He was going to pull the Swan down, anyway, and build a castle here if Fitzempress would let him. She didn’t hate him for it; he had helped Dai-Raymond to be born and he had kept his word and saved the Pilgrim. She had this feeling that the world was coming to an end and there wasn’t time any more to demarcate people into friend or enemy. Too little time to waste in hatred. Dear, dear, how mild she had become; must be middle-age.
‘How’s Basilia?’
He grunted. ‘Good Norman stock, Basilia. But she’s settling down. Do you know that Maurice FitzGerald said the other day?’
‘What?’
‘He said that we, the Normans over here, that already we’re Irish to the English and English to the Irish.’
‘Did he?’ Perhaps Pinginn was right; in time they would be absorbed.
‘Dermot’s dead.’
‘Is he?’ She rolled the information round her brain; once it would have chewed on the information, tasted it, regurgitated it, but now it hadn’t any savour.
‘Yes, and Aoife’s pregnant.’ He sighed. ‘I wonder if Basilia’s too old for children. It’s funny, but not one of us except Strongbow has made a woman pregnant since we’ve been over here. Are we cursed do you think?’ His fat face was anxious.
‘Probably.’
‘And we move out to Meath tomorrow and God knows when I’ll be back. The king’s dispersing us, the cunning sod. Gave us hell in front of the Irish, but he knows he can’t do without us, and winked at us behind their backs. Put on a hell of a performance with FitzStephen because he was the first to invade – had him paraded in front of everybody in chains. But he’s letting him keep his lands. Jesus, he’s cunning. The Irish are eating out of his hand. Oh, and Llanthony’s due to arrive in Dublin soon; the king’s called him back to advise him on Irish affairs.’ He grinned at her. ‘He thinks you slept with me so that I’d let him go.’
‘I know he does.’
Le Gros patted her. ‘And I might have done if you’d been younger, and I hadn’t liked you instead.’ He heaved himself up. ‘I’d better go. You’ll be here when I get back? No escaping to Connaught?’
‘No.’ Anyway, she couldn’t bear to leave Dai-Raymond.
‘I suppose you’ve been at that damned scribbling again,’ Le Gros said. He was mystified that she could do it. ‘I can’t think what you fill the pages with.’
‘Heresy.’
‘Well you be careful.’ He finished his mug of ale. ‘I mean it, Finn. The reformers are rampant out there now they’ve got the upper hand. Did you know the priest who was in charge of St Patrick’s Well?’
‘No.’ She vaguely remembered a jolly little man who’d stood outside the church of the well, shouting the blessing of St Patrick on passers-by.
‘He’s been forced to throw his wife and children out of his house. No more married priests. The poor woman’s begging on the streets now. And all the prostitutes have had their heads shaved. Bloody hypocrisy. I know for a fact that the first thing some of those bishops who came over with Fitzempress did when they arrived was take an Irish woman. But you can’t turn a corner in Dublin without some damned preacher denouncing the evil practices of Irish marriages, and baptisms, church rites and tithe-paying – they’ve got to pay more now, of course. Everything’s got to be according to the Church of Rome. I said to Fitzempress, “Henry,” I said, “You’ll be turning this country the same as the rest of priest-ridden Europe if you’re not careful. Lose all its individuality.”’
He was showing off to get her approval and she gave it to him. She really was fond of him. ‘Spoken like a true Irishman. What did he say?’
‘Well, he doesn’t like it any more than I do. Rather fancied the idea of easy divorce, if you ask me – did I tell you that Eleanor’s supposed to have poisoned the Fair Rosamund? But he said to me, “Raymond, old chap, what can I do? The sodding bishops are on my back. It’s Ireland or me.”’
‘Are you sure you won’t have more ale?’ There was no point in blaming him for the coming of the new era; Ireland had refused to enter the modern age and so the modern age had come to Ireland.
