‘This,’ thought the centre of it all, clinging hard to the arms of the throne as it advanced up the nave and trying to hold on to her senses, ‘is sheer paganism.’ The joy of all these people was pagan, God did not want joy at the inauguration of one of his elect, He wanted order, reverence – like the inaugurations back at Fontevrault – and above all, quiet. ‘But this isn’t an inauguration,’ thought Boniface, ‘this is a coronation.’ These people were not witnessing the installation of an abbess; they were seeing the most beloved female saint in their island return to earth in the form of her Comarba, her heiress.
The European part of Boniface felt silly and improper as she swayed over the hands that reached to touch the hem of her blue, gold-encrusted gown. But an unacknowledged and ferocious vein throbbed to the stamp of a thousand feet and swelled with the indecency of power, confusing her so that she felt possessed by an alien being, ‘I am St Brigid,’ said its voice.
They set her before the altar facing the congregation for the service, though what the service consisted of she never knew since she couldn’t hear it above the tumult. She took in only part of what was going on around her, the words being said, the hymns, more like paeans, being sung, the prayers offered. She remembered more of it later, with disbelief; at one point the congregation had actually broken into a dance. At another the Archbishop of Armagh and the Archbishop of Dublin had become involved in fisticuffs as to who should proffer her St Brigid’s ring. It appeared before her on the pages of a St Mark’s Gospel – she knew it was St Mark’s because it carried his symbol, a winged lion – so beautifully illuminated that a rainbow might have collapsed, wriggling onto it. She put the ring on.
The Abbot of Kildare, old and shaky, was approaching her and kneeling. He ruled over the monks of her abbey. She found herself looking down at him. ‘Compared to me, old man, you are nowhere,’ she thought, St Brigid thought.
There was a change. The shouting had stopped. The church had become silent so that the figures in it appeared carved, gargoyles reproduced in mass.
The palsied hand of the abbot put a pair of shoes in front of her bare feet, a tiny, ceremonial brass pair which had been made for St Brigid herself, the Mary of the Gaels, seven hundred years ago. Knowing she must put on these shoes had given Boniface sleepless nights since her arrival. ‘Supposing they don’t fit?’
‘Ah, sure now, they’ll fit. Aren’t you her very own Comarba?’
But if she wasn’t? How could they take it for granted? But she had not been allowed to try them on in advance, it was not the custom and seven hundred years of custom was not to be broken. Would she be disgraced if her feet were too big? Would these strange people fall on her and tear her to pieces as an impostor? Anything could happen in this chaos. ‘I am St Brigid,’ said the voice again, but it didn’t sound as certain as it had.
Boniface flexed her toes and her courage, stood up and twisted her feet into the metal shoes. They were cold, her toes hurt with the constriction and the enamelled brass edge cut into the top of her feet – she saw blood trickle down the side of the right shoe and shook her gown down to cover it, lifted her head and face the enormous crowd in front of her. ‘Behold the Comarba of St Brigid,’ shouted the archbishops of Armagh and Dublin simultaneously in Latin, and then again in Irish: ‘Behold the Comarba of St Brigid.’ If the cheering had been loud, it was as nothing to the roar that broke out now, so that it seemed as if it was sound and not the shoulders of Leinster princes that raised the new Comarba in her throne up into the air and carried her through the crowd to the hall for the ceremonial feast.
The only one who had nothing to eat at that feast was the Comarba of St Brigid, seated alone on a dais, smiling blessings down on apparently limitless rows of tables at which churchmen and women, lords, ladies and, far down at the end, commoners began a marathon of eating and drinking, while her head ached and her feet were in agony. It wasn’t that she wasn’t offered food and wine, but that petitioners constantly knelt before her to ‘kiss the blessed milk-white palm of you, Comarba,’ and a milk-white palm couldn’t bless and grip a leg of chicken at the same time. After the kiss each one had a petition.
‘Will God and St Brigid look kindly on my marriage to an Eoghanacht of Ara Cliath, Comarba? What day of the week would be best for it?’
‘The Corcu Duibne have not paid their one thousand cow tribute, should we host into their land for it, or wait?’
