Dublin (64 page)

  "They've no choice," a Waterford merchant had remarked to him. "Strongbow has three hundred knights, three hundred archers, a thousand men. He has the power. Without him they're nothing. If they stick with him, they're still in with a chance of keeping part of what they lost."

  "But I can see another difficulty," Peter had replied. By the feudal law of Plantagenet England, a great lordship like Leinster would pass to the eldest son; or if it devolved upon an heiress, there would be no question of her marrying without the king's permission-and kings usually made a point of giving such heiresses to their faithful friends. Since Diarmait had actually acknowledged King Henry of England as his overlord, and Strongbow was in any case a vassal of the Plantagenet king, the English magnate would be placing himself in a dangerous legal position by taking up this Leinster inheritance. "He would really need King Henry's permission," Peter had explained to the Waterford merchant. "And I wonder if he has it."

  Just at that moment, however, King Henry II of England had other things to worry about. Indeed, it seemed to Peter that the English king would scarcely dare to show his face.

  The shocking news from England had come quite early in January. By the following month it had spread all over Europe. The King of England had killed the Archbishop of Canterbury. No one had ever heard of such a thing before.

  The quarrel between the English king and Archbishop Thomas Becket had been the usual one over the Church's power and jurisdiction. Henry had insisted that those in religious orders should answer to regular courts if they committed crimes like murder or theft. Becket, his former friend and Chancellor, who owed his position as archbishop to King Henry, had obstinately set his face against the king in a bitter and long-running dispute. Some of the senior English clergy actually thought that Becket had let his new position go to his head. But after years of strife, a group of Henry's knights, supposedly hearing the king burst out in irritation "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest!" thought it was an order to kill him and went and did so in front of the high altar in Canterbury cathedral.

  All Europe was scandalised. Everyone blamed Henry. The Pope denounced him. People were saying he should stand trial and that Becket should be made a saint. Peter supposed that the English king was far too busy dealing with this crisis to pay much attention to events in a place as far away and marginal as Leinster.

  Strongbow had wasted no time. He had gone straight to Dublin. But Peter, once again, had been left behind. The news from Dublin had sounded exciting. The ousted King of Dublin had returned with a fleet from the northern isles, but the Norsemen had botched the whole business: as they started to attack the eastern gate, the English had raced out of the southern gate, caught them in the rear, and cut them to pieces.

  They'd killed the King of Dublin, too. But though the former Dublin king might have failed to grab his city back, nobody imagined that the High King of Ireland was going to stand by and see this English intruder take over a quarter of the island and its greatest port.

  "The High King won't be long coming," the messenger from Dublin had told him. "All possible reinforcements are to go to Dublin right away. And that includes you."

  So here he was at last, on a sunny summer day, coming into Dublin. And as soon as he had reported to Strongbow and quartered his men, he knew what he would do.

  He would call upon his old friend Gilpatrick and his family. Did his friend still have a pretty sister, he wondered?

  It was not often that Gilpatrick's mother had to find fault with her husband; but sometimes she knew it was necessary to put pressure on him. When Gilpatrick failed to come to his brother Lorcan's wedding, she had been as angry as her husband. It was a public insult and a humiliation for the entire family. If her husband wouldn't see Gilpatrick after that, she didn't blame him. But at some point the rift had to end. After a year she had finally decided that it was better for everyone if the priest allowed his son to visit the house again; and following some weeks of judicious coaxing and tears, she had persuaded her husband, somewhat grumpily, to allow him to visit once more. "And you're lucky," she had told Gilpatrick firmly, "that he does."

  Nonetheless, as he awaited the arrival of his son and his son's friend three days later, old Conn was not in a very good humour. Perhaps it was partly the weather, which had been strangely changeable in the last two days. But the priest's mood had been irritable for much longer than that.

  It had been one thing to have English mercenaries in the pay of Diarmait, but it was quite another to have Strongbow himself and his army setting up as a power in the land. He knew that some people in Dublin were quietly cynical about the situation. "We're probably no worse off with Strongbow than we were with that rogue Diarmait," a friend had remarked to him the day before. But the chief of Ui Fergusa was not so sure. "There's been nothing like this in Ireland since the Ostmen first came," he grumbled. "Unless the High King can stop them, this will be an English occupation."

  "Yet even the Ostmen never really went beyond the ports," his friend reminded him.

  "The English are different," he had retorted.

  Now his son Gilpatrick, with whom he had only recently begun to speak again, was bringing this young soldier of Strongbow's to his house. Irish courtesy and hospitality demanded that he give the stranger a polite welcome, but he was hoping that the visit would be short.

  And if all this wasn't enough, his wife was choosing this day to bother him again with a subject he didn't wish to discuss.

  "You've done nothing," she was saying, with perfect truth. "Though you've been saying you would for these last three years."

  They were a curious couple to look at: the priest, tall and rangy, his wife short and stout; but they were devoted to each other. Nor did Gilpatrick's mother blame her husband for putting off this part of his duty for so long. She understood very well that he was afraid. Who wouldn't be, when the problem was Fionnuala?

  "If we don't marry her soon, I don't know what people will say. Or what she'll do," she added.

  It should have been the easiest thing in the world. Wasn't she good-looking? Wasn't she the daughter of the chief of the Ui Fergusa? Couldn't her father afford to give her a handsome dowry? It wasn't as if she had a bad reputation. Yet.

  But in her mother's view it was only a matter of time.

