‘Well he didn’t make any money at it,’ said Finn irritably, upset at having the cost of a lock added to her already horrific outlay.
Vives coughed. ‘We never felt it in our hearts to condemn him too strongly,’ he said tentatively. ‘The King of Dublin charges heavy duty on goods brought in through the port. We have to import our own particular wine from Spain and the king takes advantage of the fact.’
Suddenly Finn realised what the Jew was saying. ‘You mean if I did some smuggling myself you’d come in with me?’
Vives winced. He liked a more subtle approach to such matters .‘I am sure we could reach accommodation on business of mutual interest,’ he said.
Finn nodded. ‘We’ll see.’ If things went on getting more expensive, she might indeed go into the smuggling business.
It was easier to smash the door, which was old, than the lock, and after Art had swung his axe a few times, they managed to manoeuvre themselves through the splintered gash into the room that took up the middle floor of the tower, a fairly ordinary, square, unlit, plank-floored room, but immediately Finn knew what it was to be dead. Not a premonition of death, but a realisation of it. The coffin lid was tamped down on her and life blanked out, annihilation, no sense with which to realise there was no sense. Every particle of her body absorbed the moment, which was all it lasted, so that while able to see she was also blind.
Art noticed nothing and went over to the trapdoor which led to the undercroft. The hand that went under her elbow to steady her was the Jew’s. She turned her head in his direction. ‘Is that it?’ she asked. ‘It can’t be that. Where’s God?’
Vives looked down at her and saw suffering; he knew suffering. ‘God is everywhere,’ he said, very gently, ‘but it may be too soon for you, whatever you have been through, to realise it.’
He took her up to the top floor of the tower. It was better up here, though the dimensions were exactly the same as below. But air came through the four long lights and with it the smell of the sea. Finn walked to the west window and looked out. From here the river opened up into its estuary and the bay. Today, in the rain, it was a grey-brown view of mudflats and cloud and unbounded sea. She was wracked with homesickness for other water, for the enclosed, colourful, reeded security of Lough Mask. ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ she wondered, ‘when I could be home.’
But this was still Ireland. It was the door to Ireland. She could only watch out for her country from here. From here she could face the island across the sea that threatened hers. She saw herself as a porteress with the Pilgrim and Fitzempress and the entire Norman army advancing up to her door. ‘You can’t come in,’ she said, and slammed the door in their faces. She grinned at herself for being so ludicrous, and then swore at herself because, once the Pilgrim’s face was recalled to her mind, it stayed there.
Art’s ugly head popped up through the trapdoor. ‘Will you see what I’ve found in the undercroft,’ he said and added, as Vives moved forward, ‘It’s private.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Finn, ‘He’s a friend.’ The few words the two of them had exchanged in the middle room had covered a deeper communion; she felt an understanding with Vives and with Belaset that had its root in some mutual physical and mental exile.
Art lit a lantern and they negotiated the steps which followed the curve of the wall down past the middle room and through its trapdoor to the undercroft.
It smelled of damp, and of liquor from smashed vats of beer and wine, but among the detritus of broken wood, sailcloths, rope ladders, masts, oars and rusty anchors, they found three untouched barrels of red wine, which Harold had either overlooked or hadn’t had time to destroy. Finn tapped one of them, holding the beaker attached to it up to Art’s lantern with a hand that still shook. She smelled it, then put her finger in to taste it, unwilling to drink from the beaker. With the benefit of Boniface’s training by the cellaress of Fontevrault, she pronounced the wine excellent Aquitanian. ‘From the Bergerac, I think.’
‘Will you stop boozing,’ said Art, ‘and come and see this.’
‘This’ was another trapdoor. The heavy stone square that usually blocked it was lying to one side and a chain which ran through its ring was still attached to a pulley on the wall, showing how it had been lifted. They smelled fresh water and when Art held the lantern over the hole they saw below them the brown, peaty water of the Stein trying to enter the bigger force of the Liffey further out. Little whirlpools made sucking sounds which reverberated through the undercroft.
