It was, though Sister Boniface was more concerned with the fact that her hand was being dragged in the direction of the papal legate’s velvet-covered groin. She didn’t quite realise what he was doing, but instinctively she didn’t like it.
‘Thank you, my lord, perfectly clear.’ She tried to pull her hand away, but failed.
‘We are being given an opportunity to establish a little piece of Rome in this Irish wilderness,’ said the cardinal, breathing hard, ‘and if we succeed here, we shall have a chance to spread the True Church’s influence even more widely and bring Ireland back into her holy embrace.’
Sister Boniface began to panic. Her knowledge of dirty old men was restricted to what other young nuns had whispered in the dorter and one occasion when she’d been goosed by a half-wit herder in Saumur market. But how could this distinguished, all-knowing, all-powerful prince of the Church be put in that category? She was as bemused as she was appalled by what was happening. Two irreconcilable planes of existence seemed to be overlapping; one in which a papal legate, only a little less infallible than the Pope himself, talked of godly matters, and one in which he was being very fallible indeed.
She got up, to seem as if she wanted to stand respectfully in front of him, but found her hand still clamped firmly by his own over the lump in his lap. There followed a struggle in which Boniface, bent forward and feeling ridiculous, tottered in a 180-degree arc around the legate’s knees on the fulcrum of her own arm, while the legate lectured on – his eyes exalted on the branches above his head – and puffed.
At last he gave a blissful ‘Aahhh’, brought his eyes down from the trees as if remembering she was there, smiled sweetly and blessed her. She could go.
She found herself curtseying on one plane and shaking with disgust on the other, as much at his confidence as at his masturbation. He knew she wouldn’t report him. And she knew she wouldn’t report him; not just because nobody would believe her, or that he didn’t deserve it, but he had implicated her in some way she couldn’t fathom. She had been used, as if she were no more than a handkerchief in the sexual equivalent of the cardinal blowing his nose. She had done nothing wrong; she was as innocent of breaking God’s rules on sexual matters as when she had entered the garden, but somehow she carried out of it a guilt that would remain with her all her days.
It must be the garden itself. That was it. The blame lay on Eleanor’s garden with its languor and lasciviousness. It had put some spell on the cardinal.
She was not just willing, she was now eager to get to Ireland and throw herself into God’s work in order to cleanse herself from her guiltless guilt.
Altogether it had been a bewildering and disturbing day. Apart from the nastiness she had just gone through, instructions had been heaped upon her whereby she must re-establish the rule of the Roman Church in at least part of Ireland. She must introduce the Order of Fontevrault in Kildare and spread it to other convents. She was asked to gather military intelligence for the Queen of England (though really for its king) and breed a new type of horse for Fitzempress’ army.
Faced by these many and, possibly, conflicting orders, Sister Boniface knew that the only ones to obey were those which came from the very top.
‘Thy will shall be done, Father,’ she promised
Chapter Two
If it was the swan-shaped Daughter of Lir who had examined Sister Boniface so closely when she stood in the kitchen doorway of Fontevrault on that April day, as if knowing the girl was to be important in the scheme of things, her immortal eye also perceived the patterns of power as she flew homewards.
Everywhere it was becoming centralised. That clever, cold-blooded spider, William the Conqueror, had spun an iron cobweb out of his own entrails and pressed it down on England and Normandy, connecting every living soul in both countries to the middle, which was himself.
His son, Henry I, had reinforced the system whereby everybody, except the Church, owed either rent or service to somebody greater – ending in the king.
Joyless as the system was, the misery that ensued when it was ripped apart in the following, contested, reigns of Stephen and Matilda at least showed the one priceless advantage of feudalism – stability. During the anarchy of the Stephen and Matilda years, when God and his saints turned their faces away, the meanest serf who had suffered under the old regime prayed for its return.