‘No. But incidentally, was this inn ever called the Amazon?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘There was one of those bloody preachers standing at Dames Gate ranting to a crowd of monks that the Amazon Inn on the Stein was a den of iniquity run by women in trousers who killed men and took their spirit to foreign countries, or some such rubbish. That it wasn’t their inn in any case, they had used Jews and other devils to get it away from its rightful owner. What’s an Amazon anyway? I picked the little bastard up and chucked him over the bridge. “That’s my inn,” I told him, “there’s none of your bloody Amazons there, just a friend of mine, and you leave it and her alone,” I told him, “or I’ll come back and the place’ll have a new name, the Ranter’s Balls, and yours will be the inn sign.” That’s what I told him.’ He reached out and caught her hands. ‘There shouldn’t be any trouble. But there’s a boat down in the cave harbour below the tower. Just in case.’
He joined his men across the river and they moved out at dawn. Finn and Elfwida stood on the tower roof to wave goodbye. The early light was enough to distinguish their shapes as they moved into their column – there were no trees on the north shore any more, just stumps and watchtowers. The men’s voices came across the water with an echo: ‘Bye, Finn.’ ‘Bye, Elf.’ ‘Goodbye, quartermaster.’ ‘Who’s a good little quartermaster then?’
‘Take care,’ she called. Take care of yourselves. Take care of Ireland.
The Normans moved out of her sight into the great uterus they believed they were conquering, and Finn was left to the greater enemy.
* * *
Dublin had become hysterical. Reaction and the fear of damnation had set in on conquered and conquerors alike; the conquered knowing that they had sinned or God would not have punished them like He had, the conquerors conscious of the sins they had committed during the conquest and afraid of God’s retribution, and both, therefore, in a terror which made them as wax in the hands of men who could point the way to salvation.
Preachers ordained and self-appointed, reformers, fundamentalists, madmen, had appeared like magic to stand on the battered streets of the city and howl damnation on such Irish as refused to take their particular recipe for its avoidance. Some were Irish themselves, having waited all their lives for this opportunity to bring their erring country into the fold, but many had travelled from overseas.
Further on a canon from Durham was telling a collection of traders, ‘Your filthy marriage customs have condemned you at last. Repent for marrying within the forbidden degrees. Repent for your divorces. Repent and be saved.’ Norman soldiers were being urged by Irish monks to pull down what few secular inns were left in Castle Street so that they would not be led into temptation by drink and the women who inhabited them. Prostitutes were having their heads shaved by nuns. Those with the authority to sell indulgences were doing a brisk trade.
As he crossed Hogges Green to the Thingmount, the lord of Llanthony was surprised at his own resentment at this outburst of righteousness. He had disapproved of Ireland’s laxity in his time; now he felt protective towards it against these outsiders and clerics. He pushed angrily through the petitioners who crowded round the doors of the amazing woven palace the Irish had built for his king and was immediately ushered into its hall by the chamberlain.
Fitzempress was alone unless one counted four scribes who sat at their boards around the room, writing like maniacs as the king strode from one desk to another dictating paragraphs of four different despatches in succession. It was a nice hall, light, airy, with a view over the Stein and the smell of peeled twigs which took him back to his childhood.
‘My lord.’
‘Ah, John. How goes it in the city?’
‘I haven’t had much time to find out, but, since you ask, things are getting out of hand. It’s the bloody canon courts. They’re trying to dismantle in an hour a way of life that�
�s lasted for a thousand years. The Church courts are condemning everything that moves as long as it’s Irish. Men and women who thought they were respectably married are being told they’ve lived in concubinage all this time and their children are illegitimate, which is a term they don’t understand. It’s chaos.’
‘Hmmm.’ Fitzempress picked up one of the scribes and hung him by his hood on a peg on the wall and stood back to see how he looked. He decided against it, unhooked him and put him back on his stool. ‘A Holy Roman Ireland’s what the Church wanted, and a Holy Roman Ireland’s what it’s getting.’
‘Well, but can’t Archbishop O’Toole do something about it? He’d check the worst excesses.’
‘Certainly not. How dare you?’ He went to the window, ‘They’re blaming the sinful people of Ireland, nothing to do with the holy reforming bishops. No skin off my nose; the blacker its bishops paint the Irish people, the better I look for bringing them onto the true path. Look at that view, John. There’s stags out there just begging me to come and hunt them. I like this country, makes me feel young again. And I’m putting you in charge of it when I go away.’