They dropped down one of the rope ladders and each one in turn climbed down it to see. Trying to steady the ladder into facing north Finn found that behind her and to her right and left were the solid, barnacled, weeded foundations of the tower, but ahead of her two massive piers held the tower’s base where it overlapped the foundations, so that there was a shallow tunnel under this north-east corner of the undercroft and a roofed mooring for small boats bringing goods to Ireland.
‘Here’s your smuggling route,’ said Art.
Finn was delighted. Here was her own secret back door. It was ideal for smuggling. A ship could moor out in the estuary, as if waiting for the tide, and load its cargo into a rowing boat. From upriver it would look an innocent enough procedure, a small boat rowing into land. But it wouldn’t land; it would disappear into this hidden harbour and unload.
Vives bowed to Finn. ‘When you have settled in,’ he said, ‘we shall have much to discuss.’ They went on exploring. It was Vives who found the well. They heard his voice echoing from the other side of the undercroft and the scrape of a cover being lifted. ‘You could stand a siege.’
It was a terrifying well; small in diameter, but when Finn dropped a piece of wood down it they had time to count their fingers before they heard the whispered splash. It would take so much labour and time to wind up the bucket that it would be easier to carry water into the tower from the inn, but Finn was glad the well was there. When you were in the business of stopping an invasion, you never knew what would happen.
Shivering with cold they returned to the slightly warmer desolation of the inn and Vives, offering hospitality at his home but being refused – Finn intended to live on the premises from this day forward – bade them goodbye. ‘Who will design the new inn?’ he asked.
‘Art,’ said Finn, ‘and me. But Art’s the expert.’
The Jew looked down at Art’s squat form with new interest. ‘He knows about buildings?’
‘He knows about stables,’ said Finn, firmly. She had planned this out; fundamentally, she reckoned, there was not much difference between the feeding, watering and wining of human customers and the stabling of horses. Both should have light, airy but draught-free accommodation on floors that were crack-free and suitably drained, with easily-cleaned feeding surfaces. ‘Besides, he’s spent more time in inns than most men.’
Art ignored the slight. ‘And we won’t be having rushes on our floors either,’ he said, ‘Apart from they shelter fleas, they absorb damn-all. We’ll be needing sand or sawdust, easily swept out and soaking up spills and blood.’
‘What blood?’ asked Finn.
‘Sure, you’ve got to expect fights.’
‘Not in my inn, I don’t.’
Vives looked at them both. ‘Whatever else this inn may be,’ he said, ‘it should be interesting.’ He bowed and went.
Like a good host and hostess, Art and Finn waved him over the bridge and past the mill. The moment he was out of sight, they rushed into the inn and began the work of clearing it. Finn was struggling to get a broken bench out through the back into the bawn when she heard Art swearing upstairs. She went up. Along the room at the back of the gallery was a communal, raised bed of slats and underneath it was a row of chamberpots, all of them full. Art was pointing into one of them. Holding her nose, Finn peered. At the bottom of it, shining like a fish in yellow water, was a large key such as would fit a large, brass lock. ‘That bastard Harold had a nasty mind,’ said Art.
B
y nightfall the rooms in the tower had been scrubbed, Finn had a bed made up in the top room, Art had his in the middle room, and the inn had been emptied of its wreckage which was lighting up the sky on a bonfire in the bawn. They sat by its glow, too exhausted to contemplate the stairs to the tower.
A white figure advanced across the grass towards them. Finn groaned. ‘Get away from here,’ she shouted.
‘It’s not a leper,’ said Art. It was their nearest neighbour, the miller, still white from his milling. He was bellowing welcome and proffering a flask of excellent ale. ‘The name’s Molling,’ he told them, as they passed round the flask, ‘and glad I am to see the end of Harold of Bristol. Do you know that his customers used to frighten away mine? Will you be wanting to buy flour?’
He was Dano-Irish and a typical miller, being large, jolly and unscrupulous. Finn was glad to see him and told him about her plans for the inn – at least those she was willing to admit to a stranger – and her worries about the lepers and her stream and her scheme for its supply to the inn.
