Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [208]
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