Raymond Le Gros crossed himself. The only comfort was that nobody was going to be able to get out of Dublin and tell him.
* * *
Brother Pinginn and Aoife held each other’s hands and danced, laughing and balancing stars on their noses. Finn was so pleased to see them happy she tried to clap her hands, but the music wasn’t worthy of the brave and beautiful dance; the harp played the wrong notes while the drum kept to a different time. She complained to the band. ‘Get Niall of the Poems,’ she said, ‘He’ll play the right tune. He comes from Lough Mask.’
‘Who’s Niall of the Poems?’ asked somebody.
‘She’s raving, poor lamb,’ said somebody else.
Finn began the effort of explaining and then gave up as the drum beat her back into unconsciousness. It was still hammering away when she woke up again but this time it turned into the grinding stones of Molling’s mill. The beams over her head were vibrating with the working of the huge mechanism above, and there was a white, floury spider’s web spun into a corner while pervading everything was the not-unpleasant smell of oats. Finn’s eyes rested on the web because they were too tired to move anywhere else. Brother Pinginn was dead, Aoife buried alive. Slaney, Lief, Tailltin, Dervorgilla…? Her lips tried to move. ‘Slaney.’
Blat’s face, or was it Perse’s, came between her and the web. ‘You’re ever so much better.’ Some broth was spooned into her mouth. Pinginn was dead. The joyful dance had been a fiction; odd that her mind couldn’t be rid of the happiness it gave her. Anyway, there was nothing she could do any more. She went back to sleep.
Elfwida took up quarters at the mill to help Perse run it, to nurse Finn and because the inn had been invaded by women whom Raymond Le Gros’ men had brought with them to Ireland or picked up since.
‘Where’s Molling?’ Finn asked when she was able to sit up and take notice. Perse’s plain face became plainer as tears ran down her cheeks. ‘He was a good husband,’ she said, ‘He’s up there.’
‘Where?’ Perse was pointing up Lazy Hill, which was just visible through the mill window. It looked as it had always looked, its long slope up to the leper hospital an elegant sweep against the late autumn sky. ‘There.’ There was a lump on the skyline like a low bush.
‘They won’t fetch him in, poor thing,’ said Perse wiping her eyes. ‘Persingly, I think the dead ought to be buried, especially if they were good husbands.’
Finn looked at Elfwida for elucidation. ‘He ran,’ said Elfwida, grimacing. Unnerved, and certain that the Normans would kill him, Molling had made a break for the Irish lines, but as he’d pelted, shouting, over the hill horizon a slingshot at his head, from the very force he was trying to reach, had killed him – at least, he had fallen and not moved since; a decomposing monument to the fact that Ruairi O’Conor was at last learning the rules of total warfare. Even by night it was too dangerous to bring the body in because marauding Irish kept making incursions through the lines.
Finn looked at Perse as she stood at the window grieving for a man who had been prepared to desert her, and saw what, if she hadn’t been so preoccupied, she should have seen some months before. ‘Oh Perse, you’re pregnant.’
Perse cheered up. ‘Good, isn’t it?’ Suddenly the need to protect the body which was incubating new life in all this horror overwhelmed Finn. She could have killed Molling, she could have killed the men who killed him, and the men who, by their invasion, had disrupted the life in which he had been confident. ‘You shouldn’t be hauling those sacks about.’
Perse shrugged. ‘Got to. Anyway, there won’t be anything left to mill soon.’ Large as the besieging ring round Dublin was, it had been placed so all open ground was within range of Irish fire. Most of the herds of cattle, sheep and pigs which had roamed Hogges Green were still on it, lying on their sides, killed by spears or slingshot from the north shore and the southern lines. Sorties by Norman soldiers, even those wearing mail, to bring in the carcases for food, had proved disastrous and left more than a few of them dead among the dead animals. Being under the shelter of the hill, the Swan still retained some of its livestock, ‘but they’re being eaten like there’s no tomorrow,’ said Elfwida, ‘those camp women have got no idea about rationing. And they’ve stolen everything in the mill except the unground corn. I don’t know what we’re going to eat.’
