,” he announced.

  The request that he would undertake the legal affairs of a monastery down in Munster had come as a welcome surprise a few months earlier. The fees would cover the shortfall from the bad harvest, and Walsh had been busy with the monastery’s affairs in Dublin in recent weeks. He had reached the point now, he explained, where he needed to spend a little time down at the monastery itself.

  “You think I won’t be able to manage while you’re away?” she asked, teasingly.

  “Not at all.” He smiled ruefully. “I expect you’ll be glad to have me out of the house for a while.” He paused. “But I don’t want you to say where I’m going.”

  “I’m not to say you’re down in Munster?”

  “It might be misunderstood.”

  “And why,” she asked, “is that?”

  William Walsh was a careful observer of the political scene. He was still hoping to get a seat in Parliament; but the last seven years had not been an easy time to become involved in politics.

  Superficially, the situation in Ireland looked the same as usual. The king was far away; the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds were still rivals for power, and the Fitzgeralds, as always, were the stronger. But there was one subtle difference.

  Walsh had remembered the story Doyle had told about King Henry when they met at Maynooth, and the warning it contained. It had been only a year afterwards that something of Henry’s character had been exhibited when Kildare and his royal friend had had a falling out. The cause had been a complex legal matter concerning the Butler inheritance: Henry had taken one view; Kildare, in Ireland, had flatly contradicted him. And soon afterwards, Kildare had been called by Henry to England, and a great English nobleman was sent to govern Ireland in his place. Walsh had been quietly cultivating his relationship with Doyle ever since their friendly exchange at Maynooth, and it was during one of their conversations in Dublin that the alderman had enlarged on the theme he had discussed before.

  “You have to understand,” he remarked, “that underneath all the royal splendour, Henry is like a spoilt child. No one has ever told him: no. If he wants something, he thinks he should have it. Thanks to the huge fortune his father’s loyal councillors left him, he’s been able to build new palaces and engage in some foolish expeditions on the Continent. All in search of glory. He’ll soon empty his treasury. His father had to bend with the wind—he forgave Kildare over the Simnel business, and let him govern Ireland because nobody else could. The father was pragmatic; the son is vain. And if Kildare contradicts him or makes a fool of him, he can’t stand it. His friendship, as I’ve already told you, is worth nothing.”

  Yet while Walsh suspected that the alderman was probably right, he also believed that the Fitzgeralds would continue to get their way; and events seemed to bear this out. After little more than a year, the great English nobleman had begged to be recalled. “You’d need a huge army and a ten-year campaign to bring English order to this island,” he told the king. “You’re better off leaving it to Kildare.” Henry didn’t give up so easily. He put Butler in charge. But as usual, the Fitzgeralds soon made it impossible for the Butlers to govern. There were numerous incidents. One of the Talbots, a good friend to the Butlers, was even murdered by Kildare’s own brother. There was nothing for it: last year Kildare had been sent back to govern Ireland—on condition that he cooperate with the Butlers in the administration. Of course, it was all done in the best face-saving manner. Henry clasped him to his chest; the two men swore eternal loyalty and friendship. Henry even gave his friend one of his own cousins as an English bride. But his eyes were not smiling. And for their part, the Fitzgeralds were not deceived. “He’d like to destroy us, but he can’t,” they concluded. They weren’t alarmed. They’d been surviving English kings for generations.

  To William Walsh, it seemed that his loyalty to the house of Kildare was likely to work to his benefit now. Indeed, the chance of a parliamentary vacancy had recently arisen and he had hopes that, with Fitzgerald support and the goodwill of a number of important men in Dublin, including Doyle, he might well find himself in Parliament shortly. But one still had to be careful. Very careful. And never more so than at present. For the latest rumours he had heard in Dublin frightened him, and with good reason. They concerned Munster.

  When reports from spies, that the Fitzgeralds were sending envoys to his enemies, had begun to filter through to the royal council in England, King Henry at first could scarcely believe it. “What the devil,” he wanted to know, “are these damnable Fitzgeralds up to now? It looks to me,” he added ominously, “like treason.”

  In fact it was the other great Fitzgerald lord, Kildare’s kinsman the Earl of Desmond, down in Munster, who had sent the envoys to the King of France; and it was not quite so strange as it seemed. With its ancient trading links to France and Spain, the province of Munster had always looked after its own interests overseas, and the earls of Desmond had been known to send representatives to France and the court of Burgundy since Plantagenet times. In this case, however, King Henry was right to be suspicious: for what Desmond had actually agreed, in a secret treaty, was that if Tudor rule in Ireland became too unpleasant, he would transfer his allegiance to France and seek her king’s protection. To Desmond, accustomed to generations of old Irish independence down in his Munster lordship, this might be cheeky, but it was still business as usual. To Henry, Desmond was a subject, and his embassy looked like treason. When Henry challenged Kildare about the reports, the Irish magnate laughed it off. “Desmond’s a strange fellow,” he told him. “I can’t answer for everything he gets up to in Munster.” “You’d better,” the king let him know, “because I’m holding you responsible.” That had been some months ago, and in Dublin, at least, the matter seemed to be dormant.