It took a moment to sink in. The lord of Llanthony went on to his knees. ‘My lord.’
Fitzempress looked round at him and grinned. ‘Well, I wasn’t going to let Strongbow govern it for me, the usurping sod. He’ll have to stick with what he’s got. Besides, your cover’s blown as a spymaster and I trust you and it’s not going to be a picnic. It was either you or Hugh de Lacy and you know more about the Irish than he does. Heard any good harp staves lately?’
John shook his head. ‘Somebody cut the harp strings.’
Fitzempress winced at a pain of his own. The Fair Rosamund was dead; there were those who said Eleanor had poisoned her. ‘Somebody always does. Be like me: give women up. They’re either stabbing you in the back or they’re dying on you. What the hell’s going on?’
There was a disturbance at the door where a group of men were demanding entrance of the chamberlain, who was refusing it. ‘It’s the archdeacons and some persons, my lord.’
‘He’s attending the Synod at Cashel. He just called in on his way from Armagh to give me the findings of the council of bishops at Armagh. The council has finally pronounced on the invasion or, as it put it, “the coming of the foreigners to the shores of Erin”. Do you know what those holy men have blamed it on?’
‘Tell me.’ Fitzempress was shedding some of the age which had come upon him on hearing of Becket’s murder. Ireland was a holiday for him, an opportunity to do what he loved best; increase his empire, manipulate men, and go hunting. He genuinely liked the Irish, he said they relaxed him, that the life was civilised.
But sooner or later, thought John, you’re going to have to go back and face the papal legates and get whipped by the monks of Canterbury and all the other horrors they’ve got in store for your penance. Still, you’ve got Ireland to offer them as a sop.
‘They’ve said it was the curse of God brought upon the Irish for their persistence in buying slaves from England.’
John had thought nothing about the Irish could ever surprise him again, but it could. ‘They didn’t.’
‘They did. I think it’s rather sweet. Doesn’t blame the Normans at all.’
‘What about the curse of God on England for selling its people as slaves in the first place?’
‘Ah well,’ Fitzempress said, ‘I rather think that’s the hole in their logic. But they’re not a logical people, that’s what I like about them.’
‘But that means all those archbishops and what-nots are blaming themselves.’
Fitzempress sighed. ‘Let them in.’ The Archdeacon of Llandaff, who was actually an Englishman, and a zealot, had come over to Dublin some weeks before to make sure that the Irish Church was purging itself of the iniquities into which it had fallen, and had discovered in the Archdeacon of Dublin a soulmate who had long been pestering Laurence O’Toole to institute branding as a punishment for everything from divorce to simony, and had made a serious effort at getting him excommunicated when he refused. The two of them had yoked themselves together in what they called ‘The Crusade of Reform’ and which Fitzempress, to whom they were constantly complaining, called ‘a pain in the arse’.
With them came an assortment of monks, one of them frothing at the mouth, a depressed-looking soldier, and a girl.
‘My dear archdeacons,’ said Fitzempress, ‘how good of you to disturb me.’
‘Becket-killer,’ shouted the frothing monk, ‘Assassin.’
Fitzempress smiled politely at the archdeacon. ‘Excuse me.’ He strode over to the monk, picked him up by the belt and handed him to the chamberlain. ‘The Liffey,’ he said shortly, and turned back, brushing his hands. ‘Yes, reverend gentlemen?’
Neither the Archdeacon of Llandaff, who was thin, nor the Archdeacon of Dublin, who wasn’t, lacked courage. ‘Henry Plantagenet,’ shouted Llandaff, waving his fist, ‘as you were an instrument of the devil, now be an instrument of Almighty God and send your army against the fortress of evil in which is harboured a daughter of demons, a fornicator, whom this virtuous monk here has discovered to be a heretic of such filth as no country save Islam has produced before and of whom…’
Fitzempress turned to the virtuous monk, a skeletal man whose shaking hands held a scroll and on whose dark-flushed face broken veins indicated a past of heavy drinking. ‘You tell it,’ he said, kindly. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Madoc,’ said Madoc.
‘Well, Brother Madoc? And leave out the hellfire, there’s a good chap.’
