Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [250]
“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
1370
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