The Pirate Princess: Return to the Emerald Isle (12 page)

“The first thing you need to know is how the island got its name,” Trout began. His father had left to go fishing, and he and Meg were still on the beach. “Thousands of years ago, there was these two fishermen who got stuck in a fog. They rowed about for a couple of hours and found themselves on a misty island that they never knew existed. Now, they had been fishing mackerel all day and were starved, so they lit up a fire on the beach to cook some food.”

Meg loved they lyrical way Trout talked. He spoke with a musical cadence and rhythm that
complemented his heavy Irish accent.

“As soon as they lit the coals the mist lifted and they saw this woman walking down the beach
whippin’ on a white cow. Then all of a sudden, the cow turned to stone and the lady disappeared.” Trout paused and opened his eyes wide for dramatic effect.

“White cow…
Boffin, Bo… Finn? I have a white dog back home in America that my mom named Finn. She said it meant
white
in Irish, so
Bo
must mean
cow
, Island of the White Cow, Inish Bo Finn, Inishbofin.” Meg beamed with pride at her ability to piece together some Irish words and figure out their meaning.

“You’re a regular Irish speaker
, aren’t ye,” teased Trout.

“Trout, why don’t you speak Irish here on Bofin like they do in the
Aran Islands?”

“Do
ya see those ruins on that island across the harbor?”

Meg looked across and saw the remains of an immense stone fort on top of a rock overlooking the harbor.

“Have ye heard of Cromwell?”

“Yes
. My mother told me about that awful man on our way here.”

“That’s Cromwell’s fort. The English were garrisoned there during his war. It was also a prison where they kept all of the Catholic priests they didn’t kill on the spot in the rest of Ireland
. Priests were outlawed and hunted, you know. It’s high tide now but beneath the water in the harbor is a rock called Bishop’s Rock. Of all the priests they had imprisoned here, there was only one bishop, so they decided to do something special to him, because he had fought them so. They rowed him out and chained him to the rock at low tide and rowed back to watch from the fort. The tide came in until he was under the water and drowned.” Trout looked as angry as if he had been there to watch the atrocity himself. “Cromwell’s men stayed here on the island long enough to kill the Irish language from the Bofin Islanders… We had to speak their language or die…” He paused for a second, then looked at her with a sudden twinkle in his eye. “And jaysus, it’s a hard language to speak, anyway,” he said to lighten the mood. Like the ever-changing weather on the island, Trout could go from gloomy to sunny in an instant.

“Can we go out to the fort?”

“Not now, with the tide up we can’t get there on foot. We’ll do our side of the island, the West Quarter. And besides, I want to show you some Irish ruins.”

Meg and Trout
walked up from the beach past many small, brightly painted cottages and green fields with sheep grazing. Inishbofin was about three and a half miles long and almost two miles wide. It was hilly like the shore it faced. The harbor divided the island into two primary areas, the West Quarter where Owen’s cottage was, and the North East. Trout told Meg there were two main roads on the island—the high road and the low road—the high located on the hillier western side and the low running through the harbor. These roads were the main arteries of the whole rugged and beautiful island. The wind whipped their jackets as they walked up the low road. While they walked, they talked about their families and school and how they both loved the sea. Meg and Trout had a lot in common, and for the first time in her life, Meg felt as if she could make a friend.

Every now and then they passed an abandoned house with the windows boarded up and walls falling down. Trout told her that the hard life of an islander had chased many families off the
island. Inishbofin had as many as a thousand people living here at one time but the number had dwindled down to about two hundred. Trout’s family had been on the island since it was founded, as far as he was concerned. And he told her that his father continued to lobster with a traditional currach to please the tourists, even using oars during the tourist season. Fishing for a living had died out on the island only to return with the influx of tourism. His father’s “traditional” lobsters were a regular fixture on the posh hotels’ menus. Trout told Meg that, for a long time, eating shellfish had been hated by the islanders because it was considered famine food, but that now that sentiment was changing. Just as the hatred of the English had disappeared with the end of the troubles in Ireland, eating shellfish was becoming more acceptable. In the “new” Ireland, long-held notions and objections were melting away.

It was after
Bofin’s big tourist season, so Meg and Trout were alone on the road except for the sheep and some cows that were allowed to walk anywhere they pleased. The road rose up and they turned back towards the harbor and walked out on top of a flat rock covered in vegetation and a tumbled pile of stones that Trout called
Dun Grania
. Meg looked around at the much less impressive ruins of
Dun Grania
as Trout told her that the sheltered bay had always been an important shipping harbor because of its protection and deep anchorage.

