Daughter of Lir
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
PART TWO
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Copyright
To Tony and Margaret, Roger and Ann. With Love.
Acknowledgements
Dermot of Leinster is, of course, notorious in Ireland for precipitating the Norman invasion and beginning the seven and a half centuries of English rule, although the fact that he was responsible for the rape of the Abbess of Kildare is less well known. That crime actually took place in 1134 – we don’t know why or what happened to her afterwards, since there is only the briefest mention of it in the Annals of Loch Cé – but I’ve set it twenty years later in order to combine her rape with the rape of her country.
Although I’ve taken liberties, I don’t think that any of the historical personages in the book, Henry II, Eleanor, Ruairi O’Conor, Asgall, Dermot himself, and others, act out of character, but I must apologise to the shade of Cardinal Papato who is made into a symbolically dirty old churchman, though there is no evidence at all that he was.
The only other liberty has been to set the marriage of Aoife to Strongbow in Dublin when it actually took place in Waterford.
Thank you to the London Library, the National Library of Ireland, my hospitable and helpful friends in Ireland, and my editor, Sarah Molloy, without whom… well, she knows.
PART ONE
Chapter One
The Archbishop of Cashel was a good man and did not as a general rule approve of women being killed; nevertheless when the message came he went up the stairs to his private room at a rate which made him gasp in the hope of hearing that at least one member of the breed was dead.
The monk who was waiting for him had the remoteness engendered by fatigue, and a satchel.
‘Is that it?’
The monk undid the satchel and handed over a roll of parchment. Panting from anxiety and the climb, the archbishop stretched the roll out on his table and sat down to read it. The membranes of which it consisted differed in size and shape. While they had been neatly stitched to connect one to another, they were inexpertly treated so that their surfaces were rougher than a professional scribe would have permitted and the ink was home-made brown. The writing was childish and, for economy’s sake, covered both the flesh and hair sides, but it was hideously readable.
‘It’s in Latin.’ Somehow he had expected it to be in Irish. Who in hell had taught her Latin?
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘You’ve read it?’
‘It was I who first alerted the Church of its danger.’
Even so, thought the archbishop, the monk would have to be transferred to where it wouldn’t matter if he talked; somewhere remote, some wave-lashed fastness.
Up the stairs came the voice of Gerald of Wales below in the chapter house expounding his view of the Irish people to the gathering of Irish clergy. The stressed words were audible. ‘Barbarous… primitive… wild… debauched… incestuous… you slack… correction.’
The archbishop got up and shut the door to cut off the sound. He was tired of Gerald of Wales; his opinions and his voice. Anyway, if this document contained what he feared it contained, Gerald of Wales was the last person he wanted to see it.
He sat down again to continue reading, emitting moans at each new horror.
‘Listen to this. She says the Princess of Breffni wasn’t responsible for the invasion of Ireland. That’s a lie for a start. Of course she was responsible.’ Just as Helen had brought down Troy, just as Cleopatra had destroyed Mark Anthony, just as Eve had poisoned the whole world by bringing sin into it in the first place. So Dervorgilla of Breffni was responsible for bringing the Normans to Ireland. He might forgive her for the Normans, but he’d never forgive her for Gerald of Wales…
He reached another subject. ‘Yes, well, of course the rape was a scandal and perhaps we should have acted at that point. But other women have been raped without making such a fuss about it. And the Lord knows she got her revenge.’ He looked up. ‘She’s safely dead now, I trust?’
‘Yes, my lord. She died in the fire at the tower along with…’
‘I know who,’ snapped the archbishop. ‘They must have been mad.’
The monk stood at the west window facing out over the drop from the Rock of Cashel to the plain below. Still on the retina of his memory another view transposed itself continually – perhaps it always would – on anything he looked at; a river with a hill curving down to it and jutting out in a promontory on which stood, like a candle at the end of a bier, a tower which, like a candle, was burning.
‘Oh my God,’ said the voice behind him. The archbishop had reached the heresy. He’d dropped the parchment and was clutching at his armpits as if to contain sudden pain.
The monk decided it would be kinder to deliver all the bad news at once. ‘My lord, it is feared that there is yet another…’
‘Another woman?’
‘Yes, my lord, that too, but…’
‘Not another copy?’ pleaded the archbishop, begging to be wrong. ‘There isn’t another copy of this?’
‘Well, my lord, it is feared there might be. It may have gone up in the fire, but there was another woman, and she got away, and it cannot be overlooked that she may have taken a copy with her.’
‘Is she being pursued?’
‘With tracker dogs, my lord, but without success so far.’
‘She must be found. You do realise that? She must be brought down and incarcerated, and the copy must be destroyed. We can’t have this heresy even whispered.’
‘I do realise, my lord.’
Dear Jesus, sweet Jesus, thought the archbishop. Let her be caught. Let her fall off a cliff, sink into a bog and God have mercy on her soul. Because the manuscript had been brought to him they would call it the Cashel heresy. His name would be known in history only for this ultimate insult to God. Where in hell had the woman gone?
