Finn ignored him. ‘And I’m going to have fireplaces and chimneys in the wall like they did at Fontevrault, so the smoke goes up the chimney and doesn’t choke us to death.’ Every other inn she knew of, even on the Continent, kippered its customers by having the smoke from the fire in the middle of the floor trying to find its way out by the louvre in the roof. The Swan, thanks to Fontervrault’s example, would be the most modern inn in Christendom.
‘And Gorm is making sure our stream is out of reach of those damned lepers.’ The strange little man had come up with the idea of enclosing the source in a shrine on which was carved the totally unwarranted shamrock cross of St Patrick – ‘to discourage vandals,’ he said, winking – and piping the water through buried hollow tree trunks joined together with pitch straight down the hillside to a cistern in the inn.
‘The Swan’s inherited two problems from the Noes Inn,’ Finn said, ‘one’s the lepers, as I told you, and the other is those two girls downstairs. Harold bought them as slaves. They were the inn’s prostitutes.’ The hags gasped. Only Aragon, who was wider-travelled than all of them, had ever seen a prostitute. ‘Poor dears,’ said Brother Pinginn, immediately, and trotted off down the stairs to talk to them.
‘I just don’t know what to do with them,’ Finn explained, ‘I’m not going to keep them here, that’s for sure, but at the moment they seem too ill to move. I’d hoped I’d get some work out of them after a bit, but they’re useless for anything.’
She’d unwillingly learned something of their history. They were like enough, to her undiscerning eye, to be sisters, though they were not related; they were fair-haired, skinny, very young – they reckoned their ages about fifteen – both had been sold by poverty-stricken parents, and been shipped into Ireland from Bristol some two years previously.
Brother Pinginn came back into the top room. ‘They’re sick,’ he said, as if it was Finn’s fault.
‘I know that.’
‘Very sick. They’ve got blood in their sputum when they cough. They’ve got the serg – the withering disease.’
‘They say the serg is rife in England,’ said Aragon.
‘Perhaps they got it from one of Harold’s customers,’ said Tailltin.
‘However they got it, they can’t stay here,’ announced Finn, and Aragon, who hated illness in herself or anyone else, agreed with her.
‘But where can they go, poor things?’ asked Brother Pinginn. ‘They haven’t got anywhere else.’
‘Back to England where they came from.’
‘Back to slavery.’
‘Well, then, a convent.’
‘Sure, a convent would be lovely and understanding to a couple of foreign harlots,’ drawled Bevo, surprising Finn, who had been sure all the hags would agree with her. And Tailltin joined in: ‘It’s no way to begin the fight for Ireland and its women by sending away the first couple of waifs we come across.’
‘But they’re not Irish, for God’s sake.’
‘Non Angli, sed angeli,’ quoted Brother Pinginn.
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘I won’t. I think you’re being stinking. It doesn’t matter if they’re Irish or not, it’s just Ireland’s shame that they landed up here. They didn’t choose to become prostitutes, poor dears. It was a sort of rape, and we, of all people, should know about that.’
There was a silence. ‘He’s right, Finn,’ said Muirna, gently.
‘Oh shut up, I know he is. I j ust don’t know what to do about it.’
‘If they stay here we’ll all get it,’ said Aragon.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Pinginn. ‘There was a monk had the serg at Glendalough and Abbot Laurence cured him.’
‘A miracle I suppose?’
‘Sort of. He had the loft of the old stables cleared out so that the patient was well above damp ground, and let the wind in to blow away the contagion – like it might be in this tower room – and kept him warm and rested all the time and fed him the best food with milk and some wine occasionally and offered up prayers to the Holy Mother and St Mochua and St Kevin, and he was cured. So it was a miracle; it just took longer than most.’
‘How long?’ asked Finn, suspiciously.
Brother Pinginn became interested in some dust on the window seat. ‘About a year.’
‘A year! You want me to entertain a couple of foreign whores in this tower for a year?’
‘This top room would be best,’ said Pinginn, ‘because of the air, you know. I can do the praying for them.’
