‘Now walk.’ She had to concentrate to do it, as if forcing her legs through thigh-high water. Hell was breaking loose somewhere down by the big church in screams, clanging steel, hideous noises. She waded towards it.
According to the annals some one hundred and seventy people, monks and townsmen, women and children were killed that night. Dermot admired their resistance, especially that of the monks, who fought like warriors to protect their abbess and their abbey, and as a mark of respect to their valour he had them butchered quickly. He ordered that all wounded be brought to the cloisters to be killed, a neat contained area where he could make sure the Hy Kinsella, and especially the mercenaries, got it over with fast and didn’t indulge in refinements. Madoc was in attendance so that they all got extreme unction, or as much of it as Madoc could perform, being drunk.
Before each stroke Dermot asked: ‘Where’s the Comarba?’ or ‘Haven’t seen my wife, I suppose?’ but the replies, if any, were unsatisfactory. He soldiered patiently on until a small voice with more breath than sound in it, said: ‘Stop that, in the name of the God. I am here.’
Holding onto the doorway of the church at the far end of the cloisters was a thin nun. He had found the Comarba.
* * *
For a moment, one self-sacrifical moment, Boniface knew that she had to be there. Her own death, anything, would be better than that this slaughter should go on. ‘Stop it, in the name of God,’ she said again, and wondered that God did not step out of the sky to raise again the contorted bodies which were lying around the cloisters, His cloisters. It couldn’t go on. How could He let it go on? She saw one of the bodies contort itself even more and rise up in an effort. It was Brother Flan, bleeding from a wound in the neck as he staggered towards her to try and save her. One of Dermot’s men raised his axe and with a sideways sweep of it cut Brother Flan’s head off. She was sprayed with blood as the body collapsed on itself and Brother Flan’s head rolled towards her feet, still showing a concern for her that it had never expressed in life.
She saw Dermot put down his sword and gesture to his men to stand back. ‘So you are,’ he said jovially, remembering to add: ‘The swallows are not more welcome nor the saints more blessed than the sight of you this day. Where’s my wife?’
The dead had been draped like washing over the low wall of the garth while the still-living rolled in its centre at the feet of Dermot’s men.
She heard herself moan: ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ It had not been like this when she had imagined her death at the hand of pagans. Nevertheless in a rehearsed gesture she found herself with her arms outstretched. She said more loudly, ‘Stop this. Kill me, but stop this.’
Dermot sighed as if at the female capacity for histrionics. ‘My dear woman, I haven’t come here to kill you. As I’ve been saying, I’m partly here to find my wife, who seems to have run off with some of my property. Have you seen her by the way?’
Boniface stared at him, unable to take in what he was saying.
Murchadh said: ‘The only place now is the round tower, we’ve searched everywhere else.’
She understood that. They would get to her nuns. She said quickly, ‘She’s gone. She was here but she’s gone.’
‘Came to warn you I suppose?’ asked Dermot, ‘How like her. Always thinking of others. I’ll find her. Now then, the other reason I called in was to remonstrate with you, my dear, because you haven’t really come up to my expectations; in fact, I’m afraid we’re going to be forced to have you deposed.’
Still she didn’t understand. ‘I am the Comarba and always the Comarba, even if you kill me.’
Dermot sighed again; how they did harp on about death these women. ‘Please,’ he said, offended, ‘it’s not going to be that sort of occasion. We’re going to have a happy time. We’re going to have a wedding. You’re going to be married.’
The incomprehensibility of his words added new madness to the insanity of this plane to which they had all been transferred, where hideousness was permitted by God. A man near her said: ‘She knows. She’ll enjoy it.’ They were laughing, Dermot looked around his men to see which one it would be; not any of the Hy Kinsella – he loved them too much. One of the mercenaries, that big drunk over there, the Englishman, he was a womaniser. He whispered to Murchadh: ‘What’s the name of that bastard from Bristol?’
‘Eric?’