‘Water?’ he said, ‘we millers know everything about diverting water. How else would our wheels go round? Leave it to me. And what do you intend doing with the girls?’
‘Girls?’ asked Art and Finn.
‘Come with me,’ said Miller Molling. He took them through the inn, along the quay to the disreputable warehouse. They followed him up its ladder to the loft and there, curled up on some straw and sleeping like exhausted children, were the two prostitutes who had propositioned Brother Pinginn, Madoc and Art on the day she had first set eyes on the Noes Inn.
‘Been here for days,’ roared Molling, ‘couldn’t or wouldn’t go with Harold of Bristol – not that I blame them – and nowhere else to go. I sent them over food, Christian duty, but I won’t be having them in my mill, for I am a Christian man and clean-living though my dear wife is dead, God rest her.’
Disturbed by his voice, the two girls woke up and looked back at them out of sullen eyes.
‘Strictly speaking, I suppose they’re now your property,’ said Molling, as if the girls were deaf, ‘since Harold bought them on his mortgage. Will you keep them?’
Finn looked with dislike at the two, thin bodies. Boniface’s upbringing had taught her that prostitutes were as bad as lepers, and for all Finn’s liberation from convent ideas, she could not fight off revulsion. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not going to be that sort of inn.’
But she was not capable of turning them out into the night, nor of letting them remain in the cold of the warehouse in their dirty, tinselly and extremely scanty clothing. ‘Oh, get over to the tower,’ she said, ‘Take some straw with you. You’ll find blankets in a saddlebag. Make up your beds there until I decide what to do with you.’
Unspeaking, coughing, the two girls gathered armfuls of straw and crept away. When Finn reached the tower it was to find that they were in the middle room which meant that, if the proprieties were to be observed, she had to sleep there while Art took his bed to the top room.
Tired as she was, she found sleep difficult that night. Although she’d put her bed as far away from the prostitutes as she could, she was disturbed by their continual coughing. Even in the dark the room maintained its peculiar oppression, and from the trapdoor to the undercroft came the suck and moan of the waters beneath the tower. She covered her ears, but the noise came through her fingers transmuted into the crying of a child, which was how she heard so many sounds nowadays.
* * *
With sacking on her back to keep out the wet, she worked in the rain like a dog, stripping the old thatch off the inn, walking into Dublin to order supplies and new reed for roofing – reed was more expensive than straw, but it would last longer – chipping away at the old plaster on the walls and thanking God that her time with Scathagh had given her muscle and endurance and hardened her hands. Art had persuaded her not to pull down the basic structure of the inn. ‘The lathe and wattle is sound,’ he told her, ‘it just needs re-plastering, and the wall at the back is stone. All we need to dismantle is them outbuildings.’
Miller Molling was a great help; not personally, though he made frequent forays over the bridge to encourage them, but in lending them his servant-of-all-work, Gorm, a silent weasel of a man who could turn his hand to anything. Together he and Art pulled down the warehouse and outhouses, burning such wood as was rotten and using what was not to extend the new inn.
For the next ten days it seemed as if life would never again consist of anything except wet and hard work, but slowly a Swan Inn assembled fresh-smelling bones out of the corruption of its predecessor. There was only one interruption, when Finn and Art tried out the system which they believed Harold of Bristol had used for his smuggling.
Finn put a lantern in the north window of her tower’s top floor, first closing the shutters on the other sides so that the light could only shine out onto the Liffey, virtually unnoticeable to anyone who wasn’t directly north. Candle in hand she went down past the bleak middle floor to the undercroft and waited. It wasn’t nice.
Odd how the dimensions of a building had confirmed to her that God did not exist, was just another misrepresentation of male history. It had been one thing not to believe in Him when she was insane, quite another to be of sound mind and without hope. She was suddenly overcome by the fatuity of what she was doing. This emptiness was insupportable; perhaps she should run after the Pilgrim and beg his love and pardon, perhaps she should go back to Lough Mask, live a quiet, Partraige life and let Ireland look out for itself.
