‘How can I help you, my daughter?’ asked a voice. Like all the men of his clan, the Hy Tuathail, Abbot Laurence O’Toole was tall and bony. A childhood spent as a hostage at Dermot of Leinster’s court had given him a wider view of life than was usual among monks. One of its few advantages had been to make him, like Dermot, aware of the world outside Ireland.
He also knew a distressed woman when he saw one, and immediately sent one of the monks attendant on him for a restorative glass of nenadmim, the crab-apple cider brewed on the premises. For a moment, Finn wondered if he would know who she was – he had been in the congregation which had witnessed the inauguration of Boniface as Comarba of Kildare – but few monks looked closely enough at any woman to recognise her again, and he didn’t. Suffering and sexuality had changed her, and she was wearing a red dress and cloak lent to her by Meld, Iogenán’s queen.
The woman’s distress was genuine enough, but the story she told him was a lie. ‘My lord, I am the wife of Sir John of Sawbridge, a knight in service of Henry, the King of England. I myself was a lady-in-waiting to his queen, Eleanor. We have been visiting the shrines of Europe and it was while we were returning from Kildare that my husband fell ill, and is even now back along the road in a fainting condition.’
‘My dear daughter, why did you not bring him in? We have infirmaries here and doctors who are skilled in all complaints.’ He was a kind man.
‘My lord, I fear that the most excellent infirmary may not meet his case.’ Her voice faltered. Here we go, she thought. ‘I fear he may be a leper.’
Into the river-cooled, bracken-scented air came the whiff of corruption. From the darkest corner of the monastery gateway a rag-ridden spectre gibbered at them and shook the wooden clapper in its decomposing white hand. As one man, the monks crossed themselves. Abbot Laurence told one of them quietly: ‘Fetch Brother Clyn.’
‘You won’t put him in with lepers yet?’ Finn asked. ‘I may be wrong.’
‘No, no,’ Abbot Laurence reassured her, edging back along the bench, ‘There is a quarantine house for such cases. He will be kept there for a week until Brother Clyn has diagnosed what it is – there are many conditions of the skin which give rise for alarm, but which turn out to be something quite susceptible to cure. And Brother Clyn is very skilled, a son of the O’Hickeys, who are the hereditary physicians to the O’Briens of Thomond, and has translated the authority of Galen into Gaelic, as well as the Book of the Prognostics of Hippocrates. Your husband will be in the very best of care.’
If she hadn’t known that this was the procedure, she wouldn’t have brought him. ‘You earn the gratitude of King Henry, my lord, as well as my own.’
Even abbots destined to be saints were not immune to the possibilities of having a friend in Henry II’s class, and Abbot Laurence O’Toole smiled at Finn. He would have patted her head, but the spectre in the corner gibbered at him, so he desisted.
Brother Clyn was thrilled at the prospect of another real live leper for his lazar house which just now was low in patients; all respectable Irish infirmarians liked to maintain them in memory of St Patrick who had once accommodated one in his house. On their way to the place where she had left Sir John he explained to Finn that people were inclined to believe any skin ailment was leprosy, ‘when in fact it may be caused by the bolgach, which can be as serious in a different way, or by a demon, or merely by eating salmon out of season.’
By the time they reached him, Sir John was completely unconscious, having been given a last draught of the laced mead by Art. Of Art himself there was no sign, though Finn nodded her head in the direction of a clump of bracken which nodded back. If everything went according to plan, Art would be going into the monastery later on, and she didn’t want him associated with herself in the monks’ minds.
While Finn held him, Brother Clyn lifted Sir John’s eyelids and then stripped off his tunic. He frowned at the angry rash raised by the powder made of rose-hip pips and various noxious substances provided by Scathagh and with which Finn had secretly and liberally dusted her lover’s shirt. ‘Extraordinary,’ he said, ‘I’ve not seen its like before, but I don’t think it’s leprosy.’
‘Thank God then.’ Finn cradled the Pilgrim’s head in her arms.