‘My lord,’ said Madoc, and put his hands, which had begun to shake uncontrollably, under his scapular. ‘I have long had reason to suspect that the inn over there…’ he jerked his head towards the Stein, ‘…was the haunt of a she-devil, a witch. She gained ownership of it by nefarious methods to which this soldier here, a brave member of your own army, Harold of Bristol, can attest since it had previously been his.’
‘We’ll take his testimony as read,’ said Fitzempress. He crossed to one of the scribe’s desk, took up a fat candle that was ringed with the hours and lit it from the brazier. ‘And?’
‘The inn was of ill-repute even in the days of King Asgall,’ said Madoc, ‘but since the king frequented it because he was attracted by the Amazons who ran it – they danced for him, my lord, in trousers – nothing was done.’
‘Let not that omission stain your soul, Fitzempress,’ shouted Dublin.
‘And?’ said Fitzempress. He looked over towards John and mouthed: ‘Dancing girls,’ but John didn’t see it.
‘And since the coming of your countrymen, the whore has been under the protection of one of your generals, Raymond Le Gros…’
‘The dirty dog,’ said the king, ‘Old Fatty, eh John? Well, he’s gone and she’s unprotected. So?’
‘My lord, I have been keeping watch on the place and this morning, I, and some others, apprehended one of the witch’s familiars, this female here, and searched her, and on her person we found an infamous document.’
Elfwida was pushed forward into the centre of the room. Her dress was torn and her fair hair hung over her eyes. Fitzempress smoothed it back. ‘I thought you men of God weren’t allowed to shed blood.’ Elfwida’s nose was bleeding.
‘We tripped her, my lord, as she tried to get away and she fell. The blood is involuntary.’
‘That makes it all right then.’
‘My lord,’ Madoc’s voice, which had been sing-song, became suddenly vibrant and confidential. ‘We made her talk. This manuscript was written by the witch, her mistress…’
Llandaff jumped forward, ‘What further proof do you need of satanic origin, Plantagenet? A woman who can write.’
‘So can my wife.’
John thought: He’s showing off, playing games with them. He thinks they’re comical. He’ll still be amused and aloof when they destroy this woman, whoever she is. Dear God, don’t let it be her.
Fitzem
press was saying ‘…So read the manuscript.’
Dublin raised its dimpled hand. ‘Not so, my lord. Let not the ears of good men be infected by its filth. I have had merely a minute in which to peruse the document, but enough to see that it must be read only by those who are proof against its ungodliness. It must be sent at once to Cashel for the archbishops to see and condemn, as this woman must be condemned.’
Fitzempress picked up a stool and put it near the window in the sun, then led Madoc to it. ‘Read it.’
Madoc unrolled the scroll with hands that were no longer shaking. ‘Know all who live now and who will be that I am Finola of the clan of Partraige, once Sister Boniface of Fontevrault, once Abbess of Kildare whom Dermot had raped…’
John, Lord of Llanthony, went white.
Elfwida began to sob.
‘…So I did learn at a lakeside that a man’s and woman’s body can meet in joy when they meet freely and that God must have intended this to be so,’ she had written. There was an intake of breath from the archdeacons and the monks. ‘And that nothing is more important than love, because it comes from God who is our father and our mother…’
At last the Archdeacon of Dublin’s voice stopped and allowed the sound of larks rising and falling on Hogges Green to enter the hall, like bubbles breaking. He had snatched the manuscript from Madoc when the man had faltered over the account of the monk’s death. Now Brother Madoc sat still, looking out at the Liffey.
‘So that’s what happened to her. I often wondered,’ Fitzempress said quietly.
Llandaff’s voice intruded like cymbals. ‘We have already sent word to the Archbishop of Cashel that he may expect the manuscript, my lord. He will be wanting to hear that the woman has been captured and silenced.’ He added a threat: ‘I hope it will not be necessary to appeal to the Pope on this matter.’
John said, ‘What are you going to do with her?’
‘Send soldiers with us to the inn; you have heard she is a warrior, while we are men of peace.’
‘What are you going to do with her?’
Daughter of Lir Page 51