The archbishop tore himself away in alarm. ‘Did nobody inform this person that she has already been deposed? Father Flynn?’
‘Why?’ begged Boniface.
Two brawny prioresses were advancing up the nave of the hall and the churchmen fell back, relieved that the situation would soon be dealt with.
‘Why?’ begged Boniface again. ‘Because of all the deaths?’
The archbishop looked down and his amazement at her ignorance forced a direct answer out of him. ‘My poor child,’ he said. ‘You were unfitted that night. Dermot had you unfitted for the post.’
‘Dermot had me raped.’
The archbishop nodded. ‘Unfitted,’ he said, and then big, feminine arms seized Boniface. ‘Take her back to Kildare,’ said the archbishop, ‘Let the new Comarba make some arrangement for her. I am afraid the poor soul has gone mad.’
He was wrong. Up to that point Boniface had been sane, trying to stop the world going mad around her. It was then, as she saw that structure on which she had built her life and in which she had put her trust was insane, that she went mad. They were going not just to ignore her, but obliterate her. She would be a non-person. She began shrieking incoherence at them and fighting every inch of the way as the prioresses half-carried her out of the hall.
The churchmen could hear her screaming outside and the archbishop signalled to the choir to cover the noise; in a minute a cool, sexless Nunc Dimittis was re-establishing the order and purity of God, helping them to forget the woman who had brought sex, like the disgusting intruder it was, into their company, reminding them of everything their foundation was in being to negate.
The archbishop heard one very young monk whisper to his neighbour: ‘What’s “raped”?’ He sighed. There it was. How could she not have known? She had been deposed for that; not because her abbey had been attacked. Abbeys had been attacked before and would be again while the devil reigned, but their abbots and abbesses were not deposed, however politically inept. Her real sin – and nobody should have had to point it out to her – was in being raped, and not just in the decent privacy of a field, but in full view before a high altar. She had literally displayed the hole in the virginal fabric this choir was now re-weaving.
Perhaps they should send a messenger to the Pope to express regret at what had happened to his foreign nun, but he confidently expected that when the Holy Father heard the delicate circumstances attendant on the matter, he would take no action.
And the new Comarba – he was going to appoint Mór, daughter of Donal O’Conor Faily, a sensible Irish virgin of mature years and a good apolitical choice – she would have to deal with the madwoman, stop her making a nuisance of herself. He didn’t know how, but it wasn’t his problem.
The chanting ceased, leaving the air peaceful. He knew just how to strike the right note now and put this upsetting episode behind them all. He strode back into the centre of the dais and wagged his finger at the assembly, his kindly old eyes twinkling at them. ‘These women,’ he said.
* * *
If the archbishop didn’t know what to do with a raped ex-Comarba, the new Comarba of Kildare didn’t either. The best thing would have been to put her on the next boat back to France and forget all about her, but Mór had gathered the unspoken dislike of the council for any more anti-Irish propaganda in Europe, and a raped nun shouting her wrongs from the housetops would certainly have provided that.
Anyway, the woman was pregnant and Mór was sorry for her. For the time being, and until the child was born, she hid her out of everybody’s way in Sister Mairenne’s disert outside the walls of Kildare.
* * *
Everything stopped. Except the rape, which went on and on and on. When flakes of snow came through the ill-fitting door of the disert, the big man came in with them and began it all over again. He clambered in through the window on the moonlight, wearing the smiling head of Dermot of Leinster, and, without waking Sister Mairenne, raped her once more.
‘He’s dead.’ Sister Mairenne broke her vow of silence to comfort Boniface when she woke screaming.
But he wasn’t dead, he was alive and ripping her apart. And the guilt – if she’d done this or done that it wouldn’t have happened – was alive. The overwhelmingness of male strength was alive. The cancer the man had left inside her was alive, and growing. Only Boniface was dead.
* * *
And God was dead.