‘Not here, for God’s sake. This is my room.’ The moment Gorm had finished thatching the first section of the inn, Art had moved his bed into it and, with enormous relief, Finn had left the prostitutes and the hated middle room for the top floor. She sighed. ‘Jesus.’
Brother Pinginn nodded. ‘That’s just what he would do.’
A voice in Finn’s mind demanded: ‘Where’s the profit in it?’ A charitable act on this scale would have earned her merit points in heaven under the system Boniface had believed in; in this new realism it would gain her nothing but trouble and expense. Nevertheless, these people, her friends, were here because they loved her and loved Ireland. The Swan was a democracy or it was nothing. And in this instance she was outvoted. ‘All right, help me take my things back down, and a pox on the lot of you.’
Next day two coughing ex-prostitutes snuggled their abused bodies into the first clean, warm beds they’d ever had to themselves in one of the finest rooms they’d ever seen, and fell asleep.
Finn found that sharing the middle room with her fellow-hags alleviated some of its nastiness, though the moan from the confluence of waters at the base of the tower still disturbed her.
Aragon stayed only a fortnight; when the seas were free from winter gales she took passage with Lief, the Norwegian, on one of his trips to Bristol to collect the ship that had once belonged to Harold of Bristol now that it had been made seaworthy.
With the remaining hags at Finn’s disposal, work on the building of the Swan speeded up and became a pleasure to all of them. Art taught Bevo the rudiments of carpentry and she began to make the simple furnishings the inn would require. While Art and Gorm completed the new sections of the extended inn, Blat started digging and planting the vegetable and herb gardens. Finn, Tailltin and Muirna dismantled a stone wall in the bawn and built a kitchen. Using her memory and common sense Finn constructed two chimneyed wall fireplaces, one in the nobles’ parlour and one in the new kitchen.
‘What’s them?’ asked Miller Molling on one of his inspections.
‘So’s the smoke can get out,’ Finn told him, sucking her bleeding fingers.
‘Funny looking things.’
They were definitely not beautiful, both having a drunken tendency towards one side, but they were, she knew, not bad for an amateur stonemason. She plastered the fireback of the grates with clay mixed with cow manure to make it tensile and, offering up a prayer to her non-existent God, lit a fire in each. Watching the flames from the shavings and off-cuts direct themselves up the chimneys was one of the most beautiful sights she’d ever seen.
There was a shout from outside. ‘Smoke.’ Modestly, Finn went outside to receive an applause which couldn’t have been greater if she’d built Chartres Cathedral. Only Gorm and Art were unmoved; they couldn’t see the point of chimneys.
Finn looked round: ‘Where’s Pinginn?’ The little monk was of no use at all in the building processes; he ran about investigating everything with interest, contributing no practical help whatever and generally getting in people’s way, but his delight in everybody else’s achievement was warming.
Blat pointed to the orchard. ‘Down there.’
She went through the sopping grass to find him. The winter had been mild, if extremely wet, and looked as if it was giving way to an early spring. Blat had pruned the apple trees to within an inch of their lives, but they would soon be in bud.
Suddenly she realised she wasn’t unhappy. She couldn’t say she was happy – happi
ness was what she’d known with the Pilgrim and unlikely to be repeated – but her depressions were becoming rarer, giving way to a prosaic but satisfying sense of achievement. She had lost a lover, but she had found a cause, a family and a new home. There was no point in longing for the old one; she had to find contentment here. She had found contentment here.
‘Pinginn,’ she called, and then she saw him, surrounded by bandaged figures to whom he was doling out some of the ale they had bought from Miller Molling. ‘God damn it,’ she said; the lepers had been a growing nuisance to the building workers, sometimes ringing the site altogether, shouting abuse, threatening Finn because she’d piped their favourite stream, leering at the hags and demanding free beer with menaces.
She was so angry that they ran off, leaving Pinginn to face her. ‘But the poor things deserve some kindness,’ he said, miserably, ‘they have little enough.’
‘They’ve got a hospital up on the hill,’ said Finn, ‘and I’m going to see they stay there. How many customers will we get while we’re infested with lepers I’d like to know?’
