By day her memory droned out the sermons she had sat through in which she, representing womankind, had been castigated, denounced, villified.
‘“I am Eve”’ Abbot Flynn had quoted an old Irish poem in one such sermon, very nearly making her laugh at the thought of him as a seductress…
‘I am Eve, great Adam’s wife,
I wronged Jesus long ago,
I stole heaven from my kin.
It is I should hang upon the cross.
There would be no ice, no snow,
No winter with its blasts,
There’d be no hell, no grief,
There’d be no terror, but for me.’
By night, in her dreams, St Brigid held out to her the left-hand illuminated page which Boniface was beginning to think of as ‘The Word of Woman’ as if trying to pass on some secret inheritance. The grimacing face of the Thing on the Wall drawn on the bottom of the page became familiar, no longer frightening, its terror directed past her to something else. To Brother Flan. One night she sat up and said: ‘It’s Brother Flan who’s frightened of it.’ That was it. It was men who were frightened of the Witch on the Wall and its lozenge-shaped, predatory orifice.
Was it fear, and not contempt, that made them withhold the skill of writing from women?
Her mind felt stretched by the accommodation of new thought. Sometimes she trembled with fear that she might be breaking God’s rules by questioning the pronouncement of men who had been His servants. But she was exultant, with an explorers’ expectation of wonder and adventure in undiscovered territory.
Alone she looked out on it, and yet she felt God’s presence with her as never before, and something else which might have been other women who had arrived in this same country of the mind whose footsteps had been obliterated.
* * *
It was the custom before winter set in for the Comarba of Kildare to make a cuairt, a circuit, of the lands and churches belonging to the abbey. Donal MacGillacolmoc and the O’Faolain and others told Boniface it was also the custom to take with her a small but effective armed force. Behind her back, and with the help of Abbot Flynn and the Archbishop of Dublin, they got guarantees from Dermot for her safety.
Unaware that she was being protected, Boniface used the visitation to enforce and modernise the system of tithes and rents owed to her abbey. She had been doing her sums and discovered that if she put into effect all the schemes she had planned for the future they would be considerably underfunded. ‘This should be a rich establishment,’ she complained to Sister Gormlaith, ‘and here we are tightening our belts.’
‘The churches collect the baptismal penny and the screpall of anointing, and they give us two thirds,’ said Gormlaith, loyally.
‘Not regularly, and not until we go and fetch it,’ said Boniface, ‘which wastes our time and also costs money. And what’s all this about first fruits?’ The system whereby the first sheaf of a corn harvest, the first basket of apples, every first calf and every first lamb and so on, was owed to the Church, was new to her.
‘Ah well now, that’s more in name than in fact,’ said Gormlaith, ‘they’re also due to give the first son and the first daughter to the Church but, sure, if they did that we’d be knee deep in monks and nuns. And anyway, they’ve been having to give it to Dermot for his wars.’
‘Well he hasn’t got any wars now,’ said Boniface, ‘so they can give it where it belongs, to St Brigid.’
‘Ah, Comarba dear,’ wailed Gormlaith, ‘Don’t let’s be having any more trouble with the Mac Murrough.’
‘I am not aware of having trouble with him in the first place,’ said Boniface.
The cuairt went well. The new Comarba was received with lavish welcome wherever she went, and her strictures on the future punctuality of tithe-paying and the re-institution of first fruits were attended to, though it was more than once pointed out that what went to St Brigid could not then go to the King of Leinster.
‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,’ said the Comarba, ‘and unto St Brigid the things which are Brigid’s,’ a phrase which was widely admired and equally widely quoted, not least to Dermot of Leinster.
Time and again she was warned that she had offended the king by her advice to his vassals not to go to war, and that she was offending him again by demanding tithes and rents which he had appropriated for himself. In Celtic fashion, none of the warnings were direct, just sidling references to the fact that ‘Your man,’ which was how the king was universally called behind his back, ‘was dangerous to cross,’ that ‘Your man has his funny moods, for all that he’s our own.’