He pulled himself together. They would find her. The trawl of the Church was inescapable and this shrimp would be caught. She’d be making for somewhere she considered safe. If he didn’t panic, if he were calm and used all the cunning that had made him archbishop in the first place he would discover where that was.
‘You must be tired,’ he said to the monk. ‘Have some wine.’ He poured it out with his own hand. ‘Do you know this heretic’s story?’
‘Some of it, my lord.’
The monk held the clue then, to the woman’s hiding place. ‘Tell me all about it,’ said the archbishop, ‘Go back before the invasion. What possessed them to appoint the woman in the first place?’
The monk perched on a chair and then slumped. He hadn’t sat down in twenty-four hours. ‘She was intelligent,’ he said quietly, ‘and forceful, all the qualities that caused trouble later. And, of course, she was Irish…’
* * *
Looking out into the winter night sky through the squint which she had slid back because of insistent knocking on the gates, the porteress of Fontevrault Abbey could see only a dim figure and hear a male, retreating voice. ‘She’s Irish. She’s been abandoned. Pray for me, sister, for I have sinned.’
‘God forgives the sins of all who turn to Him,’ sai
d Sister Teresa, the porteress, automatically. ‘What’s Eye-rish?’ She had never heard the word.
But there was no reply and the figure had gone. Grumbling, because her fingers were becoming arthritic, Sister Teresa pulled back the bolts on the wicket in the gates, lifted her lantern and found herself staring down at a skinny child about six years old who stared back out of brilliant, dark-blue eyes with a mixture of such misery, terror and ferocity that the old porteress put down her lantern at once and lifted the child into the warmth of the convent.
‘What’s Eye-rish, Mother?’ she asked the abbess, having requested her presence urgently to the porteress’ lodge.
‘It’s a nationality,’ said Mother Matilda, ‘A strange, barbarous people. Celts, I believe. The question is, how did this one get here and what shall we do with it?’
‘Keep it?’ suggested Sister Teresa, hopefully, ‘It is female. And sent to us by God.’ The abbey did accept novices as young as this child. Generally the intake was restricted to the nobly-born, but there was something so vulnerable about this foundling that the porteress’ elderly heart had been stirred to protection.
‘Or the devil,’ said Mother Matilda. She leaned down towards the child, wrinkling her nose at the nits which clung to strands of the fine, black, wavy hair: ‘Can you talk, my little one?’
The child could talk all right. She jabbered angrily away at them, wiping tears from her eyes as if they were shameful and adding swathes of dirt to an already filthy face, but not a word could they understand.
‘I suppose that’s Irish,’ said Mother Matilda, straightening up. ‘Well, whatever else she is, she’s brave.’ She approved of courage. ‘Hand her over to the Mistress of Novices for now. Later, we’ll see.’
* * *
Transferred into a world as ordered as a black and white chess board, where sound broke out with the ringing of a bell and stopped as abruptly, the Irish child lost some of her terror, though misery remained, and so did ferocity. As she absorbed its language she learned much of its beauty, but she also discovered that some of her fellow novices, especially those of her age group, could use it to hurt.
‘Eye-rish, eye-rish,’ Sister Petronilla, aged seven, would chant at her, ‘pagan Eye-rish,’ and the others would join in until the Irish foundling threw herself on them, howling and scratching, not to defend her Irishness – for how could she defend a nation that had abandoned her? – but to stop them saying it.
* * *
‘In my view it was the Prince of Darkness who left his own daughter on our doorstep,’ said the Mistress of Novices to the Mother Superior as they walked together down to the river behind a gaggle of little wimpled girls who were let out for an hour after Tierce, like hounds, to play in the abbey pasture. ‘The child is untameable. Only this morning she bloodied Petronilla’s nose and pulled Clotilde’s hair. I cannot recommend her acceptance into our sisterhood.’
Mother Matilda grunted. At the moment she was more concerned about the coper from Perche who was leading a roan into the paddock for her inspection. Mother Matilda was a hunting abbess and didn’t care who knew it; in her view the only ways to God were on your knees and on horseback. The coper was asking a shocking price for the horse, but warfare between King Stephen of England and the Empress Matilda had devastated Normandy and taken most of its horses into their armies.
‘How old?’ she asked the coper suspiciously; she liked her horses young enough to learn her ways.
‘Four, blessed Mother.’
The right age, if the man was telling the truth. She peered short-sightedly into its mouth, ran her hand over its withers and back, and then caught sight of the Irish child who had climbed onto the paddock fence to watch, and who was shaking its head.
‘No?’ mouthed the abbess at her. The Mistress of Novices might be right, but there was something about the child Mother Matilda liked. Since learning Norman French she had informed them that her name was Finola and had recited a list of kings from whom she was descended. Uncouth kings, the abbess had no doubt, but royal in their way perhaps. There had been a mother and a father, a fight in which they had both disappeared, and a ship full of nasty men and a long journey. So much and no more had she been able to tell them and even that much had caused her distress, as if her mind wanted to veer away from it. If she cried for her mother, and the abbess suspected that she did, she did so unheard and unseen in the blackness of the novitiates’ dorter.