  But recently Walsh had heard another and even more disturbing rumour. There were still members of the Plantagenet dynasty at large. Most preferred to stay out of trouble, and out of England. But it was always possible that one of them could be used by a foreign power to mount an expedition against King Henry, like the invasion of Lambert Simnel against his father. It was something Henry dreaded. So when Wa
lsh heard the rumour that the King of France was now planning such a challenge with one of the Plantagenets, he could be sure of two things: that the Tudor king would be suspicious of anyone who went to see the French-loving Desmond; and that he would be sure to have spies in Dublin and the other ports watching out for people travelling to Munster.

  “The trouble is,” he now explained to Margaret, “not only do I, a lawyer who’s had favours from the Fitzgeralds, have to go down into Munster but part of my business there is to see the Earl of Desmond himself.”

  “Must you go?”

  “I really have to. I’ve been putting it off, but the business can’t wait.”

  “What can I do to help you?”

  “I shall go straight to the monastery. With luck I may even be able to see Desmond there. But I shan’t say I’m going into Munster, and I don’t want you to say so either. If anyone asks, which they won’t, just say I’m up in Fingal. On no account say I’m to see Desmond.”

  “I won’t,” she promised.

  By the second week in August, it should have been harvest time. But there was no harvest. The stalks in the fields were brown and sodden. Summer had collapsed. Recently, however, a strange, damp heat seemed to have been building up in the atmosphere, and even in the ground. Out in Dublin Bay, under the grey sky, the sea looked whitish and sullen, like milk in a pan before it swells and froths over. As the groom had remarked to Joan Doyle that morning, “It isn’t this time of year at all.”

  Joan and her husband had gone down to Dalkey three days earlier. The village had not changed its overall shape much in the last century and a half, but the Doyle’s fortified house had been joined by half a dozen similar merchant forts belonging to important traders and gentry, including the Walshes of Carrickmines, who wanted to take advantage of the deep-water harbour. Doyle would go down there from time to time to check the storehouse or supervise the unloading of a cargo, and Joan would usually accompany him. She enjoyed the intimate quiet of the fishing hamlet below the hill. They had been there two days when Doyle was called back into Dublin on business, and she had decided to ride in with the groom the following day at her leisure.

  It was a mistake. She should have gone in the morning. The oppressive atmosphere and the darkening sky in the south should have told her. But she had been slow getting out of the house, finishing little chores that really could have been done some other time. By early afternoon, when they finally left, it was obvious that a storm was coming. “We can still be in Dublin before it reaches us,” she said. As they passed Carrickmines and heard the distant rumble of thunder over the Wicklow Mountains, she remarked ruefully to the groom that they might get a bit wet; and a little later, as the sky grew black and the first gusts of wind suddenly came through the trees, she laughed. “We’ll be drowned.” But when the storm finally swept down from the hills and broke over them, it was beyond anything she could have imagined.

  There was a huge bang and a flash of lightning. Her horse reared and almost threw her; and the heavens opened. Moments later the rain was falling so hard that they could scarcely see the road in front of them. They edged forward, looking for shelter. At first they saw nothing, but after a short distance, round a curve in the road, they became aware of a squat, grey mass just ahead to their left. They pressed towards it.

  It had been an uneventful day so far. Walsh was now away. Margaret had only one of her daughters and her youngest son, Richard, in the house with her. The boy was making a new chair in the barn; he was good with his hands. Her daughter was busy with the servants in the kitchen. Margaret had just been glancing out at the storm through one of the greenish windowpanes—she was rather proud of the glass windows that had recently been installed in the house’s big hall—when she was called to the door. Finding two bedraggled figures seeking shelter, she naturally took them inside at once.

  “Dear Lord,” she cried, “we’d better get you some dry clothes.”

  So she was quite astonished when one of the two pulled off the scarf she’d put over her head and remarked cheerfully, “Why, it’s the woman with the wonderful hair.”

  It was the cursed Doyle woman. For just a moment, she wondered whether, for some obscure reason, the alderman’s wife had come there deliberately to annoy her; but a huge crash of thunder from outside made her admit the absurdity of the idea.

  Seven years had passed since they had met at Maynooth. Occasionally her husband had mentioned seeing the woman in Dublin, and once or twice she had caught sight of her herself, on her rare visits into the city—though she had always turned aside to avoid her. And now here the creature was in her own house, her soft brown eyes lighting up with pleasure and her pretty face, as far as Margaret could see, looking even younger than her thirty-seven years.

