Actually in this she did Dermot an injustice. Struggling in the sea of his ambition were moments of altruism and clear-thinking which rose to the surface now and then like drowning swimmers. He had indeed wanted a European abbess because he had thought she would prove neutral in the warring of the clans and would help to bring the Irish Church closer to the Church of Rome. In their relief that he wasn’t going to try and impose one of the Hy Kinsella on Kildare, the other clans had agreed to his plan.
To show Boniface how impolite it was to get information by direct questioning, Dermot set about procuring his more subtly. ‘While it was our gain, it must have been a loss for your abbey to lose its abbess.’
‘Me? I wasn’t an abbess. I was kitcheness of Fontevrault.’ She gathered by his incomprehension that if there was an equivalent post in Irish convents, it was known by a different name. ‘Don’t you have kitchenesses in Ireland?’
‘We have slaves to do the kitchen work, you cannot mean that.’
And Boniface was so shocked by the mention of slaves that she never did get round to telling the King of Leinster that her position had been a high one. Which was her second mistake.
‘Slaves? You’ve still got slaves in Ireland? But slavery is banned by the Church.’
‘You see how necessary it is that you come to teach us. Being a modern man, I do not keep them myself, of course, but I fear that the usage is widespread elsewhere.’
* * *
‘What a night,’ said Sister Clotilde, when they got back to their room. She weaved unsteadily towards a magnificent bed. ‘Did you see the linen some of those ladies were wearing, the bracelets? And what a charming man. Boniface, if this is barbarism, it may not be so bad after all.’
Boniface grunted. She would be relieved when they got to Kildare and could begin work. ‘Did the queen talk to you? She only addressed a brief word to me.’
‘There’s been a quarrel between the queen and the king I gather, but I don’t know what about. They can talk all night, these Irish, and not tell you a blessed thing. And they’re all devoted to the king. They said she was an O’Carroll. Everybody else seemed to be Hy Kinsella, whatever that is, or related to the king in some way, or his foster-brother or something. No thank you, dear.’ The serving girl who had been assigned to them was trying to undress her. ‘Where we come from we say our prayers before going to bed.’
In the early hours of the morning, Boniface was woken up by a stab of pain. The spring moonlight came through the unfamiliar, cambered window, across the bed to the doorway where the serving girl was sleeping on a paliasse.
Boniface frowned. She had no pain. Yet pain had been around somewhere. She decided it had been in a noise of some kind. She listened to the sounds of the night outside, which were like those in the Angevin countryside, but not quite. The smell of the air contained forest, turf-fires and a not-unpleasant something she could not recognise.
She gave Clotilde a pinch. ‘You’re snoring,’ and went to sleep again.
It might have been O’More, now deep in a room under the earth, that she heard. Or it might have been the King of Leinster, who had called his chamberlain to his chamber, and said: ‘Free all the slaves.’
‘All of them, Mac Murrough? Now?’
‘Tell them they’re not slaves any more. They’re free to go.’
‘Go where, for the sake of God?’
‘Nowhere. Where can they go? Wouldn’t the bloody place collapse without them? Tell the buggers I’ll flay them alive if they make a move. But tell them they’re free to make it.’
When the door closed behind the chamberlain, Dermot began to cry. He beat his fists against the stone wall until they were skinned, to the consternation of his cousin, Urlacam, who was sharing his bed that night. ‘Don’t be doing that, Mac Murrough darling.’
He threw himself face down beside her. ‘God crucify them,’ he wept. ‘A washer-up. They sent me a bloody washer-up.’
* * *
Sister Boniface breathed freer when they set out for Kildare a week later. She wasn’t sure whether it was because she was on the last leg of her journey or because she was leaving Dermot Mac Murrough behind. She found him disturbing, although she was at a loss to know why.
‘Well,’ said Sister Clotilde, ‘they did us proud. Most attentive, they were. I enjoyed myself. What’s the matter?’
‘The king.’
‘I don’t see why you don’t trust him. You owe him your post and you ought to be grateful to him for the chance to do God’s work.’
‘I’m grateful to God.’
