Kings of the Boyne

Reviews for Nicola Pierce

Behind the Walls

‘This is not glorified history; it is history as it really happened with its gritty and realistic depiction of the terror-struck city of Derry in 1689 where Protestants are threatened by the Catholic army. It’s a vivid evocation of life in a city under siege – boredom contrasted with times of real fear. Memorable characters help us share in the feelings of the people trapped and give us an insight into those feelings, both in historical times and today. Heart-breaking in places, the story is testament to the resilience of people; a moving read’
parentsintouch.co.uk

‘An excellent novel’

Robert Dunbar,
The Irish Times

Spirit of the Titanic

‘Gripping, exciting and unimaginably shattering’

Guardian Children’s Books

‘Captivating’

Sunday Business Post

‘Intriguing’

Belfast Telegraph

‘I absolutely adored this book. It makes you feel like you were there’

Finty, reader review

City of Fate

‘This fantastically written book will hook you from the start … this is historical fiction at its best’

The Guardian

‘A compelling novel, combining rich characterisation with a powerfully evoked sense of time and place’

Robert Dunbar,
The Irish Times

‘Excellent … vivid and moving’

BooksforKeeps.co.uk

If you have even just a little interest in the Battle of the Boyne, please visit the fantastic battle site and museum at Oldbridge House, the Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre in Drogheda. I also recommend visiting Drogheda’s Millmount museum and fort, the site of that bloody massacre committed by Oliver Cromwell’s army. An unexpected thrill for me was when my mother brought me to Christ Church Cathedral, in Dublin, and I found myself standing right in front of a chair that had once cushioned the rear of King William III.

The title of the book came from a former student of St Peter’s School in Rathgar. I met his class in Rathgar Books and mentioned my difficulty in choosing a title. I had barely finished my sentence before Dylan Harold blurted out ‘Kings of the Boyne’. Cheers, Dylan!

I am grateful to history buffs Aisling Heffernan of the Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre, Eamon Thornton of the Old Drogheda Society, historian and musician Aideen Morrissey and former MLA for East Belfast Michael Copeland for their wonderful anecdotes both about the Battle of the Boyne and 1690s Drogheda.

Thanks to my brother-in-law, Doctor Ciaran Simms, for lending me his grandfather’s books on Irish history.

Thanks also to David Doyle for telling me all about meadows.

I first read Saint Teresa’s poem on the Facebook page of poet and writer Nessa O’Mahony.

A big thanks to the readers of that difficult first draft: my other brother-in-law Donagh McCarthy, Rachel Pierce, Damian Keenan, Marian Broderick, Niall Carney and Conor Geoghegan. It’s a long story, almost as long as the book itself, but they had their work cut out for them, and I appreciated all of their responses and suggestions.

Once again designer and artist Emma Byrne blew me away with her work. And thanks so much to my ever-patient editor Susan Houlden who propped up my confidence following
that
first draft and prodded me to move in a different direction.

Finally, thank
you
for reading this book!

F
or a second or two Gerald O’Connor wanted to be back home in Offaly, in his tiny bedroom that was too small for him now. Even before he had left, he had already begun to dream of a bigger bed and grander window.

Instead, that room continued to shrink as he grew taller, longer and wider. There were nights when he felt the whitewashed walls inching their way towards him; he could stretch out a toe from beneath his blanket and prod the coolness of the stone, challenging it to push back.

His bedroom window was the size of his sister’s sewing basket so he could not see the ruin of his grandfather’s castle. For that, he had to step outside and there it was: broken stubby walls covered in weeds, long spidery cracks and ancient matted webs dotted with the dusty, dried-up corpses of a multitude of flies and beetles. The
roof was long gone and only one window, minus the glass, remained. This had been his own private empire when he was a child. It was where he had hidden himself after he threw a stone at his sister, dropped the cat down the well (it was an accident!) and fell into the biggest puddle around while wearing his best cloak. His family had always known where to find him, marvelling that he didn’t realise this himself.

On summer days he sat in its shadow and dreamed of a time when the castle had stood tall and pristine – the bustling home of a busy, important family, his family, the O’Connors. He had begged his sister Cait to draw the castle as it would have been. Following a brief discussion with their father, Cait sketched the shape of what Mr O’Connor described from memory. He had been a little boy when it was destroyed by the English army of Oliver Cromwell. Cait did her best, and the little sketch, after spending years nailed to Gerald’s bedroom wall, was now sitting in the pocket of his tunic. It was faded and worn, but Gerald would not leave it behind, though he rarely so much as glanced at it since he could see it perfectly in his mind’s eye.

