‘Perhaps he knows something we don’t,’ said Brother Pinginn, nervously, then added a look from Finn, ‘But he doesn’t know you either.’
The Vikings might have made their first settlement at this, their first landing place – they had built a defensive stone tower at the point of the peninsula, and buried their dead warriors where their wraiths could watch over it and the sea from their tumuli – but they had quickly turned their backs on it to dispute and win from the indigenous Irish the area round the Liffey’s ford where their city now stood, and if the Stein settlement then had looked anything like it did now Finn didn’t blame them. The place was a waterside slum. The only building in good repair was the tower itself, ancient as it was, and the stone quay that served it. Against the tower, actually leaning against it like an over-familiar drunk, was the inn, though the tubbed bay tree which stood outside it as a sign had gone brown from thirst. The clap-board of the inn’s two storeys was rotting, its thatch was going severely bald and such of its rubbish that hadn’t been thrown into the creek to wash against the quay piers littered the quay itself. From its loft window a couple of skinny girls dutifully displayed their braceleted ankles to any passing trade – obviously the innkeeper catered more than food and drink to his customers – but not as if they were anxious to attract it.
The other buildings along the quay went socially downhill from that; dirty, collapsing, indeterminate structures which might have been warehouses, shops, even dwelling places; all of them looking as if they had lost the will to function. One open door displayed the dispirited basics of a ship-chandlery. But to whom? No boat bigger than a rowing boat was tied up at the quay, there were no cranes for unloading cargo, no inducement for the larger ships passing up the Liffey to call in. The place’s nearest neighbour, the miller, shunned it; the lepers from the hospital on the hill were banned from all public places, and even a dump like this would be off-limits to them. So who used it, the inn, the warehouses, the girls?
‘Smuggling,’ said Art, which had been Nessa’s opinion when he’d described the place to her; and now, as she looked towards the place, became Finn’s. The upper lights of the tower, for instance, were high enough to have a panoramic view; upriver towards the city, northward over the Liffey estuary to the other bank, westward over the rise of land which sheltered the other buildings at their back and inland to the south. A candle in any of the seaward lights could guide a ship towards it at night, carrying the commodities of trade on which the King of Dublin would otherwise insist on levying a tax, which was practically everything that passed through his port. She was disgusted, not by the probable illegality of this place she had come to see, but by the fact that it manifestly wasn’t making a profit out of it. Nobody would live in such a slum if they were making gains, however ill-gotten.
‘We’ll see,’ she said to herself. New horizons were opening to the new woman. Crossing to the bank she did not at once turn into the quay but skirted the buildings to view the land at their rear. It turned out to be a dip of ground in which previous husbandmen had cultivated gardens to judge from the herbs growing wild among the weeds between the fencing and a cluster of choked apple trees. Her concern was the inn’s water supply. She traced it to a spring issuing halfway up the hill – she was pleased to see that it retained some vigour even in this drought – which twirled its way through a course in the grass. A leper from the hospital was dabbling his feet in its unprotected source while he washed his bandages and, further down, some cattle trampled its edges as they drank. By the time it reached the back of the inn it had been dispersed and merely oozed into a pond in the fly-blown backyard. As Finn watched a serving man emerged from the inn’s back door to plunge a ewer into the pond and return inside with it. She rejoined Art, Brother Pinginn and a still-dazed Madoc, who were being solicited with much vulgarity by the girls in the loft window.
‘We’re going in,’ she told them, taking a deep breath, ‘Don’t drink anything.’ They had to squeeze through a door which had so dropped on its hinges that its access must have impeded any fat customer.
Inside the place was mercifully dark, lit only in parallels by the sun coming through the slits of the closed shutters, but their noses informed them that the interior lived up to the exterior’s promise. Slumped figures clustered round tables in the shadows glanced up like disturbed dogs at their entrance. One of them actually snarled. The demeanour of these customers suggested that they were here only because they’d been chucked out of everywhere else.
‘God’s blessing on you all,’ called Brother Pinginn, brightly.