‘Eric. How could I forget?’ He took the man into a corner and explained the procedure, elaborating, using words as an aphrodisiac, giving him more to drink, flattering, promising reward, until juice ran out of the man’s slack mouth and Dermot was afraid he would peak too soon. ‘Go get her, my boy. She’ll struggle, but she’s gasping for it. Go and get the bitch.’ Eric obligingly moved down the length of the cloister. ‘Wait, we need respectable witnesses, Murchadh, get the abbot. The rest of you get all the live ones here. Father Madoc. Madoc, what about some appropriate words for the happy couple?’
Madoc swayed through a fuddled memory. ‘I marry you to each other. Good luck,’ he said.
Boniface watched it all, saw the gestures Dermot was making to the big man and the way the big man looked towards her. She took in the realisation of an event so monstrous that the knowledge that those men could perpetrate it at all almost outweighed the fact that it was to be perpetrated against her.
She stood outside herself, seeing what Dermot saw, a posturing, silly girl who had been merely allowed to pretend. All courage gone, she prayed for time to reverse so that she could send all the nuns out of the tower to face this and leave herself safe inside.
Carefully, she backed into the church. Because it was nearer to them the men followed her in through the lower door, the monks’ entrance, maintaining a perverse effect of normal procedure. The choir and altar were lit, and she knew herself outlined against brilliant colour.
People were being herded in through the western door to watch. She saw Abbot Flynn and Brother Fintan. ‘Help me.’
Dermot gave the big man a push towards her but stayed still himself, between her and the audience. The big man came up the nave taking silly, tiptoeing steps, laughing.
Boniface snarled. She reached up to the flambeau above her head, tore it out of its socket and threw it at the man. He sidestepped and left it flaming on the floor. Father Flynn’s idiotic pile of books was right by her, and she began throwing them as hard as she could at the rapist coming up the church. The Word of Men. Energy gave her release and she screamed and threw, and threw, and as he still came forward, ran up to the altar, howling, and hurled its crucifix, then its candelabra, the pyx. The pyx hit him in the chest and he growled, loosened the string of his trousers and leaped on her.
Much later she was to remember that although he ripped off the bottom of her skirts so that she was naked from the waist down, he took trouble to hold her with one hand while he made sure her veil was in place with the other. ‘Nun, Nun, Nun,’ he kept saying.
She fought all through it, though the pain between her legs was like being reamed. She was being reamed. She fought because she had a sudden image of herself as ridiculous, being jerked up and down like some puppet on this human pole. She saw Dermot watching. She felt her head snapping back at each lunge of the penis. There was a moment when she heard laughing and applause. There was another moment when she was rolled towards the reredos and saw the face of the crucified Christ looking pityingly down. ‘Help me,’ she yelled at it. ‘Jesus save me.’ That brought on the man’s orgasm. ‘Nun,’ he roared. ‘Nu-u-u-nnn.’
He withdrew, pulled up his trousers, smiled sheepishly at the congregation and went. They filed out after him.
Boniface lay where she was for a while, retching, and then hauled herself up to sitting position; no skirt, her collar and bodice torn open but her veil still firmly on her head. Again she saw herself as ridiculous, not that it mattered. ‘Help me,’ she said quietly, out of habit.
The church was empty. ‘Help me.’
Dermot didn’t kill anybody else after that, effecting
an orderly withdrawal of his men almost immediately. But the ex-Comarba was left in the church until the nuns had been helped out of the tower because none of the monks wanted to approach her. When Clotilde and Gormlaith and the infirmaress, Sister Maire, ran in they couldn’t find her at first until a trail of blood and slime on the stones near the altar showed that she had crawled beneath it.
* * *
‘I suppose we should have acted then,’ said the Archbishop of Cashel, looking back nearly twenty years from his room on the Rock. ‘It was an atrocious act. We condemned Dermot, of course, but the political repercussions of excommunicating him would have been far-reaching, and he was quick to show penitence in practical form. Some tidy little foundations, gifts of land, that sort of thing. And we were very tied up with reform about that time.’
The monk, still looking out at the plain, nodded.