It had therefore been a grateful people on whom the new king, Henry II, had reimposed the iron cobweb and extended it. Now he prepared to spin new filaments into it, this time of a justice which would bypass the untidy plethora of feudal courts – barons’ courts, manor courts, sheriffs’ courts, county courts – and link his subjects directly to himself by a Common Law. It was a modern idea, a great far-seeing idea and, since the people paid for their justice, a very profitable idea.
But as the Daughter of Lir passed over the gridiron of Plantagenet Europe and came home to Celtic Ireland, she left neatness and order and exploitation behind and instead saw beneath her a chaotic swirl of patterning which had not altered since the time of myth into which she had been born.
The trouble with the Irish, everybody said, was that they had never been conquered by the Romans and therefore had no conception of a straight line. Their roads, said everybody, were as convoluted as their thinking. They even refused to swaddle their children as mothers did in better-regulated nations where babies were put into strait-jackets as soon as they emerged from the womb in case their limbs had ideas of their own. Not, said everybody, that more could be expected from a nation where even women had rights enshrined into the legal code.
The Irish elected their kings and made them share their power with abbots rather than bishops (another departure from the custom of other countries) and with the brehon judges, representing a law which had been old before the Dark Ages blotted out the learning of the rest of Christendom. In fact, the Irish were in thrall to only one thing – tradition. But their freedom and thralldom made them vulnerable.
No king, not even Brian Boru in the previous century, had succeeded in overpowering all the others. The swaying scales on which the Irish had established their civilisation could not be decisively tipped. There could be no centralisation, no iron cobweb, in a country where power ebbed and flowed as one kingdom spilled over into another and was then driven back, where alliances between states were formed and broken and where a member of an opposing clan was as much a foreigner as a Turk.
Even the Norsemen hadn’t been able to conquer Ireland but instead opted for what little they could get and had settled on strips of land along the eastern and southern seaboards. Everywhere else the political pattern remained locked in its timeless, tortuous reflection of Celtic art, as careless of the rest of the world as if it did not exist.
But the Daughter of Lir, sagacious fowl that she was, shed tears even as she trumpeted out joy on her return, because her travels had taught her that, for Ireland, timelessness was coming to an end.
Hostility between the kingdoms of Breffni and Leinster had ancient origins, like everything else in Ireland, but in 1152 it had become a personal feud between the two kings when Dermot of Leinster abducted Dervorgilla, wife to Tighernan O’Rourke of Breffni.
Breffni, however, was in alliance with Connaught and in the following year Connaught marched against Dermot of Leinster, who was getting too uppity for everyone’s taste, and demanded the return of Dervorgilla to her husband, along with the vast herd of cattle that had been abducted with her.
By the time the new Abbess of Kildare set foot in Ireland the business was nearly over. It had been a small war, no different from a thousand others Ireland had seen in her time.
It was only later that it turned out to have been Armageddon.
* * *
Dermot Mac Murrough, King of Leinster, acknowledged the demands incumbent on a civilised man by explaining in person to a prisoner when he had to blind him. It was never easy. For one thing the prisoner rarely took the explanation in good part, and for anot
her thing it was so difficult to pick one’s words.
‘Look at it this way’, for instance, is a phrase that can sound tasteless to a man whose eyeballs have just been pierced, and if there was one thing Mac Murrough prided himself on, it was his taste.
It was an example of it that, for O’More, lord of Leix, he had the blinding done in the highest room of his tower at Ferns, so that O’More could look out of the window and carry the memory of a last beautiful view into his darkness.
It went well. Enna, the Mac Murrough’s hereditary executioner and blinder, had adjusted the irons to exactly the right width and heated them to the point where they cauterised the eyes and produced little blood, which Dermot always hated. Madoc, the priest, had been sober enough to intone some helpful prayers. And O’More himself had shown all the courage which had made him such a pain in the arse as a vassal.
