Muirna said, ‘It’s Irish, my lord.’
‘Well, stop bloody playing it.’
She watched him walk away.
* * *
That evening in a summer glade, a frightened young man gave two rounds of wax and a scroll into Finn’s hands. All the way to the forest she had wished that she hadn’t put the boy into extra danger by demanding the Pilgrim’s accounts, since it was no longer necessary; the dreadful suspicion that had flickered at the back of her mind as Isabel had talked had been lulled. He’d been in Aquitaine with the king. He was the king’s marshal and nothing more.
She had said goodbye to Muirna; she did not dare to stay any longer in case she encountered him again.
Hardly bothering, she ran her eye down the list the clerks in Fitzempress’ careful Exchequer had written down in careful hand. Then she held the membrane tighter and read down it more carefully. ‘To Huw of Buckley for services rendered… xls.’
Huw of Buckley was the name of the smith on the road from Chester to Wales.
There were other names and other amounts. Further down she came across: ‘To Alan of Galloway for services rendered… 10 L.’
Alan of Galloway was the jealous nephew of William the Lion of Scotland.
The list swooped down onto the grass. She felt Lief s arm round her. ‘You all right?’
She looked up at the Norwegian. ‘He’s Duckweed,’ she said.
‘Yust sit down a minute.’
‘No,’ she tore herself away. ‘Don’t you understand, the bastard’s Duckweed.’ Eleanor’s garden had been an enchantment, just as it had on another occasion. She’d mooned about in it quite as sloppily as all the other poor fools. And all the time this man had been planning harm against nations that did not, and should not, belong to him. Had been planning harm to her.
‘Give me that bloody list.’ She ran her eyes down it, memorising each name as if she were cauterising them into her brain. Here was every agent he used; here was every agent she would put out of action.
When she’d finished, she thrust the membrane at Robert and slammed the gold pieces into his hand. ‘Not one word of this.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said with feeling, and ran.
It was twilight as Lief and Finn made their way along the strand of the Thames to spend the night at the monastery of the Black Friars near Ludgate. Lief kept his hand on his sword hilt; the shadows that gathered in the bushes were watching out for unsuspecting travellers. He tried to urge Finn on quickly, before the City of London closed its gates for the night, but he couldn’t get through to her. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ he heard her whisper. ‘He’s Duckweed.’
Chapter Ten
Within months of each other, the Celtic countries of Fitzempress’ empire began to give him trouble.
William the Lion of Scotland moved south into the disputed borders of Scotland and England because he had reason to suspect that the King of England was about to bring an army against him. A woman traveller had turned up at his castle in Lothian saying that on the road from England she had come across a dead man, who had been robbed of all but a pouch containing a letter. Since the letter carried the seal of Henry Fitzempress, William read it – and swore terrible oaths. The letter was to the Earl of Chester and contained a plan to extend the frontier of England beyond the Tees and into his, William’s, territory. Since the woman traveller was obviously ignorant of what was in the letter – since women could not read – William let her go.
Suddenly there was a conspiracy in the marches between the barons of Brittany and Maine to resist Fitzempress’ lordship. Duke Conan, who ruled Brittany in the name of the King of England, was unable, or unwilling, to put the rebellion down.
In North Wales, Owain of Gwynnedd all at once moved an army east across the river Clywd and snatched land which belonged to the Norman Earl of Chester. He also wrote to King Louis of France, offering help against Fitzempress because, he said, he had learned that the English king had designs on Gwynnedd. A friendly monk had shown him correspondence bearing the seal of Fitzempress, which proved it.
In his castle at Chinon, where the Plantagenets had gathered for Christmas, Fitzempress went into a temper that seemed to the man standing by unnecessarily violent. He rolled on the ground, biting at the straw and swore on the various limbs and organs of God in a way which threatened to bring a thunderbolt through the roof. Eventually, spitting and shaking, he was persuaded to quieten down.
Even so, he raged. ‘I’ll have your balls off,’ he said, ‘John, I swear I’ll have your sodding eyes out. You might as well be blind. Why wasn’t I warned?’
