Liberty

  ‘Take a barrow each and you, the coward’s daughter.’ He squinted, pointing at me. ‘You look stronger than these other wastrels, you take the ladder.’ He pointed to a tall ladder leaning up against the slaughter shed.

  ‘Head down to the nearest well and fill the barrows with water enough to cover the hides,’ he told us, speaking in a fast and rough voice. ‘Then make your way down to Rue de Bonneterrie and head back up Rue de Lin. Climb the ladder and pass up the hides and cover as many of the thatched and shingled rooves as you can manage.’

  I knew that one fiery arrow shot from a bow across the city walls could land on a roof, sparking a fire that would leap from one roof to the next and engulf a whole quarter in flames in moments.

  ‘Even stray carts and vendor stands,’ the tanner barked. ‘Anything flammable, cover it. And keep coming back to fill your wagons. We will work ceaselessly, no time to break except to quench your thirst so that you do not faint from the heat.’

  We stood there not sure who should go first so I strode across the courtyard to the ladder. It was awkward and heavy but I managed to wedge it beneath my arm. The other women took their barrows of skins and we pushed them out into the streets.

  The nearest water station was on a corner where a town well had been dug down a deep shaft. I rested the ladder against the stone wall enclosing the well and we took it in turns to pull up full buckets of cool water to tip over the skins in the barrows until they were full and heavy.

  ‘What of you and Colin, then?’ Aimee grunted at me as we bumped and struggled our way down the narrow streets where vendors had closed up and shut their windows.

  ‘I don’t know. I love him but … alas,’ I said. ‘We must focus on our defence of the town now and I will think of that later.’

  ‘The drawbridges are up,’ Aimee replied. ‘So they will have a hard time getting across the water. No man will brave the bog. Drowning in that mire of human waste and entrails would be a much worse death than an arrow to the heart.’

  I was calmed by her words. It was true that the deep waterway that surrounded the city was a great barrier. It protected us somewhat from being besieged by heavy weaponry.

  ‘They may get their horses to swim them across,’ I worried aloud, thinking of ways the enemy might combat the stinking obstacle.

  ‘More likely they will fill the water with rocks and logs and debris to make a crossing,’ one of the other women said. ‘That’s what I heard they did up at Roye. Even threw the corpses of their own dead into the bog to build up a causeway.’

  We were dealing with an army renowned for their brutality and Charles had a reputation for pigheaded stubbornness. When Beauvais had done the unthinkable the previous day by refusing to surrender quietly, the despot would have been incensed and we all knew he would stop at nothing to take Beauvais and punish her for her wilfulness.

  ‘Lieutenant Lagoy said that the enemy is attempting to climb over the walls and take us that way. I wonder if their ladders could reach though, as the walls are very high.’

  ‘They build scaffolding and climb it,’ another woman answered.

  Two unfamiliar women struggled past us, carrying an injured man on a wood and canvas stretcher. He was covered in burns; his flesh was raw and blistering.

  ‘With a marriage to Lagoy in my future,’ I told Aimee as I shifted the heavy ladder to my other hip, dragging it on the stones as I went, ‘I have nothing to lose. I will fight to the death to save my city. They will have to cut me down because I will not bow my head to them. I am the King’s woman.’

  ‘And your day in the forest with Colin?’ she asked and gave me a knowing look.

  ‘If I never know happiness again,’ I smiled shyly at her, ‘I will always have the memory of that afternoon. Thank you for your silence, Aimee.’

  ‘I love my Pierre,’ she said, blowing the hair from her face. ‘And I know love when I see it and you and Colin have always had it. Damn that Lieutenant to hell for standing in the way of that.’

  ‘We cannot win. We are doomed!’ a woman shrieked from behind me and began to wail hysterically.

  ‘While we breathe, we have hope,’ the oldest lady in our group shouted back at her. ‘We must fight, so let’s do our little bit and get these damn hides on the rooves and shut up!’

  We stopped at the first house and I climbed to the top of the ladder while the others passed up the heavy sodden hides. My clothes were soon saturated and I smelled no better than a diseased animal.