The living cancer which had been implanted in Boniface’s body emerged out of it in August, still living, and was taken away to foster care before she could see it, in accordance with the wish she had expressed before her final madness. It cried as it was carried away and the thin sound answered that of Dervorgilla’s crying still echoing somewhere in the stones of Kildare Abbey.
* * *
The jolly young Norman pilgrim who turned up at Kildare in late September was the answer to its Comarba’s prayer. She had him brought to her apartments where Sister Aine acted as interpreter, since he had little Irish.
‘Have you sinned, my son?’ Mór asked him.
‘Bless me, Mother. I’m afraid I have somewhat.’
‘And you seek expiation in holy pilgrimage?’
‘Yes I do. Actually, I was hoping to travel into Connaught, from Loch Derg, but every time I set off I keep getting turned back. Apparently there’s a war on.’
The Comarba regarded him sternly. ‘There is indeed terrible war between Connaught and Ulster and in the normal way I would advise you not to go, though doubtless your soul could benefit by it.’
Sir John of Sawbridge perked up. ‘Do I gather this is not in the normal way?’
The Comarba took a turn around the room, making the floorboards creak. She was a massive woman. She was also a worried one; the misery of the poor soul, who now had to be tied up for her own safety, concerned her. She was receiving no help; as far as the male church establishment was concerned the woman no longer existed. She had prayed long and hard for an answer and had now received one.
She looked at the young man carefully. For all his robe and his scrip and his staff he didn’t have the look of a pilgrim, he was too pleased with himself, too tricky; nevertheless the Comarba was no mean judge of character and she saw, beneath the arrogance, a decency which the young man himself probably didn’t know he possessed. She shrugged heavy shoulders. One took what God sent.
‘My son,’ she said, ‘as heir to the blessed St Brigid I have the privilege to grant indulgence, and I can promise to absolve you of many sins if you will help me in a certain manner. I want you to escort a poor lady to Connaught. I cannot say that it will be a safe journey, but I can send with you a guide who has travelled the area himself, and who should take you through most of Nature’s dangers and even, with God’s help, those of man. Will you go?’
Sir John, thought Sir John, you’ve done it again.
Fulke had already returned to the Continent with their early report on the state of Ireland, but since he’d sailed John had been thwarted time and again in his attempt to go deeper into the west by the bloody war they were indulging in over there. He hadn’t worried too much. God wouldn’t let him down. Something would turn up. And here it was. He was being given the perfect passport. The lifting of sins off his soul was a bonus, considering how many these charmingly willing Irish girls had enticed him into committing.
The two godsends smiled into each other’s eyes. ‘Madam,’ said Sir John of Sawbridge, ‘I’m your man.’
* * *
‘She is a lady who has been foully mistreated. Ask me not how,’ explained the Comarba on the way to the disert. ‘As a result she wanders in her wits – a temporary affliction, so the doctors inform me. God has not deserted her, however, for out of her ravings we have discovered that she is a noblewoman of Partraige ancestry. A curious patronym, you will think, since none of our native words begin with the letter ‘P’. Of Pictish derivation probably, and we have traced her sept to the shores of Lough Mask where, though it may be sadly diminished, we
believe it to still exist. She is called Finola.’
Sir John nodded politely. He didn’t give a damn what the woman’s name was. ‘This Lough Mask,’ he said, ‘in O’Conor territory is it?’ The O’Conor king was a powerful but unknown quantity and Fitzempress needed to know more about him.
‘It is.’
The stone hut held a withered female hermit with hairs sprouting from her chin and, chained round its waist to a ring in the wall, a sticklike scarecrow that cowered and muttered as Sir John entered and which, he presumed, was his charge. Of the two he would have preferred the hermit.
