But she couldn’t bear to let him go. She gave him chance after chance. As they lay watching the moonlight, she said: ‘You’re no pilgrim. Why did you come to Ireland?’
She felt him tense and then give a deliberate yawn. ‘I most certainly was a pilgrim, until I got led away by mad abbesses.’ He leaned over and nuzzled her ear. ‘Let’s do it again.’
The next morning she persisted, desperate to make up her mind one way or another, not wanting to make it up against him. ‘Do you think Fitzempress will invade Ireland?’
She was burning the bacon, and he snatched the pan away from her. ‘How could you be a kitcheness and such a bloody awful cook?’ As they ate he said: ‘Fitzempress? I shouldn’t think so. He’s got enough on his plate. Which is more than I can say for mine.’
‘But he might?’
And then he said: ‘Best bloody thing that could happen.’ He saw her face. ‘Come on, Loon, face it. They’re a lovely people, but they can’t go on like they are, continually warring between the tribes, all these backward customs. I mean, that’s why you were sent here. You can’t tell me you approve of that little priest over there having a wife.’
She looked across the water towards the smoke behind the willows which came from the louvre in the thatch of Baccaugh’s house. ‘I like his wife.’
‘So do I, but that’s not the point. Priests shouldn’t have them. Honestly, somebody’s going to invade them sooner or later because they’re such a bloody shambles. You ought to have seen the battle at Ardee. And look at how the poor old Partraige are preparing to avenge you on Dermot – with a poem. I ask you.’ He hissed in his breath. ‘What Dermot needs is a touch of the castrations, not a bloody poem.’
On and off for the rest of that day, in between making love to her, he cited the weaknesses of the Irish. On one level, she realised, he had a genuine affection for them and on the other he was perfectly prepared to betray them. All his friendship for the O’Conor, the kindness he had received from Iogenán, from Niall, from Blat; all that was in one compartment of his soul and had no connection with what he saw as his duty to Fitzempress. During the battle at Ardee he had charged in at the risk of his own life to save the Partraige contingent and yet he would take their country away from them without a second’s thought.
‘When I was at Tuam,’ he told her, ‘there was a peasant draped across Ruairi O’Conor’s threshold; he’d been dispossessed of some cattle or something and wanted Ruairi to get them back for him. And do you know how he was doing it? He was starving himself. It’s a custom. You fast against somebody.’ He jerked his head and tutted. ‘If they fasted against me they could starve themselves to bloody death, but Ruairi righted his wrong for him. Said it was against his honour to be fasted against. I ask you.’
She watched him as he revealed more and more of his contempt, watched his long, thin feet when they went paddling, watched his hands as he did up his boot-lace, watched his mouth as he chewed a reed, unable to imagine what it would be like without him, listening to him leaving her.
‘And this Scathagh business. I said to Ruairi I couldn’t understand how he could allow it.’
‘She healed me,’ said Finn, gently.
He was affronted, ‘I healed you. Look at you,’ He ran a hand down her flanks and tweaked her bottom. ‘Not a bad-looking woman, considering the wreck you were when I found you. You can thank sex for that. That’s what women need, not roaming about killing wolves and kicking young men in their prospects. If I had my way Scathagh and all the rest of the hags would be thrown off that island, lock, stock and whatsit.’
It was getting dusk again, the clear evening light gaining a bloom.
‘God,’ he said, leaning back, ‘but it’s lovely here. I give you that. I could do wonders with this place.’ He looked reflectively towards the north bank of the lake where shadows were making untidier the untidy shape of Iogenán’s rath. ‘That’d make a wonderful site for a castle. You could dominate the country for miles around if you built a castle there.’
She built it in her mind; a tall, grey, geometric, unforgiving entity like the castles back in Anjou. Around it was not the pastoral, communal countryside that existed now but fenced, arable fields, each one docketed and calculated. Lough Mask would be accountable, so many eels to be trapped and attributed, so many fish and no more to be caught for the lord who owned them. The deer out there in the forests wouldn’t be the clan’s any more, they would be the king’s and anyone who took one without the king’s permission would be a poacher in his own land and subjected to the terrible punishments of feudalism. There would be a block outside the castle for the cutting off of poacher’s hands, a gibbet with Partraige bodies swinging from it.
