Madoc hadn’t wanted to remember. He had screamed and spat and shouted – it was during the enforced rehearsing of his lines that he had jumped overboard.
Now Finn said, ‘Father Madoc. On the Octave of St Brigid in Ireland, did you or did you not pronounce words of marriage over me and Eric of Bristol?’ Was it worth it? Yes it was. She was owed. They’d landed her with the rest of this life to fill, they could fill it. Madoc stared fixedly at his boots but Finn’s training and threats brought the reflex, ‘I married them.’
Art audibly whistled with relief.
‘Not very convincing,’ said the rabbi, but Belaset, scratching her armpit, was looking at Finn. ‘What a lady like you could do with an inn and a ship?’
‘A lady like me,’ said Finn, grimly, ‘can do anything.’
Belaset nodded. ‘You come and talk with Bela. Let’s the men stay here.’
She took Finn’s arm and hobbled her towards the other side of the courtyard where steps led up to the gallery. Again Finn’s nostrils twitched, intrigued and delighted by the sophistication of artificiality. No flower she’d ever come across smelled like this. ‘You like the scent?’ asked Belaset.
Finn nodded. ‘What’s the flower?’
‘Never mind the flower,’ said Belaset, ‘mostly it comes out of the whales’ heads.’ Her room was a riot of tapestries, foreign carpets and cloths of which the colour bewildered the eye. Delving into a chest underneath a pile of mouth-watering silk she came up with a piece of oiled silk wrapped round something the size and shape of a ball which turned out to be a grey, waxy substance. ‘See that, Irish? That’s from a whale’s head.’
Finn regarded the ambergris. ‘It looks disgusting.’
‘Never mind disgusting, that make scent stick. You ever get the ship, you look for whales and get that stuff out their heads, we’re in business. I got perfumiers in Spain make smells court ladies sell their virtue for if they got any. I send some to Eleanor of Aquitaine and her ladies go crazy for it. Eric of Bristol didn’t have no wife.’
The tone hadn’t changed but Finn jumped. ‘He killed the wife he had,’ went on Bela, ‘pushed her downstairs for nagging, only nobody could prove it so the property stayed in the family. But he went to Ireland to join Dermot so her brothers didn’t get him, but he don’t marry no more, not that I heard and if I don’t hear, it don’t happen. Raped a few women maybe.’
Their eyes met. ‘It would still be valid,’ said Finn, carefully, ‘If he raped a woman and a drunken priest had said the marriage words beforehand.’
Belaset nodded, ‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘And rape is an offence for the king’s court,’ said Finn, repeating Scathagh’s law lessons, ‘and a woman is entitled to compensation for it and a royal judge might give her the man’s property as compensation, especially if she’d been made the rapist’s wife, and he might rule she wasn’t responsible for the debt run up by the man and the man’s brother. There’s justice in England under Fitzempress, they tell me.’
‘Sure,’ said Belaset, ‘if you pay for it. But that Fitzempress owns the Jews and his share of the money owed them and he don’t give it away so easy. You got money?’
‘No.’
‘Then how’d you pay a mortgage, always supposing some damn fool transferred it you?’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Finn, ‘not at first. In fact, I’d need to borrow more.’
‘You like the clothes off Bela’s back?’ asked Belaset, twitching one of her many shawls off her shoulders, and proffering it, ‘the skin of her teeth, maybe? Where you learn to bargain like that?’
‘In a hard school.’
‘Hard, maybe,’ said Belaset and her spurious rage dropped away as she looked carefully at Finn. ‘You suffered, certain. But you ain’t suffered like Bela. You ain’t suffered at all until all your children die before you do, like Bela’s. You got children maybe?’
And lancing through a chink in her mind she had kept stopped up until now, barely knowing it was there, Finn experienced a pain so sharp she thought for a moment it was physical. It paralysed her. She found herself enveloped in the Lady Belaset’s fat, scented arms. ‘Your god and my god,’ Finn heard her say, ‘they’re male, sure for certain. Neither got no pity. You want a drink?’