‘How is she today, Sister Mairenne?’ asked the Comarba. A shrug indicated that the patient was as usual. ‘We keep knives away from her,’ said the Comarba in an undertone. She led the pilgrim up to the scarecrow. ‘Lady Finola, this gentleman is making a holy journey to the stations of Lough Derg and has kindly agreed to escort you to your own people. Will you go with him?’ She spoke in the loud, careful enunciation reserved for the deaf. She shoved Sir John nearer. ‘Say something.’
‘Nice day.’ Mentally he picked the creature up between thumb and forefinger and held it away from him; there were lice crawling in the tangled hair. He’d seen saner March hares. And he wasn’t keen on the way its eyes flickered over him and away. ‘This sept as you call it,’ he said, ‘You’re sure they’ll take her in?’ He didn’t want to get landed with her.
‘I don’t know the custom in Normandy,’ said the Comarba with dignity, ‘and it is true that they haven’t seen her since she was a child, but the Irish look after their own.’
Nor was Sir John reassured by the sight of his guide, a gargoyle on legs called Art, although he was surprised and impressed by the horse which was to bear the loony’s luggage, an Arab, if he wasn’t mistaken, with her yearling.
‘We are sorry to lose Art,’ the Comarba told him, ‘but he is devoted to the Lady Finola and insists on accompanying her.’
‘Then why doesn’t Art take the loony?’ wondered Sir John.
As they stood at the postern and watched the ex-Comarba and her escort ride off down the track to the west, Sister Aine wondered much the same thing. ‘Surely Art could have taken her.’
‘I don’t want her left alone with a man,’ said Mor.
‘But Art wouldn’t touch a hair of her head, and the pilgrim looks harmless enough.’
The Comarba of Kildare sighed. ‘Dear daughter, you don’t realise what she has become. It’s the men I’m afraid for.’
* * *
There was no Boniface; she’d been jammed down on a spike and the cracks held together for a time before shards whirled off into a void of primal terror. It was the imbalance of the world which stopped the pieces of the non-thing from joining up, the unruled injustice of chaos. If she could even it, inflict some proportion, the shards might come together enough for her to return to a lakeside where a small, clean girl called Finola waited for her to enter the only substantial thing there was, the blessed insubstantiality of water.
The ugly one was safe, but the new one was taking her into a forest where trees reached out to stuff jagged branches up that torn entrance into her body. His face and voice intertwined with sexual foliage; she had seen him before.
‘Was. She. Oh what’s bloody Irish for raped?’ He wasn’t really interested, merely trying to make conversation; if he could improve his Irish during this journey it would be something gained. But the gargoyle ignored him as he had for three days, pretending not to understand even when he asked where they were.
And where were they? He’d expected to reach the Shannon by now in which case Connaught would be on the other side, but, though they’d traversed some mountains, they’d encountered no river as big as the Shannon was reputed to be. All they’d seen was bog and forest. He’d never known such forested country, or such a deserted one.
They weren’t making good time: the loony’s weak condition was holding them back, and the Arab didn’t like acting as pack horse, not that he blamed it.
And Art insisted on treating the madwoman like a queen, watching over her, standing guard when she went off into the bushes as if he, Sir John, might have designs on her. Which would be the day. She gave him the creeps with her skinny, dirty little body and her muttering. Doubtless she’d encountered something nasty in the woodshed at some time or another, the way she shrank from being touched, but she was making an unnecessary meal of it.
The gargoyle’s ears were waggling. Sir John heard the sound of cantering horses behind them on the soft leafmould of the forest floor. Until then they’d been following some track through the trees which Sir John had believed to belong solely to badgers, but Art had them and their horse off it in seconds. Why the little bastard thought anybody’d be interested in a pilgrim, a gargoyle and a loony, Sir John failed to understand, and said so. Art hissed the Irish equivalent of ‘Shut up’, took the woman further back under cover and then crawled forward on his belly to watch; Sir John went with him.
The riders were warriors. Sir John was impressed, as he always was, by the completeness between Irish soldiers and their mounts which they rode without saddle or stirrups, though why they made life so difficult for themselves was a mystery; something to do with their bloody tradition. Ah well, all the easier to defeat them in battle if it came to that. He hoped the Connaught troops were equally uncivilised. Still, the speed with which they could cut through this damn terrain made them formidable.