  We worked hard all morning until the job was done. I was bathed in sweat, my underclothes clinging to me and my bonnet sodden. My muscles ached and my feet throbbed. Many more women were busy in the other quarters, covering everything they could. Fires burned in the street and a stream of women of all ages filled carts with boiling oil, water and slop to transport them in a never-ending caravan to the base of the wall. There, men carefully hoisted the carts up to the battlements where the contents were tipped down onto the enemy trying to scale the walls on their many ladders and ropes. The ones who were not picked off by our archers must have been retreating with terrible burns. I could hear screams ringing in my ears all morning. But most of the screams were coming from inside the city as our injured men were hurried to the makeshift hospital set up in the marketplace. Women were dispensing bandages and salves for the wounded. The day was stiflingly hot and uncomfortable, and with the fires burning it was on the cusp of being unbearable. I could hardly breathe and hot embers stung my exposed cheeks.

  ‘You girls,’ an officer called to Aimee and me as we sucked greedily at a water gourd that someone had passed to us. ‘Take these hammers to the Bresle Gate and give them to whoever is in charge there.’

  A barrow of hammers had been found at a carpenter’s house. My cousin and I took a handle each of the heavy wheelbarrow and made our way through the crowds of women, heading toward the western gate. As we reached the outer road, nearest to the walls, I heard a sound that thrummed in my ears. Thwump. Aimee screamed and through my sweat-blind and dirt-encrusted eyes, I leapt back and saw her fall to the ground, her skirts on fire.

  ‘Aimee!’ I screamed and ripped off my apron to douse the flames. I beat it desperately while she writhed and squealed like a pig being slaughtered.

  I rolled her to put out the embers completely and as I did so I saw the arrow in her side.

  ‘Pull it out,’ she screamed.

  I dared not. If it had found its way to some vital part inside her belly, she might bleed to death. I started unloading the hammers onto the cobbled stones as fast as I could, all the while telling Aimee to breathe deeply to control the pain.

  ‘Just listen to your breath,’ I urged.

  Once I had emptied the barrow, I shouted at a young girl standing in a doorway to get someone to come and collect the hammers. I helped Aimee to her feet as she once again cried in pain. Carefully, I placed her into the barrow with the arrow pointing skyward. I gently pushed the wooden wheels over the stones as she panted and grimaced in pain. I took her not to the marketplace that was already awash with blood and blistering burns, but to Captain Balagny’s manor house. There I would beg the fine ladies to call a proper doctor to attend my cousin. I was, after all, destined to be one of them.

  All around me, dirty, perspiring women and children ran through the streets wailing as if a comet was hurtling toward the earth or the final days predicted by the Bible were upon us.

  ‘Beauvais is lost!’ they shouted. ‘The enemy has breached the moat. They will swarm in like hornets.’

  ‘What are they saying?’ Aimee cried at me, her bloody hands at her side. Her face was as grey as granite.

  ‘They are coming over the walls,’ I said, panicked.

  ‘We don’t have enough men up there to stop them!’ she moaned.

  I looked around the streets that were filled with frightened women. Women everywhere. Strong, well-built
Beauvaisi women.

  And I knew then that if we were to resist the soldiers who were clambering up the framework of their belfry, if we were to stop them from spilling over to slaughter our men on the wall, if we were to prevent them from coming down to raid and pillage our city … I knew what had to be done.

  We might not have had enough manpower in Beauvais, but we certainly had a surplus of womanpower. I needed to rally my own army of Beauvaisi women.

  It was nigh on midnight when my sister stopped sobbing.

  ‘I cannot bear to live, Betsy!’ She sniffed, staring at me through swollen eyelids. Her whole face was shiny and pink.

  ‘Hush that nonsense.’ I frowned at her and patted her knee. ‘Isabella needs her mammy. She needs you to be strong for her.’

  ‘They’ll hang poor Jimmy and if they have a mind to, me as well. I’d sooner go and jump into the sea from a cliff than let those English dogs drop me.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what George and Will were saying?’ I reminded her. ‘They’ll break Jimmy out of the slammer tomorrow night. They’ve got a plan.’

