What did that mean, to be an Englishman? There was the matter of dress, of course. You didn’t go around with bare legs or ride without a saddle. You didn’t let your wife wear a bright saffron-coloured shawl like an Irishwoman. You didn’t speak Irish except to the natives; you spoke English. In his grandfather’s day, Walsh recalled, a gentleman would speak Norman French. It was still used for the more formal court proceedings. But if you went down to Dublin now, the merchants and the royal officials would usually be speaking the Frenchified English that was current in places like Bristol or London. And above all, you weren’t supposed to marry the Irish. “Marrying them,” one of his Fingal relations had declared to him, “that’s where the rot starts.”
Indeed, the English government had become so fixated by the subject that four years ago, at a parliament held down in the town of Kilkenny, a series of statutes had been promulgated which actually made all such intercourse between the communities illegal.
Privately, Walsh wasn’t impressed with the Statute of Kilkenny. The colonists had been marrying the Irish ever since Strongbow first obtained Leinster by wedding King Diarmait’s daughter; and just as the Norse and the Irish had been marrying before that. This attempt to force the two communities into separate worlds might be possible, but he thought it smelled of panic. Laws were no good when they couldn’t be enforced.
But even if he didn’t think much of the larger issue, Walsh understood perfectly well what it meant to be English here in his own locality. It meant guarding his and his neighbours’ farmlands from the O’Byrnes.
Most of the time, it had to be said, everything was quiet. But now and again, things got interesting. Ten years ago, the chief of the O’Byrnes at that time, an unusually ambitious man, had come down with a large force and surrounded the castle. “Do you really think you can hold the place if you take it from me?” Walsh had called down from the wall. But he had only received a volley of missiles in return for his pains. The siege had gone on for several days until the Justiciar, the Earl of Ormond, had come out of Dublin with a large party of knights and driven the invaders away. “Personally,” Walsh had told his wife, “I think O’Byrne is playing a game. He’ll make a nuisance of himself to see how much he can get out of the Justiciar.” And when some months later O’Byrne came to an agreement with Ormond, and the remarkable news came back—“That wild man of the mountains has been given a knighthood, no less!”—Walsh had laughed till he cried. All the same, the walls had been strengthened again, and from time to time troops of cavalry had been stationed there. For nearly ten years things had been quiet after that. But the underlying truth still remained. The farmlands south of Dublin were safe because the castle protected them; and the castle was there because the English ruled in Dublin.
As he had pointed out to one of his cousins just recently: “The English king gave us our lands and our position. He can also take them away. And you cannot suppose for a moment that the O’Byrnes and the O’Tooles would leave us in possession of them if the English power was taken away.” Yes, John Walsh thought, that was what, at the end of the day, it meant to him to be English.
So what the devil was that girl doing? On the eastern side of the little plain where the castle was set, the high hump of the bay’s southern headland rose, masking the fishing village of Dalkey from his view. Half a mile away, with the headland as a magnificent backdrop, he had set up a large rabbit warren. That was another useful custom the colonists had brought with them. The warren provided him with a constant supply of meat and fur. And it was by that warren that the girl was lurking. Was she planning to steal some rabbits?
He knew who she was, of course. She was the daughter of his beautiful, dark-haired cousin up in the mountains. His cousin had married one of the O’Byrnes, he’d heard, some years ago. This little girl looked just like her. The same brilliant green eyes. He smiled to himself. If she stole a rabbit, he was certainly going to pretend he hadn’t seen. He’d noticed her lurking about on his land once before though, some months back; and shortly afterwards he’d lost those cattle. That was a more serious matter.
But then another thought occurred to him, and he frowned. There had been trouble down in Munster recently, and the Dublin authorities had been concerned enough to send troops. There was a new O’Byrne chief now, and seeing the English forces occupied elsewhere, he had taken the opportunity to move into several small forts down the coast. It was cheeky, but Walsh reckoned that the Irish chief would probably get away with it. At least for the moment. Was this a prelude to another attack on Carrickmines? In Walsh’s opinion, that would be ill-advised. The people in Dublin were already nervous. A couple of weeks ago, they’d sent a squadron of horsemen over to camp at Dalkey, in case any attempts were made to sneak up the coast. At the first hint of trouble from the hills, there’d be further squadrons coming out to Carrickmines—quite apart from the fact that the place was far too strong now for O’Byrne to break into. All the same, you could never tell. Was it possible that his little cousin was lurking by the rabbit warren for a more sinister purpose? Was she looking for troops? Was she noting the state of the walls and the castle gate? If so, she hadn’t concealed herself very well. He would be sorry if his young kinswoman were careless about such things.
Or was there something else going on? His eyes searched the slopes. Were they up there already, waiting to sweep down as soon as the little girl ran back or gave a signal? He scanned the hills. He did not think so. The girl was moving away now. Which way would she go?
The falcon on his wrist was getting restless again. With a single sweep, he let her loose and watched her rise, magnificent and watchful, into the summer morning sky.