‘You were, my lord.’ The lord of Llanthony was pale, but firm. ‘Ever since Woodstock, I’ve been begging you to ameliorate your policy to the Celtic nations.’
‘Ameliorate?’ The king made five syllables riccochet round the tower room. ‘I’ll ameliorate the bastards. I’ll castrate the entire sodding race.’ For once, he sat down and drummed his fists on the table. ‘Why all of them? Why all at once?’ He looked up towards heaven. ‘God, you sent me Becket, did you have to send me Celts as well?’
‘My lord, you can have my resignation. I’ve failed you. But I’ll tell you this much; there’s a common factor behind these rebellions. Somebody is orchestrating them.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. But somebody, somewhere, has been forging documents purporting to come from you – and with your seal. If you were to keep me in your service, I should want permission to question your clerks.’
‘You think it’s a clerk who’s stirring up the Celts?’
‘No, my lord. But one of them has given an impression of the seal to the somebody who is. And I think that somebody’s an Irishman.’
He outlined his reasons to the king. He had traced the people who had carried the inflammatory letters to Scotland and Gwynned. One of them was a woman, the other a monk. The monk was found to have taken ship at Milford Haven, the jumping-off point for Ireland from Wales. The woman had been described as having an Irish accent. ‘And as far as Brittany is concerned, I believe Conan to have been bribed to go soft on the revolt there. He is under the thumb of a wise woman called Jehane. I’ve had her castle searched and in it I found some gold pieces minted in Ireland.’
Fitzempress had recovered his calm. ‘I’ll say this for you, John. You haven’t been idle.’
‘No, my lord.’ God, he’d worked and if he could scent down this man who opposed him and his king, he’d work more. To find and scotch this elusive, hinted-at enemy who ran through his troubles like a vicious fleck of Irish green, had become his obsession.
Henry asked, ‘What the hell would a sodding Irishman be doing in all this?’
‘I don’t know, my lord.’
‘Better find him, John.’
‘I will, my lord.’
‘And kill him.’
‘I will, my lord.’
* * *
The news of Laudabiliter had shaken even Ruairi O’Conor’s complacency in the inviolability of Ireland, though it strengthened his faith in his watcher by the sea. As a result, Finn was given all the gold she asked for to spend on her agents. With it she fuelled the rebellions which kept Fitzempress and his army rushing back and forth to quell yet another outbreak.
And with some of it she bought pigeons.
For several mornings while she was making her pre-dawn patrol of the tower roof, just as Molling began his mill, she had noticed a pigeon rise from behind his house, circle, and fly towards her over the Stein to disappear behind her own inn. At first she thought nothing of it. The Abbot of St Patrick’s had tried to forbid laymen keeping pigeons and doves since the birds’ depredations of church cornfields cost bushels of lost wheat. But Dubliners were too independent and too fond of pigeon pie for the ordinance to be strictly enforced. Nearly everybody had a pigeon cote, the Swan included.
But on the fifth dawn that the pigeon took almost exactly the same course, Finn became curious and followed its route to find Art
standing in the far gable door of the roof.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ She climbed up the ladder. Around the loft were wooden cages in which pigeons were murmuring throatily. One of them, the flier from the mill, was upside down between Art’s hands as he untied a scrap of cloth from its leg.
‘Become a bird fancier in your old age?’ In the morning light she saw suddenly how old he had become. The fingers that fumbled with the knot of cloth were distorted with arthritis. It had never occurred to her that Art could age; he had seemed eternal. ‘I’ll have to get him a stable boy,’ she thought. They had recently opened a stable for post-horses, a business which only just broke even, but attracted long-distance travellers.
Art was grumpy. ‘Be minding your own business,’ he said, ‘this is between Gorm and me. If he’s coming over for a drink at night he puts a cross on this ribbon, and if he’s not he doesn’t. A pigeon always flies back to the coop he comes from, if his mate is there and if he’s fed.’
He scratched the pigeon’s head with his crippled finger and put it into a cage with another. ‘Could they fly from another country?’ asked Finn, interested, ‘Across the sea?’