  ‘A foolish and dangerous idea being hatched by a pair of halfwits,’ she said, looking cross. ‘They’ll commit their own felony and be forced to join Jimmy. Three nooses and our family destroyed. I won’t have them risk their own lives to save one.’

  I looked at my older sister as she lay back on my bed. She was a head shorter than me with honey-blonde hair and a button nose. Brigit had always been beautiful. Even with the snot-glazed cheeks and swollen eyes she was pretty as a picture. Baby Isabella had settled and was sleeping soundly in the corner in her basket. We had kept the two of them with us in Gransha as it was far too dangerous for Brigit to return home to Antrim. The yeomanry would have her on a list for questioning. They’d detain her – and brutally.

  ‘Da will speak well of you,’ I told her. ‘If they come knocking here tomorrow, we’ll tell them that you have been staying with us here for weeks and, as you feared, your Jimmy was colluding with the rebels.’

  ‘I can’t betray him so cruelly,’ she moaned.

  ‘But you must if they come before we can break him out and get you all on a boat,’ I told her.

  ‘Da is right angry and will never get tired of telling me he predicted this,’ Brigit muttered.

  ‘He’s a grand grumbler.’ I smiled. ‘Too righteous for his own good. I sometimes wonder how our ma put up with him.’

  ‘Oh, she didn’t!’ Brigit gave a weak smile. ‘She had no time for his moods and grumps. Ma was a tough woman and would send him out to walk in the snow whenever he complained. She would tell us that a home is for smiles and laughter, and if anyone wanted to be sour they were to take it outside.’

  I didn’t remember our mother as well as Brigit did. I had only been five years old when our mother passed away. Brigit had been ten. I was sometimes jealous of the extra five years she had spent with Mammy. For the last year of her life, the poor woman had been laid up on her sickbed, frittering away to skin and bones. I wished so hard that I could remember the earlier, happier days. My strongest memories of my darling mother were of sickness and pain. Her sunken eyes had stared out from a face set like a statue and the voice I remembered had been little more than a hoarse whisper.

  ‘You must get some sleep, Brigit,’ I said to her, more because I felt like my eyeballs were about to fall out of my head from tiredness. ‘I have two trunks of Mother’s old clothes under the window. She was smaller than me, wasn’t she? More your size. I’ll find you a nightdress and you can go through the rest of them tomorrow and choose some skirts and things to pack for Scotland. We have kin in Paisley who will welcome you in.’

  ‘If I go,’ she said, looking terrified, ‘I might never be able to come back. Or not for years, at least. Not unless the rebels really do run the redcoats out of Ireland.’

  ‘Oh, you can be sure we will.’ I smiled and winked at her as I went to the heavy trunks to find something suitable for my sister to sleep in and began rummaging around.

  The strong smell of keeping-herbs made my eyes water. My father had packed away my mother’s clothes and for fifteen years the trunks sat under my window. I had placed a stack of books and a small crystal vase for cut flowers on top of them. I always found the trunks’ presence comforting, although I had stopped short of going through them as I was afraid it would make me too sad and summon up too many memories. But if George and Will could pull off their daring plan to break Jimmy Ballantine out of the lock-up and spirit the little family down to Bangor to a boat that would take them to Scotland, then Brigit would be needing clothes.

  ‘I’m sure there must be a nightdress in here somewhere,’ I muttered to myself and opened the heavy latch of the second trunk, breathing in sharply.

  I may have been imagining it but I felt my mother’s spirit as I tried to smell her scent. I shut my eyes for a moment and let my mother’s face fill the dark space. Carefully, I pushed the clothes aside. ‘Hang on, Brig. What’s this?’

  My hand touched something hard that wasn’t the bottom of the trunk. I reached down and pulled out a book.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked again, looking up at Brigit. ‘I didn’t even know Mammy could read.’

  ‘Oh my Lord,’ Brigit gasped. ‘I had forgotten about it. It is the Sister Book.’