‘Well, I can’t see anything wrong with him. I admire a man who’s trying to bring Christian light into the darkness. And he holds you in the greatest respect. He told me.’
‘Yes, but why isn’t he coming to the inauguration?’
‘He’s busy I expect. The poor man is a king, after all. And he’s sent us with a magnificent escort – look at it.’
‘But half Ireland’s to be there, apparently. Why not him, if he’s king of so much of it? A little local difficulty, he said. Don’t you think there are rather a lot of little local difficulties?’ She tutted with irritation. ‘Things are happening I don’t know about.’
‘Politics,’ said Clotilde, ‘Earthly concerns. Nothing to do with us. Look, there’s an eagle.’
When they left the Slaney valley, the countryside opened up into illimited, rolling grassland broken only here and there by woods and dotted with gorse just come into bloom. The impression that it was deserted was dispelled by a small field or two, and an occasional pasture for cattle, marked off by wattle fencing. It was the herds of ponies which held Boniface’s eye; apparently wild, shaggy but, she saw, in good condition. They couldn’t be as wild as all that, she decided, because they didn’t gallop off as her cavalcade went by.
‘We’re approaching the Curragh,’ said Murchadh, who was Dermot’s brother and who had politely, though somewhat silently, accompanied them so far.
‘The Curragh?’
Murchadh’s voice took on a sing-song tone: ‘It is the racing place of great horses and great kings, overlooked by the kings of Leinster when we lived in the palace of Dunn-Ailinn. The nun herself, St Brigid, would sweep over its smooth sward in her chariot. Her convent is on the edge of it.’
Boniface began to warm to St Brigid. ‘Do you still have a palace at this Dunn-Ailinn?’ The thought of Dermot hovering over her nearby threatened the freedom she was beginning to breathe in the gorse-filled air of this open country.
‘Not just now.’
‘Another little local difficulty?’
And there it was coming towards them, a band of armed men trotting down a hill in the distance.
‘Put up the flag of truce,’ shouted Murchadh over his shoulder.
‘Truce?’
‘It is here that we leave you, Comarba,’ said Murchadh. He looked at her hard. ‘It is by the Mac Murrough’s doing that you are here, and you will be remembering your duty to him.’
With a certain amount of ceremony and exchange of Irish, she and Clotilde with their pack horses and the Arab mare were handed over to the new troop and were sent trotting off to the north, while Murchadh and his men turned back to the south.
‘What’s all this about? Whose soldiers are you?’ asked Boniface of their new captain, first in Latin and then French, but though he smiled and bowed he seemed not to understand her.
She became alarmed. Was she being kidnapped? Was this appointment of hers so political that it was being contested by some enemy of Dermot’s?
She had spotted monasteries in the distance during her journey, perched on hilltops, but as she approached Kildare she could see that this one outranked them all. The hill on which it stood was just another wave in the grassland sea which, Clotilde had said uneasily, reminded her of their crossing, but the church at its centre was as high as a cathedral and beside it, higher still, was a tower, a strange, round narrow thing with a conical top which commanded the country for miles around. Piled around
this core were buildings which, from her view, presented their roofs in untidy geometric variety, walls, ramparts and, stretching down from these, houses, streets and shops – the nearest thing to a city she had yet seen in Ireland.
And ringing the bottom of this city were the tents of what was obviously a sieging army. As sieges went, it seemed an amiable affair. The gates of Kildare itself were open, allowing traffic to go in and out under the watchful gaze of some soldiers. Other besiegers were trading with merchants from the town and yet others were carrying on some loud, cheerful backchat with townswomen who leaned over the ramparts.
Boniface and Clotilde were taken to a large pavilion not far from the gates where they were greeted by a young man who introduced himself as a prince of Connaught and the commander of this section of Connaught’s army.
‘I must apologise, holy lady, that my father is not here to pay his respects to you, and I apologise for greeting you in a tent. In fact, I apologise for everything. But I thought we ought to have a little talk,’ said Ruairi O’Conor in fluent Latin, and grinned. He was a tall, red-headed young man of cheerful disposition and under different circumstances, Boniface might have approved of him. They were not, however, and she didn’t.