‘I so wish you’d realise my side of things,’ Dermot told him and smote himself on the forehead – he’d nearly said ‘my point of view’. ‘It’s a matter of progress. How are we ever going to bring Ireland into the twelfth century if sub-kings like you keep defying overlords like me. As one reasonable man to another, there’s got to be one High King.’
‘It’ll never be you, you treacherous bastard,’ shouted O’More. He was still struggling against the ropes; Dermot had to admire him.
‘Ah well now, treachery,’ he said, ‘Could I not be accusing you? Didn’t you turn against me when the O’Conor proved so troublesome and took away me darling Dervorgilla, not that she was any loss, God bless her femininity. But I want you to know that this unpleasantness is not because of your treachery so much as your lack of foresight – ah God now, I’m sorry.’ He tutted with vexation at his lapse into tastelessness. ‘You see – ah God again – but I’m the only one fitted to be High King because I’m the only one with the European outlook… There now, I said “outlook”. My apologies, O’More dear. All the rest of the boiling lot of you, including the O’Conor, are just a lot of tribesmen.’
‘You treacherous bastard,’ shouted O’More again, ‘you guaranteed my safety to the Church, you bastard.’
‘That’s another case in point,’ said Dermot. He crossed to the window and looked out, waiting for the bells in the church and castle to ring for midday. ‘The Church is as backward as anything else in this country. We’re going to have to do something to Europeanise that as well. In fact…’
‘My clan will have your balls for this.’
‘On the matter of balls now,’ said Dermot, leaning out of the window; from this height he could see the procession of monks, like black ants, leading across the abbey gardens towards the church for None. He turned back into the room and nodded to Enna to get the other instruments ready. ‘Since we’re on the subject, I’m afaid now we’re going to have to ensure that there’ll be no little O’Mores. Just in case they should grow up with their father’s old-fashioned ideas.’
O’More started screaming but the bells began to ring one second after. In the middle of it, the sentry popped his head round the door and mouthed his message through the hubbub. Dermot raised his voice to apologise for not staying longer. ‘There’s herself just been signalled. Did I tell you I’d sent to Europe for the new Comarba of Kildare?’ He tried to interest O’More in the part the new abbess was to play in his, Dermot’s, plan for the Europeanisation of Ireland, but the man refused to attend so Dermot left him in his ignorance.
As he shut the door on the noise and blood, Dermot shook his head sadly at the sentry.
‘A grand man, O’More,’ he said, ‘but no vision.’
* * *
Dermot bowed low before the new Abbess of Kildare: ‘The swallows are not more welcome nor the saints more blessed than the sight of you this day.’ he said. He turned to her companion, Sister Clotilde, and bowed again: ‘There is a double grace on us.’
Tired as she was, Clotilde simpered. Seasickness had slimmed her down somewhat, but she still possessed proportions which did not usually attract compliments.
It had been a desperate journey; five days of heavy swell from the mouth of the Loire to Wexford with Boniface having to spend most of them below decks, dividing her time between Sister Clotilde, who insisted that she was dying, and the horses, who’d seemed intent on it.
True to his word Fitzempress had provided her with two mares, though not from Brittany but from the Holy Land, with odd, thrilling heads, aristocratic blood and even more aristocratic tempers. Reluctantly, she’d been forced to let them recover from the crossing in the care of whichever king it was who’d met her on Dermot’s behalf at Wexford. She’d lost track of the kings and lords she’d met since landing – dozens, it seemed, had popped out of the forest to greet her during the long ride to Ferns, making it even longer with their insistence on speeches of welcome, interminable accounts of their ancestry and achievements, and introductions to the ranking members of their clan.
She had been shocked by their beards, their magnificent, barbaric jewellery, their trousers and their boasting.
There was no recognition, no sense of familiarity with these people from the childhood she could not remember, and she was glad of it. She did not want to feel Irish. She gloried in being a foreigner, in being thought a foreigner, bringing the good news of civilised, Roman, Christianity to a country that had strayed off its path. She was polite, but she received their welcome with a remoteness which bordered on superciliousness.