Art lay like a log till they were well gone, then went back to report to the madwoman.
‘Hy Kinsella.’
They were the first words Sir John had understood since they’d started. He said: ‘Isn’t that the clan of Dermot of Leinster?’ He’d met Dermot during his first survey and thought him an interesting chap.
Art nodded to the woman and indicated that he’d track them and that she was to stay where she was. He nipped off.
They were in a glade and the shadows were lengthening. The evenings were drawing in and another bloody day had gone without anything achieved. Praying for patience, Sir John began to make camp, and behind him the non-thing took a knife out of Art’s saddlebag.
The leaves of the trees turned gold and red in the long, autumn light like the colours of a painted church. Dermot of Leinster, he’d said, Dermot of Leinster, only this time he’d turned his back. She would balance the void by sticking the knife in his neck and haul herself up by it.
Jesus, thought Sir John, the loony didn’t believe in travelling light. Under the top blankets in the pannier was a very nice swansdown quilt, a box such as women carried their jewellery in and… Good God, on it was the device of Eleanor of Aquitaine. What was an Irish madwoman doing with an Arab mare and a trinket box belonging to the Queen of England?
He’d lived with danger for the best part of his life, and when a breath whistled behind him he ducked down and sideways. The knife point perforated his earlobe and scored along his cheek.
Though Sir John’s looks weren’t beautiful, he was fond of them and he struck the knife out of the loony’s hand with all his force, putting her on her back and kneeling on her legs to stop her kicking. His intention was to explain his displeasure with the flat of his hand on her backside, but he found himself looking into her eyes and he stopped.
It cannot be said that his anger was gone; for Sir John and his like treachery by a woman was more horrible than treachery from a man since it threatened the natural order of things. But in the woman’s eyes was an experience, a re-experience, of something so dreadful that it was outside the natural order. It outweighed the attack on him. For the first time in his life John found himself hanging over the edge of somebody else’s hell.
In trying to relate it to something he could understand he likened the woman to a dog turned vicious by the cruelty of a previous owner.
Now, Sir John’s defence against outrages of the universe was to impose neatness on himself and everything belonging to him in the hope that it would catch on by extension. He had the
true Norman’s mania for order and, like all Normans, such order had to reflect his own importance.
In that moment of connection between him and the madwoman, she stopped being a person he was travelling with and became part of his entourage; it was a difference he would have been unable to explain, but it brought the woman under his responsibility. That he was stuck with her was a misfortune, but since he was indeed stuck with her he would train her like any other vicious animal, mixing reassurance with discipline.
Her jerked her to her feet. ‘I don’t know what your last master did to you, young woman, but we are going to do it different. You’ll be a credit to me if it kills you. Credit, you bitch. Damn, what’s Irish for credit? Well, you’ll learn.’
When Art came back he found a shaking ex-Comarba sitting on a log, her hands tied before her, with the pilgrim inexpertly and painfully pulling through her hair an ivory nit comb which had been given to him by his mother.
‘And tomorrow,’ the pilgrim said to him, ‘you can heat some water and wash this female. Wash, understand? And it won’t do you any harm either. See what she did to my face? Face? There’s going to be some changes. This may be the back of beyond, but if you think I’m travelling through it with a couple of disasters like you two you’ve got another think coming. Understand?’
And, oddly enough, Art looked at his ex-Comarba, then at the pilgrim, and nodded.
* * *
An abnormally dry, hot summer had shrunk the Shannon; nevertheless the pilgrim’s jaw dropped when he saw the width of it. He decided to cross further up the eastern bank where it was narrower and where holy men ran ferries under the protection of St Patrick; Sir John couldn’t swim and distrusted any water on a large scale.
Daughter of Lir Page 13