Supply ships from Wexford had tried to row up the Liffey by night, but had encountered a boom of boats, each one containing armed men, stretching across it and had been sunk. Crossly, Finn said, ‘A fine time for the O’Conor to become efficient.’
It was as if her pneumonia had provided a defensive embankment between what had happened in Dublin and this bit of the present. Her very weakness had robbed her of the ability to experience the grief that waited on the far side of it in ambush. She kept her mind away from it, from what might have happened to Slaney and the others, and concentrated on Now, narrowing her responsibility to what she could cope with. If it hadn’t been for Perse’s baby she might have clambered back over the embankment; as it was the greatest emotion she felt was irritation at the mess they were all in.
Her legs ached when she did it but that night, daring Irishmen and Normans alike, she walked from the mill, over the Stein bridge and into her inn. It was very cold and everything was still.
The Swan was a mess. There were no women about – Le Gros had sent them back into the city by night so that they could eat up Strongbow’s provisions, not his – but during their occupancy they certainly hadn’t killed themselves with housework. There were also fewer soldiers in it, since a heavy guard was needed along the line of Lazy Hill, but those that lay around asleep had been drinking; there was a pool of vomit on the floor. It was a wonder the place hadn’t burned down; each man seemed to have built his own fire on the floor on which to cook his own individual meal. There was still plenty of peat stacked at the back door, but they had smashed up most of her benches and one of her tables – her lovely oak, nobles’ table – for firewood. Dirty pots were piled high in the sink of the kitchen which looked as if it had been sprayed with grease. There were no hams hanging from the beams, though the bunches of herbs were still there, and the flour bins were empty. No geese, no hens made any sound in the orchard. There was one milch cow left in the byre but the pigsty was unoccupied.
Finn forgot the pain in her legs. She stalked through her inn and up into the tower. Le Gros was sitting gloomily by a brazier which was burning the remains of one of her writing boards, nursing a cup of wine.
‘What have you done with my bloody inn?’ Finn shouted at him.
He jumped. ‘This is my command post, madam, kindly leave it.’ The wine had befuddled him; for a moment he didn’t recognise her.
‘I’ll give you command post,’ yelled Finn; fury had made her careless, ‘You’ll be in command of sod all if you go on like this. You won’t have anything to eat; what’s worse my women won’t have anything to eat and one of them’s having a baby and that’s a bloody sight more important than your bloody war. Now get up off your fat arse and let’s get things organised.’
It came to Le Gros that he was being berated in Norman French and, moreover, by a personage, woman or not, who knew her own mind. It gave her the advantage. She had caught him during one of the few periods of his life when he was at a loss. Raymond Le Gros was good at war and good at leisure, but he had never until now had to live through a period which was neither. Sieges imposed great anxiety and great boredom on the besieged, a combination which sent some men mad and others into melancholy. In Le Gros’ case it had induced a physical and mental lethargy made deeper by the knowledge that his mercenaries were drifting into indiscipline and that he ought at least to be doing something about the food situation, but wasn’t sure what. He was no housekeeper; he wasn’t a fool either.
‘What do you suggest?’ he asked.
The former kitcheness told him. At length. She took him down to the undercroft and counted what was left of the provisions she had laid in before
the occupation. The kosher wine barrel was empty and had been pushed aside from the trapdoor. The Aquitanian vat was still a quarter full. ‘And you make sure it stays there. For medicinal purposes,’ Finn snapped.
Le Gros followed her into the inn where she pointed out each atrocity while he listened. She reminded him of the Norman nurse, a woman of spirit, who had brought something like order into the draughty, lax, Welsh castles where he and his Geraldine cousins had careered through their childhood. His men woke up to find their commander being commanded by an angry Irish skivvy, but Le Gros was unperturbed. ‘Hear that?’ he said to them, ‘One communal meal a day from now on. There’ll be a guard on all stores and this lady will be in charge of issuing and cooking them. Hear that, Jacques?’
‘And a guard at the mill,’ snapped Finn, ‘I’m not having them take that flour when they feel like it.’