‘I’m damned if I do,’ said a voice of sheer courage from the only human presence in the dungeon. And Finn smiled at herself, for if she could not go to heaven, neither could she be damned. The tower was reality; she would stay in it and face it. In one sense it freed her of responsibility except to those she was responsible for, this eccentric entourage she was collecting, and Ireland, that most eccentric of countries. For them and for herself she was going to fight with no sins barred. The rest of the world could look out.
An oar batted the underside of the trapdoor. Finn freed the counterweight they had attached to the chain to make it possible for a single person to open the trap, and pulled. Art’s face was framed in a black square. ‘That lantern up top’s no bloody good except as a general guide,’ he said, ‘on moonless nights we’ll be needing another hanging on the piers. And the ship that brings the cargo will have to show a light or you end up rowing all over the Liffey to find the bugger. If Lief hadn’t got worried and shown a lantern on his port side I’d have finished up back in Connaught.’
‘Did you bring that blasted Viking into this?’ Finn was furious. ‘Why not invite the King of Dublin while you’re about it?’
Unperturbed, Art scrambled into the undercroft. ‘If this was a trial run, didn’t I need a trial ship to get a trial cargo off, you stupid woman? He’s brought us in some nice Gloucestershire wool so the lord and lady customers can sleep warm and a nice iron cauldron and the devil of a job we had getting it into the curragh. And not a drop of duty to pay on any of them. Your man’s a fine sailor, and a better smuggler.’
Finn sighed. It seemed that a Viking giant had joined the Swan Inn and its fight for Ireland.
On the tenth day, unbelievably, it stopped raining and on the day after that Finn heard a call from over the bridge, dropped her plasterer’s board and ran, yelling, along the quay to welcome the people she most wanted to see in the world. Brother Pinginn, Blat, Tailltin, Aragon, Muirna and Bevo had arrived at their new home.
Muirna pointed at the tower. ‘Inis Cailleach all over again,’ she said.
Finn kissed her, kissed all of them. ‘Now you’ve come it will be,’ she said. She gave them no time to explore but hauled them up to the top room of the tower to feed them and, with Art, to hear their news. They were full of it. Thanks to all of them, except Aragon who had been seeking the salvage of her ship, Dermot was a haunted man who now heard the words ‘Remember Kildare’ in every bird call, every creak
of a door. ‘Muirna even managed to get into Ferns and hiss it through his window,’ said Bevo, ‘Blat and I shouted it in the market when he rode through, and other marketwomen took it up. He’s not a well-liked king, and everybody in Leinster is worried he’s brought bad luck on them. Brother Pinginn was wonderful, kept shouting it on hilltops and then scampering off. But the best thing is Niall’s poem. Everybody’s singing it.’
Finn looked at her king-wreckers with tears in her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Ach,’ said Muirna, uncomfortable, ‘We’ve got a purpose at last. Tell us about the inn.’
She told them, drawing her and Art’s plan in the dust of the floor.
‘Basically the Swan will be three inns,’ she said, ‘one for the sailors and common people, because we’re going to need their information, especially the sailors’. But if we’re to attract good-class trade we must have a separate section with better sleeping quarters.’
‘What’s the third?’ asked Brother Pinginn, fascinated.
‘That’s for special visitors,’ said Finn, ‘the secret ones. They’ll come to the tower.’
She told them about the undercroft, told them everything in her pleasure at being part of a group again; of Miller Molling, the lepers, of her scheme to literally stream-line her inn, with a water supply that would lead into her kitchen then out again to a washing trough, and would be well away from her house before leading into the privies.
‘That stupid man there,’ she said, nodding at Art, ‘wanted the privies next to the kitchens, but I’m going to have them sited like at Fontevrault.’
‘If it’s a bloody convent we’re building,’ grumbled Art, ‘we can save our bloody trouble, for nobody’ll come.’
Daughter of Lir Page 28