Finn shook her head and Belaset resumed her seat. ‘All right, I tell you what. I like Ireland. You people tolerate Jews and only kill each other. That’s nice, refreshing. Maybe I take a chance on you. Tuppence interest in the pound per week, coming down to a penny when we got mutual confidence and Bela’s a fool.’
Nessa, the only Partraige in the entire clan who understood percentages, had briefed Finn. She pulled herself together. ‘Not that much of a fool,’ she said, ‘that’s over forty per cent per annum. A penny interest in the pound per week will be all I can afford, and that won’t be for a bit either.’
‘You want to ruin me?’
‘It’s better than nothing a week, which is all you’re getting now. The inn is a pit and the ship’s laid up.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Lady Bela, I’m going to make money. I’m going to run the best inn in Ireland. I’m going to use my ship for trade and earn a fortune. I’ll kill whales with my bare hands and get that stuff out of their heads, if that’s what it takes to get more money. And I’m going to get information so that not a leaf drops in Christendom but I know about it, by God I will.’ She stopped, shocked at what had been formulating in her head and only just crystallised into intention by words.
Belaset was slowly nodding. ‘Bela better get in on this empire early, eh? What for you want it? You don’t want no jewels and fancy men. Pretty girl like you can get them any day.’
‘Power. I’m going to need power.’
‘Power yet. It don’t keep you warm nights. And I tell you about power. You get it, you keep quiet about it, or sure as certain some man’ll come and take it away from you.’
Finn smiled. She was beginning to like the Lady Belaset very much. ‘You and I can beat them.’
‘You got charm, you know that?’ said Belaset. ‘But the job you got, it’ll take more than charm.’
When they rejoined the others Belaset put on another show of rage. ‘That Harold, I’m finished with him. He reneged on his payments long enough. This lady can take a message to Moses Maimonides in Dublin to foreclose and take seisin legal. Harold can go to hell, and this Irish lady can take over. We make a new chirograph, she and I.’
‘Is that wise, Lady Belaset?’ asked the rabbi worriedly.
‘How do I know from wise. It’s a chance. So poor old Bela’s a chancer.’
When, some hours later and after many signings and transactions, the Gentiles were leaving Jewry, the rabbi remembered to ask. ‘What about the ship?’
‘Sure,’ said Belaset, ‘Who’s to be the new master so’s we know the name when he calls to collect?’
‘It’s a mistress,’ said Finn, ‘Her name’s Aragon.’
Bemusedly the two Jews let them out of the gate and watched them go down the street. ‘Rabbi,’ said Belaset in Hebrew, ‘the next time old Bela says she’ll take a chance, just slit her throat. Save time. Cut out the middle man.’
‘Middle woman,’ said the rabbi.
* * *
Five days later, as mysteriously as he’d left it, Madoc was returned to Glendalough. The monks found him wandering outside its gates in a dazed condition. When they questioned him on where he’d been, his answers were confused and they could make nothing of them. Thereafter there was a change in the man, though Abbot Laurence wondered whether it was for the better; true, Madoc voluntarily gave up drinking, but he seemed to have become vicious and when he talked, which wasn’t often, he swore revenge on someone whose name he could not remember.
* * *
Three weeks later, as she prepared to become landlord of the inn at the Stein, Finn produced a piece of board and asked Brother Pinginn to paint an inn sign on it. ‘New owner, new name,’ she said. ‘It’s to be ca
lled “The Swan”.’ But when Pinginn proposed to draw just a swan on the board, she stopped him. ‘There can be a swan in the picture,’ she said, ‘but I want a lake scene. The Swan doesn’t mean a bird.’
‘What does it mean then?’
‘An island.’
Chapter Eight
The 1160s had promised to be good years for Dermot Mac Murrough, but they didn’t live up to it. He’d started the new decade as undisputed King of Leinster – or as undisputed as a king of Leinster ever was – as king to the King of Dublin, and with the High King of Ireland, MacLochlainn, as his ally. All that stood against him was a defeated Connaught and poor old Tighernan O’Rourke of Breffni, still raging with humiliation from Dermot’s abduction of his wife, though she had long been returned to him.