‘If I offer this chalice, will St Brigid lift the curse on my family?’
‘Can my son be baptised in the church of St Brigid?’
‘We are suffering insult from the clans of Meath. Should we make war on them now, do you think?’
She was dazzled by their certainty that she held the answer to their problem, while at the same time the European part of her felt that they were consulting her much as the ancient prophetesses had been by the ungodly of the past. What amazed her was that this certainty was unshaken by the fact that the question and its answer – sensibly, she told them all to wait until she was more cognisant with their situation – were made through an interpreter. There was not just complete lack of resentment that she was a foreigner foisted upon them, they ignored it altogether. Later she was to realise that partly they were relieved that she was an outsider, not some relative of Dermot’s, and that anyway they had no sense of nationhood. To these handsome, rich men and women there was no such thing as ‘Irish’ or ‘Ireland’. To the prince of Meath, the prince of Munster was as alien as a Frenchman. Their view of the country they lived in was not horizontal as a person who stood upon the land, it was vertical; the land was family, a tap-root that went back to a great ancestor. They might conquer somebody else’s territory for the riches it gave, but it remained just a place of hills and fields and cattle to them if their ancestor had not ridden over it, not true land at all. St Brigid was not a national figure, she was universal, like the moon, and since her shoes fitted this particular woman then this particular woman was her heir, even if she came from far-flung Cathay.
It was then that Boniface saw how right she had been to conceal her Irish birth. They made it easier for her by not caring, and she realised that to reveal it would involve her in the maelstrom of Irish politics. By arriving among them from somewhere they had never seen and had hardly heard of she could remain remote, omniscient, a mystery in what was already a succession of mystery.
A mystery whose feet were in agony. By the time they carried her to an anteroom where Sister Gormlaith was waiting to take the shoes off, her feet had swelled over the edges of the enamelled brass and strips of skin came off with them. ‘It could have been worse,’ said Gormlaith, dabbing her feet with witch hazel, ‘the poor dear Comarba before you had the bunions.’
It was an odd feeling to watch the terrible shoes taken away; they were used only for the inauguration and, since the Comarbship of Kildare was for life, the next time they were put on Boniface would be dead.
Up to this time she had slept in the senior nuns’ dormitory, now she was taken to the apartment reserved for the Comarba. Sister Clotilde trotted along beside her. ‘Sweet Mary, but won’t I be glad to get to bed. Wasn’t it wonderful? Of course, it was uncivilised, but it was wonderful.’
At the door of the room, Boniface turned to face her accompanying train of nuns. ‘I thank you,’ she said, ‘and congratulate you. It went well. Now you can leave me.’
The Irish sister turned obediently, blessing her, and glided off down the corridor. Clotilde stayed.
‘This is the Comarba’s room, Clotilde,’ said Boniface gently, ‘I am the Comarba.’
‘But…’
‘Only me,’ said Boniface, still gently.
Clotilde’s face crumpled. In the days since their arrival they had never been apart. She bobbed a curtsey, wiped her eyes, turned and hurried after the sisters. Boniface watched her go, then limped into the room. For all the shouting and ceremonial, this was the true realisation of her high position, a simple thing. To be left by herself. Here
was real glory for a woman who had never been alone in her life. She crossed the wide elm boards of the beautiful room to look out of the little window at a courtyard where a single pear tree stood by a stone-circled pool. Behind her was movement, but Boniface ignored it – it was only Ban, her serving woman, who didn’t count as company, pouring water into a ewer for her to wash in.
As she snuggled down later under her swansdown quilt, the Comarba of Kildare remembered kindly that it had been given to her by a queen. A mere queen.
* * *
The sense of omnipotence lasted about a week, sustained by petitioners, high and low, and by the stream of invalids and cripples who were put in her path every time she went abroad so that her shadow might cure them. ‘Oh High, holy nun, bless the track of our ways,’ they called out to her. But gradually it began to dissipate.
‘One of the O’Faolain princes wants to marry his wife’s sister,’ she reported to Father Flynn, the abbot of the monk’s side.
‘Does he now? Well, and she’ll make him a fine wife – a lovely girl, a lovely girl.’