‘But I think, madam, that your husband should be quarantined until this affliction has been safely diagnosed. There are pestilences abroad this year brought upon us, I fear, by the wickedness of our own king and this may be one of them.’
He was relieved when she said that she would be staying at Cill Brigid, a small nunnery in the foothills, for the duration of her husband’s illness. ‘Return in seven days, madam, and I am sure I shall have good news for you.’
They loaded the Pilgrim onto an ambulance cart. She scrambled up to kiss him for the last time and then stood watching it rock away towards the gates of the monastery.
When it was out of sight Art joined her with the horses. Neither of them spoke as they took a track up to the mountaintops.
The plan was to disappear. If they left for Dublin before he did – once he had recovered, and persuaded the monks to let him go – he might be able to pick up their tracks. Besides, they still had business at Glendalough.
They were searching for a site which overlooked the monastery where they could wait and watch for the Pilgrim’s departure – at least, Art was looking for one; Finn just sat her horse and followed Art. They had provisions for a week and there was no lack of water in the Wicklow mountains, even during the drought which was turning the eastern plains of Ireland into concrete.
Brushing through overhanging branches, they followed a goat track going upwards until the trees began to thin and they were increasingly treading tracks of heather through which broke lichened outcrops of granite; to their right was more mountain, but to their left there were occasional glimpses of tree-lined drops and of lakes reduced to twinkling ponds by the distance. Along the steeper edges ancient shepherds had planted hawthorn hedges to stop their flocks plunging to their death, and in their effort to cling on to the soil the trees had developed muscled trunks as thick as wrestler’s arms. It was when they had passed one of these hedges that Art, speaking low, said: ‘Mistress, there was a hand back there.’
As the words penetrated a miasma of misery, heat and flies, she looked at him carefully. Poor old Art had taken a lot lately. She must use him more kindly.
‘Not a dead hand, either. It moved.’
They retraced their steps quietly, each drawing a dagger they carried. Outside the benificent influence of Glendalough, this was country which belonged to outlaws.
Sure enough, out of one of the hawthorn clumps stuck a hand. It was a left hand resting on a smooth section of branch, cupped palm-upwards as if waiting for alms to be put in it. A small, once-smooth hand with well-shaped nails but now grubby and marked here and there with scratches and hard work. It was attached to a wrist of which the arm disappeared into the hawthorns’ interior. They stood still and listened, but no sound came from within the thick wall of leaves.
There they were and there the hand was; expectant, possibly magical, impossible to ignore. In the circumstances Finn was thrown back on her manners and did the polite thing. She extended her own hand to the one in the bush and shook it.
‘Oh my God,’ said a high voice from the hawthorns.
With difficulty Art parted the spiked branches and they peered in. Between the mountain edge and the hawthorns was a patch of thin grass and on it, with his right side to the drop, sat a very small monk next to a large wheel of cheese and keg of water. There was a manuscript on his knees. He was patting his heart from the shock, and when he saw Art’s face he patted it harder, but even then Finn detected an artificiality, as if by over-acting his fright he was, as it were, earthing it.
‘Don’t do that.’ He came crawling through the tree roots at them and stood up, a very small monk indeed. The artificiality was not just in his manner but extended to his looks, which were so perfectly handsome, apart fro
m a balding head, and so miniature that they seemed unreal; he might have been carved from a less-than-lifesize piece of soapstone. He could have been a child playing at monks, but he was not a child, though whether he was in his twenties, thirties, or even forties, it was impossible to say. His long lashes blinked at them: ‘Well, and what are you two dears doing on my mountaintop?’ He was shaking from shock still, but playful.
‘What are you doing?’
He wagged a finger at them. ‘I asked first.’
‘Looking for a place to stay.’
