‘What perversion carved that?’
‘A devil. Or a man. Actually…’
The claustrophobic womb which the courtyard had become was lanced by singing coming from the other side of the wall behind them, disciplined, aseptic chant, as if God was reminding his nuns of his purity.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the monks. We’re close to the monastery here.’
‘Lord, we’re late for None.’
‘Gormlaith will take it,’ said Clotilde, ‘But that’s what I was going to say. The thing was put here, facing the men’s side as a sort of warning to them against you-know-what. In case they felt like coming over the wall. It’s a warning against women. Who could hate us so much? Or fear us?’
‘Us?’ Boniface saw no relationship between herself and the thing. And she knew Clotilde was wrong. Whoever had perpetrated the carving on the wall was female, a demon probably, but a female demon. Its message was the hideous final triumph. ‘Look into this,’ it said to the male. ‘Abuse it, enslave it, set up your masculine God over it. But this hole is what you come out of and this is what you disappear into. This is the final profundity.’
She was then as horrified by herself as the Thing. What bestial cupboard had opened in her mind to let that thought out? No doubt its evil was infecting her. ‘I must go to my prayers,’ she said.
They backed out of the courtyard, taking care not to touch each other. When they were outside they turned and ran, skittering back to the safety of the God they knew.
Boniface put off her visit to Dervorgilla until another time. She’d encountered enough sexuality for one day.
* * *
‘I don’t think Fitzempress himself has better housing for his horses, or better horses for that matter,’ Boniface dictated to Brother Flan, her scribe, in one of her letters to the Abbess of Fontevrault. ‘Should you ever visit us, Mother, we can promise you excellent mounts here at the end of the world.’ (It was a little joke between them that she and Abbess Matilda addressed their letters from and to In fine mundi in partibus Hiberniae: Ireland at the end of the world.)
She looked suspiciously down at the membrane on which Brother Flan’s goose quill had left those irritatingly mysterious shapes. Her relationship with Flan was not warm; Brother Flan disliked women, which was possibly why he had been designated as her secretary by Abbot Flynn in the first place, but just lately it had become distinctly cold because Boniface was beginning to suspect him of doctoring her letters, especially those reporting to the Pope and to the Mother Superior at Fontevrault; altering phrases of which he disapproved and even, occasionally, of suppressing matters over which she and the abbot were at loggerheads. She had not been able to prove it, but there was a certain lack of response in parts of Mother Matilda’s replies which made her wonder. He’d even objected at first to her describing Ireland as the end of the world, saying that it was the world which was at the end of Ireland.
‘What have you put?’ she demanded angrily. The thought that this pipsqueak of a monk might be thwarting her sent her nearly mad with fury.
‘I don’t think Fitzempress himself has better housing for his horses,’ the monk said tonelessly.
‘You’d better have.’ Because she knew he disapproved of her interest in horseflesh, she went into a long description of her stables.
* * *
Unable to credit that stables in the charge of the drunken gargoyle, Art, who had greeted her so rudely on her arrival, could be anything but a shambles, she had discovered them to be not only on a magnificent scale, but an example of cleanliness and good management which any king would have envied as they would have envied her in having Art to run them, once they’d got over his occasional descents into drinking, and his ugliness. This, the ugliness, was unusual among a race that had so far turned out to be good-looking. Art was incredibly, agelessly, ugly; his pointed ears stuck out at right angles to his warty face. He was dark, squat, bow-legged and ill-tempered, especially to those ignorant in the way of horses. On his good days he tolerated fools with monosyllabic grunts. On his bad days, when he was drunk, he reviled them in lengthy, obscene tirades.