  I took the book across the room to hold it close to the lamplight so that I could read the inscription on the front of the leather cover. It felt heavy in my hands. By the light of the oil lamp it looked almost alive, as if it were breathing.

  ‘Systir Saga,’ I murmured. ‘These are strange words. And below, here, Sister Story.’

  ‘They are foreign words. See these early markings? Runes. From up in the Nordic regions, I think,’ she answered, getting off the bed and coming to stand beside me, resting a gentle hand on the hide. ‘Ma showed me this when I was little and I wish I could remember everything she said. It was when she first got sick. It is quite amazing, isn’t it?’

  Very gently, I opened the book and looked at the words inside, all handwritten, all names. I turned the heavy pages, which felt cold and faintly oily. My name was last. Next to Brigit’s.

  ‘What is all this? All these names?’ I wondered aloud, still bewildered and intrigued.

  ‘It’s a book with all our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and cousins and sisters in it. All the womenfolk that share our blood,’ Brigit whispered. ‘I can put Isabella’s name in there now.’

  I let my finger run back over the names. My mother’s, scratched into the page by her own hand: Isabella Boyne, Newtownards, Ireland. And my grandmother, Sybill Joyce, Paisley, Scotland, the daughter of Isabel Campbell, and beside her name, her sister’s: Katherine Campbell. The symbol of a broomstick was scratched in next to Katherine’s name. The distant aunt who was burned as a witch. We were the end of her blood.

  ‘Granny, Mammy, aunts,’ I whispered and tears came to my eyes.

  I could feel them all smiling up at me from the page. The names of women who had lived their lives before us. I felt myself grow taller. My heart swelled up with pride. These women were my women. I was the result of the lives and passions of these women who had gone before me. Katherine Campbell. Burned as a witch. What a price to pay for being a woman! I looked back to the beginning where the words were faded and I ran a finger over them to feel the grooves in the leathery surface. Who was this first mother? The mother that begat all the mothers, all the way down to me. I had the blood of goddesses. I suddenly felt like a part of something so much greater and powerful than just Betsy Gray of Gransha.

  ‘Look at all of them and the places!’ I marvelled.

  There were some written in strange letters that I couldn’t understand and places that I’d never heard of. And in the margins were notes and scribbles. Names of castles or estates perhaps. I sat on the end of my bed, tracing my hands over my grandmothers, aunts and cousin
s so many times removed. I stopped on one name. It was in a strange hand.

  ‘Is that … Yes. Dear heavens, Brig, it’s Grace O’Malley. Wasn’t she the pirate queen? It can’t be her. Can it?’

  ‘Show me.’ My sister tugged at the book and gave a coo like a pigeon. ‘Oh lordy, Grace O’Malley. I’ve heard tell of her. She was a wild woman of the seas.’

  ‘Pirates and witches! My heaving horses!’ I laughed and shook my head, feeling overwhelmed.

  ‘It’s really something, isn’t it?’ my sister said. ‘Look at these places. Paisley. Beauvais. Is that in France?’

  ‘And here I was thinking we were proud Irish girls!’ I laughed. ‘But we are a little bit of everything. Isn’t it amazing, Brig?’

  My sister put her arm around me and rested her head on my shoulder.

  ‘I remember the day Ma sat me down and read all of these names to me,’ she said. ‘She told me then that we had blood of iron and that I should grow to be a strong, good, right-minded woman to honour all those who had gone before me.’

  Little Isabella, named for our mother, began to stir in her basket. My sister went to her, speaking to me over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m glad you found that book,’ she said. ‘It has given me a new inner strength. My Jimmy is a good man who stands for his principles and we will rescue him and I will take my family to Scotland, to Paisley, where our great-grandmother and aunt lived. One day we will come back and claim our Irish blood. I will be strong for my daughter and all the daughters that will come after her.’

  I closed the book and held it to my chest, my eyes closed, feeling my heart beat against it. I felt close to my mother for the first time in many years. I had spent so much of my youth missing her, missing a mother’s warm advice and stern guidance. Da was a grumpy old so-and-so but I loved him something fierce. But he wasn’t and couldn’t be a mother to me.