‘Ooh-er. Please yourself. I’m not curious.’ He used his shoulders as he talked, shrugging, lifting one, then the other. ‘Well, I’m Brother Pinginn. My mother gave me the nickname and it’s stuck.’ – A pinginn was the smallest denomination in Irish currency – ‘And since you ask, I was trying to do a St Kevin. “Pinginn,” I said to myself, “Pinginn, see if God has forgiven your sins and sends a blackbird to lay eggs in your hand, like He did to the blessed Kevin.” I was quite prepared, you know; I’d have stayed still until she’d hatched them, bless her, like St Kevin did. But He seems to have sent me you.’
He peered upwards at Finn and added naughtily: ‘Comarba.’
Art was still holding his knife and instinctively tightened his grip on it. Pinginn held his hands up to his throat in part-feigned, part-real terror. ‘I can’t help it if I know who she is. I was at Kildare for a while, and I like studying women’s faces, especially hers. You could kill me but it wouldn’t stop my knowing and if I know something I have to say it. I think the whole world would be better if we all said everything to each other, and I know it’s got me into trouble beforeandwillagainbutthat’sthewayIam…’ He spoke faster and faster, babbling himself into a frenetic spiral which Finn began to fear might end in a fit. She shook him by the shoulder. ‘Stop being silly.’
Immediately he stopped. He blinked at her gratefully. ‘You could stay with me. I won’t tell anybody,’ he said.
He lived in a cave opening out onto the mountain’s face, just below the patch of grass on which they had found him. A path safe only for goats led down to its mouth, which was screened by bracken and bramble. Brother Pinginn shepherded Finn down it with officious gallantry, putting himself between her and the drop – ‘Heights are about the only thing I’m not afraid of.’ Tenure of the cave would have been dreadful in winter, but in a summer such as this it was attractively cool; a perpetual trickle of water ran down its back wall where ferns grew in the fissures. Scratched on its walls with considerable artistry were outlines of a hare, two wrens and a jackdaw, drawings of creatures which Brother Pinginn had found wounded in some way or another and had tried to help. ‘But I’m not going to do that any more. I’m not. It hurts too much when they die.’ From an iron spike driven into a fissure three rolled manuscripts hung on strings to keep them from damp. ‘These are my three best friends, Virgil, Homer and Boethius. Say Hello nicely.’ It was more than big enough for three people – and by peering over the brambles at its mouth it was possible to see the portion of St Kevin’s road that led to and from the monastic city of Glendalough.
Brother Pinginn took them back over the mountain to where there was pasturage for the horses, and shocked Finn to the core by refusing to go near the animals. ‘Nasty big things,’ he said. He was afraid of horses, the only person Finn had ever met who was. But he helped them carry their panniers to his cave, staggering on ahead in his eagerness to give them hospitality.
Finn was having trouble fitting the little man into the scheme of things. ‘Is he a fairy man, do you thing?’ she muttered to Art.
Art spat: ‘He’s a fairy right enough.’ And Finn realised that for the first time, to her knowledge, she had encountered the phenomenon known as ‘effeminacy’ which was whispered about in convent dormitories with ill-informed discussion on Leviticus chapter eighteen, verse nine, as to how one could lie with mankind as with womankind and what exactly one did that condemned it as ‘abomination’. She was still unsure but, of all people, she had the least reason to unquestioningly accept the Church’s condemnations. The little man didn’t seem vicious to her, just odd and vulnerable.
He flapped impotently with a blanket, trying to string it from the cave roof in order to screen off a sleeping compartment for her, until Art snatched it from him and did the job himself, and then pointedly made up his own bed of bracken as far away from Brother Pinginn’s as possible. Through her fatigue that evening as they fed from his wheel of cheese she listened to his babbled account of how Abbot Laurence had told him he was more fitted to the life of a hermit than that in a community, and she heard pain more clearly than the words. ‘A misfit,’ she thought, as she drifted off to sleep on abed of bracken, ‘Like me.’
