Dublin (77 page)

  "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

  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 obvious, 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.

  "Y." 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 look 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.