Tom was on his way to church when he passed her. He usually went there in the afternoon, but today he was an hour later than usual because one of the fishermen had insisted on talking to him until long after the Angelus had sounded farther down the valley.
She was a pretty little thing. Long black hair. He had never seen her before. She had been loitering by the track that led across the common from the shore. As he had passed her, she had stared at him with the strangest green eyes.
Tom Tidy was a small man. His sandy moustache and pointed beard made a little triangle which the slope of his shoulders thrust forward. There was a quiet determination about him, yet also a hint of melancholy, as though God had required him to plough a furrow which, as it turned out, had no end. Tom Tidy might not be impressive, but you could always rely on him. Everybody said so. Why only the other day, when he had been paying his rent at the diocesan office, the archbishop himself had come in and said, “If there’s one man I know I can trust, Master Tidy, then that man is you.” Master Tidy, he had called him: a title of respect. That had made him blush with pride.
Tom Tidy had always gone to church every day when he still lived in the southern suburb of Dublin. After his children were married and he had lost his wife of thirty years, and wanted a change, the archbishop’s bailiff, who was looking for reliable tenants, had offered him very good terms to move down to the fishing village of Dalkey.
And Dalkey was pleasant enough. Situated on a shelf of bare ground between the high hump of the bay’s southern headland and the sea, it consisted of a single street with a little church and plots of land on which homesteads and gardens were laid out. Such a homestead was known as a messuage. Tom Tidy’s plot was of average size—thirty yards of frontage, running back forty yards. But he also had the right to several strips in the communal field behind the plots and to pasture his livestock on the open common which lay on the seaward side. The town plot was known as a burgage, and the holder of such a property in a township—unlike the peasants and serfs who inhabited smaller cabins—was a freeman known as a burgess.
Though it looked and almost was a tiny town, Dalkey had no borough charter. It was a part of one of the archbishop’s great manors. The archbishop was the feudal lord; his bailiff collected the ground rents, the feudal prise tax on the fishermen’s catch, and ce
rtain other dues. For almost all offences, the inhabitants would be summoned to trial at the archbishop’s court, for which his bailiff would select the juries. In short, the Irish settlement of Dalkey was organised in a typically English manner.
Tom Tidy paid three shillings a year for his holding, which totalled three acres. From this base he operated a small carrying business, taking goods from the little harbour into the local farmsteads or into Dublin. His homestead was one of the larger ones. The thatched dwelling house was modest; but behind it was a substantial yard with a long barn where he kept several vehicles: the cart for carrying fish, the big wagon for the great casks of wine and barrels of salt, and another for bales of cloth and furs. He also brewed some ale which he sold in the locality and for which he paid the bailiff a small tax on each brewing. Business was occasional. Some days he worked, some he did not. The slow pace of Dalkey suited Tom, the widower, very well.
There were thirty-nine burgages in Dalkey, though as some of them had been joined, the number of burgesses was actually less. Most of the burgesses, however, did not live in Dalkey. Landowners and Dublin merchants took the burgages and then sublet, often in smaller parcels to lesser folk. Tom Tidy, therefore, was one of the more important people in the place. Indeed, the position of head man, or reeve, being open at present, the bailiff had told him, “Although you haven’t been in Dalkey long, Tom, we’re thinking of appointing you.”
It was the shoreline that had given Dalkey its name. Some way out from the beach, a small island and a line of rocks had suggested the Celtic name of Deilginis—which meant Thorn or Dagger Island—which Viking settlers had later converted to Dalkey. No great river from the interior came down there, so that for most of its life it had only been a fisherman’s hamlet. More recently, however, Dalkey had acquired a new significance.
The sandbars and mudflats of the Liffey estuary had always been a hazard to ships, but since the days of the Vikings, the activities of the port had added to the silting up of the river, while the squat medieval cogs, with their broad beams and deeper drafts, found it harder to negotiate the Dublin shallows, even though they usually hired pilots to guide them in. Nearby were other havens with deeper waters. The little port at Howth on the bay’s northern peninsula was one; down below the southern point of the bay, Dalkey was another. For the island acted as a natural harbour wall to protect any ships that came in, and the place had excellent deep water—eight fathoms even at low tide. Merchant ships with deep drafts would often unload there—sometimes all their cargo, sometimes just enough to lighten the vessel—so that they could then negotiate the Dublin shallows. Either way, it provided extra employment for the people of the settlement, including Tom Tidy.
After passing the girl, Tom went another fifty yards before he stopped. There was no vessel in the little harbour at present. The fishing boats, he happened to know, were all out. So why was that girl coming along the path from the water? There was nothing to see down there. What was she up to? He turned to take another look at her, but she had vanished.
The little stone church of Saint Begnet’s stood on the northern side of the street. Beside it was a graveyard and the priest’s house. The last priest had died that spring and a temporary curate had been coming over from another church to hold services on Sundays. In the meantime, Tom had been entrusted with the keys, both of the church, which he locked at night, and of the priest’s house, which was being used at present by the officer of the visiting squadron, whose men were encamped in tents in the garden behind. Two of these men were always posted down by the shore to keep watch for the approach of the O’Byrnes or any vessels that might contain them.