This would be a Scathagh-less place, with the priest’s wife and his children cast out of it, and a bewildered Partraige subject to laws and taxes they’d never heard of; the women marrying whom they were told to marry, and lumping it if they didn’t like it. Military keeps on the more strategic islands of the Lough. Mailed soldiers keeping a different peace from the lazy, amiable peace which permeated the very earth. Her earth.
Not for you, not for anybody, she thought, is that going to happen here. I won’t let it happen.
And that was that, the end of the only love affair she’d ever have. He didn’t notice.
* * *
In the night she said: ‘When do you want to take me to this bower of yours?’
He was pleased. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘The day after. I’ve got goodbyes to say.’ She sat up abruptly, dislodging his arm: ‘Where’s Art?’
‘Oh my God, who?’
‘Art. Where is he? I haven’t seen him in days.’ The island had seemed to float off into some summer-filled time of its own, leaving the rest of the world to disappear, but now she had to re-connect.
‘Sloped off because he couldn’t stand seeing us together, I expect. Worships the ground you walk on, poor little sod. I saw him lying in a corner at Almaith’s house today, pissed as a newt. Almaith seemed less than delighted to have him there under her feet, I can tell you.’
She was amazed. ‘Does he? Worship the ground I walk on?’ She got out of bed and wrapped her shawl round her while she went to the window to look out at the lake. Perhaps the celibates had got it right after all; there was too much pain in this business of love between men and women. Now that she had begun to feel agony in advance for the separation she was going to impose on herself and the Pilgrim, her heart ached for the pain of any other human being.
‘Seems to. Can’t understand it myself, but I can’t see any other reason for him to throw up a good position at Kildare to go traipsing Ireland with a loony.’
From his view he could see the ouline of her head; her hair was darker than the light which was suffused by the reflection of a full moon on the lake. The confidence with which he’d gone to bed, when he’d thought he’d got her labelled at last, was less assured now. He wanted her away from here and in his home surroundings so that he could get used to her, and so that her particular assembly of features – and God knew he’d seen more beautiful women, and had them too – wouldn’t keep thrilling him down to the marrow every time he looked at her. It was so bloody un-knightly to be obsessed by a woman. He wanted her domesticated, like a water supply, his own well that he could dip into when he needed to and would stay put when he didn’t.
The next day they made visits to the same people, but at different times and with different objectives. Sir John was bidding a final, and truly regretful goodbye to Iogenán, Baccaugh, Blat, Niall and all his Partraige friends. Finn was saying au revoir and a lot of other things.
She went to see Nessa. ‘Where did you say that priest was?’ She spent a long time at his house making arrangements. Then she went back to Inis Cailleach where she entrusted everything she knew to the women who had become her sisters.
The Academy’s course was as good as over. Aragon was preparing to leave and begin her legal fight for the ownership of her late husband’s ship. Bevo wa
s going with her. ‘I’ve decided I like boats,’ she said.
Tailltin and Muirna were still trying to think of an alternative to going back to their clans and being married. Muirna was considering joining one of the strolling bands of actors, jugglers and acrobats which went around the country giving entertainments.
Finn looked round the hall at all of them, her beloved fellow-hags, the pretend-man that was Dagda and, finally, the great female who sat like a troll in her carved chair.
‘We’re all misfits,’ she thought, ‘Tailltin was right.’ It wasn’t just the rapes but Scathagh who had changed them so that they were disqualified from, and no longer wanted, the conventional role of a women. Perhaps the Pilgrim was right. If it hadn’t been for Scathagh she might have gone off to his damned bower and been contented.
‘You made us independent,’ she suddenly shouted at Scathagh in accusation. ‘What are we going to do?’ She had made an absurd decision which would lead her into loneliness such as she had never known, not to mention hardship. It wasn’t too late.
‘Don’t talk to Scathagh like that,’ Dagda said, outraged.
‘Why not? If I’m independent now I’m independent of her as well.’ Unexpectedly, Scathagh lumbered up from her chair and over to where Finn sat and looked her in the eye. ‘Applaud the first graduate,’ she said to the others. ‘Dagda, get some wine.’