She stormed up Lazy Hill to the lazar house and found the hospitaller examining his apple trees, just as she had done. She’d already encountered him a couple of times; a gentle, completely ineffectual old monk.
‘Can’t you keep your lepers under control?’ she shouted over the hedge at him.
He looked round, mild and apologetic. ‘I’m afraid not, God love them,’ he said. The trouble with lepers, thought Finn as she stormed back down the hill, was that the biblical status of their disease and the general tenderness with which they were treated gave most of them airs. ‘Uppity as a leper’ had entered the language. Nobles and kings frequently had their progresses interrupted by a bandaged, suppurating figure rapping a wooden clapper and shouting for alms with considerable rudeness. Gritting his teeth into a benign smile, royalty would chuck over a piece of silver both to mark his charity and to stop the nuisance coming any nearer.
She passed a sheepish Brother Pinginn. ‘I’m seriously thinking of getting a dog that’ll attack monks and anything in bandages,’ she shouted at him.
Blat heard her and looked up from her digging. ‘Get geese,’ she said.
‘Geese?’
‘Geese. The poor men only approach from the hill, not the quay. Put geese in the orchard; good watchdogs, good eating, and a brave leper who’ll come near them.’
Finn patted her cousin on the back, and put geese on her list of animals to be acquired when the inn was finished.
And at last, on March the 5th, the Feast of St Kieran, one of the twelve Apostles of Ireland, it was. Silently the staff of the Swan gathered in the middle room of the tower to make a ceremonial procession round the inn they had built, with Brother Pinginn leading the way and giving blessings.
‘Can the girls come too?’ he asked, ‘It’s mild and a little outing would do them good.’
Finn was reluctant; processing her inn with a couple of prostitutes, however much they had put their past behind them, would, she felt, bring it bad luck. She resented the fact that the rest of them had been working so hard while the two girls had just idled about in the top room eating their heads off, but Brother Pinginn had refused to let her use them, other than to give them a little light sewing. The taller one, who had brown eyes, struck Finn as one of the stupidest girls she’d ever met – and she was never given any reason to change her mind. The other one, with blue eyes, had wits as sharp as her nose. Her name was Elfwida. That of the dim one was Wulfraitha but to the Swan establishment she had quickly become known as Perse, short for Persingly, which was how she began almost all her pronouncements. ‘Persingly, I like sunny days better than rainy ones,’ she would say, or, ‘Persingly, I think lambs are sweet,’ or, ‘Persingly, bad food makes me sick.’
Well, they had assumed personalities and become part of this odd establishment of hers. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said.
The staff of the Swan Inn went down the staircase into the first section, the nobles’ parlour. It smelled of fresh mortar and sawdust. In its middle stood a long oak table, which had been shipped down the Liffey from Naas in Kildare, and had cost five of her fast-diminishing shillings. Settles, benches and rush stools edged the walls. The back of the room was open stone and contained Finn’s fireplace complete with trivets, gridiron and spits, though this was mainly for cosmetic purposes since the bulk of the cooking was to be done in the communal kitchen at the back connected to the nobles’ and common parlours by separate doors.
In silence the staff looked at their handiwork, Bevo passing her hand over a chairback, then progressed to the kitchen. This was a wonderful place with an enormous fireplace next to which was the cistern. Pots, ladles, choppers, skillets and carving knives hung in neat rows on the walls, herbs from the ceiling. Blat, who was in charge of it, was secretly afraid of its modernity, but Finn knew there was not its equal in Ireland, nor in England for that matter. Hams were curing in the smoke house. Bins were full of flour, oatmeal and salt. A peat stack stood outside the back door near the newly-planted herb garden, and fires were laid ready to heat the stones of the sweat-house and the bath. Ale was brewed.
