“He’s turned you down.” She transferred her gaze back to Peter. “Haven’t you, Welshman?”
The years had been more than kind to Fionnuala. If as a girl she had been lovely, thought Peter, there was only one way to describe her now. She was magnificent. A brood of children had left her body lithe, but fuller. Her hair was still raven black, her head held proudly, her eyes the same astounding, emerald green. At ease with herself and all the world, she looked exactly the Irish princess that she was. And this is the woman, thought Peter, that in different circumstances I might have married.
“I’m afraid that I have,” he admitted with a trace of awkwardness.
“He’s been dispossessed,” she suddenly cried out. “We have all been robbed of the land we have loved for a thousand years. Do you not see that, Welshman? Can you not imagine his rage? We were not even conquered. We were deceived.” She stopped, and then in a lower voice continued, “You do not care. You owe him nothing.”
He did not reply.
“It is to me that you owe something,” she said quietly.
The two of them gazed at each other, while Gilpatrick looked puzzled. He couldn’t imagine why the knight should owe his sister anything.
“You are enjoying good fortune now, Welshman,” she went on bitterly. “But it was not always so.”
“It is usual to be rewarded for twenty years of service,” he pointed out.
“Your English king has rewarded you. But it was I, like a fool, who caused you to be noticed when I gave you Dublin.”
“It was yourself you gave to me. Not Dublin.”
“You betrayed me.” She said it sadly. “You hurt me, Welshman.”
He nodded slowly. Every word of it was true. He noticed Gilpatrick looking mystified.
“What is it you want, Fionnuala?” he asked at last.
“My brother still has two daughters to find husbands for. Leave him on his farm at least until they’re wed.”
“That is all?”
“What else could there be?”
Did she, he fleetingly wondered, wish that she had married him? Or could she only hate him now? He would never know.
“He must pay his rents,” he said.
“He will.”
He pursed his lips. He could imagine the future trouble his tenant would probably cause him. There would be years of sullen looks and anger. How could it be otherwise? Perhaps Fionnuala would be able to keep her brother in order, perhaps not. One day, no doubt, it would end with his kicking her brother off his ancestral land. That was just the way of things. But he supposed he could live with the fellow until these last two daughters had gone to their husbands with suitable dowries.
“You ask nothing for yourself,” he remarked. “Will your own daughters not be looking for good husbands? English knights perhaps?” For if they look like you, he thought to himself, that might not be impossible.
She answered with a laugh. “My children? I’ve seven of them, Welshman, running free with the O’Byrnes in the hills. They won’t be marrying English knights. But take care,” she added, looking straight into his eyes, “for they may come down from the hills one day, to take their land back again.”
“Well, Fionnuala,” he said slowly, “that may be. Your brother can stay, at least. I’ll do it for your sake. You have my word for that. If you’ll trust my word, that is,” he added wryly.
She nodded, then turned to her brother.
“So Gilpatrick,” she asked, “am I to trust the word of the King of England’s man?” And as she said it, she glanced back at her former lover with a faint, ironic smile.
But Father Gilpatrick, confused though he was by their conversation, had witnessed too much since the days when he’d crossed the sea with Peter. And so now, though the knight had been his friend, he could only answer her question with a silence.
SEVEN
Dalkey
1370
THE FALCON flapped its wings and tried to rise; but Walsh’s gloved hand held it fast. Its great, curved beak struck down at the hand, but John Walsh only laughed. He loved the bird’s fierce, free spirit. A fitting companion for a French or English lord. Its eyes were marvels, too: they could pick out a mouse at a thousand paces.
Walsh stared out from his castle wall. Like most of his family, he had a strong, soldier’s face. His blue eyes were keen. They had to be, here in the borderlands. And they narrowed, now, as they fixed upon something. It was a small moving object, of no significance at all. Quite ordinary. Too ordinary. It struck him as odd. Nothing was ordinary in the borderland.