But as time went on Dermot became haunted by voices, as if his conscience had become externalised and acquired the gift of speech and song. Several times when he was out hunting he heard the bean sì calling his name from the woods. ‘Dermot, Dermot,’ it keened, ‘Remember Kildare.’ When he went hosting into Meath, it called to him from the mists on the road to Tara, ‘Remember Kildare’, and though some of his men went plunging after it, all they found was bog and an echo. At night when he was in sore need of sleep, the wailing woman flew to his window and pressed her terrible lips against its bars to whisper, ‘Remember Kildare.’ While he was looking over his cattle at the macha samraid a tiny fairy man in the robes of a monk appeared on a hilltop and chanted ‘Remember Kildare’ before he vanished. A herd of his horses galloped by him in the Barrow valley and one of them shouted ‘Remember Kildare.’
He thought he had lived down Kildare, for he had regretted it as an impolitic move and had given penitential money to the church as well as founding new convents in Dublin, plus rebuilding into a beautiful abbey the monastery at Ferns. But the trouble with a vociferous external conscience was that it not only reminded him of his sins, but it reminded everybody else as well. It seemed to Dermot that those who were with him when the voice called whispered to each other afterwards and avoided his eye.
He could have lived with it; he had lived with his conscience for fifty years and it hadn’t bested him yet, just as he had got along without anybody’s good opinion but his own. It was the poem he couldn’t live with; the country wasn’t big enough for both of them.
It was well known that the best of Irish poets, the most respected people in the land, could, if angered, use a satire to kill or, at least, inflict shame and disgrace, which was worse. A poet could compose an aer to blight crops, dry up cows and raise blisters. Senchan Torpest in the seventh century had been put in an ill humour on discovering rats eating his dinner and had uttered a line which killed ten of them on the spot.
Who composed the satire on Dermot Mac Murrough was not discovered. Dermot traced the source to Connaught but was unable to pinpoint it further. Pride in his satire had warred with cowardice in the soul of Niall of the Poems and, not unreasonably in view of Dermot’s lust for revenge, cowardice had won. It seemed to have been sung first by the bards, who every so often went en masse round the kings and chiefs of Ireland delivering their latest compositions, during their great circuit of 1160. Even among Dermot’s allies it was well received, being both funny and vicious and conforming to all Irish rules of prosody; his enemies heard it with joy.
It loses nine tenths of its sting in translation, of course, but its refrain went something like:
‘Sing of great King Dermot,
Leinster’s worthy son,
who bravely marched his army,
against a single nun.’
In no time it was being sung at the aenachts and markets, even in Leinster itself.
The Irish could respect a bastard, but not a ridiculous bastard. Suddenly it was recalled that though he had cuckolded Tighernan O’Rourke, Dermot himself did not know where his own wife was since she had run off with part of his treasury.
Dermot knew he was being laughed at; the very air of Ireland sniggered behind his back, but he could find nobody with the courage to sing the poem to his face. Eventually it was Murchadh Mac Murrough who, first disarming his brother in case of accidents, repeated it to him, then held him until he was out of the fit.
Perhaps, even at that moment, Dermot was defeated though, being the man he was, he faced it out. His allies and sub-chiefs were bound to him by loyalty in some cases, fear or bribery in others, but Dermot knew that all those bonds would not hold them to a laughing-stock. The satire combined with the voices was rotting the links and at the first real test they would snap.
* * *
Finn personally took only a small active role in the persecution of Dermot, though she mastermined it. The work was done, and done brilliantly, by Brother Pinginn, Niall of the Poems of course, Art, Blat and the hags of Inis Cailleach until a groundswell of anti-Dermot laughter arose all over the nation and made their encouragement unnecessary. For Finn, getting rid of Dermot was now merely one objective; she also had to watch out for Ireland. On a wet autumn day Moses, the Dublin Jew and agent for the Lady Belaset of Bristol, turned up at the Noes Inn with several Dublin constables and the necessary writs, and evicted Harold of Bristol from it. Harold protested, kicked one of the constables on his shin and spat at Moses, but there was nothing he could do about the foreclosure which was legal and long overdue. Out of their charity the Jews paid his passage to England and, swearing revenge, Harold took it, enlisted as a mercenary and disappeared into the maelstrom of European war.