Boniface, safe in the certainty of God, failed to see the problem. ‘I have no quarrel with Dermot,’ she said in answer to them all, and she really could not see that she had.
The adulation she received during the cuairt went to her head, or so she was informed by her truth-teller, Sister Clotilde, who accompanied her. ‘You’re getting all remote, and sort of stiff,’ Clotilde complained, ‘and you don’t tell me things any more.’
Boniface smiled at her pityingly. How could she take Clotilde into the heady, terrifying regions of the mind she was treading now?’
‘Dear Clotilde, you are a good soul, but God is showing me matters in which you, as yet, can have no part. Have no fear that I shall depart from His rule in the high office to which He has called me.’
‘You’re getting pompous and all,’ Clotilde said, and rode to the back of the column in a huff.
* * *
It was winter on the night she returned to Kildare.
In the early hours of that same night there was knocking on the gates of the abbey and a few minutes later, Sister Brigh woke up the Comarba with the announcement that a lady was in the guest house, asking to see her.
‘Can’t she wait?’ Boniface was tired. The cuairt had been successful, but punishing.
‘Comarba dear, she’s not that sort of lady.’
Nor was she. Despite the plain cloak in which she was wrapped, and even if Boniface hadn’t already been introduced to her at Dermot’s castle of Ferns, she would have recognised the woman as royal. The Queen of Leinster was remote; dried up, as if all traits had been leached out of her, but command remained. Under her uninterested eye, stumbling nuns and servants, unbidden, brought candles, wine and cushions and then retired. Sister Aine stayed as an interpreter, sitting back in the shadows, leaving the queen and the Comarba to face each other across the table.
‘I have come to warn you,’ said the queen with the emotion of someone watching grass grow.
Boniface began her piece about having no quarrel with Dermot Mac Murrough, but his queen lifted her hand and stopped her. ‘It has only been a matter of time before he came against you and he’s picked today. I don’t know why today. I don’t expect he does. But I saw the decision happen to him yesterday in Dublin. Since it was a Monday he was prevented by one of his geasa from setting out, and I made up my mind to forestall him. However, at midnight he will have been released from his taboo and, I have no doubt, is already on his way.’ She closed her eyes as if to mark off some dreary agenda, then added: ‘He has a large force of Hy Kinsella with him, and among them are some foreign mercenaries.’ She opened her eyes.
‘Geasa?’ asked the bewildered Boniface.
The queen looked towards Sister Aine. ‘Tell her.’
Aine said: ‘They are the forbidden things of the king of the Leinstermen.’ It shocked Boniface to see that her nun was shaking. She went on: ‘To travel withershins around the Wicklow Hills on Wednesday. To sleep between the Dodder and Dublin with his head on one side. To encamp for nine days on the plains of Cuala. To ride on a dirty black-hooved horse across the plain of Mullaghmast. To travel along the Dublin road on a Monday.’
Until that point Boniface had been uneasy; the queen’s horrific impassivity had made her recital disturbing, but this farrago of superstition reduced the whole business to vulgarity.
‘I see that you are amused,’ said t
he queen. ‘That is your prerogative. I have done my part.’ She rose, and one of the abbey servants popped up as if emerging from the floor. ‘Prepare three fresh horses,’ the queen told him.
‘But you’ll stay the night,’ spluttered Boniface, ‘It’s dark. You can’t…’
‘I thought I had made it clear,’ said the Queen of Leinster, ‘that Dermot will be here soon. I have my own reasons for not wishing to encounter him, since I too made a decision yesterday. It was to leave him. I am taking with me a somewhat large proportion of his more valuable jewels.’ She closed her eyes, again mentally ticking off things that ought to be said. Her face was skeletal in the candlelight and Boniface realised she was looking at a woman exhausted not just by an unthinkable night’s travel – it was well over thirty miles from Dublin and most of those had been achieved in the dark – but by years that had drained out of her almost everything that kept life in the body.
‘Ah yes,’ said the queen and turned to Sister Aine. ‘It occurred to me on my way here that I might be putting you all in extra danger if Dermot thinks that I am taking refuge here. It was too late to turn back. However, if I were you I should raise the abbey to be ready for attack.’