‘Am I being kidnapped? I warn you, my person is sacred and I refuse to be embroiled in any of your disputes.’
The young O’Conor said he was glad to hear it. ‘In a little while you shall be free to enter Kildare where, I understand, they are waiting impatiently to welcome you. They’ve been without an abbess since the old Comarba died two years ago. But there is one little matter… I suppose the Mac Murrough didn’t tell you that the north of Leinster had been occupied by my father’s army?’
‘No,’ said Boniface, ‘He didn’t.’
‘Typical.’ The pavilion, like the young O’Conor prince, was pleasant, with one side open to the spring day, well furnished and well supplied with wine and provisions of which, Boniface noticed with disapproval, Clotilde was partaking as fast as she could. She herself had refused all offers of refreshment. She felt tired, angry and humiliated by her ignorance of the situation. There had been no indication during her stay with Dermot of Leinster that part of his kingdom was under the occupation of his enemies.
‘Actually,’ said the young Ruairi O’Conor, ‘we don’t intend to occupy it for long. The main body of the army has already gone north on other business. What’s left of us is only here until Dervorgilla has her baby.’ He looked carefully at Boniface. ‘The Mac Murrough didn’t tell you about abducting the lady Dervorgilla either?’
‘You may assume, young man,’ said Boniface, coldly, ‘that the King of Leinster has not enlightened us on many things. Supposing you do.’
‘He’s left us in the dark a bit as well,’ said O’Conor. ‘For instance we didn’t know that the new Comarba of St Brigid was going to be so young and pretty.’ He caught her look, and hurried on with the enlightenment.
It consisted of so many hostilities between so many kings with so many complicated Irish names that Boniface’s head began to ache, but the up-to-date gist turned out to be that, in order to pay back a certain Tighernan O’Rourke, the King of Breffni, for past grievances, Dermot Mac Murrough had abducted O’Rourke’s wife, Dervorgilla. ‘Now the King of Connaught, my father, is in alliance with O’Rourke just now and so we hosted into Leinster to fetch her back for him. And the cattle she’d taken with her. Are you sure now you won’t have some wine?’
‘Just get on with it,’ said Boniface.
‘Ah well, now.’ The young man was suddenly awkward. ‘It’s difficult, don’t you see, you being a holy nun and all, and so young.’
‘I gather this Dervorgilla was pregnant.’
‘Very.’ Ruairi O’Conor was relieved. ‘In fact, we were approaching the Curragh on our journey back when she began to have pains, though they seem to have stopped now so whether…’ A tap of Boniface’s foot hurried him on. ‘Anyway, there was nobody in our army to act as midwife, and anyway it wouldn’t have been decent, so we popped her into the holy convent here. And there she is still with no baby yet to show for it. And claiming sanctuary.’
‘Sanctuary?’ Boniface was on her feet. ‘You mean to stand there and tell me that there is an adulteress, a pregnant adulteress, in my convent claiming sanctuary?’
Sympathetically, the O’Conor poured her out some wine, and this time she took it.
‘There now, isn’t that the advantage of having a foreign abbess? We were afraid you might be in the Mac Murrough’s pocket and would be taking her side and that we’d have to go in and get her once the baby was born.’
Boniface was so horrified that the wine horn dropped from her hand. ‘You were prepared to invade sanctuary?’ Things were getting worse and worse.
‘Ah well, sanctuary isn’t what it was. Three hundred years ago we watched the Norsemen burst into our holy places, raping and stealing, and we waited for the wrath of God to descend on their evil heads. But nothing happened.’
‘They went to hell, that’s what happened,’ said Boniface, ‘and that’s what will happen to you if you dare to set one foot over my abbey threshold, adulteress or not.’
The young man smiled at her, though with less charm. ‘She can stay until she has the baby,’ he said, ‘and then we take her back to her husband, sanctuary or not.’
It was evening by the time the discussion was over and Boniface was allowed back on her horse in order to ride up the long shadowed track to her abbey gates.