They looked back at the fort
. The view from this vantage was much better than it had been from the harbor, and Meg could see why Trout had brought her here. The peninsula the fort was situated on rose up behind the fort to a rocky hill with scattered patches of green grass. The fort walls rose up from a rock that protruded into the harbor.

“Before Cromwell
, the fort over there was the castle of a Spanish pirate called Don Bosco. Bosco had allied himself with Granuaile, for whom the ruins on this side of the harbor were named.”

“Who’s Granuaile
?” asked Meg

“Who’s Granuaile?” Trout
was stunned. “She was the Sea Queen of Ireland, Grania Ni Mhaille, Grace O’Malley, the greatest Irish sea captain of her time. She controlled all the waters of Connemara from her castle on Clare Island just north of here. You haven’t heard of her?”

“No
.” But Meg wanted to know more. “A woman pirate?”

“Of course
.” Trout then thought twice about his answer. “Well, it depends on who’s talkin’ about her. To the Irish, she was a great female chieftain of the O’Malley clan with a fleet of ships patrolling her seas. But to the English, she was a murderous pirate. It’s all about perspective, ya know.”

“Of course
,” said Meg, egging him on.

“
She and Don Bosco ran a chain from here to the fort,” he pointed across the water, “and would trap ships that came into the harbor. They would charge them a fee for safe passage. Granuaile knew these waters like the back of her hand and the foreign ships had to pay or be sunk.”

“Sounds like good business
. She was a regular tour guide.”

“Smart woman she was…
Don Bosco and her made a killin’ for a while but they had a fallin’ out of sorts and Granuaile ended up chasin’ him off the island. Before he was chased off, he supposedly buried a treasure under his castle. They say he had put a Spanish curse on it so that only he could dig it up.

“
Long ago, there was a priest on the island who tried to find the treasure. He snuck out to the castle one night and started to look, but as he was digging, he heard a voice speaking in Irish from below the ground that told him to stop. Thinking he heard a voice from hell, he ran away and never returned to the castle.”

Meg looked across the harbor at the ruins
. She felt differently about the fort now from when she heard about it the first time. She went from feeling utter disgust toward an oppressive English-ruled fortress to an overwhelming urge to explore an abandoned pirate castle.

“Trout, you
gotta get me out to that castle.”

“I guess we could see if me
da is back from fishing. It’s startin’ to get a bit foggy and he might’ve come in.”

Meg looked around her and was astonished to see that a light fog had indeed started to roll in off the water
. The weather on Bofin was as mysterious as the island itself. She and Trout turned their backs to Dun Grania and made their way back down the low road to the harbor.

By the time the time Meg and Trout reached the harbor, the fog had fully set in and they found Declan Davin on the shore unloading the currach with his other son, Dennis. They had just started down into the water to lift the currach up on the beach when they saw Trout and Meg approaching.

“How’s
Trout?” Declan called out.

“
Fine, Da. Megeen wants to go and see the fort and the tide’s only just goin’ out.”

“
Well, why don’t ya wait till the tide’s out?”

“
You know how these Yanks are. Everything has to be right now, and Megeen, after beatin’ the ocean before, tinks nothing can stop her, not even a fog.”

“
So what are ye askin’?”

“
We just want to row the currach over, and seein’ as you’re not in need of it, I don’t want to disappoint the great granddaughter of The O’Flaherty.”

“
Oh ya don’t, do ya? All right, Trout,” Declan said, handing him a line. “And you, Miss Megeen, stay out of the water or I’ll have both of your hides, O’Flaherty or no.”

Trout, in his big rubber boots, walked out in the water and held the boat as Declan lifted Meg into the currach. There was a pair of oars still in their locks and Meg grabbed the ones in the bow while Trout sat aft. She looked down at
the oars, noticing they didn’t have a wide paddle blade at the end as Meg was used to. Rather, they were just skinny and thin, for skimming on the top of the water, Trout said. The currach was incredibly light and sat on the water like no boat she had ever been on. The slightest pull of the oar moved it incrementally more than Meg thought it would. Had Trout not been with her, she would have twirled around in circles, but with a little coaching they were soon gliding through the quiet, fog-locked harbor. Although they couldn’t see much through the fog, they could hear the waves on the shore and the clanking of lines and tackle hitting boats somewhere in the mist. They passed the
Cailín Mo Chroí
that was still tied up to Mr. Woods’s boat and noticed that the huge yacht had a light on in the cabin.