Oddly enough, it was Sister Clotilde who, once she had found her land legs, reacted enthusiastically: ‘A splendid-looking people. And the country’s just like England.’
Never having been to England, Boniface was unable to pass judgement, but it was certainly different from Anjou. As with the people, the landscape struck no chord in her memory and remained alien, though her mouth watered to hunt over it.
She felt the same need to keep at arm’s length the King of Leinster himself, although he was reassuringly beardless, dressed like the nobles back home, and spoke to her in good Norman French. Dermot Mac Murrough was in his forties. He was a tall man with a face as round as a moon decorated by an exceptionally small mouth which would have made him comic, except that when he opened it to speak a voice of such quality came out that, for the person spoken to, it momentarily altered everything – his own looks into beauty, a dull day, the truth.
His reception of them might have been accorded to royalty. There were several more kings and queens, bishops, abbots, abbesses, to be greeted, a choir of young girls and boys sang a paean in praise of St Brigid, of whom Boniface was now the successor, flowers were strewn, welcome cups were drunk.
‘Devastated. I am devastated that I could not meet you at Wexford,’ Dermot told her. ‘A little local difficulty.’
As they rode up the hill towards his castle, Dermot leaned over to the new abbess, and pointed to it. ‘Stone,’ he said.
Boniface, who was tired, and in any case did not expect castles to be built of anything else, merely nodded. ‘Very nice.’
Dermot was quiet for a moment. He did not make that mistake again. Boniface didn’t realise she had made one at all.
The feast that night was noisy and magnificent. Clotilde kept gasping at the jewels on display, the food, the workmanship and design of their drinking cups. The gifts Fitzempress had sent with them for Dermot, addressing him as ‘his royal brother’ – allies were always useful – barely compared with them, but Dermot accepted them graciously.
‘I have a gift of my own for you.’ Boniface had decided it would be politic to present the King of Leinster with one of the mares. She told him about her plans for breeding. Despite the sense of alienation she could not shake off, she was charmed by Dermot’s interest and by his knowledge. They spent the first two courses talking horses.
By the third she felt they had established enough of a relationship to ask him why he had sent to Rome for an abbess for Kildare, a foreigner – Dermot had not asked the Pope for an Irish nun, nor did Boniface enlighten him th
at the Pope had sent him one. She found it puzzling; already it had become apparent that most of such appointments in Ireland were hereditary, a barbaric custom.
‘Ah now, madam, you do me too much honour. Sure, and it was a good idea of mine. We have become insular, looking too much in on ourselves, creating our great churchmen and women from our own people and not bringing in fresh blood, new ideas. But it was the Archbishop of Dublin who wrote to the Pope. At my suggestion. He is of the Hy Kinsella.’
‘And who are the Hy Kinsella?’
She was rude not to know, he decided, and, if she didn’t know, to probe into matters which existed so deep in the marrow bone they could not be translated into words, especially foreign words.
‘My clan.’
He began to talk to her about his plans. ‘We are wanting to modernise. We don’t want the old backward ways. One king, one church, working in tandem for Ireland and for God.’
It dawned on Boniface that, just as the Roman Church was using her appointment to further its cause, Dermot of Leinster had brought it about in order to further his. She had no doubt who the ‘one king’ of Ireland was intended to be. But she still didn’t understand why he had sent for a foreign abbess, so she persisted in her questioning.
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘The Abbess of Kildare has always carried such prestige, representing the great St Brigid. With St Patrick and St Columkille she forms the most powerful holy triad in Ireland. So the various clans have always wanted to have one of their own relatives in the post, backward tribesmen that they are. It was time to bring in an outsider, someone away from tribal politics, who could help with our great reform.’
‘Someone who could be influenced by you,’ thought Boniface. ‘Well, I am God’s creature, not yours, not anybody’s.’
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