That castle represented his family’s once-glorious past, and Gerald was determined to retrieve that glory once more. It was the reason that he was standing here, in the middle of a crowd of fellow soldiers belonging to King
James, in some place called Ardee, staring at a tree and the forlorn couple standing in front of it

The chosen tree had weathered its fair share of storms. It was tall and grand, its bark a variety of reddish hues that reminded Gerald of numerous scabs he had gleefully picked from his knees as a child. There were still a few leaves clinging on, doing their best to ignore the wintry temperatures, but they would be gone soon enough, to join their companions who curled up and rotted on the ground. Death was all around the Jacobite army on this gloomy day.

Having done his duty, Gerald fell back into line. Jacques, his friend, nudged him, a comradely shove that Gerald could not bring himself to acknowledge. He was too anxious; his breath was short and slight while he felt every strand on his head twitch in nervous anticipation.

The young couple in the centre of the circle of soldiers kept their eyes on the ground in front of them. The damning evidence was in a grey sack that was slumped by their feet, its open neck displaying the fine, white powder that was deadly lime.

Gerald stared at it in awe. How innocent and harmless it looked now, reminding him of snow that had been trampled into the mud.

Next, he glanced at the girl. It had been his job to bind her wrists together. He had had to hide his gentleness from his commander as he stood behind her and brought her hands slowly to meet at the small of her back.

She showed no fear, no emotion at all, but he saw the tremor in her fingers that were topped with cracked nails, as he folded them together and wound the rope around her wrists. He saw the bluish marks on the inside of her arms where her captors had grabbed her. He saw the rip in her dress; the sleeve had been torn away at the shoulder seam.

Something about the girl reminded Gerald of his only sister Cait. Cait only ever wore long, white woollen tunics. Not that he thought that this was particularly remarkable, only that no matter what she did or wherever she went she rarely stained her dress – unlike the Protestant girl standing before him, whose dress was a rainbow of stains and grubby patches.

Gerald moved closer to his friend Jacques so he could ask quietly, ‘Is it really necessary to tie them up like that?’

Jacques shrugged. ‘You are forgetting, my friend, that they were hoping to murder all of us!’

It was true, not that the boy and girl had admitted as much, but they had been discovered by Jacobite soldiers in the very act of lifting that hefty sack between them to pour its deadly contents into the only well for miles around.
Once it hit the water the lime would disappear from sight but would sicken and kill any mortal that consumed the merest sip. Such a simple plan, but then the best ones usually are.

To the casual onlooker, the atmosphere might have seemed relaxed and even good-humoured, though every now and then a single word was murmured, ‘Murderers!’

Yet no murder had actually been committed. Gerald thought that this was important, but Jacques shook his head. ‘If we had arrived any later than we did, we might be drinking their poison, and then, a few minutes from now, the agony would begin.’

Gerald tried to scrape some rage together for the girl, but he was distracted by her vulnerability.

Jacques found it necessary to add, ‘Remember, Gerald, you are a soldier of the king’s army. In wartime the lives of your fellow soldiers should be your only concern.’

The young criminals were refusing to acknowledge the Jacobite commander’s questions. Therefore, it remained a mystery who they were, where they were from, who had directed them to poison the well and who had supplied the lime. Ah … at last there was a response. The girl remained mute, but her partner betrayed his true feelings by blurting out, ‘We needed nobody to tell us to do this!’

Seeming satisfied with this, the commander nodded and
scribbled a line or two on the sheet of paper in his hand. He made one more attempt to push for final confirmation of their guilt. ‘So, you do not deny it? You both intended to poison the well?’

The youth scowled. As far as his audience were concerned, this was as good as an admission of guilt.

Then there was a moment full of promise when anything might have happened, when someone might have called out, ‘Stop! Let them go!’ or when God might have struck that tree with a bolt of ferocious lightning. Alas, the moment passed, as all moments do, and the commander, folding up his report, issued his verdict: ‘I hereby pronounce you both guilty and sentence you, in the name of King James, to hang from the neck until you are dead.’

Desperately, Gerald tried to think of some kind of argument he could make to change the commander’s mind, or at least to, in some way, delay his reckoning, but he was just a lowly soldier, with absolutely no right to an opinion in matters like this. This was army life.

To shatter the tension, someone somewhere behind Gerald said something that caused a ripple of barely suppressed laughter. Gerald did not hear the exact words, but he recognised the tone and knew it was crude, tainting the very air around them. Doing his best to ignore the ugly
atmosphere, he wished the commander would silence the fools in their midst.

Perhaps this was the biggest challenge of soldier life, having to get along with the rough as well as the smooth. Some of his companions were the sort of fellows that Gerald would ordinarily have nothing to do with. Just like him, they were poor Catholics, but Gerald had little in common with the rabble who spoke coarsely and preferred to use their fists to debate a point, which explained the broken noses, torn earlobes and blackened holes for teeth. Few of them could read or write.