Since he had suspected this foreign abbess to be one such fool, their initial relationship had been bumpy. On the first day she had required him to produce a horse for her – she’d been going hunting with the nobles of a local clan, the Hy Tuathail – the mount had been an insult. Boniface had dismissed it with a glance and demanded that alternatives be brought out into the stable paddock for her to try. When she’d settled eventually on a high-spirited but soft-mouthed chestnut mare called Dilkusha, she’d seen Art raise his eyebrows in surprise at her good taste. But he still didn’t trust her. To Boniface’s annoyance, he joined the hunt on his own pony to follow her progress. Whatever she jumped, however fast she galloped, Art was behind her. She’d tried shooing him away but Art had stuck to her as if attached to an invisible leading rein. Eventually the glory of the day and the sense of comradeship which comes to riders in a chase had cleared her bad temper. When they jogged back into the stables that night, Art had stood at her stirrup to help her dismount, muttering.
‘What did he say?’ Boniface asked of Sister Aine, who had come with them.
‘He says you may be a Norman on two legs, but on four you’re an Irishwoman. It’s his version of a compliment.’
Boniface had taken it as such. Later, as she’d got to know him better, she wondered whether Art’s almost mystical perception with horses extended to human beings, her in particular. When, through Aine, Boniface had explained her plan for breeding from the Arab mare, Art had approved. He treated the horse when she arrived as if she were royalty, fed her on a secret formula which put her in perfect health and found a stallion for her mate which, he said, came from Connemara and with which even Boniface could find no fault. He’d supervised the covering himself and Finola was now in foal.
‘What’s that he calls her?’
‘Finola. She was the swan-daughter of Lir, of the second sorrow of storytelling. Why?’
‘Nothing.’ But it was an odd coincidence. Art, without knowing – because nobody knew – had, out of all the names he could have chosen, picked on Boniface’s real name, her Irish name, the one which she had been given by the parents she could not remember.
Of all the Irish she’d met, Art was the one to whom she was almost, but not quite, tempted to reveal her nationality. Despite the horror of his appearance, she felt comfortable with him. He was connected through the smell of horses, manure, liniment and even strong drink, to a forgotten time in the past, as if there had been someone like him in her childhood. As if not all her early childhood had been unhappy. This sense of security allowed her to lower her dignity by quarrelling with him as she would with no one else. Their disagreements were conducted through an appalled and amused Sister Aine, though more and more Boniface could understand what he said.
‘Ask this maniac why there are gorse bushes tied to Finola’s stall if you please.’
‘Tell herself the bloody mare’s becoming a stall kicker which is an evil habit as the Lord knows and brought about by boredom as I’ve told her till I’m sick of it.’
‘Tell him I know what he’s doing, him and his boredom. He wants to harness that poor thing to a plough because he’s a serf who doesn’t know how to treat a noble animal and if she’s kicking it’s because she lacks the right exercise. The right exercise, tell him.’
She visited Finola and Art and the stables every night when she could. They were among her happiest hours. Still smarting over Brother Flan, their familiar smell calmed her as it always did though, unusually, tonight they stank strongly of horse urine. More unusually still, one of Art’s stableboys was hanging by his roped feet from a hook in the rafter. He arched his back to lift his head and greet the Comarba politely, an action that set him circling.
‘What’s going on?’
Art’s croak came from a stall in which there was much activity. ‘Didn’t the bloody li
ttle shitpot take his eye off Cruith and let him feast himself on foxglove?’ Cruith was a red roan, hence his name, and one of Art’s favourites.
‘He said the lad allowed Cruith to eat foxglove,’ translated Sister Aine.
‘Ask him how he is.’
‘How are you?’ enquired Aine of the revolving boy.
‘Not him. The horse. Tell Art oily purgative food with tepid water every three hours.’
Art’s dreadful head appeared over the half-door. ‘Will the woman teach her grandmother to suck eggs? What does herself think I’m doing here? And the horse piddling like a bishop.’
They went to speak to Finola, Boniface explaining to Aine that one of the symptoms of foxglove poisoning was excessive urination.
Eventually Art joined them, grunting that the roan would do.
‘It has come to my notice,’ said Boniface, coldly, ‘that he was drunk again last night.’
Art spat as Aine translated. ‘Who’d be telling her that?’