Carrickmines Castle. Carrickmines meant “Little Plain of Rocks.” And certainly there were rocks enough, strewn around over the terrain nearby. But the real character of the place derived from the stately slopes of the Wicklow Mountains that rose just in front of the little castle and, behind it, the six leagues of road that led northwards across the rich coastal strip up to Dublin.
The moving object was a young girl. The last time he’d seen her, he remembered, some cattle had gone soon afterwards.
The castle was built of stone; it had already been reinforced several times. Most of the motte and bailey mounds of the original colonists were sturdy stone strongholds now, and they were to be found scattered over huge tracts of the island. Three of the best in the Dublin region lay at the northern and southern ends of the broad bay: there was one on the northern peninsula of Howth; a little way above that lay the stout castle of Malahide; and here at Carrickmines, just below the high headland that marked the bay’s southern extremity, the Walsh family guarded their farmlands and the approaches to the great, green centre of the English power.
The territory around Dublin was a huge patchwork of estates. The greatest landowner, by far, was the Church. The Archbishop of Dublin held numerous huge tracts. His big manor of Shankill lay just south of Walsh’s castle; below the city, taking in the old lands of Rathmines, was his even larger manor called Saint Sepulchre. But nearly all the religious houses of Dublin—and there were many of these now—had their rich estates in the region: the monks of Christ Church, the nuns of Saint Mary, the knights of Saint John; Ailred the Palmer’s hospital had two handsome estates; even the little leper house of Saint Stephen had some rich farmland not far from the Walshes, and known as Leopardstown. Some of the land on these ecclesiastical estates was managed directly by the church landlords themselves; mostly it was let to tenant farmers. The rest of the territory was held by men like Walsh.
“And a great comfort it is,” a Dublin merchant had once remarked to him, “to know that the countryside around is safely in the hands of loyal Englishmen.”
Was that true, Walsh wondered? Up in Fingal, it probably was. There was a tiny residual element of the ancient Celtic aristocracy still in the region—though a small family called O’Casey was the only example that came into his mind. The former Viking families had almost all been pushed out of Fingal. In their place were Norman and English names—Plunkett and Field, Bisset and Cruise, Barnewall, and the Talbot lords of Malahide. They were all stout Englishmen; they married among themselves or other English families. But elsewhere, the situation was less clear-cut. If the Norsemen were no longer in Fingal, what about the old suburb on the north bank of the Liffey? Oxmantown, people often called it nowadays, but the origin of the name—Ostmanby, the town of the Ostmen—was not forgotten. There were plenty of people of Norse descent around there. And making the great curve round to the west and south of the city, one encountered local lords with names that were anything but English. There were the Harolds, descendants of Ailred the Palmer’s son. They were Norse. So were the powerful Archbolds. As for the Thorkyll family, they descended from a former Norse king of the city—loyal to the English Justiciar, no doubt, but hardly Englishmen. And finally, there were the families like his own. There was a cluster of them in the territory south of the city, living on rich, fortified farms. Howell, Lawless, and the several branches of the Walsh family: their names might or might not make it obvi
ous, but they all had come over from Wales. Were they, too, loyal to England? Of course they were. They had to be.
All the same, life down in the southern farmlands was rather different from that above Dublin. Because of the wild Wicklow Mountains which rose close by, and where the old Irish clans still held sway, the area was more of a frontier. John’s mother had come from the settled conditions of Fingal, and it had worried her that he was allowed to run wild with the local Irish children, but his father had taken a different view. “If he is going to live beside these people,” he would say cheerfully, “then he’d better know them.” And know them he did. Even at the Walsh farmstead, a harpist or an Irish bard would sometimes arrive and offer to entertain his father in his hall—an offer his father never refused, and for which he always paid generously. And as for young John, there was hardly a month when he didn’t go out with the fishermen at the nearby coastal village of Dalkey, or go up into the Wicklow Mountains and run with the O’Tooles and the O’Byrnes. They all knew who he was, of course: he was a Walsh, one of the colonists who had taken their best land from them. But children have a passport into places where their parents may not go, and for a number of years the boy was only dimly conscious of the barrier that lay between himself and his companions. He spoke their language, he usually dressed and rode bareback as they did. Once he discovered an even closer link.