The child clambered over the fence and approached the horse. With practised, skinny hands she thumbed the roan’s lip up to display its teeth. ‘Feel,’ she demanded.
The abbess ran her forefinger along the bite of the teeth – and felt the tell-tale roughness of the filing which had shortened them in an attempt to make the horse appear younger than it was. She turned furiously on the coper, who backed away. ‘This horse has been bishopped, you son of Satan.’
With a large-sized flea in his ear, the coper and his roan were sent packing and Mother Matilda looked down at the Irish foundling. ‘They taught you horse-sense, whoever your ancestors were,’ she said.
Suddenly, and for the first time since her arrival, the child smiled and the abbess made up her mind. ‘We keep her,’ she said to the Mistress of Novices. ‘I have taken an interest in her.’ She looked down again into the child’s astonishing blue eyes. ‘And since Finola is an outlandish and unchristian name, she will be known as Sister Boniface.’
* * *
In the spring of 1154 flocks of whooper swans were seen in unusual numbers over Central Europe as they flew back north to their breeding grounds. They flew over what was essentially one great forest in which the villages, towns and cities were just different sizes of clearings connected to each other by trackways and, occasionally, a Roman road, or a river. The assault on the forest was well under way and there were assarted fields in it that had not been there when the swans had flown south, but it still remained a threat which could grow back and overwhelm the tiny labouring figures on the ground if they paused in their efforts to cut it down.
The sound of air displaced by huge wings made the figures look up. Some saw flying food and ran to get weapons with which to shoot it down, others took the swans to be tokens of hope from the Virgin Mary that the coming year would be a good one. But whenever the swans passed over the head of one of the Irishmen or women living or travelling on the Continent, he or she would wave and wish good luck to the Children of Lir of Ireland who were going home.
In one of those enchantments which were an everyday hazard of mythical times, the one daughter and three sons of King Lir of Ireland had been changed into swans for nine hundred years. But so potent was their legend that by the time the nine hundred years were up and they had crumbled in human death, they had gained immortality in Irish imagination; the Children of Lir becoming all swans and all swans becoming the Children of Lir.
From a swan’s eye view there hadn’t been a lot of change in the world since the Children had undergone their transformation. The birth of Christ had brought great hope to it, but the termite gatherings which were armies still advanced and retracted, building empires and toppling empires in a swirling but consistent pattern. The Daughter of Lir would have had reason to honk out her misery at the condition of her human sisters and their continued bondage to their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, most of them in bondage themselves, but her black, grieving eye might have brightened at the escape which Christianity offered in its celibate sanctuaries of convents where her sisters could lead unnatural, but longer and freer, lives.
It is a coincidental fact that on a day in April 1154 it was a pen from a flock of swans flying up the Loire Valley that broke away from the others and circled over the elegant rooftops of the Abbey of Fontevrault as if intrigued by the sight of a convent which provided not just sanctuary for women, but was unique in Europe in giving them power.
In Fontevrault an abbess ruled not only two hundred and thirty nuns but over the adjoining monastery of one hundred monks, owing al
legiance to no male figure except the Pope and God.
The roofs covered refectories, dormitories, lavatories, hostels, cloisters, a springlike church, hospitals, walkways, fountains, all carved and gilded, contributed by the nobility of Christendom eager to save their souls and provide fit accommodation for their daughters. When kings and queens visited Fontevrault – as they frequently did – they stayed in the luxury of the nuns’ guest house and ate at the nuns’ lavish table, and the monks were only invited if they behaved themselves.
As if time lay heavy on her wings, the swan circled the abbey. Below her webbed feet was the pepperpot shape of Fontevrault’s kitchens, the finest in Europe, where in a doorway stood a young nun.
The swan trumpeted out a call as the Daughter of Lir might have done to a fellow countrywoman, for the nun was Irish; with her white, freckled skin, sapphire-blue eyes and the dark eyelashes and eyebrows which indicated that the wimple covered a head of soft, black hair, she was unmistakably Irish to those who recognised the physical types of that faraway country.
One expected a woman of such colouring to be gentle, a vulnerable dreamer. Men meeting Sister Boniface for the first time sweetened their voices, traders with whom she had preliminary dealings inwardly decided that she should not have to pay top prices, and then found themselves bargaining hard to get any price at all.
Sister Boniface looked up at the swan overhead, crossed herself out of respect for the Virgin Mary and briskly shook her fist at it, in case it dropped a mess in her clean courtyard. Then she turned back to concentrate on the scene in the kitchen. She had never heard of the Children of Lir, or, if she had, she had forgotten, just as she had forced herself and everyone else in the abbey to forget that she was Irish. If that nation had abandoned her, then Sister Boniface had taken her revenge in abandoning Ireland. What little was known of its people took the form of base words, ‘barbarous’, ‘pagan’, ‘wild’, ‘uncultivated’ and if ever the subject came up Sister Boniface used them as freely as anyone else and with more vehemence.
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