‘Never mind who told me.’ Assured that she was now fond of Art, the nuns were happily informing on him. ‘Very drunk. He was overheard accepting a bet from the smith that he could jump the paddock wall on a horse that was blindfolded. Did he do it?’
Art sulked. It was the recently suspended stable boy, now righted, who said: ‘They were both blindfolded, your honour, but God lifted them over as sweetly as a zephyr.’
‘I’ll give him zephyr.’ Not for the first time Art was treated to a lecture on the evils of drink, breaking God’s rules and risking a good horse. She was interrupted in mid-flow by Brother Flan with a message from Abbot Flynn, but she waved him away. ‘Tell this drunkard if there is any such recurrence, he leaves this abbey for good.’ It was an empty threat and she’d made it before.
‘I didn’t think he could do it,’ said Sister Aine, as they left.
‘I knew he could,’ said Boniface, ‘That’s two prayers you owe me.’ They paid their bets by prayers for each other’s soul.
The confrontation with Dervorgilla, which Boniface was dreading, could no longer be put off.
In the lovely chamber over the west gate which was reserved for guests, Dervorgilla was kneeling in prayer at a prie-dieu while her ladies embroidered. She hauled her bulk to her feet at the abbess’ entrance with eager politeness. ‘It’s so good of you to come when you’re so busy.’
Like everything else in Ireland, Dervorgilla was unexpected. Boniface had envisaged that a married princess who eloped with her lover would be a Delilah, someone tall, dark, young and throbbing with ungovernable desire.
The woman who greeted her with outstretched arms – Dervorgilla’s hands were almost invariably palm-upwards, as if in a plea – was dumpy and forty-four years old. As usual with Irishwomen, her complexion was clear and made her look younger than she was, despite her greying brown hair. Her eyes stared out of her face like large, timorous pansies, the only remnant of what must once have been a beautiful, but short, woman. ‘Shall we have some wine?’ she asked, ‘would that be nice?’
Someone had educated her well though, it was impossible not to feel, harshly. Her fluent, unaccented Latin came mostly in questions, asking for an approval that was rarely granted; her diffidence elicited the protective instinct in a few and the bully in nearly everybody else.
‘She’s so gentle,’ had been Clotilde’s verdict.
‘She’s so weak,’ had been Boniface’s.
Under some vigorous questioning by the new abbess, Dervorgilla had admitted herself truly penitent for her sin in running away with Dermot of Leinster, although Boniface wondered whether that was only because the idyll had turned out badly. The ease with which Dermot had handed her over when threatened indicated that he had quickly tired of Dervorgilla, even that he hadn’t loved her at all but had only abducted her in order to get even with O’Rourke, her husband, for past defeats.
As they’d become acquainted, Boniface had grown less shocked with Dervorgilla but more inclined to slap her. The woman was a pawn, prepared to believe anyone who knew their own mind, vulnerable to romance, impulsive, never thinking things through. She had been shifted about so that two men, Dermot and her own brother, the O’Melaghlin, could wreak revenge on her husband.
‘My brother, bless him, thought I’d be happier with Dermot,’ she told Boniface and her little hands had pleaded for understanding for her brother. She would blame nobody for the mess she was in. ‘He said I’d been destined for Dermot really. We had been betrothed when we were young, you see. He was wonderful then, Dermot. I’d always thought I was in love with him. My brother said God would understand if I snatched some happiness. But God didn’t like it, did He?’
The abbess accepted some wine sternly. ‘It has been said that your husband maltreated you, Lady Dervorgilla. Is that true?’
Dervorgilla eased herself down to the window seat and looked out. Her dress was of soft, green linen and, with the light behind her, she looked young. ‘Men get like that, don’t they?’ she said vaguely, ‘And of course he’s old and spends so much time on the battlefield. They’re not very good, men, at dealing with all the feminine things, are they? I don’t think he meant it really, do you?’ In Dervorgilla’s soft mind men never meant any harm really.
‘Did he or didn’t he?’ The irritation Dervorgilla always provoked with her evasions made Boniface’s voice sharp.