Boniface watched Aine turn and run. She heard her screaming. She heard other screams. The hysteria and fear seemed to be happening in some dimension which left hers untouched. She disapproved of it.
The queen’s dull eyes looked straight into hers. ‘Goodbye. We won’t meet again. I have to say that I think you are a stupid woman. You have meddled in things you don’t understand and I have taken the risk of warning you of your danger not for your sake but as an offering to God in the hope that in return He will allow me to find peace.’
Boniface opened her mouth to speak, but the queen went on. ‘I shall not tell you where I am going in case Dermot tortures you and finds out.’ She might have been remarking on the weather.
She wrapped her cloak more tightly around her and went to the door, then paused. There was one thing more on her list and she turned round to deliver it. ‘I don’t know what Dermot plans for you, but it will be dreadful. He is a dreadful man.’
She considered with her head on one side. ‘Odd, when you think he was so very nearly a great one.’ She nodded to herself. That was all. She went.
Boniface stayed on for a moment to collect her wits in the room which was still stale from the previous day’s use, quiet, but already vibrating from the terrified preparations beginning around it. ‘Oh really,’ she said, crossly.
She went on saying it, still crossly, in the hour that followed, an irrelevance of disbelief in the midst of an all-too-believing panic which set in motion emergency procedures on a scale that made her realise they had been expecting this.
The bell in the round tower, the bell in the two churches of the abbey, the bell in the monk’s chapel, all the bells in the town sounded out the alarm as torches flared through the streets and passageways until Kildare was a clanging lighthouse on the edge of the black Curragh sea. The horror was infectious, ancestral to the Christian Irish who had watched Norse raiders lope towards their wooden shelters, axes in hand. It clung to people’s faces as they streamed in through the abbey gates, carrying their children and possessions. Boniface watched it cause irrational acts; Abbot Flynn directing the carrying in of the books and manuscripts to the church, and then wasting time arranging them in neat piles; Sister Cruimtheris opening her linnet’s cage at a window, freeing the bird to certain death from night predators.
Father Flynn, Gormlaith, everybody begged her to leave before it was too late. ‘Too late for what?’ she asked, ‘Dermot is a Christian king, not the devil.’ Over her head, Gormlaith said to the abbot: ‘She’ll stand a better chance here. If he caught her outside…’ The decision was made and they went off. Boniface stamped her foot and shouted after them: ‘I am the Comarba,’ but a monk rushing past pushed her off balance so that she fell against the wall.
Well, there was one thing she could see to. She ‘Oh reallied’ herself through the jostling and walked down to the stables. Art, she was relieved to see, was having all the horses led out, Finola among them with her beautiful, lanky new foal. Dilkusha was saddled.
‘Mount up,’ said Art, ‘we’ll get out by the postern.’
‘Not you as well. I’m not leaving.’ She watched Art’s hairy little hands reach out as if to grab her and throw her up on the horse, but he didn’t touch her. ‘This whole thing has been blown up out of proportion,’ she went on, realising for the first time she was speaking Irish, and had indeed been speaking it for some time. ‘If Dermot comes, and I say if, we will talk like reasonable people. He may be upset because his wife has left him, but I shall explain…’
‘And hens will piss holy water,’ said Art. ‘Will you get on that bloody horse?’
‘No. If the worst happens, and it won’t, but just in case, I want you to take the horses, Finola and Henry anyway…’ she had given the foal Fitzempress’ name, though Art had trouble pronouncing it, ‘…and take them out through the postern to somewhere safe. Go to the disert first and take Sister Mairenne with you.’ Sister Mairenne was an anchoress who lived a mile outside the abbey walls in an isolated spot known as ‘the disert’. ‘I don’t suppose anybody’s given a thought to that poor soul all alone out there.’
‘She won’t come,’ said Art, and the tears rolling out of his eyes were the most shocking event of the night so far.
‘Neither will I. Do it.’