They rowed
a ways farther, and through the fog they could see the ruins of the castle looming on top of its rocky home. Beyond that, they barely saw a lighthouse that guarded the harbor entrance. Since the tide was going out, the ghostly specter of Bishop’s Rock rose out of the water like an evil presence pointing to the clouds. Trout pointed it out to her, and just the sight of it made the hair on Meg’s arms stand on end. They rowed past the rock and soon pulled into a small cove with a beach. Trout jumped out and helped Meg get on shore. They pulled the currach up in the beach as high as they could, then tied a rope to a large rock above the waterline.

“
What was that back there, Trout? All the Yank stuff. And my name is
Margaret
, not
Megeen
,” Meg said indignantly.

“
I got us the boat, didn’t I? And us callin’ ya Megeen is something nice. It’s like callin’ ya
Little Meg
.”

“
I thought that was
Meg Beag
in Irish.”

“
Maybe out on the Aran Islands. Not here,” Trout said with a smile.

“
I guess you’re right. Sorry.”

“
Not to worry. Just stay close and watch where ya step.”

They walked up a well
-worn path over a rocky hill passing a few grazing sheep who barely acknowledged their presence. From the top of the hill the fog had temporarily obstructed what was probably an amazing view. Fog has a certain magic of its own—Meg could hear the waves lapping the shore and sea birds cawing from some hidden place but was not able to see any more than the contrast of the green down below and the silvery-grey mist that surrounded them. Trout led her down the hill and they were soon able to make out the ruins that lay below. The stone fortress rose out of the mist the closer they got to it.

It was much bigger than it seemed from afar. The stones of the fort
perched precariously on the rock at the mouth of the harbor appeared as if they could be easily pushed into the water. Towering over them, the walls rose up from the green grass in a jumbled mass of stone and cement. They entered the grey walls through the Spanish arch, as Trout called it, which was a large, carved stone that was perched on other larger rocks that held up a wall of stone and mortar. The fog that enveloped them added to the mystery of the ancient ruins that surrounded them.

“
Before the Spaniards built this castle there was a fort here. The rock below us is a perfect spot to defend the harbor entrance.”

They walked through the structures that were enclosed within the fort. Wall after wall of roofless buildings blended themselves into the grey sky.
Meg found the smell of the sea and the moss-covered rocks amid the grass intoxicating. She had never set foot in something so old and her imagination was reeling. There were openings in the walls both high and low that must have been used for defending the castle. Meg and Trout looked out a small window opening to the fog-shrouded bay. In her mind, Meg was able to envision a chain strung over the water and a boat trapped in the harbor.

How incredible it must be
, Meg thought, to live among such amazing ruins. But Trout didn’t seem to be the least bit impressed. Meg supposed that when you live next to something like this castle it eventually becomes just a pile of rocks you take tourists out to. Sunlight streaming through the fog gave the entire place an eerie look. The mist was like a silk veil that, if pulled back, would reveal a thriving pirate castle from the past. Trout and Meg walked between more stone walls and made their way into a courtyard that was situated in the center of the castle.

“
So where did the priest dig for the treasure?” Meg asked.

Before Trout could respond, a man’s voice pierced the mist.
“That’s just an old folktale,” he said, startling them. The voice came from the direction of the Spanish arch where they had first walked in. Trout and Meg jumped at the sound but, Meg recognized the strange accent. Al Woods stepped into the courtyard.

“
The Digger,” Trout whispered.

“
His name is Mr. Woods, Trout.”

“
You can call me Al.”

“
Just Al?” asked Trout.

“
Alonzo if you wish.”

“
Alonzo…Wasn’t that Don Bosco’s name?”

“
You’re correct, young man.
Don
is an honorific used in Spain, just like
Sir
is used in English. It’s usually reserved for royalty, but in this case it was a self-proclaimed title of the Barbary corsair, Alonzo Bosco.”

“
Al…onzo, what are you doing here?”

“
I saw you two rowing out here and thought I should make sure you were safe. It’s not a good idea for two little kids to be walking around old ruins in the fog.”

“
Thanks, Mr. Woods. I just wanted to see the old fort,” Meg said.

“
Did you come to see an old fort or a corsair’s castle? I thought I heard you ask where the pirate treasure was.”

“
You know about the treasure?” Trout and Meg said in unison.

“
I know quite a bit about pirates and I’m kind of an expert on Don Bosco, you could say. Actually, his treasure is long gone.”

“Cromwell,” theorized Trout.