  If when she first returned from the Palmer's, her father remarked that Fionnuala seemed to have improved, her mother had watched her with more scepticism. She had tried not to quarrel with her daughter and she had kept her busy; but after a few weeks the signs of stress had begun to occur again. There had been tantrums and sulks. More than once Fionnuala had run out of the house and not come back all day. Her parents had suggested she should return to the Palmer's, but she had refused; and on the occasions when they met Una in the town, it was clear that a coolness had developed between the two girls.

  "We'd better get her safely married," her mother declared.

  It wasn't as if no thought had ever been given to the subject. Fionnuala was sixteen now. Her father had been talking about finding her a suitor for years.

  But if he'd been lazy when she was younger, she suspected he was nervous now. There was no knowing how Fionnuala would react to anyone they proposed.

  "She'll certainly know how to put them off if she wants to," her father remarked glumly. "God knows whom she'll insult." There was also the question of dowry. Negotiating with the future husband was always an anxious process. If word got out that Fionnuala was difficult, "twelvescore cattle won't be enough," her father said bitterly.

  The whole business seemed so likely to lead to costly embarrassment that the priest had to admit he had been secretly putting it off every month.

  "Anyway," his wife now said coaxingly, "I might have a candidate."

  "You might?"

  "I was talking to my sister. There's one of the O'Byrnes."

  "O'Byrne?" This was promising news indeed. His wife's sister had done well when she married into that family. The O'Byrnes, like the O'Tooles, were one of the finest princely families in northern Leinster.

  "It wouldn't be Ruairi O'Byrne?"

  "It would not." Even the O'Byrne family, amongst its many members, had the occasional weak link. Ruairi, as it happened, belonged to the senior branch of the family; but young though he was, he had already acquired a dubious reputation. "I am speaking," she continued, "of Brendan."

  This was quite another matter. Though only a junior member of the princely clan, the priest had always heard that Brendan was a sound fellow. For his daughter in her present state to marry any O'Byrne, apart from Ruairi, should be counted a blessing.

  "Have they ever met?" he enquired.

  "He saw her once in the market. It seems he asked my sister about her."

  "Let him come here," said her husband, "as soon as he likes." And he might have said more had not one of the slaves appeared to tell them that Gilpatrick was approaching.

  Of course Gilpatrick had been glad to see his old friend when Peter had turned up at his door.

  "You told me to come to see you if ever I came to Dublin," FitzDavid said with a smile.

  "I did. Aha. I did," said Gilpatrick.

  "Once a friend, always a friend."

  It wasn't quite true. You couldn't ignore the fact that things had changed. Even amongst the churchmen with the closest English connections, the murder of Becket had soured their view of the English king.

  Gilpatrick's father never missed the opportunity to remark to him, "Your English king is still a friend to the Church, I see." And the disturbing new presence of Strongbow and his army had begun to worry many of the bishops.

  Gilpatrick had accompanied Archbishop O'Toole to a council up in the north where the elderly Archbishop of Armagh had declared, "These English are surely a curse sent by God to punish us for our sins." The assembled churchmen had even passed a resolution suggesting that all the English slaves in Ireland should be freed. "For perhaps," some had suggested, "it is our making slaves of these English that has caused offence to God." Gilpatrick hadn't noticed many people freeing their slaves on this account, but the perception remained in the community: the English were a penance.

  Nonetheless, it would have been unnatural not to greet his former friend and he did so warmly.

  "You haven't changed at all," he cried.

  That wasn't true either. And now, as they made their way up to his parents' house, he glanced at Peter FitzDavid and thought that, though he could see the same boyish face and innocent hope, there was something else in his friend now. A hint of anxiety.

  For the fact was that, although Peter had been on active service for three years, no one had rewarded him with so much as a single cow.

  "You must get yourself some land, Peter," he remarked kindly. It was strange, he realised, that he, an Irishman, should be saying such a thing to a foreign mercenary. In traditional Ireland, of course, a warrior would be rewarded with livestock which he could pasture on the open lands of his clan; but at least since Brian Boru, Irish kings like Diarmait of Leinster had been known to reward their followers by granting them estates which lay on what would formerly have been considered to be tribal lands. Yet if you failed to obtain material rewards, he reflected, the traditional system was kinder. A brave warrior returned to his clan with honour.

  A feudal knight, though he might have a loving family, had no clan system to support him.

  Until he got an estate, though he might be a man of honour, he had no substance. The Irish priest felt a little sorry for his foreign friend.

  If Gilpatrick had also been a little uncertain what sort of reception FitzDavid would receive from his father, he needn't have worried. His father welcomed Peter with stately dignity. And for his part, Peter observed that the priest's stone house was well furnished and comfortable enough, even if he did notice with wry amusement that the churchman kept a gold-rimmed drinking skull in the corner.

  No mention was made of Becket. His parents asked the visitor about his family and his experiences with King Diarmait in the south. And when at last his father couldn't resist remarking that, as a priest, he felt a little nervous of the English king, "seeing what he does to archbishops," Peter passed this off by laughing. "We're afraid of him, too."

  If any proof of his father's friendliness were needed, it came when he remarked to his son, "I would not really say your friend was English."

  "My family was Flemish, in fact," Peter said.

  "But you were born in Wales? And your father before you?"

  "That is true," Peter agreed.

  "You speak Irish almost like one of us, I would say.

  That would be because you speak Welsh?"

  "All my life."

  "Then I think," said the Irish chief, "that you are Welsh." He turned to his wife.

  "He is Welsh." She smiled.

  "You're Welsh." Gilpatrick grinned.

  "I am Welsh," Peter wisely agreed.

  And it was just as this fact about his identity had been established that a new figure appeared in the doorway.