‘Perhaps he drank too much, do you think? My brother and he never got on, I just don’t think I was the right sort of wife for him, poor old thing.’
‘You have to go back to him.’
The pansies turned on the eighteen-year-old abbess in desperate appeal. ‘Can’t I stay here?’
‘Indeed you can’t.’ If Dervorgilla had been a different sort of woman, thought Boniface, she could have insisted on her right to sanctuary, which would have made things very awkward, but during the talks they had been having she knew she had gained such ascendency over Dervorgilla that there was no question of it. ‘You may remain here until the child is born, but then we must hand you over to the O’Conor. It would be breaking God’s rules for us to stand between a wife and husband.’ She added more gently, ‘O’Conor would come in and get you anyway. You wouldn’t want that, would you? He’s promised to escort you safely back to Breffni.’
‘And the baby?’ Dervorgilla’s arm were protectively round her stomach, ‘O’Rouke would…’ she couldn’t say it, ‘He wouldn’t be very nice to it.’
‘What do you want to do with it?’ And even as she asked, Boniface knew that asking Dervorgilla what she wanted was like consulting a pig on its fancy for flying; the situation in which Dervorgilla could choose to please herself had never arisen, and never would.
Sure enough, Dervorgilla returned her question with another: ‘What can I do?’
Boniface got up to take a turn around the room. Her plan to trade the safety of Dervorgilla’s baby for Dervorgilla’s acquiescence in leaving the abbey’s sanctuary seemed less perfect here than it had down in chapter. Well, she had asked for power, and here it was, complete with responsibility. Her first duty was to God and her abbey. ‘We could find a wet nurse for it, and see that it gets safely to your brother’s family.’
‘Ye-es.’ And if ever there was proof that Dervorgilla’s upbringing had been harsh, it was in her reluctance to relinquish her child to the same.
‘I see. Well then, it could be fostered with good people until it was old enough to be raised here, in Kildare, either as a monk or a nun, according to what it is.’ She was aware that celibacy was not what every mother wanted for her child; she was consistently amazed by how keen some were to deliver their poor little offspring into the world of the flesh. And she was being generous in making the offer. It wasn’t every abbey, after all, which would take bastards in – but she disapproved of that outlook; several saints had been born out of wedlock. St Brigid for one.
‘Here? She could be away from men?’ Perhaps because of its vulnerability, Dervorgilla always referred to her future
child as a daughter. ‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you take her away immediately?’ Dervorgilla had her own sort of courage; she was smiling as always, but the pansies were overflowing.
‘O’Conor is becoming impatient,’ Boniface explained gently, and then got cross. There was pain around again. ‘I hope you’re not going to be difficult, Lady Dervorgilla.’
‘No. Oh no. I’m sorry. I’m grateful. Really.’
They prayed together, the long penitential prayers in which Dervorgilla seemed to find comfort and which the abbess knew were good for her soul. Afterwards Dervorgilla said: ‘At Mass tomorrow, could you ask the priest to read that bit I like? About the women taken in adultery?’
‘Very well.’
‘He was lovely, wasn’t he? Jesus. He doesn’t condemn me, does he? He said so.’
The story of the woman taken in adultery had always rather shocked Boniface, who couldn’t help feeling that her Lord had bent His Father’s rules a bit. ‘Apparently not. Not as long as you’re truly repentant and sin no more.’
On her way out, Boniface astonished herself again. She paused at the door, turned, and, in a different voice from the tone of command she generally assumed to Dervorgilla, found herself asking: ‘Why don’t you fight?’
And Dervorgilla answered her differently, as if they’d changed to another level of understanding.
‘I’d never win,’ she said.
Chapter Three
Dervorgilla proved difficult at the end. She bore the birth well, considering her forty-four years. She’d been right: it was a girl – but when they took the baby away she screamed. Long after she had been given over to the O’Conor, the abbey’s stones held the sound and whispered it back like a diminishing wrong note.
Daughter of Lir Page 9