Art shrugged. He didn’t know. But on Aragon’s next trip, which was to Brittany, partly to trade and partly to make trouble for Fitzempress, she took a crate of pigeons with her. Finn had forgotten the matter, being busy, when a month later Art came stumbling down the ladder from his loft with a scrap of cloth in his hand and shouting. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Ah me little darlin’, all that way and he comes back to me.’
So Finn devised a code for her most important agents, like Muirna; she allotted each a colour. Since almost none of them could write they would communicate in symbols – a crown for king, a collar for a brehon, a castle for a Norman and so on – which in each case referred to the people of the area, with crosses and other signs to mean various things according to their number. It was a crude method and Finn longed for universal literacy with ardour, but it would at least enable her to keep track of where various people were and, to a limited extent, what they were doing.
The next time Bevo travelled via Wales to see Muirna she took a pair of pigeons with her. When she came back, two months later, it was to inform Finn that the young clerk Robert had died under torture. He had confessed to making a wax impression of the seal ‘for an unknown lady’, but he had taken the secret of Muirna’s involvement to the grave with him. Finn had grieved for him already – ahead of Bevo had arrived a pigeon carrying Muirna’s sign on the leather round its leg on which had also been drawn a young man under the lash. Above him were four crosses, which Finn had designated as the symbol for death.
That night Elfwida was kept awake by footsteps which paced the tower roof until early morning.
On a day of late winter a pigeon flying from the north landed on the roof of the Swan and fluttered into its loft. Art brought Finn the pouch from its leg. ‘Bilberry,’ he said, ‘that means Oriel.’
She smoothed out the soft vellum. The drawings on it were vertical. At the top was a triple crown. Below that were pincers clasping a round shape from which dripped red tears onto a single, patterned crown. ‘The High King has blinded Eochy,’ she said.
‘Isn’t he the bastard,’ said Art, ‘for didn’t he guarantee Eochy’s safety?’
‘Yes.’ There was more here than the usual savagery by which one king safeguarded his position from another. Eochy, king of Ulidia in the north, had rebelled against MacLochlainn of Ulster, Ireland’s High King. After much skirmishing, in which he had come off worst, he had been induced to go under the roof of MacLochlainn to talk things over and make his peaceful submission. It hadn’t been easy to persuade him – MacLochlainn was not a king to inspire trust – but both the Archbishop of Armagh and the King of Oriel had guaranteed his safety. Therefore, by blinding him, the High King had not only deprived Eochy of his eyeballs – and other bits as well – he had offered the grossest insult to the honour of Ireland’s premier archbishop and a royal ally on whom he depended.
Finn called the hags and Brother Pinginn to her room. ‘I can’t be sure,’ she said, ‘but I think this is it. If MacLochlainn’s allies turn against him, Ruairi O’Conor can move at last.’
Two days later a man rode his horse into the Swan’s livery stables and told Art to look after it well. ‘He’s come a long way,’ he said. Art rubbed the gelding down, fed and watered it and went to find Finn. ‘He’s from Armagh,’ he told her, ‘the horse carries the cathedral brand. He’ll have been delivering a message to Archbishop O’Toole.’
It didn’t surprise Finn that the messenger had come out to the Swan after discharging his duty, rather than stay overnight in the city.
Laurence O’Toole had been elected to the Archbishopric of Dublin at the insistence of Dermot of Leinster, but it had been a popular choice – Dublin felt honoured by having such a saintly man as its primate.
After his inauguration, however, it became less sure. There was such a thing as too much saintliness. Laurence O’Toole had extended the austerity of his own life to curb the excesses of the monasteries and, by gaining influence over its king, of Dublin itself. Church sergeants patrolled the streets arresting drunks and unlicensed prostitutes. Visitors still fed well in the monastery guest houses, but they had to listen to uplifting readings from the Bible while they did it. Being outside the city limits, the Swan had escaped the general holiness which was pervading Dublin – and its custom had gone up accordingly. Finn stood in the doorway of the common parlour to get a look at the man.