‘And a guard at the mill, Jacques,’ said Le Gros.
‘Nobody slaughters that cow out there, either,’ said Finn.
Le Gros sighed. ‘For the moment nobody slaughters the cow. The lady Perse is having a baby and apparently that is more important than our war.’
‘We’ll move back into the inn here,’ said Finn, ‘but I’m not having that baby born among a lot of soldiers. We’ll sleep in the middle tower room.’
Captain Jacques said: ‘There’s the trapdoor to the river, my lord. Supposing they get out?’
‘Where to?’ Finn stamped her foot. ‘There’s no boat. And from here on in at least one man will be sitting over the trapdoor day and night catching fish. Fish is about all we’ll have to eat.’
‘Fish and pigeons,’ nodded Le Gros.
‘And no more…’ Finn stopped. ‘What pigeons?’
‘The occasional pigeon drops in to the loft up there,’ said Le Gros, ‘Only the other day…’
‘Did it have something tied to its leg?’
‘Did it, Jacques?’
‘I think it did, my lord.’
She made them search for it and searched herself, kicking recumbent men out of her way, ruffling through the dirty sawdust of the floor. Eventually, one of the soldiers remembered he’d picked up a bit of leather and kept it, never knowing when he’d need a patch for his jerkin. ‘This it?’
She tried to snatch it, but Le Gros got there first; he wasn’t as intimidated as all that. Smoothed out, there was nothing of strategic importance on the leather, just a picture somebody had scrawled on it. ‘Not very good,’ he said, ‘Four birds, swans from the look of ’em, landing on a lake.’ He looked up. ‘Mean anything?’ Good God, he thought, she’s beautiful.
* * *
The relief of knowing that Lief, Tailltin, Dervorgilla and Slaney had reached Lough Mask made Finn better; not well – she needed good food and rest for that – but better. She transferred herself, Perse and the Elf to the inn and began reorganising the situation there with an irritable efficiency that wrong-footed the soldiers into obeying her. It was illogical, she knew it was illogical, to be assisting men she had spent her strength opposing, who had destroyed her city and massacred its inhabitants. But her own side was effectually just as much the enemy now as the Normans, and she was rapidly narrowing down her loyalties to individuals. She had done what she could for Ireland; if she could create a niche in which a baby could be safely born then she had achieved something which dwarfed everything else, even saving the Pilgrim. Through Perse, God was giving her a second baby: she wasn’t going to fail this one.
Oddly enough, her confederates in the enterprise were the Norman mercenary soldiers themselves. Perse was their favourite anyway and the sight of her growing waistline as she waddled through the inn domesticated it for them. She reminded them of home. They all ate their meal a day together in the commons parlour, even Le Gros – the men on duty had to do with oatcake – and little as it was, several of them slipped food off their own platters onto Perse’s. ‘Get it down you, Perse, you’re eating for two.’ Dai from Caerleon and Raoul, a Fleming from Ghent, made a cradle for when the baby was born out of slats from the empty pigeon loft. Robert the Breton ran a book on whether it would be a boy or a girl and the colour of its hair. The Scotsman Macwilliam got a punch in the mouth from Captain Jacques for his bad joke in suggesting that when the baby was born they should eat it.
Gradually they became comrades in adversity, even Finn, whom the men had disliked as ‘too stuck up’ at first, even Elfwida, who’d been a sex object – they were all becoming too weary to bother about sex. Finn relaxed. At the moment they were just hungry; if the sieges went on they would be starving and unpredictable, it would be as well that by then they were all bonded in camaraderie.
Oddest of all was the growing liking between Le Gros and herself. Raymond had been cheered by the way she’d taken at least one problem off his shoulders, and called her ‘Quartermaster’, but he still had plenty of others and in the evenings he’d join her by the fire in the kitchen – she wouldn’t allow one anywhere else but the common parlour in order to save fuel – to discuss them. The fact that she was no threat, being a woman, yet obviously of his own class, while remote from Norman politics, encouraged his confidences, especially as she was in no position to repeat them.