The archbishop poured out more wine. ‘And she really didn’t help herself, you know. She went quite mad, demanding action, excommunication for Dermot, his denunciation in the chronicles and annals, that sort of thing. She was quite shameless about it. She actually wanted it published abroad. She even wanted to inform the Pope, but I don’t think anybody would write the letter. After all, that was the last thing we needed just then. It would have completed Adrian’s picture of us as barbarians.’
‘Why didn’t she go home?’ asked the monk, though not of the archbishop.
‘That’s what we couldn’t understand,’ said the archbishop, heartily. ‘She was so advised, I believe, but there was some tale of a promise she’d made to the Reverend Mother at Fontevrault. A matter of honour, she said. Honour, I ask you. I’m afraid by that time it was obvious she didn’t have any left. She was pregnant, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said the monk.
‘Hideously embarrassing. You know what that means, don’t you? It means, I’m afraid, that she’d, well, enjoyed it. It’s a well known fact women don’t get pregnant unless they do. Well known. I can’t remember now what happened to the, er, perpetrator.’
‘Dermot had him killed,’ said the monk, ‘He said he couldn’t keep in his employ a man who would rape a nun.’
The archbishop shook his head. ‘Typical Dermot.’
‘So the annalists didn’t mention the rape,’ said the monk.
‘Well, one or two. Loch Cè did. But more or less in passing, not a big fuss like when Aedh MacRuairc and the Hy Briuin killed the Superior of Kells and his congregation in 1117. It wasn’t really in the same class. In a way she’d asked for it. God have mercy on her soul.’
‘Yes,’ said the monk.
PART TWO
Chapter Four
They put Boniface’s bed next to the window in her room so that she could look out on her courtyard, and from there she watched winter turn into spring and the pear tree develop into bud.
Sister Gormlaith came in with the look of agonised love that all her nuns turned on her, as if they would do anything for her but didn’t know what. ‘There’s a deputation from the north Leinster clans, Comarba dear,’ she said, ‘Donal MacGillacolmoc, the O’Faolain and the others. They want permission to march on Dermot in the name of St Brigid, all of them swearing blood and fire.’
Boniface kept her eyes on the pear tree. ‘No.’
‘Just a little war, Comarba,’ pleaded Gormlaith, ‘Sure the man’s not fit to live.’
‘No,’ said Boniface, ‘No more death.’
She heard Gormlaith weeping as she went out and say to Ban, ‘The Christianity of her, and the courage.’
‘No,’ thought Boniface, ‘No Christianity, no courage.’ She felt nothing, as if she had been wrapped in a cocoon through which her brain sent commands and words as if from a long way away and belonging to someone else.
It was not Dermot’s physical death her brain demanded, but his soul’s. He must be removed from the mercy of God by the only institution which had the power to inflict that eternal punishment. He must be excommunicated. But even while her brain made that its priority, the person inside the cocoon wondered that the brain could have the energy to feel hatred and demand retribution. She dreaded the time when the numbness would dissolve and the emotions waiting outside it crowded in on her. Greatest of all, she knew, would be the pulverising guilt at her responsibility for the deaths caused by her blundering unawareness of how dangerous Dermot was. She knew she must see the man brought down, not for herself but for the people he had killed while they had been under her protection.
‘He must lose his soul,’ shouted the brain through the muffling cocoon, but the person inside it wondered if there were such things as souls, Dermot’s, her own; and in the act of wondering gave up and instead watched a blue tit swing upside down on a twig.
She heard the door open and Sister Clotilde’s heavy step across the boards. ‘Abbot Flynn refuses to meet you, Boniface.’
The cocooned spirit found that understandable. She had wrought too much destruction on his abbey, too many of his monks had died.
‘He’s afraid to denounce Dermot, or demand his excommunication in case he comes against the abbey again. And, oh Boniface, he says he cannot meet you now that you are… no longer a virgin.’
Wasn’t she a virgin any more? How odd that she should be condemned for the one thing of which she was guiltless.
‘He won’t even let us write to the Pope.’ The elm boards of the room shook as Clotilde rushed to the bed and fell on her knees beside it throwing her heavy arms over Boniface’s body. ‘Oh my dear, poor dear, I would do anything… We must go home, away from this dreadful place. Mother Matilda will take you back. We should never have come.’