Finn nodded. The Pilgrim’s bower wasn’t for the woman she was now, even if she ever had been. She was a fighting Connaughtwoman, and she was going to have to fight.
As they drank Finn’s health, Muirna said: ‘Admit it, you haven’t made our lives easier.’
Scathagh looked around the table. ‘I see women fit to live their own lives. If you ask me “fit for what?”, that was never my problem.’
‘So we’re on our own,’ said Tailltin.
‘That’s a condition of life,’ said Scathagh. ‘Certainly you won’t have me; I am leaving here again. I am needed elsewhere. Whether you have each other is up to you. I gather Finn has a plan so I suggest you listen to it.’
Finn told them. After they’d discussed it Scathagh took Finn up to her gallery. The floor shook as she heaved herself over it to a chest which she opened and, after some rummaging, took out two leather bags containing powdered substances. ‘These should do the trick.’ She told Finn their properties, how and in which quantities they should be used. ‘I gather you don’t want to kill him.’
‘I should,’ said Finn, ‘if I were a proper patriot. But I love him.’
‘Don’t,’ said Scathagh, ‘and don’t love your country either.’
‘What else is there? Outside the church, Ireland is the only country I know of which gives women some rights of their own; even in Leinster their rights are written into the law.’
Scathagh took her round to the other side of the gallery, a portion of it that Finn had never seen. On their way they passed the big, shambling double bed which, Finn realised, Scathagh shared with Dagda. Past that the gallery was virtually empty, only rolled up rugs and hangings lying on the floor among packed baskets and chests. Scathagh was preparing to leave and Finn knew she would find the world even less safe without her. In one of the window lights, standing on a sill, was a figure in stone only nine inches high and yet with a density of mass that made it seem larger. At one and the same time it was like the Thing on the Wall at Kildare, though without its violence, saddle-backed, crouching over its open labia, but worn into a gentler gravitas. ‘The Mother,’ said Scathagh, ‘the oldest thing there is. The only non-betrayer. Love her.’
Behind the figure’s bald head the window framed a piece of the lake which had turned opal under the setting sun. ‘I love you,’ said Finn, temporising, ‘if that will do.’
Scathagh’s face made no change. ‘We are all Her daughters,’ she said, ‘and while you’re about it, extend some of your affection to Dagda.’ When she came to Dagda as she said her goodbyes, Finn kissed her: ‘Thank you, Dagda, for all you’ve done.’ Scathagh had been right; in her own awkward way, Dagda, more mentally crippled than any of them, had given her students everything she had.
Dagda was ungraceful. ‘Well, I hope you remember it.’
With the four others Finn stood for a moment in a circle, their arms linked round each other’s shoulders. ‘It’s not goodbye, hags. Thank God.’
Finally, as the long dusk of the summer evening set in, she went to find Art.
She rowed back, pulling as savagely at the oars as her emotions pulled at her. ‘What happiness has there been in your life that compares with the happiness you’ve known with this man?’ they asked her. But her adolescence was over. She knew, as surely as she knew anything, that the idyll they’d known on Lough Mask couldn’t survive transplantation. ‘One of these days,’ said the mature Finn, ‘that same man and his master will try to rape my country as surely as Dermot and his man raped Boniface. Could I sit in some English bower while they did it?’ She looked around at the darkening lake and its enfolding shoreline. ‘No, I couldn’t. And I’m not going to.’
Swan Island was casting a long shadow over the water and the Pilgrim was pacing up and down. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
That night she said: ‘Would it be all right if we stopped off at Glendalough on our way to Dublin? There’s a priest there that can prove my claim to some property.’
‘You won’t need any property.’
‘It’s always useful.’
It wouldn’t have been any sort of life that he offered her, she thought; it would have had to be lived entirely through him, cut off, dependent on his visits, his interests, his financial support. She was right to be ending it, but that didn’t help the pain.
‘Pilgrim.’
‘Yes?’
‘Art’s coming with us. He’ll be waiting with horses at first light. Iogenán’s lending us some of his horses and keeping mine for a while.’