Finn read the situation in the sailors’ parlour as easily as she could now read the written word. The central fire was burning high, sending its smoke up straight to the roof and making the room and its crowd slightly over-hot, which was deliberate policy – the drinks bought by thirsty men more than paid for the fuel. The shepherd from St Mary’s was playing a reed pipe and one of the sailors off the Breton ship was dancing to it. Asgall’s hog-keeper had brought a girl tonight who was not his wife and was kissing her. There were a couple of well-ordered games of chess going on in one corner and a rowdier dice game getting nasty in another. Ever since there’d been a stabbing over a wager, Finn had made Lief ensure that her order banning all weapons in the inn was strictly enforced. She looked towards the settle where Lief always sat and the Norwegian nodded; everything was under control.
Finn felt affection for him; she blamed herself for the weakness of the flesh which had led to their one intimacy; she didn’t love the man, but he had relieved her of the burden by never referring to it and had gone on being his old, dependable self as if there had never been anything between them.
She turned her attention to the central table at which Perse was doling out tonight’s speciality, pork and cabbage. Almost reluctantly, Brother Pinginn had pronounced the English girls finally well, and it had been accepted by everybody else as automatic that they should become part of the Swan, and by Finn because she needed more staff and reckoned they owed her a year’s wages. She had dispossessed them of the tower’s upper room, moving into it herself, and – because the staff dormitory was overcrowded – put them in the middle room. They didn’t seem to mind its atmosphere. Perse was an asset, a slow but long-working carthorse, and popular in the sailors’ parlour because even the stupidest customers could run intellectual rings round her.
Elfwida was a problem. She too was a good worker and now served permanently in the nobles’ parlour because, to Finn’s amazement, it transpired that the more upper-class the customers, the more they lusted after Elfwida, whose skinny body and fast repartee made an apparently irresistible challenge to them. King Asgall himself had boomed at Finn: ‘Teach the elf-maiden to dance and I’ll give you twelve cows for her.’ Knowing Brother Pinginn would object, Finn had turned the offer down with regret; she couldn’t fault Elfwida’s behaviour to the customers; the girl titillated yet kept the response at arm’s length. It was off-duty that she threw tantrums and pestered as if she were testing every
body, particularly Finn, to see how far she could go. Like Brother Pinginn – the only person with whom she was calm – she flirted outrageously with Lief and, like Brother Pinginn, was ignored.
Perse ladled out a second platterful of pork and cabbage in front of the messenger from Armagh and he tucked into it with the concentration of a man who had ridden too fast for two days to stop and eat. ‘Jesus,’ said Finn, aloud, ‘I wish I knew what he knows.’
Elfwida was at her elbow. ‘I can find out, Finn. Finn, let me find out.’
‘How?’ Messengers were chosen for their ability to keep their sender’s counsel.
For answer, the girl crossed to the back of the messenger’s bench and put her arms round his neck. Through the noise of the parlour, it was impossible to hear what she said but it was provocative, and the messenger responded as if he’d been even longer without women than food. Finn wasn’t surprised: the man was unattractive.
There were surprised looks at the entwined couple – the Swan had never provided girls: you had to bring your own. Brother Pinginn came up: ‘What’s Elf doing?’
‘What does it look like? She’s going to get information.’
‘Stop her. Finn, stop her.’ When Finn didn’t move, Pinginn rushed forward, but Finn held him back. ‘Leave her alone.’ She dragged the little monk into the kitchen. ‘Leave the girl alone. It’s her decision.’
‘It’s not. It’s yours. I’ll never forgive you if that child goes into danger of her soul and it’s your fault the poor little thing you’re as bad as a pimp…’
Finn shook him. ‘Stop being silly.’ Perse came into the kitchen. ‘Elf and that chap have gone to the stables. Persingly, I thought she’d stopped all that.’
‘Finn,’ begged Brother Pinginn, sobbing. ‘I beg you.’
Finn took up a tray and headed for the nobles’ parlour. ‘Stop being silly.’ It wasn’t her doing. She hadn’t asked the girl. They needed that information. If war had broken out in the north it was the beginning of the end for the north’s ally, Dermot. Asgall could be persuaded to desert his overlord and fight for O’Conor, she was sure of it, but it would have to be done soon, before Dermot commandeered the Norsemen of Dublin to fight on his side.
Daughter of Lir Page 35