Tom entered the church and, after genuflecting, made his way towards the altar. A little to one side there was a wooden screen behind which a prie-dieu afforded a private place to pray. Here Tom sank down on his knees, and for several minutes he was lost to the world in prayer—so that he hardly heard the church door open. Nor did he look up. If someone else had come to pray in the silence of the little church, he had no wish to disturb them. He remained where he was. A few moments passed as he heard the faint scuffling of soft leather shoes on the floor. It seemed to him that there were two people near the door, but because of the screen he could not see them and, presumably, they could not see him either. Then he heard a voice.
“I was trying to find you down by the shore.”
“You saw the lookouts?”
“Of course.” This voice, it seemed to him, was a girl’s. The other belonged to a man. They were speaking in Irish, but he understood them well enough.
“You have a message for me from O’Byrne?”
“I have. He is not coming to Dalkey.” The girl’s voice again.
“I see. And if not Dalkey, where?”
“Carrickmines.”
“When?”
“In a week, there will be no moon. It will be then. In the dark. Towards midnight.”
“We’ll be ready. Tell him that.”
There was the sound of feet on the floor, and of the church door opening. Then the sound of its being closed.
Tom kept very still. As soon as he had heard the name O’Byrne he had felt a stab of cold fear. You never knew what those people might be plotting. And you didn’t want to know. People who heard too much, people who could turn into informers, had a way of disappearing. Ten years ago, he remembered, a fellow at Dalkey had got word of some trouble brewing and informed the authorities. One of the O’Bymes had died as a result. A week later, they had fished the informer’s body out of the sea—without a head.
So as the rest of the conversation reached him, he wished he could vanish into the floor. If they—whoever they were—moved farther into the church and discovered him, what would they do? He had felt a sense of panic running through him; a clamminess had spread across his brow. Even after the door had closed and the church returned to silence, he was still shivering. He remained for some time, still on his knees, listening.
At last however, he looked cautiously round the screen. The church was empty. He got up and went to the door. Slowly he opened it. No one was in sight. He stepped out. His eyes searched for a sign of the couple he had overheard. They seemed to have vanished. They were not in the churchyard, nor when he reached it did he see them anywhere in the street. He went back and locked the church door; then he started to make his way towards his house. Still there was no sign of them.
He was halfway along the street when, glancing at the track that led across the common towards the south, he caught sight of the girl, her long dark hair streaming behind her, running like a deer. That was her, the messenger, without a doubt, on her way back towards O’Byrne. He had a sudden, foolish instinct to rush after her, but realised it was useless. He looked around for a sign of her companion, but there was none at all. He must certainly have been one of the Dalkey men. But who? Was the man there, in one of the homesteads, watching him at this very moment?
Slowly and thoughtfully Tom Tidy went along the street. When he got home, he attended to his six cart horses. After they had been fed and closed in their stalls for the night, he went into his house, took a meat pie from his larder, cut a large slice, and put it on a wooden platter on his table. He poured ale from a pitcher into a pottery mug; then he sat down to eat. And to think. He did not leave his house that evening.
The next morning, Tom Tidy was up with the dawn and working in the yard beside his barn. He was a tolerable carpenter and he had decided to make a new tailboard for the fish cart. He chose a plank and for more than two hours he worked quietly, shaping it to his satisfaction. Nobody came by to disturb him.
He had gone over the business carefully in his mind the night before; now he reviewed it calmly. Tom Tidy was a loyal fellow who knew where his duty lay. But he wasn’t a fool. The dangerous information that had come into his hand had to be passed on; but if it was ever traced back to him, he wasn’t sure he could answer for his life. How should it be passed on then? And to whom? The obvious answer m
ight have been to inform the officer in charge of the squadron; but that was too close to home. Any sign from the soldiers that they suspected the true state of affairs would be noticed by the village, and whoever had been in the church with the girl would probably guess that Tom was the one who had given them away. There was the bailiff over at the archbishop’s manor, but Tom had always thought the man was indiscreet. If he told the bailiff, it wouldn’t be long before the whole area knew. The wisest course, he considered, would be to speak to someone in Dublin, but this would require some careful planning. Who was discreet as well as powerful? Who would protect him? Whom could he trust? He wasn’t sure.
When he had finished the tailboard, Tom Tidy put his tools away, left his house, and walked up the street, glancing at the houses to the right and to the left as he did so. A breeze coming up from the harbour brought with it a sharp, salty tang that smelled good and invigorating. It was time to get some advice.
While the burgesses who owned the leases in Dalkey included significant gentry and Dublin families like the Dawes and Stackpooles, the tenants who actually lived there were a mixed collection. Several of the fishing families contained burly red-haired figures who were obviously of both Irish and Viking descent. Others derived from the modest English townsmen and smallholders who had come across in the decades that followed Strongbow’s invasion—men with names like Fox and White, Kendal and Crump. Most had been there a generation or two and were scarcely distinguishable from their Irish and Nordic neighbours. But in seeking advice, Tom ignored them all.