He grunted. He was outside the hut by the light of the fire trying to wrestle her swansdown quilt into a pannier, while she packed by rushlight in the interior.
‘Pilgrim.’
‘What?’
‘I’m grateful. This time with you has been the only youth I’ve ever had.’
She was departing from procedural banter and making him uncomfortable; her voice held a note that added to the elegaic quality of the lakeland summer night.
‘Plenty more where that came from. This bloody quilt has got a will of its own.’
She put Scathagh’s powders into the box Eleanor of Aquitaine had given her and packed that round with her leather sling. There was no more youth to come. She told herself she’d been lucky; some people didn’t have eight such days ever.
When he came back into the hut, he found her stretched face down on the bed, her hands clutching the bedclothes and holding them against her face and body as if she would absorb them into herself.
Chapter Seven
The Wicklow mountains were typically Irish in being unexpected; the innocent traveller set off from Dublin into the gentle hills of its south and was suddenly embroiled in dizzying granite. It was like finding the Lake District just outside London, or the Pyrenees on the edge of Paris. They were so wooded with oak, ash, rowan, alder, holly and yew that from the depth of one of their few passes it was impossible to see their tops, which reinforced the impression that they were not so much rising up as swooping down, great blocks of leafy, celestial rubble tipped out by God to remind man of his insignificance.
St Kevin’s Road which ran through the pass leading to Glendalough pursued the track the saint had taken in his search for a womanless, temptationless solitude. It had been built over his holy footsteps so that vast numbers could follow in them on a winding, empirical road which dealt with hazards as it came to them; logs laid over the bogs, a stone bridge over a waterfall, cobbled ramps to assist horses up inclines.
Sir John was physically and mentally feverish, querulous at this delay in catching a boat for home, and unwell. The smell of bracken
when they were under trees would overwhelm him so that he was semi-conscious for minutes at a time. His back had developed a rash that itched abominably but the effort of scratching it made his limbs ache. Alarmed, he insisted on being helped down from his horse to pray at every wayside shrine. His mortality commanded his attention to his sins which seemed enhanced by the vibrations of holiness coming from the monastery even before he had reached it, and by the obvious and enviable state of grace of the other travellers on the road, pilgrims, sick and troubled petitioners, churchmen high and low.
If he died now with eight days of thorough-going sin on his soul… and he hadn’t thought to confess before he left Lough Mask because it hadn’t seemed like sin… his loony kept offering him some herbal drink which she insisted would make him better but didn’t at all.
A lake… a great sheet of cool water… Glenn da Locha, the Glen of the Two Lakes… St Kevin had pushed an importuning woman into it… his loony was importuning him to drink again… her face wavered in front of him: ‘I love you. Remember I love you.’ Bees and insects buzzed into collective sound: ‘Have we overdone it?’
‘No, he’ll be all right.’
‘Take him into the shade until I get back.’
‘…Remember I love you.’
Scathagh had assured her he wouldn’t die, would, in fact be as right as rain in a day or two; nevertheless Finn wavered as she walked down the road towards the monastery gates. Nothing, no country, no way of life, was worth this; where did it end if you returned betrayal for betrayal?
But her feet carried her on to the stone gateway. No woman was allowed in beyond the walls and the porter was even dubious about letting the abbot know that she wanted to see him, but her professional Latin and the Queen of England’s device on Eleanor of Aquitaine’s box eventually persuaded him to send a message. She sat on a stone bench under an oak tree by the river opposite the gate, just able to see over the wall of the monastery the steep roofs of its many churches and the priapic round towers which rose up in puny rivalry to the surrounding mountains with their ogreish names, Lugduff, Poulanass, Derrybawn and Coomaderry. An angular, crucified Christ hung in stone outside the gate with his flat, nailed hands palm-outwards and his little head sunk on his right shoulder. She averted her eyes from the thing; it had watched Boniface’s violation at Kildare and done nothing. The sound of a choir chanting a Laudate interspersed with the trilling of sandpipers from the lake. Butterflies chased each other in aerial courtship. She felt isolated by this male powerhouse of sanctity and learning, lonely for another lake where the coming together of men and women had reflected the natural order about them.
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