Gerald, on the other hand, was an O’Connor. His father was a respected soldier in King Louis’ army; his grandfather had been a chief in Offaly, while his great-grandfather had been a prince back in those glorious days when Ireland had her own royalty. And if all that wasn’t enough, his mother’s ancestor, and his own namesake, ‘Gerald the Great’, the eighth Earl of Kildare, had ruled Ireland for thirty years. Furthermore, Mrs O’Connor’s mother wore a diamond cross that had been given to her father by that splendid hero Hugh O’Neill.

Throughout Offaly they even had a special saying about the O’Connors: ‘Fortune had taken their honours but had left them kings.’

Before he took his first steps, it was made clear to Gerald
that he was the product of greatness and had a duty to uphold that greatness. Sometimes he worried that he might prove unworthy of his family’s past, but he kept that to himself.

The sniggering continued behind him, and Gerald fancied that the girl’s head dipped a little lower.

Meanwhile, two horses had been summoned to do their duty. Gerald was much relieved that his and Jacques’ horses, Troy and Paris, had not been chosen for the gruesome task.

‘Don’t bother saddling them,’ said the commander. ‘They won’t be sitting on them for long.’

Nobody laughed; nobody was meant to.

Feeling like he might still intervene, Gerald shot a questioning look at the commander that went unnoticed. Two soldiers held the horses steady. The animals were restless, not liking the intensity of the crowd. They shucked their heads as if to say ‘Yes! Yes!’

Gerald fretted that the chestnut mare might tread on the girl’s bare feet. Instead, the horse lifted its tail to release a gush of greenish, brown sludge that splashed the girl’s right foot. She never flinched, refusing to move away from the stinking mess. After all, why should she care about that now?

Now Gerald longed for it all to be over.

The priest stepped forward, his Bible already open at
the verse he intended to read. Nobody had asked him to do this, and Gerald wondered if this was the priest’s way to inflict a final cruelty on the Protestant pair as they had no way to escape the Papist ritual, right down to being sprinkled generously with Holy Water.

Jacques muttered something in French, and Gerald was confident that his friend was agreeing with him.

Up went the ropes into the tree where two soldiers waited to feed the tail ends back to those on the ground. When they were satisfied that the ropes hung straight, they signalled all was ready, not wanting to call attention to themselves by shouting down to the soldiers below. The boy and girl were shoved up onto the bare backs of the horses. Perhaps there had been some earlier discussion about whether to blindfold them or not. Their faces were left uncovered.

Having carried out the last rites, the priest addressed the pair for the final time, ‘Pray, my children, will you beg God for His forgiveness?’

For the first time in his life Gerald found himself questioning a priest. He thought:
for goodness sake, what use are prayers to them now?

The confusion persisted in his head:
But she – they – didn’t do anything. We stopped them in time
.

Why didn’t he say something to try and save them, just open his mouth and make a sound?

However, it was the joker behind him who spoke once more. Oh, it didn’t matter what he said, only that Gerald was now ready to prove himself. He swung around, startling Jacques, to defend the girl’s honour, his sword clenched in his hand as he asked, ‘What did you say?’

He hardly knew who he was speaking to and, besides, it did not matter since he could not be heard above the sound of the horses’ backsides being slapped and the soldiers’ shouts. The animals wasted no time in jumping forward and running a few paces before realising that they were riderless.

It was Jacques alone that witnessed the torment on Gerald’s face, as the young soldier turned back to see the boy and girl’s last dreadful moments.

Out of the corner of his eye Gerald saw a few men bless themselves. So, not all of them were ignorant savages bent on bloodshed.

Finally, it was over.

It was only then that Gerald realised that the commander was gone. The priest stood by, his expression heavy with sorrow, waiting for the bodies to be cut down. Gerald stepped forward to help but Jacques held him back, saying, ‘We are to move on, to set up camp before nightfall.’

‘But …’ began Gerald until he saw the determination in his friend’s face. It was time to go. The priest licked his thumb to flick through the pages of his Bible. Jacques rolled
his eyes. ‘He will try to convert the dead, no?’

Gerald sighed.

Falling into step behind their comrades, Jacques allowed a few minutes to pass before asking quietly, ‘Did you not know that even women die in wartime?’

Instead of answering Jacques’ question, Gerald said, ‘An old woman was killed in our camp last year, outside Derry.’

Swiping at a persistent fly that threatened to land on his nose, Jacques guessed, ‘She was a Protestant, yes?’

Gerald looked at his friend impatiently. ‘No! I mean, yes, I suppose she was. I don’t know. Is that really the point?’

He kicked the ground, understanding that Jacques would not answer such a silly question, because the woman’s religion was the entirely the point. Of course it was.