Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [254]
What did that mean, to be an Englishman? There was the matter of dress, of course. You didn’t go around with bare legs or ride without a saddle. You didn’t let your wife wear a bright saffron-coloured shawl like an Irishwoman. You didn’t speak Irish except to the natives; you spoke English. In his grandfather’s day, Walsh recalled, a gentleman would speak Norman French. It was still used for the more formal court proceedings. But if you went down to Dublin now, the merchants and the royal officials would usually be speaking the Frenchified English that was current in places like Bristol or London. And above all, you weren’t supposed to marry the Irish. “Marrying them,” one of his Fingal relations had declared to him, “that’s where the rot starts.”
Indeed, the English government had become so fixated by the subject that four years ago, at a parliament held down in the town of Kilkenny, a series of statutes had been promulgated which actually made all such intercourse between the communities illegal.
Privately, Walsh wasn’t impressed with the Statute of Kilkenny. The colonists had been marrying the Irish ever since Strongbow first obtained Leinster by wedding King Diarmait’s daughter; and just as the Norse and the Irish had been marrying before that. This attempt to force the two communities into separate worlds might be possible, but he thought it smelled of panic. Laws were no good when they couldn’t be enforced.
But even if he didn’t think much of the larger issue, Walsh understood perfectly well what it meant to be English here in his own locality. It meant guarding his and his neighbours’ farmlands from the O’Byrnes.
Most of the time, it had to be said, everything was quiet. But now and again, things got interesting. Ten years ago, the chief of the O’Byrnes at that time, an unusually ambitious man, had come down with a large force and surrounded the castle. “Do you really think you can hold the place if you take it from me?” Walsh had called down from the wall. But he had only received a volley of missiles in return for his pains. The siege had gone on for several days until the Justiciar, the Earl of Ormond, had come out of Dublin with a large party of knights and driven the invaders away. “Personally,” Walsh had told his wife, “I think O’Byrne is playing a game. He’ll make a nuisance of himself to see how much he can get out of the Justiciar.” And when some months later O’Byrne came to an agreement with Ormond, and the remarkable news came back—“That wild man of the mountains has been given a knighthood, no less!”—Walsh had laughed till he cried. All the same, the walls had been strengthened again, and from time to time troops of cavalry had been stationed there. For nearly ten years things had been quiet after that. But the underlying truth still remained. The farmlands south of Dublin were safe because the castle protected them; and the castle was there because the English ruled in Dublin.
As he had pointed out to one of his cousins just recently: “The English king gave us our lands and our position. He can also take them away. And you cannot suppose for a moment that the O’Byrnes and the O’Tooles would leave us in possession of them if the English power was taken away.” Yes, John Walsh thought, that was what, at the end of the day, it meant to him to be English.
So what the devil was that girl doing? On the eastern side of the little plain where the castle was set, the high hump of the bay’s southern headland rose, masking the fishing village of Dalkey from his view. Half a mile away, with the headland as a magnificent backdrop, he had set up a large rabbit warren. That was another useful custom the colonists had brought with them. The warren provided him with a constant supply of meat and fur. And it was by that warren that the girl was lurking. Was she planning to steal some rabbits?
He knew who she was, of course.