‘Out,’ a figure loomed up from a corner, ‘Get her out. No women allowed.’
For a second Finn’s knees sagged. The voice was the same as the one which had ejaculated “Nun” on the night of her rape and the face and shape were the same as the body which had covered hers before an altar. Nessa had warned her – ‘The twin,’ he’d said, ‘from the same dark womb in the same dark hour’ – but she hadn’t been able to prepare her stomach.
She swallowed. ‘If you’re worried that women will lower the tone,’ she said clearly, ‘who are those ladies upstairs?’
There was a guffaw from one of the shadows.
The man was in front of her now, illuminated by the crack in the door, and she looked him straight in the eye. She might feel sick but she wasn’t afraid of him; she had the ability to kill him if she wanted, and through him the spectre of his dead brother. She was going to take away his inheritance. She saw him falter and become puzzled, like a guard dog with an intruder who acts unexpectedly. He swore and shrugged, as if he couldn’t be bothered to turn her out and instead said to her companions: ‘Are you going to drink or not?’
‘Order some beer,’ she told them and began her circuit, wading through the filthy rushes to the back door to look out into the backyard, peer into barrels, crick her neck to the tantalising door at the top of the steps which was also the door of the tower.
‘What you doing?’ demanded the innkeeper. She took the proffered pot of beer from his hand, paid for hers and those of the others, and ignored him.
‘Their father was a considerable merchant,’ Nessa had said, ‘with property in Bristol and Dublin and a ship to trade between. But the sons were gamblers and after his death they lost nearly everything except the inn and the ship – and they’ve mortgaged even those to the Jews in Bristol.’
It will take money, thought Finn, but Nessa was right: the place has possibilities.
‘What you want?’ The rapist’s brother was becoming aggressive again. ‘You going to drink that beer or not?’
Finn was lighthearted by her relief of compunction to such a pig. She lifted her pot of beer and emptied it so that it sprayed his feet. ‘Not,’ she said. Ushering the others before her she emerged into the sunlight to catch the boat for Bristol.
* * *
The English Church had been trying to abolish slavery for years, with more effect than its episcopal counterparts in Ireland, but it hadn’t succeeded with Bristol. Bristol had been a trading port before there was a church; a great castle had been built there because of the importance of the town rather than, as was usual, the other way round. It wasn’t that Bristol was wickeder than other cities, more that it had been supplying demands so long that the process had become compulsive. If there was a market for slaves in Ireland, Spain, Iceland or Niji Novgorod, then Bristol felt it had no other course but to pack men and women on offer in the poorer parts of England into boats and send them off, just as it sent off wool and iron in return for tallow and skins, apes and ivories. If there’d been a demand for grandmothers, the Bristolians would have shrugged their collective shoulders and shipped them out as well – nothing personal, but trade was trade.
Under the anarchy of the Stephen and Matilda war, Bristol had either the good luck or good judgement to back Matilda, which meant that, added to the peace and stability engendered by her son’s reign, it had his gratitude as well in the form of a favourable charter. So
the port of Bristol, which boasted that it could accommodate a thousand ships in its harbour, prospered and allowed its community of Jews to prosper because Jews had money and were prepared to loan it for expansion.
So the Jews prospered, but such profits as they were allowed to keep after giving the King of England his rake-off – all Jews belonged to the king or, as they put it, acted as his milch-cows – they invested in building themselves thick-walled, high-windowed stone houses close to the king’s castle in Bristol where they could take refuge if the prosperity ran out. For it had been forced on Jewish attention that when times were bad Gentiles had a tendency to look round for a scapegoat and remember that it was the Jews who had been responsible for crucifying Christ and must therefore be the cause of God sending the flood/drought/murders/pestilence/financial depression that was afflicting them at the moment. They would then inflict their righteous anger on the Christ-killers in very unrighteous ways.