A party of boys had gone up into the hills and ridden their ponies over to the lakes at Glendalough. The old monastery there was a shadow of its former self: the bishopric had long since been taken over by Dublin and only a small group of monks lived there now; but John had still been impressed by the quiet beauty of the place. They had stopped by the little settlement nearby when he had noticed the dark-haired girl watching him. She was about his own age, slim; he thought her rather beautiful. She was sitting on a grassy bank, eating an apple, and silently staring at him with a pair of bright green eyes. Feeling a little uncomfortable under her steady gaze, he had gone over to her.
“So what are you staring at?” he had demanded to know; though he had said it in a perfectly friendly way.
“You.” She took another bite out of her apple.
“Do I know you?”
She munched for a moment or two before replying, “I know who you are.”
“And who is that?”
“My cousin.” She watched his look of astonishment with interest. “You’re the Walsh boy, aren’t you?” He agreed that he was. “I could be a Walsh, too, if I wanted,” she declared. “But I don’t,” she added fiercely, taking another bite out of her apple. Then she had suddenly sprung up and run away.
Could this girl really be related? he had asked his father that night, when he got home.
“Oh she’ll be your cousin, all right.” His father had looked amused. “Though I’ve never seen her. Your uncle Henry was a great one for the women. You’ve more cousins in Leinster than you suppose. There was a beautiful girl once, up in the hills. That would be his daughter by her, I’ve no doubt. It’s a pity your uncle died when he did, but he certainly left a record of his passing.” He sighed affectionately. “Is she pretty?”
“She is,” John said, then blushed.
“Well, she’s your cousin,” his father had confirmed. “And I’ll tell you something more. Most of the land around here, and right up to Dublin, used to belong to the mother’s people. The Ui Fergusa they were called. We’ve been here since the days of Strongbow, when we were granted the estate. But they have long memories. As far as the descendants of the Ui Fergusa are concerned, we’re on their land.”
The memory of the girl had fascinated him for a long time. Once he had even gone over to Glendalough to ask after her. But they told him she had moved away, and he had never seen her again.
Indeed, a year later he had wondered if she might have died. For that had been the time of the terrible plague.
The Black Death had finally come to Ireland, as it had to all Europe. From 1347 onwards, for nearly four years, the plague, carried by fleas from the rats with whom, whether they know it or not, humans always share their dwellings, had swept across the whole continent. In its bubonic form, it afflicted its victims with terrible sores; in its even more deadly pneumonic form, it attacked their lungs and was passed, with terrible rapidity, from person to person on their breath. Perhaps a third of the population of Europe died. It had arrived on Ireland’s east coast in August 1348.
The Walshes had been lucky. John’s father had been going into Dublin on the very day that news came that the plague had arrived there. News of the Great Mortality, as it was called, had already reached them a little earlier from merchant ships coming into the port; so that the moment Walsh heard of a sudden sickness in the city, he had turned back. For more than a month the family had remained on their farm; and God, it seemed, had ordained that they were to survive. For though other farms were struck and the nearby fishing village of Dalkey suffered—they even heard there had been deaths up at Glendalough—the plague had passed them by.
But the effect on the Dublin region had been considerable. In the city and its suburbs, there were whole streets left almost empty. The Church estates had lost numerous tenants. There was a sense of desolation and disorder, as if the land had just been at war. And so it was hardly a surprise to the Walsh family if the O’Tooles and O’Byrnes up in the Wicklow Mountains, sensing the weakness in the plains below, began to come down to see what pickings there were to be had. There were certainly cattle with not enough men to guard them. Nobody familiar with the traditional life of the clans could be surprised if there were a few cattle raids. “They’ve been taking each other’s cattle since before Saint Patrick came,” John’s father calmly remarked, “so we needn’t be surprised if they extend the compliment to us.” To young John, and he suspected to his father, too, there was a certain excitement in the prospect of a raid. There was the thrill of the chase, the chance of a little skirmish with people whom, in all likelihood, one would recognise. It was part of frontier life. But the royal Justiciar in Dublin had taken a bleaker view. To him, and to the citizens of Dublin, these signs of disorder were to be deplored and must be dealt with firmly. Fortifications were needed. And so it was that the castle of Carrickmines—which had been neglected for years—had been repaired and strengthened, and John Walsh’s father had been asked to move out of his farmstead and take over as castellan of the place. “We need a good, reliable man,” the Justiciar had told him. And young John had been dimly conscious that the change also represented a social promotion for his father. In the eyes of the royal officials at Dublin, he was now one of the king’s officers, more of a knight than a farmer, nearer to the status held by his ancestor Peter FitzDavid who had first been granted the land.