They moved out into the bawn and stood to admire the herb bed by the door, soon to sprout parsley, rosemary, thyme, mint and sage, then on to the vegetable beds planted with cabbage and beans. Animals had been bought and there was a cow with a calf in the byre, and a she-donkey in foal cropping the pasture. As they passed under the budding apple boughs of the orchard, a dozen geese came honking towards them and Brother Pinginn skipped to Finn’s side for protection. Blat had gone into Dublin to bargain for them and come back driving them before her, ferocious strong-necked birds with loud voices and a loyalty only to those who fed them, which the Swan company took care and turns to do, all except Brother Pinginn who was intimidated by them.
The apple boughs were in bud as they passed under them and up the hill to see the unwarranted shrine of St Patrick which enclosed the source of the stream.
There was no water in sight, except the view of the Liffey to their left; the stream now ran underground through wooden pipes – not a complete success, since they had a tendency to burst in cold weather, but adequate. Reverently the staff followed the new turves which had covered the pipe back down to where it emerged to pour its water into the cistern in the kitchen. The overflow was conducted by a tiled gulley through a washing trough outside, and they followed it, past the sweat- and bath-house, and then to where it returned back into its natural course and a pond for horse and cattle, which was also stocked with fish.
Finn took the lead. The next bit was her pride and joy. The stream left the pond and flowed on into the trees to disappear beneath two wooden huts, one larger than the other. Just as in the best monasteries, the water, having served every other need, could now serve the most basic. She threw open one door and then the other to display the larger, first-class privy which had two individual cubicles containing a seat in which was a carefully-sandpapered hole, and the second-class privy which contained the more usual communal bench with holes of varying sizes to fit various-sized bottoms. Sheep wool, for the wiping of those same bottoms, hung on little hooks.
The staff stood in admiring silence, listening to the stream which would take impurities away into the Stein which would take them into the Liffey which would take them out to sea.
‘Gawd,’ said Elfwida, admiringly, ‘what a shit-house.’
‘And your sailors’ll still piss straight into the Stein,’ said Art.
From behind them advanced the geese, who seemed to regard the privies as their special area. Pinginn complained: ‘They’re ruining my health.’ The geese rushed him every time he came, so that his trips to the privy were fear-filled and infrequent scampers. ‘I’m getting constipated.’
Muirna asked Finn, ‘What will happen when the customers go to the privy and the geese attack them?’
‘Oh hell,’ said Finn wearily, ‘like Iogenán used to say, we’ll burn t
hat bridge when we get to it.’
They returned to the second-class parlour; much the same as the nobles’ except with the more usual centre fire – Finn had run out of stone and couldn’t afford to buy any – and a deal table, passing by the inn’s oiled, clapboarded frontage which gleamed in regular horizontals broken by the carved doorways and shutters along a swept quayside. A new bay tree flourished in a pot.
For a moment, before going in they looked up at the sign which was set between the two doors. Pinginn had painted it well – a lone swan flew over an island on a lake so familiar to most of them. Instinctively the hags clasped each other’s hands.
‘This is home,’ said Tailltin as if defying a statement nobody had made. ‘It’s Ireland.’
‘Dermot’s Ireland,’ said Finn. Dublin, for all its autonomy, was still part of Leinster. ‘But, God help us, not for much longer.’
* * *
That night they opened for business.
And nobody came.
* * *
Well, Miller Molling and Gorm came, and the miller sat in solitary state in the first-class parlour and Gorm in less state, but equally solitarily, in the common room. Both were entertained with more food, drink and attention than they could cope with, but the occasion lacked sparkle. The staff kept looking towards the door. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Tailltin, ‘Why won’t they come?’
Finn shook her head. She didn’t know what to do. With two of her few last pennies she had hired a crier to shout the news of the wonderful inn through the streets of Dublin, but new inns were being opened every day in that flourishing city and, with the weather still wet, nobody wanted a muddy ride or a damp boat trip to visit yet another.
They were up against stiff competition as far as travellers went. The monastic houses had excellent accommodation for guests, and Irish hospitality laid on its kings the duty to provide free public hostels for anyone needing lodging and food, though, as none of these was in the Dublin kingdom, Finn had hoped they wouldn’t affect her business.
Daughter of Lir Page 29