Boniface stared down at her. Somewhere there was an instinct to go back to those sunny, regulated corridors and hide, creep back beneath the mother hen’s wing, but it didn’t permeate the layers around her.
‘Take her back.’ Like a chick that had ventured too far and got itself hurt? A vaguely ridiculous object of pity? And hadn’t she, in another world, made a promise not to return without success?
She saw quite clearly and drearily. ‘You must go,’ she said, ‘You go back and tell them. Get Mother Matilda to write to the Pope.’
‘But you must come too.’
‘And leave Dermot victorious?’ She stroked Clotilde’s back. ‘You wouldn’t want that.’
Clotilde wept, clung, protested, but Boniface knew Ireland was now such a horror to her that eventually she would be persuaded. For herself, no change of venue could rid her of horror, she would carry it around with her for the rest of her life and beyond – if there was a beyond.
Two weeks later she stood at the guest house window to wave Clotilde goodbye. ‘I love you,’ she said quietly, and wondered why she had never said it to Clotilde when she had been in her presence.
Two weeks after that she set off herself, accompanied by Art and Sister Aine to attend, uninvited, the great Church Council of Ireland at Mellifont.
The countryside was responding vigorously to an early spring, leaf, grass, flowers and blossom popping out like escapees from a prison in which only Boniface remained and which was so timeless, so seasonless that it seemed natural for her monthly periods to have stopped.
Numbness had its advantages. Though the beauty of Mellifont Abbey, a copse of stone trees among the living foliage around it, failed to move her, neither was she nervous as she pushed past the enquiring priests who tried to bar her way into the great hall full of gorgeously mitred and coped men. How could they intimidate her more, who had been undone by the expert of undoing? Well, she’d give him undoing.
She walked calmly up the centre of them to the dais where the Archbishop of Armagh was addressing this great assembly of Ireland’s ecclesiastical establishment, climbed up its steps and spoke.
‘I make no apology, my lords, for interrupting you. You know who I am and what has happened to me and my abbey. In the name of St Brigid I call for the excommunication of Dermot of Leinster. I demand that his name be written in the annals as i
nfamous, that he be cast down from his kingship.’ She heard her voice echo under the great carved beams of the roof, felt it sink into the velvet and silks of the congress.
She had no doubt of their acquiescence; they themselves had made her heiress to the saint of Kildare, they themselves had told her how important she was. Why were they avoiding her eyes? Why were they whispering? Why didn’t they answer? Had they excommunicated Dermot already?
‘Let his wickedness be recorded for all time,’ she said clearly in response to the command of that distant brain. ‘That he had me raped, me, the Comarba of Kildare, heiress to the great saint herself. In the name of Brigid I accuse him.’
There was outrage in the assembly, but not for Dermot. She watched a hundred pairs of eyes turn away from her, heard the tuttings of irritation, saw a couple of archdeacons come towards her to lead her away and then stop, not wanting to touch her. She saw Abbot Flynn flapping his hands in desperate apology to those around him, then twist his forefinger against his temple as if to indicate that she was mad.
They were embarrassed.
For the first time an emotion pierced Boniface’s numbness – incredulity. They didn’t want to know. ‘Don’t you hear me?’ she demanded.
Beside her, the archbishop cleared his throat. ‘Will someone remove this poor woman?’
The archdeacons came forward and took her arms. She tore away from them, hissing through her teeth. ‘Listen to me.’ She knelt down on the edge of the dais to where a young scribe was frozen in the act of writing the council’s proceedings. ‘Write,’ she demanded. ‘Write what I have said.’ He got up from his table and backed away from her. She saw the archbishop signal to the gallery where abbesses and nuns were separated from the male body of the council. The cocoon was ripping apart and the reactions from which it had protected her came rushing in, tearing her to pieces with their violence. She struggled on her knees towards the archbishop and tugged at his cope. ‘Depose me, my lord, for the great harm I brought on my abbey, but at least let me hear you excommunicate Dermot first.’
Daughter of Lir Page 12