‘I ought to be in the city,’ he’d grumble, ‘in the castle with Strongbow. They’ll all be plotting and scheming, putting in their bids for lands, and I’ll be left out.’
‘De Cogan’s in an outpost as well,’ she pointed out, ‘and you can’t get any lands, any of you. You’re bottled up.’
‘Temporarily, temporarily. It’s just a matter of waiting until the Irish slacken their guard; they will eventually, you know.’
She was silent. She was afraid they would. The Irish weren’t used to long campaigns, especially sieges.
‘Who are you, Finn?’ he asked one night, ‘You’re not Irish.’
‘I am. But I was brought up at Fontevrault.’
‘A nun? What made you leave it? Man trouble?’
She found herself smiling. That just about summed it up. She steered him away to a subject which interested him more, his career: ‘Who are you going to marry?’
He stretched. ‘I’d thought of one of Dermot’s daughters, which would have given me an Irish connection and therefore more land. He was offering them round like playing cards at one time. However, they’ve disappeared. At the moment I’ve got my eye on Strongbow’s sister, but that’s the trouble with being stuck out here – Miles De Cogan might get her.’
‘Is she worth getting?’
‘Good Lord, woman. With Strongbow owning Ireland? I’ll say she will be.’
‘He doesn’t own it yet.’
‘He will. That’s if Fitzempress doesn’t interfere.’
His fear of Fitzempress, which he made no attempt to hide, cropped up constantly in his conversation. As far as Raymond Le Gros was concerned Ireland was a piece of cake to be carved up between its invaders if, if, if, they could only do it and become established before Fitzempress tried to take it away from them. She saw an opening: ‘I heard Strongbow’s got one of Fitzempress’ spies locked up in Dublin Castle.’
Le Gros turned on her. ‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘Gossip.’
‘You worry me sometimes, Finn. As a matter of fact it’s true, the poor bastard. My Lord Llanthony, brilliant chap, knew him in Aquitaine. Strongbow’s taking a risk keeping him a prisoner – Fitzempress wouldn’t like it if he knew. But if he lets John go, John’ll bring Fitzempress whistling over here so fast our feet will be dangling from the gallows before we know they’ve left the ground. Dear God, I wouldn’t like to be a prisoner in Dublin just now; we think we’re on short commons here, but it must be hell in the city. Still, I don’t suppose Strongbow’ll let him die. Might need him as a bargaining counter if the worst comes to the worst.’
* * *
In a succession of bad winters, the one of 1170–71 was the worst the eastern half of Ireland had ever known; refugees from the war zones who imposed themse
lves on relatives in the safety of the mountains were welcomed under the sacred laws of Irish hospitality, but providing food for two families instead of one meant a shortage for both which the weak, very young and very old did not survive. There was no snow at first, just a griping cold that manufactured complicated and beautiful crystals on the outlines of every blade of grass, every twig. Travellers unwary enough, or desperate enough, to venture any distance in it were frozen in mid-stride so that they were later found lying with a knee raised in frantic effort to elude the elemental robber which had taken their life. Small rivers froze.
The Irish besiegers of Dublin piled more skins over their cosy tents, built fires big enough to roast an ox and roasted oxen on them, flapping at the turning carcases with their cloaks so that the smell of cooking wafted towards the silent, starving city. The winter was their ally, a force even greater than their own thousands; nothing could withstand it and them. They relaxed in the security of their confederation, and went hunting while they waited for the gates of Dublin to open and the Normans to come out, suing for peace.
And the gates did open. Twice. But the thin heralds who crossed the lines to speak to the O’Conor under flags of truce were not offering surrender, merely asking for safe conduct for two Irishmen who had business elsewhere. And O’Conor acceded to their requests.
The first figure to emerge was that of Dublin’s archbishop, Laurence O’Toole, on his way to Armagh where an assembly of Ireland’s greatest bishops and clergy was waiting for him. It had finally impinged on the Irish Church’s consciousness that the battle in the south-east was not just another personal feud between the High King and a recalcitrant subject, but an invasion that could change the face of Ireland. The bishops were going to discuss it.
Daughter of Lir Page 48