On her way back she found activity going on at the foot of the round tower where a ladder was being placed so that the nuns could climb up to its door ten feet above the ground. Brother Flan was there and when he saw her he pushed her into the queue and gave her the tower’s heavy key. ‘When the last one’s up, haul in the ladder and then lock the door.’
She gave another ‘Oh, really,’ and tried to break away, but he caught her and shook her, viciously. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble.’
The tower smelled of urine and bird droppings. They crunched on twigs as they moved and sat down on the bench which ran around the windowless room, if it could be called a room, into which the door opened. There were too many of them for the space, but ladders led up to the circular platforms of the higher levels and some of the younger nuns with steady heads climbed up them. Cruimtheris went some hundred feet all the way to the top and remained there as look-out. Sister Acall’s nerves got on everyone else’s since they kept making her faint and moan, but they had the virtue of keeping the infirmaress occupied.
The nuns rapped out questions to each other: ‘Did they send the message to the O’Faolain and Donal?’ ‘Will they come in time?’ ‘Will they come at all?’ In the hubbub both in and out of the tower, Boniface was ignored.
They heard the boom of the abbey gate being closed and its great draw-bars being slid into their brackets. Gradually the stampede of preparation died down to be replaced by silence. The tower whispered with unsynchronised prayers. They could hear Sister Cruimtheris’ shuffle as she moved round her four windows calling out ‘Nothing yet’ with such regularity that when she said: ‘They’re coming,’ it took some seconds to realise the change since her tone hadn’t altered. Then it did. She began shouting so that the entire abbey could be warned. ‘They’re coming, they’re coming. Torches. Oh Jesus, hundreds of them. The speed. They’re coming.’
Sister Clotilde said: ‘It might be help,’ but not long after that they heard shouting along the ramparts. There was a crash that vibrated up the tower as a ram was hurled against the gates.
In that moment Boniface took in the truth. Until then she had believed herself caught up in some conspiratorial re-enactment of Celtic legend indulged in by an excitable people to feed their love of drama. Dramatic it might be, but it was happening, was going to happen, to all these people, to her.
‘“It will be dreadful,”’ droned her memory, ‘Dreadful, dreadful, dreadfuldreadfuldreadful.’
She screamed: ‘But it was Your rules.’
The faces turned to her in the shaking candlelight shocked her into the knowledge that she had screamed aloud, and some self-possession came back. They had been His rules. She was right. Her soul was safe.
She remembered her imagining from another, unreal life of a Boniface being speared by the pagans before her church door. Had it been prophecy? Was heaven to receive her so soon? Could she face it as that heroic, imaginary Boniface had faced it?
It was a bit quick. She felt ill at the quickness of it, her stomach heaving. But a summons was a summons, and better by far than the powerlessness and insignificance she had experienced in this last hour or so. These nuns, monks, those frightened townspeople out there, were hers. In protecting them and sacrificing herself she would attain sainthood. It was the bit in between now and then which made her legs tremble. She stood up and unlocked the tower door. ‘Help me get the ladder down.’
They clung to her, holding her back, pleading. ‘I’ll only be a minute. There’s still time. I’ve remembered something important,’ she said, then looked at them with all her old power. ‘I am the Comarba.’
Knowing her own mind gave her the advantage. They obeyed her. ‘When I’m down, pull up the ladder again and lock the door.’ She gave the key to Gormlaith and stood on the top rung of the ladder facing inward, impressing a last image upon them. Clotilde was crying. ‘May God bless you,’ said the Comarba.
When she was down she called to them not to take the ladder up yet; some women and children were clustered around the tower and the hedge of St Brigid’s fire, putting their faith in the protection of the holy places. Boniface sent them all up the ladder, slapping them when they slipped or hesitated in her impatience to get on with her sacrifice. When her soul had gone to heaven all their danger would be over, but in the meantime they might as well be safe, though overcrowded.
The ramming of the gate took on a hollower note cracked by splintering and the howling round the abbey intensified. The ladder was hauled up into the tower and the door closed. ‘Just a minute,’ said Boniface to God and hustled through the hedge opening to throw some peat bricks on the sacred fire. ‘Mustn’t let it go out.’
Daughter of Lir Page 11