“On the contrary, Don Bosco’s treasure was gone long before Oliver Cromwell arrived on Inishbofin. In fact, it was moved to a new location shortly after Don Bosco was chased off the island.”

The more Meg heard
Al talk, the less she could figure out where his accent was from. It was not American or British, yet his English was very proper.

“I’ve never heard any of this, and I should know
. My family has been here forever,” challenged Trout.

“No one knows about the true story of Don
Bosco, except me,” Al countered. He gave them a strange look of one who knows a secret. “After a long and prosperous partnership, he was double-crossed by the sea witch who drove him from Inishbofin and stole his treasure. I have been coming here for years searching for the key to find where she hid it.”

“The key,
a sea witch… Who are you talking about?” asked Meg.

“I’m talking about the conniving, treacherous, pirate witch Grace O’Malley,” Alonzo said
, pronouncing the name as if he was spitting out poison.

“She wasn’t a witch
. She was a queen,” said Trout.

“She was a witch who enchanted Don
Bosco, then double-crossed him and stole his half of their treasure,” Alonzo said, drawing nearer to the kids, his dark eyes wide. He regained his composure and said, “They had plundered a lot of gold together, nearly two million pounds. Don Bosco kept his half safe in a secret chamber below this castle, and it was guarded by a Jinn, or Genie.”

“A genie, like in Aladdin?
I thought they were in Arabia in magic lamps. You’re trying to spook us!”

“Don
Bosco was a Muslim Moor and the Jinn existed in their beliefs. They could be assigned the task of guarding an object.”

“Like a treasure!”

“Exactly,” Alonzo continued. “Granuaile surprised him one night with a fleet of ships and chased him from Inishbofin threatening to kill him if he ever returned to these waters. A few months afterwards, Don Bosco disguised himself as a fisherman, snuck back on the island and, much to his dismay, found that she had defeated his Jinn and stolen his plunder. She had even summoned an Irish spirit to guard the empty chamber.”

“What a story,” said Meg.

“Brilliant,” said Trout, “it all makes sense now, the old story of the priest searching for the treasure told that the voice he heard from below the ground spoke to him in Irish to stop digging. That part never made sense to me, seein’ it was a Spanish curse.”

“Indeed, Grace O’Malley was a
bruja
, a witch. It was her curse that guarded the secret chamber after Don Bosco left.”

Meg didn’t bother to fight with Alonzo about Granuaile
, and although Trout seemed bugged, he held his tongue also. Alonzo was an archeologist and Meg decided that he could probably help them learn more about the treasure. She asked him if he could give them a tour of the fort and tell them all about it.

Alonzo walked them around the ruins explaining to them how Cromwell had turned the castle into a
seventeenth-century, star-shaped fort using much of the existing castle left by Don Bosco. Originally built as a barracks for Cromwell’s army, the fort was later used to hold the clergy that they had captured. From here, the priests were sent out around the British Empire to be sold as slaves. The English held the fort for a long time and used it later on to curtail the activities of French pirates who used the harbors on the west coast of Ireland to hide out.

Alonzo showed them a well in the center courtyard, explaining that it held a hidden entrance to the secret
chamber. He also said that he had located the chamber himself, but that he would not show Meg and Trout where it was. He quickly followed that up to say that when he entered the treasure room the spirit that guarded it must have left and there was no clue as to where the treasure had been moved. Alonzo was very informative yet guarded at the same time, and Meg sensed he was not telling them all he knew.

After the guided tour they walked from the fort back over the hill and to the
foggy cove. Alonzo helped them into the currach and guided them back in his skiff to the other side of the harbor.

While
they glided through the water Meg tried to make sense of everything she had heard. Granuaile and Don Bosco were partners and had plundered two million pounds of gold, and Grania later moved it. That was the first part that didn’t make sense to her. How in the world could anyone carry or move a million pounds of gold? That is so heavy! Also, if Granuaile beat the genie and cleared out the treasure chamber, why would she put an Irish spirit there to guard it? It was just not adding up.

“Trout, I have been thinking about all of this treasure stuff and I can’t figure out a couple of things. First of all
, how could anybody carry around a million pounds of gold?”

Trout said “Why
? How much do you think it weighed?”

“A million pounds.”

“Yeah. What do you think?”

“
I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

Trout looked at her and laughed so hard he nearly fell out of the boat. His laughter echoed around the harbor and
Meg furrowed her brow, questioning why he was laughing.

“A million pounds…
That’s brilliant. You tink it’s a weight!” He said in between laughs, “I tink he was talking about its value not the weight. Pounds was what our money was called before the Euro.”