In the middle of the night she woke with a familiar ache in her back and wetness between her legs. She was menstruating. As she fumbled in her saddle-bag for the linen cloths and the harness which kept them in place, she began crying at the cruelty of the non-existent God who allowed her to conceive from rape but not from love. The Pilgrim’s baby would have been an inconvenience in her life verging on disaster, but now that all chance of having it had disappeared she knew how very badly she had wanted it. Once she’d begun weeping she found it difficult to stop and stumbled, holding her hand over her mouth to stifle the sobs, out through the bushes of the entrance, and felt her way up the goat track to the grass at the top where she could weep unheard for the woman she might have been and now would not be.
The night around her went comfortlessly on about its business, exuding the smell of gorse and far-away trees, emitting a scream of terror from a leveret as a fox carried it to its earth, carrying the infinitesimal chant from the valley where a necklace of tiny lights wound its way to St Kevin’s church for night office. She was crying into an abyss.
But not alone. A humped little shape a few feet away was crying with her. ‘I’m sorry,’ sobbed Brother Pinginn, ‘I’m so sorry for you.’
There were times to come when this little man would embarrass and exasperate Finn almost to violence, but however frayed their relationship became it held through the generous strand woven on the night he, a stranger, grieved for her. She marked the beginning of her long and laborious march back to faith from the same moment.
He had earned the right to know something about her, so for the last time in her life she told him her story, which earned her the right to hear his. He kept it short but very much to the point. He was an Ulsterman from one of the poor branches of the Clan Sinach and while he was a child his father – ‘Not a nice man at all; I couldn’t tell you what he did to my darling mother’ – offered him as a novice to the abbey at Armagh where one of his few happinesses had lain in applying his talent for illustrating. When the monastery of Jumièges in Normandy, which had close links with Irish monasticism, had appealed to Armagh for a first-class illustrator, Pinginn was the one chosen to go. ‘They didn’t tell me there was a war on. Stephen, the King of England, was fighting Queen Matilda all over Normandy and hell was loose.’ He and his companion had been caught on the road by a band of roving cut-throats such as war throws up. His companion, who was in charge of their money, had been killed for it. He had been lucky to escape with his life, ‘at least, I suppose I was lucky. They used me as a woman.’
He turned to look at her. ‘Men can be raped too, you know.’
She hadn’t known.
‘And, well, it might help you though it doesn’t help me, but you ought to know that there are worse things than being raped.’
‘Are there?’
‘You can enjoy it.’ He began to cry again.
Finn looked over the valley into new complexities of horror in the human condition. He shouldn’t have told me, she thought; he shouldn’t tell anybody.
The monk wiped his eyes. ‘I didn’t want to hide from you that there is a lot of filth on my soul,’ he said, ‘But I want you to know that Jesus and I are working on it. He knows I couldn’t help it.’
Being th
e sort of person he was, he had confessed what had happened to him and his reaction to it when he got to Jumièges. They had sent him back to Armagh at once. Once there he was again totally honest and Armagh, too, had decided to get rid of him and had sent him to Glendalough which at first, thanks to the humanity of its abbot, had been prepared to tolerate him.
The monk shifted. ‘Are you still talking to me?’
She was overwhelmed by his guilt and his courage. Who was she to condemn anybody? ‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ He had no defences at all, either in his honesty or in his empathy for another’s suffering, as if what had happened to him had exposed his nerve endings to vicarious pain, so that a grieving human being or an injured animal could cause him agony. Partly because of what he described as a nasty incident with another monk, and partly because he kept bursting into tears every time he passed the figure of Christ on the cross, Abbot Laurence had sent him away to be a hermit. ‘But I get so lonely,’ he said, ‘left alone with my sins. If somebody doesn’t need me, I’ll die.’ There was no doubt he was in earnest.
‘So eventually,’ he went on perkily, ‘I had a heart to heart with God and I told Him straight: “Lord,” I said, “Unworthy as I am, if You don’t send at least a blackbird to nest in my hand, like You did to St Kevin, I’m going to chuck myself off this cliff, even if I do end in hell because at least hell has some company and I can take water to other thirsty souls or something.” And I would have done, you know.’
Daughter of Lir Page 24