Until she landed on its soil, Finn had forgotten that there would be people in England who actually spoke English – unlike every other member of her party. To her dismay she discovered that such people were in the majority in the vast rabbit-warren of a market that was Bristol. Though traders shouted out their wares to her, African birds in cages, samite from Syria, sea-coal from Yorkshire, apples from Gloucester, they might have saved their breath for all that she understood them. At last they discovered a clerk keeping tallies who spoke Norman French, though with a Bristolian glottal stop. ‘The Jewryl? Straight up to the castle and turn right along Matildal street.’ He winked craftily at them. ‘But if it’s usural you’re after, my duck, there’s Christians who’ll advance you money at less interest.’ Since usury was not forbidden among the Christian Irish, as it was elsewhere, Brother Pinginn and Art did not realise how illegal his proposition was. Finn did. Even so, she would have preferred to deal with him if she could.
The Jewry, when they found it, looked closed. It always did. Jews locked their front doors and made entrances and exits by secret ways. The only sign of life was behind a huge iron barred gate like a portcullis. Behind it, in a passageway leading to a closed door, sat an old man surrounded by a collection of artefacts made odd by its range. There was a cooking pot, several books, a good hauberk, a ploughshare that had seen hard service, two rabbits in a hutch, a pile of assorted cloths, a skirt, three hats, a reliquary and a pile of hay. ‘Poke it through the bars, whatever it is, lords and lady,’ he said, ‘and we’ll see how much old Bundy can advance on it. Good terms. Good terms.’ After a shrewd look at them he’d spoken in French.
‘I am looking for a certain Berechiah ibn Daud,’ Finn told him.
‘Let’s call him Benedict,’ said the old man nervously, ‘a good Christian name and what for do you want him?’
‘Business,’ said Finn, ‘mine.’
They’d have had less trouble being admitted to the Tower of London treasury; it was only when Finn spoke the two words, ‘court case’ that the old pawnbroker agreed to call somebody else, the somebody else heard ‘court case’ and agreed to call the Rabbi ibn Gabirol, and it was when the rabbi, who had silky black curls flowing from under his black hat, heard the words ‘court case’ that the gate was unlocked and the door beyond it unbarred to allow Finn and her party to pass through, once Art had been persuaded to leave his dagger in Bundy’s possession for the duration. Finn’s dagger was under her cloak and she was glad of it, though the only massed Christ-killers she saw were a group of small boys glimpsed through an open door sitting at benches and chanting. Elsewhere, at first, it seemed almost disappointingly prosaic; as she proceeded along passageways, Finn heard women calling to each other from their overhead windows and saw washing being draped on lines between them. But when they reached the centre of the labyrinth the Jews had constructed she could see she was in alien territory.
It was a large, square courtyard, paved in white stone, with pillared archways on its four sides forming a walk above which was a gallery where more archways led off into rooms behind a fretted ironwork balustrade. In the centre of the courtyard a fountain was playing water into a marble basin.
It was a beautiful place and totally unsuited to the climate. Later, when Finn’s knowledge of Jews had advanced, she was to understand better. The Jewish community in Bristol was Sephardic, still longing for the home in Cordoba from which they had been driven by the Berber invasion, still remembering the sharply-divided light and shade of Iberia under another sky which left them perpetually cold. Though bee-eaters and hoopoes had been replaced by sparrows and chaffinches in the courtyard’s sweet chestnut tree there were rare moments when the English sun, as now, shone just enough for a melancholy pretence that they were not here at all.
‘Pulchrissime, magister,’ said Brother Pinginn in his best Latin to the rabbi, enchanted, as they seated themselves on benches, but the place made Finn nervous and her French harsh. ‘I’ve come to give you a chance to avoid a court case I intend to bring against a certain Harold of Bristol, whom I understand to be in the debt of one of your people, Benedict ibn Daud…’ The rabbi raised one thin, yellow-white hand to stop her. ‘His chirograph must be checked, forgive me a moment.’ He left them.
‘What’s a chirograph?’
A servant brought them refreshment while they waited, dried figs and almonds and sherbet to drink, which sent Brother Pinginn into ectasies but which Art, who was as nervous as Finn, pronounced to be ‘fizzy piss’. ‘Will we be giving him some?’ he asked, nodding at Madoc, who swayed on the bench beside Finn, his dull eyes staring at his boots, ‘Isn’t this his big moment after all?’