She looked around at the small number of men and tents and asked: ‘Aren’t you concerned that the King of Leinster might counter-attack and retrieve this woman?’ The last thing she wanted was to be in the middle of a war.
Standing politely at her stirrup, Ruairi O’Conor shook his head. ‘We’ve got his foster-brothers as hostages. Say what you like about Dermot, he’s fond of his family. And it’s my view he only took the lady out of revenge; he doesn’t strike me as keen to get her back at all.’
‘This is awful,’ moaned Clotilde, as they went up the hill. ‘That Dermot… we’ve been most cruelly deceived. What a beginning.’
‘We are here on the command of the Pope, the Holy Church, and God Himself,’ said Boniface. ‘So sit up straight. God is with us even in this benighted land.’
And, although Clotilde was beginning to doubt it, He was. As they left the ring of the besieging army, the town erupted around them. It might have been Jerusalem welcoming Christ on Palm Sunday. Fronds and flowers were lain on the track for their horses to step on, men, and especially women and children, shouted out greetings to her with unmistakable joy. They were a factor Boniface had not envisaged and she was moved by them, even while she knew that the warmth of their welcome was not for her personally, but for the figurehead she represented. In this divided, tribal land these people considered themselves as belonging to the clan of St Brigid and her successor was holy to them, whoever she was, because the succession itself made her holy. She was their luck and their protection.
The huge abbey gates were open and out of them now came more joyful people, this time nuns and monks – very peculiar nuns and monks, as Boniface’s tidy mind noted. The nuns had too much hair and nearly all of it showing, while the monks had too little from the outlandish tonsure which had shaved the front of their heads rather than the crown, making all of them, even the youngest, look bald. And they leaped about, making happy yippee noises, in a fashion not at all according to the dignity of a religious. However, their hearts were undoubtedly in the right place, and she could correct their appearance and mannerisms later. Their eighteen-year-old abbess whipped her sleeve over her eyes so that she could bless them with propriety, and allowed herself to be led inside to her destiny.
Only one person seemed displeased at her arrival. As they crossed the outer courtyard she heard shouting from a rooftop and looked up to what appeared to be a gargoyle perched on its ridge, waving a leather bottle and giving vent to words which needed no interpreter to tell her
were rude.
‘Who on earth is that?’
Sister Gormlaith, the senior nun at Kildare, glanced up. ‘Ah now, Comarba, don’t you mind. It’s only Art.’
‘And who is Art?’
‘The echaire-ri, the head of the stable boys.’
‘The head?’ What could the others be like? Was she expected to entrust her precious Arab mare to such a one?
‘Ah now, he’s a lovely man with only one fault and that against himself – he’s subject to a bit of liquor. Just now he’s scared you’ll not be appreciating his handling of things. But he’s of the sidhe – a fairy man – when it comes to the horses. St Brigid could have wanted no better for the care of her stables.’
St Brigid, Boniface felt, must have been easily pleased. She put Art on her growing list of Things To Be Dealt With, but it would have to do tomorrow. Tonight she was too tired.
* * *
Rocking as if she were aboard ship, Boniface was carried into the great abbey church of Kildare seated on a gilded throne carried by princes to a fanfare of trumpets and cheering that out-crashed the noise any storm at sea could have made.
‘All hail, the heiress of St Brigid.’ The words were made massive by the sheer force with which they were emitted by a thousand throats and came hurtling at her as if they had taken material form so that she nearly ducked.
The church was crazy with colour. Even when it was empty the coldness which could have been engendered by the almost menacing height of its roof was counteracted by the light from its many windows bouncing off fiercely beautiful and comic paintings on the wooden panels which hid the stone walls. What wasn’t painted was carved and gilded so that it seemed enveloped in a continual, glorious noise. But now, packed with half the nobility of Ireland – the only great absentee was Dermot of Leinster – decked in jewels and silks and with the scarlet and blue cloaks of the common people who filled what space there was left, some of them clinging to the vaulting and pillars of the roof like brightly-coloured bees massed in a hive, it was shocking.
Daughter of Lir Page 6