It was still raining on the next day when Finn and Art carried their saddlebags over the wattle bridge to the Noes quay. Finn stopped in its swaying middle and looked at what was now, if she could pay the mortgage, her property. Not only was she the new landlord of the inn but she had also used part of Belaset’s extra loan to buy cheaply the crumbling buildings that ran inland from it along the quay. In themselves they were too derelict to be worth much, but ownership of their site gave her the entire Noes peninsula, apart from the leper hospital further away up the hill.
The prospect was not edifying. Rain made even meaner the deserted, crumbling collection of buildings. It dripped off balding thatch into drains blocked with filth and, even as she watched, a flake of rust responded to one raindrop too many and one of the hinges holding a shutter broke off so that the shutter swung down and sideways, drooping like a creature given way under ill-usage.
Finn turned round to look at Art. Art looked back. Finn picked up her saddlebag and walked onto the quay. As she did so a tall, sallow-faced man in bright cloak and headgear stepped out of a shed doorway.
‘Lady Finola? My name is Vives and Lady Belaset instructed me to welcome you, watch over you and give you the keys.’ He looked at her carefully to see if this Gentile would mind the protection of a Jew; he had come to Ireland from East Anglia where anti-semitism had broken out into pogroms and had still not got used to the general lack of prejudice among the Irish lay community.
Finn thanked him gratefully. His presence gave official sanction to what increasingly seemed a mad enterprise, his welcome made the day less grey, and she needed all the protection she could get. The keys, however, proved redundant. The inn was about as secure as a cheese. Not only were the shutters rotting, but so was the door which anyway had been kicked in. They went inside.
Harold of Bristol had taken his revenge with an axe. Every table, chair, stool, every beaker and jug had been smashed. The earth floor was an undergrowth of splintered wood and pottery shards.
Vives said impassively, ‘I am sorry.’
Finn shrugged. ‘I was going to burn it anyway.’ While it retained objects that the rapist’s brother, and perhaps the rapist himself, had touched the place was abhorrent to her. ‘I’m going to tear down the walls and begin again.’
They walked out into the back garden, which Art called ‘the bawn’, to find more ruin, smashed barrels and water butts. But Finn’s interest was in the water supply. They walked across the flat, weedy garden, through
a neglected orchard and up the slope to where the stream emerged out of a fault in the hillside. Despite the drizzle, another leper, or perhaps the same one she had seen on her first visit, was sitting on a stone beside it, gloomily watching the run of water through the slit in the bandages which covered his face.
Finn felt revulsion overcome the compassion which Christ enjoined should be extended to lepers. ‘Get away from here,’ she shouted at the wrapped figure. ‘Haven’t you got a stream up at the hospital?’
The figure turned to her. ‘I like this one.’
‘Well, it’s mine. And you keep away from it.’
There was a wooden clapper in the suppurating hand and the leper shook it at Finn before he limped off up the hill. She was aware that this was not a good beginning among neighbours, but she couldn’t help it. Even as Boniface she had always dreaded the ceremony at Easter when the nuns of Fontevrault had accompanied the almoness to the lazar house at Montsoreau to distribute alms which, even though they were proffered on long, shovel-like alms plates, involved a contact that made her own healthy flesh crawl with digust. She was able to feel pity for lepers only when they were out of her sight.
The next most important place was the tower, about which Finn felt considerable curiosity. The lower part of its south wall formed the north wall of the inn and its only apparent entrance was up the inn’s rickety staircase, which also led to the gallery that served the inn’s sleeping quarters.
They climbed up to the landing in front of the door and Vives presented the keys for Finn to try in its formidable lock. He too was obviously curious about the tower and intended coming in with them. Finn didn’t dispute his right – the Jews were her mortgagers, after all. She tried first one key and then another, but none of them fitted, then Vives tried, then Art. ‘Damn the man,’said Finn, ‘he changed the lock.’ They scoured the inn for its key without finding it and reluctantly Finn sent Art down to the saddlebags to get an axe with which to break it – the lock was big and made of excellent brass, the only thing of quality in the place. As they waited on the landing for Art to come back Vives said: ‘We always used to think that Harold of Bristol used this tower for smuggling.’
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