Finn nodded. How much longer they could keep the priest under sedation without killing him was worrying her. On the other hand, trying to economise with Scathagh’s fast-dwindling draught, they had given him none for the sea journey over, and that had nearly brought disaster. For Madoc, waking up from drugged confusion to confused reality, had broken free from Art’s grip, screamed at Finn and, in trying to get away from her, had fallen overboard. A second later Brother Pinginn had jumped in after him, a noble act which might have proved more effective if he’d been able to swim, which he couldn’t, though Madoc could. Shouting instructions and horrific Scandinavian oaths, Lief threw a raft over the side and had his men turn the ship round in an amazingly short distance. The sea was calm, luckily, and they had soon hauled both men aboard relatively unharmed.
From that moment Madoc transferred his horror from Finn to Brother Pinginn, spitting and punching at the little monk whenever he came near him.
‘There’s gratitude for you,’ said Finn, crossly, ‘when you tried to save his life,’ but Brother Pinginn shook his head.
‘He’s fighting himself. He’s me. One of me, and he loathes it. He won’t admit it to himself. I expect that’s why he drinks.’
When the rabbi returned he had someone with him, a Jew whose appearance underwrote every prejudice the Gentiles depicted into the caricatured Judensau they scrawled on walls. She was fat, middle-aged, hook-nosed, and outrageously bedangled with every form of jewellery – a sharp contrast to the rabbi who was thin, cultured and aesthetic – as if she had made herself into her own walking safe deposit. The loveliest thing about her was her smell. Finn, who was used only to dabs of rose- or lavender-water, sniffed appreciatively at a new, exotic, olefactory experience. The woman wheezed with effort and moaned at her feet, which were squeezed into tight, high-heeled shoes, but her flat, black, kohl-rimmed eyes gave the impression, as Art said later, that if she shook your hand you should count your fingers after.
‘It is as I thought,’ the rabbi told them, ‘the debt has now passed to the Lady Belaset and she holds Harold of Bristol’s chirograph. She should hear what you have to say.’
‘And get on with it,’ said the Lady Belaset, ‘because these seats put the cold in my bum.’
She embarrassed the men, even her rabbi obviously felt she was letting the Jewish side down, but Finn’s hostility became tinged with admiration. ‘That’s
it,’ she thought, ‘to become disgraceful, where you don’t give a damn.’ Aloud she said: ‘This Christian priest here is witness to the fact that he performed a marriage between myself and Harold’s brother, Eric of Bristol, and therefore it is me, and not Harold, who should have inherited his property. I am prepared to produce this man in the king’s court to prove my right, but I have come to you first to see if this procedure can be circumvented.’ She felt queasy and ashamed that even in the mind of Jews she should be bracketed with the rapist. ‘But this is survival,’ she thought, ‘I’m owed.’
‘That’s a good word that circumvented,’ said Belaset, ‘you want to explain it?’
‘Foreclose his mortgage,’ said Finn, ‘Basically you own his inn and his ship anyway…’
‘No Jews don’t own nothing,’ said Belaset, ‘the Christian god and king don’t allow it. Christians own things, Jews just lend the money to buy ’em.’
‘…and put me in as the owner instead,’ finished Finn.
Belaset stood up, rubbing her backside, to peer at Madoc. ‘That a witness?’ she said, ‘I seen livelier corpses.’
‘He’ll talk,’ said Finn, praying hard, ‘when it’s necessary.’
‘Now it’s necessary.’
All the way over on the boat Finn had been training Madoc for this moment, telling him that if he ever wanted to see Ireland again and end his present purgatory, he had to pronounce three words. ‘When I ask you, Madoc, all you have to say is: “I married them”. It was a joke to you, you bastard, wasn’t it? Remember? But the joke’s home to roost, Madoc. Say it. Say: “I married them”.’
Daughter of Lir Page 26