‘She’s his wife’s sister,’ screeched Boniface, ‘It’s incest. It’s against God’s rules.’
‘That’s a pity, because his wife doesn’t seem to mind at all.’
Boniface went white. ‘His wife’s still alive?’ She put her head in her hands. ‘What am I to say to the Pope about this country?’
Father Flynn, very old, mild and ascetic, would have patted her if it hadn’t been sinful for him to touch a woman. They had to hold their meetings in the church, the only communal ground on which the men and women of the abbey were allowed to speak to each other. They sat in two great chairs on opposite sides of the choir, the abbot with two monks as his chaperones and the abbess with two nuns as hers. Boniface despaired of understanding how a man who guarded so carefully against carnality in his own life could be so lax about its practice in other people’s. But the anomaly was everywhere; not only were there separate entrances into the church for the nuns and monks, but the ordinary men and women of the congregation also had their own doors and, when a service was in progress, were separated from each other in different oratories. From the apparent exuberance of sin with which they mingled outside, Boniface wondered why the church builders had bothered.
The abbot smiled sweetly at her. ‘The Pope – that was a fine letter he sent with you. How is he?’
Boniface calmed herself with an effort: ‘Well, thank you. Did you read the bit about incest?’
‘So I did. I was forgetting. Well then, we’d better be telling the O’Faolain he can’t marry her.’
‘I’ve already told him.’ Rome wasn’t built in a day, she reminded herself, though whether it would ever be built here in Ireland if this gentle old dodderer was to be one of its bricklayers was doubtful. However, she was gratified to see that Father Flynn regarded her as his superior, just as the Abbot of Fontevrault did the abbess there, and was prepared in his vague way to accept the new policy she brought with her. She had broached the matter of the monks’ tonsures with him and he had agreed what he called ‘St Patrick’s hairstyle’, the custom of shaving the head from ear to ear and letting it flow down at the back, was now outdated and should be changed for ‘St Peter’s’, though he appeared to think that this was Rome wanting to be modern, for ‘Didn’t the poor dear Popes lose touch with us during their Dark Ages.’
Boniface moved on to the next item on her Things To Be Done list. ‘Dermot of Leinster,’ she said. ‘I wish him to be publicly denounced. How can the sins of the common people be corrected when kings are allowed to flaunt their wickednesses unchecked?’ When she’d learned of Dermot’s adultery with Dervorgilla she knew that her initial distrust of the king had been vindicated.
The abbot shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Is this the little matter of the abduction?’
Boniface stared at him. ‘Hardly a little matter, I should have thought.’
‘Well, no. But do you see, Comarba, the fault lies with that temptress out there,’ the old man pointed an agitated finger in the direction of the guest house where Dervorgilla was being lodged. ‘I have chided him on the matter, and he tells me she set him on. She sent him messages that the O’Rourke was being cruel to her and inflamed him with her desires. She is Eve all over again, and it is shame on our holy abbey that she is in it.’ His long white eyebrows jerked up and down in the nearest state he could get to anger. ‘The Mac Murrough cried in his penitence as he told me, so he did. And he is seeking God’s forgiveness with a substantial gift to our abbey here, and the promise to found a daughter house in Dublin.’
‘So you won’t denounce him?’
‘A substantial gift,’ muttered the old man, collapsing back in his chair, ‘and a daughter house.’
‘I see.’ Dervorgilla was to get all the blame while Dermot bought his way back to the bosom of the church. Boniface shut her mouth tight. She had rarely been so angry. She held no brief for the trollop Dervorgilla, but neither was she going to let Dermot of Leinster get away with a flagrant breach of God’s rule. This was just the sort of thing she had been sent to this country to change and, by the Lord, she would make an example of it. It appeared, however, that she would have to do so without Abbot Flynn. She sat still and silent for so long, the monks became nervous. Had she known it, she looked formidable – thin bones only just imprisoning a temper.
She moved on to the next matter on her list. ‘St Brigid’s fire,’ she said. ‘It should be put out.’