It was a small incident at this time which had taught him what all this meant for his own identity.
The family had been installed at the castle only a few months when the officer from Dublin rode up. It was a fine morning and young John had just decided to ride over to see one of his Walsh cousins on a neighbouring farm. As usual when he went about in the locality, he was wearing only a shirt and tunic; his legs were bare and he was riding his little horse without a saddle. He might well have passed for one of the young O’Byrnes. The man riding up the lane from Dublin was as smartly dressed and turned out as any English knight, and John watched him, not without admiration. As the man drew up in front of the castle gate, he glanced at John and enquired curtly whether Walsh was within.
“Who shall I say is looking for him?” John asked.
The knight frowned, uncertain whether this young fellow before him belonged to the castle or not; and meaning only to be helpful, John had smiled and explained: “I’m John Walsh, his son.”
He hadn’t expected any particular response to this statement; so he was much taken aback by what happened next. For instead of merely nodding, the knight stared at him openmouthed.
“You are Walsh’s son? Walsh, the warden of this castle?” A loo
k of disgust crossed his face. “And your father lets you ride about like that?”
John looked down at his legs and his bareback horse. It was already obvious to him that this young knight must be a newcomer, one of a company who had recently arrived from England to help the Justiciar in Dublin. All the same, under the contemptuous gaze of the nobleman, he felt a little shamefaced.
“I was only riding to another farm,” he said defensively.
“Dear God, man,” the knight cried out, “you don’t have to dress like a native.” And seeing the youth looking confused, he told him sharply, “Pull yourself together.” Then without another word to him, he rode in through the castle gate.
At first, John had intended to continue on his journey; but he had only gone fifty paces when he had stopped and turned back. The knight was rude—he obviously knew little about Ireland—but John did not like to be scorned by a man who was, after all, one of his own kind. A short while later, therefore, he was in his mother’s chamber, having his hair vigorously brushed and struggling into a clean white shirt and leather boots. By the time the knight was ready to ride out, he encountered in the yard a young man who might have been a handsome squire in any English castle.
“Better,” he remarked tersely as he strode past him; and having mounted, he signalled John to accompany him through the gateway. As they came outside, he pulled up his horse and pointed to the rich pastureland in front of them. “Tell me something, young Walsh,” he said in a voice that was more friendly. “Do you want to keep this land?”
“Yes, I do,” John replied.
“Then you had better realise that the only way you’ll do so is if you remember you’re an Englishman.” And with that brief advice, he rode away.
Standing on his castle wall today, twenty years later, Walsh would not have disagreed with the knight’s assessment. The King of England’s rule, in some shape or form, extended over parts of Ireland; but since the early days of colonial expansion in the time of Henry II and his son, there had been a gradual retreat. The island now was divided up between the native Irish and the colonists in a vast patchwork of territories, representing a series of accommodations or stalemates. The English rulers were on the defensive, not only against the Irish ruling clans but even against some of the settlers who, after five or six generations in the borderlands, were more like Irish chiefs themselves, and almost as hard to control. When the English administrators in Dublin looked out at the uncertain world around them, they could draw only one conclusion: “We’ve got to stiffen the backbone of our people here. Get some English order, or the place will degenerate into chaos. Remind our colonists that they are Englishmen.”