Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [301]
Her offence—and it was a minor crime—was that she was wearing a saffron-coloured scarf over her head.
“Your name?”
She gave it. Cecily Baker. A straightforward English name, misleading only to the small extent that, like plenty of other people with English names in Dublin, she had an Irish mother—an O’Casey, as it happened. She was English officially though, resident in Dublin, and therefore not allowed to wear the saffron-coloured scarf that was popular amongst the native Irish.
It wasn’t only the long-prohibited Irish dress that the guardians of the law had been looking for that day. In Dublin, as in London and other cities, there were plenty of ancient laws regulating what people could wear. Craftsmen weren’t to dress themselves up like aldermen, who were their betters; nuns were forbidden to wear fine furs. It was all part of the business of maintaining social order and morals. Some of these laws were more observed than others, but they were there to be remembered whenever the authorities decided to assert themselves or needed to collect some money. In answer to their questions, she told them that she was unmarried, though betrothed, a seamstress, and that she lived a short distance outside the city’s southern gate.
“Can I go now?” she asked. If they wanted to prosecute, they knew where to find her. But to her irritation, they still wouldn’t let her go. Someone had to come and answer for her, they insisted. So she gave them the name of the young man she was to marry: Henry Tidy, the glover. And they sent a man off to fetch him. Then they told her she could sit on a wooden bench while she waited.
Cecily Baker was a serious young woman. She had a round face, red cheeks, a pointed nose, and a sweet smile. She was a very nice young woman. She also had some very strong opinions.
It was Cecily’s opinion that Holy Church was sacred; others might criticise the shortcomings of some of the religious orders, but it was the faith that was important, and the faith should be firmly defended. Those people in other countries—she had heard of Luther and the so-called Protestant reformers on the Continent—who wanted to upset the order sanctified by the centuries were wreckers and criminals as far as she was concerned; and if sound Catholic monarchs like King Henry VIII of England wanted to burn them, she had no objectioh. She thought it was probably for the best. She went to mass regularly, and confessed her sins to her priest; and when once he forgot how many Ave Marias he had given her as a penance for a small offence the previous month and allotted her too few the next time, she gently but firmly reminded him of his mistake. She also had very clear ideas about what a young couple, like herself and Tidy, once they were betrothed and soon to be married, should do together. And these ideas were physical and unrestrained—so much so that young Tidy had been quite startled. The fact that these sins of the flesh should then be confessed to her priest was, as far as she was concerned, a very proper part of the process.
And perhaps it was the confidence of knowing she’d fulfilled all her religious obligations that gave Cecily an equal conviction that the secular authorities had no right to impose on her unjustly. She knew perfectly well that her arrest—just for wearing an old scarf of her mother’s—was an absurdity. She knew about the rule, but she could see that the men at the Tholsel were simply trying to collect a few fines. She wasn’t impressed, and she certainly wasn’t afraid. But she did wish that Henry Tidy would turn up. After a while, she began to feel quite lonely, sitting on the hard bench.
She had to wait nearly an hour.