The abbot’s thin body jerked in its chair and the accompanying monks and nuns jumped. ‘Every night,’ continued Boniface, ‘one of my nuns leaves the dorter and goes up to the shelter by the round tower and tends the fire that burns up there within the hedge. It seems to me to be a pagan custom and I wish it stopped.’ Irresistibly the fire reminded her of Beltane, heathen ceremonies, druids, leaping cattle and nameless pre-Christian rites. A babble of voices broke out around her. ‘You can’t be doing that, Comarba.’ ‘St Brigid lit that fire.’ ‘It’s been burning near seven hundred years.’ ‘It brings luck to the abbey.’
Boniface nodded. ‘Exactly. Luck.’ Sacred wells were one thing, but fires, like so much in Ireland, were pure superstition. She didn’t think she was going to win on this point, but she had to try.
The abbot, having recovered from his shock, wheedled her again. ‘Apart from the fact that it has been said there will be catastrophe if it ever goes out, we sell the ashes of it as a holy keepsake. Woman mix them into their bread to help conception.’
As far as Boniface was concerned that merely proved her point, but she could see she was getting nowhere. ‘Then I wish it known that I do not mean to tend it.’
The abbot smiled. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said, ‘Tonight is the twentieth of the fire’s cycle. It’s the night when St Brigid herself sits up there and tends it.’
Well, she had won some and lost some. ‘Take it slowly,’ the Abbess of Fontevrault had advised her, ‘Remember their tradition is as old as ours, in some cases older. You can’t modernise them overnight.’
Boniface got up. The abbot got up. They bowed to each other, blessed each other, and left by their separate doors to their separate convents.
That night, after her discussion with Abbot Flynn, Boniface stood at her window for a few minutes as she always did to drink in the solitude. Then she put on her outdoor shoes and went out. She walked towards the glow of the fire which, with the round tower, was the core of the abbey, and looked over the hedge.
So much of the abbey’s life, and therefore its Comarba’s life, was dominated still by the customs and personality of the long-dead saint whose spirit was worshipped here. Encrusted as they were with legends, a whiff of a real, strong-minded, warm-hearted, quirky woman came out of them and here, tonight, was added a scent of horrifying ancient holiness.
The wattle shelter in which the nun, whose turn it was to tend the fire of St Brigid, usually sat was empty. The heart of the fire under its covering o
f peat bricks sent up a straight line of white smoke against the dark, early summer sky. There was no sound but she felt herself to be watched. Boniface looked up and saw that the barn owl which made its nest in the highest opening of the round tower had its eyes on her. A conviction came that if she watched any longer, a peat brick might detach itself from the creel by the shelter and put itself on the fire. She walked back to her apartment.
* * *
‘Does any sister accuse another?’ asked the new Abbess of Kildare of her nuns, ‘If so, now is the time.’ She said it without expectation. Back home in Fontevrault at this point in the weekly chapter meeting accusations had come thick and fast – it was the duty of any nun to save her sisters from a fall from grace by bringing her sin into the open. Boniface had done it often enough herself. But either this peculiar Irish flock of hers were blind to their sisters’ failings, or, which was more likely, thought their abbess, they weren’t prepared to betray them to their new Mother Superior.
The silence in the chapter house remained absolute, apart from the sound of birds outside coming through the slit window high up in its walls. The building was narrow and deep and gave the impression that its congregation was seated in the bowels of a ship.
The abbess surveyed her nuns, their consciences as apparently clear as their complexions – all except Sister Acall, who had an outbreak of boils. They were happy enough to accuse themselves, she thought. The last half hour had been filled with nuns spreadeagling themselves before her to knock their head on the stone tiles with ‘Mea Culpas’ for peccadillos, some of them so small they would have passed unremarked at Fontevrault, but accuse each other they would not.
‘Very well,’ the abbess’ voice sliced into the silence. ‘Then I accuse Sister Cruimtheris of not cutting her hair as I commanded all of you to do. Does she admit her fault?’
Sister Cruimtheris could do little else. As she lowered herself full length on the floor in abasement, some of her ginger hair flopped forward onto the stones, the only colour in the black and grey of the chapter house.
Daughter of Lir Page 7