  “The woman with the red hair,” she cried again, though there were one or two streaks of grey in it now.

  “You’d best come to the fire,” said Margaret. With luck, she thought, the storm would soon pass and the unwelcome visitor would be gone.

  But the storm did not pass. It seemed on the contrary that, having crossed over the Wicklow Mountains, the storm had come to a halt beside the great curve of Dublin Bay and that it meant to release all its noise, and livid flashes, and its great deluge of water upon Dalkey, Carrickmines, and environs.

  While the groom was taken to the kitchen, Margaret sent her daughter to fetch the alderman’s wife some dry clothes, while Joan Doyle cheerfully removed her wet ones by the fire, and gladly accepted the proffered glass of wine. Then, having put on one of Margaret’s robes, remarking that she might be there for some time, she sat on a big oak bench, comfortably tucked her feet under her, and settled down, as she put it, to have a good talk.

  Perhaps it was just her cheerfulness that Margaret found irritating. The harvest was ruined, William Walsh was away taking risks with his reputation; yet while the thunder crashed outside, this rich little Dublin woman chatted away as though there was nothing wrong in the world. She talked of events in the city and her life there, suddenly remarking, for no reason Margaret could see, “But you’re so lucky to live down here.” She ran on about the delights of Dalkey. She described a visit she’d paid to Fingal. But it was when, as an aside, she expressed her sorrow about the Talbot murder at the turn of the previous year that Margaret lost patience and almost before she realised what she was saying, sourly remarked, “One less Talbot never did any harm.”

  It was quite unforgivable really. It would have been cruel even if she hadn’t known that Joan’s Butler family were close to the Talbots.

  And however much the Doyle woman might have taunted her in the past, it was worse than bad manners to insult her like this when she was a guest in her own house. The words were scarcely out of her mouth before she felt ashamed. The insult found its mark. She saw the Doyle woman give a little gasp and flush, And she hardly knew where the conversation might have gone next if her fifteen-year-old son, Richard, had not just then come into the house from the barn.

  “This is your son?” The Dublin woman turned and smiled; and Margaret secretly gave a sigh of relief.

  There was no denying it, her youngest child was a very handsome boy. Slim, with red hair, not quite as dark as hers, a few freckles, an easy temper. If, like most boys of his age, he was sometimes moody, with strangers like the alderman’s wife he was always engaging. Margaret could see that he had charmed the Dublin woman in no time. Thank God, she thought ruefully, that he has his father’s good manners. He was soon answering all their guest’s questions about himself and describing his simple country life with such artless enthusiasm that Joan Doyle was quite delighted; and if she had not forgotten Margaret’s insult, she chose to believe as if she had, so that Margaret was only too glad to let the two of them talk. Only once did she interrupt. The Doyle woman had been asking Richard about his brothers and sisters when she enquired, “And your father, where is he?”

  “He’s up in Fingal,” Margaret answered sharply, before her son could speak.
He glanced at her with a hint of annoyance as though to say: do you think I’m so stupid that I’ll blurt out the wrong thing? The Doyle woman saw it, but all she said was, “My husband has a very high regard for your father.”

  By late afternoon the storm had not abated. The thunder had rolled out into the bay, but the rain was still pounding down with the same monotonous hiss. “You won’t be going anywhere this evening,” Margaret heard herself say. When she went into the kitchen to supervise the preparation of the evening meal, Joan Doyle accompanied her; but she waited and didn’t get in the way until, seeing there were some peas to be shelled, she quietly made herself useful. Whatever her feelings about the woman might be, Margaret couldn’t really complain of her.

  It was early evening when they began to eat. Normally it would still have been bright outside, but so black were the storm clouds that Margaret had to light candles on the big oak table. As well as a fish stew, beef, and sweetmeats—her guest was, after all, the wife of a Dublin alderman—Margaret provided a flagon of their best red wine. I’ll need it myself, she had thought, to get through this evening. Yet during the meal, at which, in the Irish manner, the whole household ate together, the Dublin woman was so easy with everybody, laughing and joking with her children and the groom, the men from the farm and the women who worked in the house, that Margaret had grudgingly to acknowledge that she was, after all, a wife and mother not so unlike herself. And perhaps it was the wine she was drinking—for when she had wine, it usually softened her mood—but Margaret even found herself laughing at Joan Doyle’s jokes and telling a few herself. The whole party stayed at the table late, and after they were done and the table cleared, the two of them still sat and drank a little more. When it was finally time to retire to sleep, Joan Doyle remarked that she’d be well enough there on the broad bench in the hall. “Just give me a blanket,” she suggested.