Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [81]
I cross without answering her. I should be looking for the gaol, but I can't face it yet. I wander up the hill, past Dunnes Stores, a stall selling local fudge, a poster inviting costumed revellers to a Quentin Tarantino Night.
St. Canice's seems almost small after the great cathedrals of England. Its walls are gray and serene; beside it, the round tower pencils the clouds. I look for the grave, but they must have moved it. Inside the church I finally stumble across the headstone, one of the dozen propped against the walls. With difficulty I make out the old French letters framing a fleur-de-lys cross. Here lied José de Keteller, they say. Say thou who poddest here a prayer.
José de Keteller came to this town in chain mail with a long sword, I remember, an old-style legitimate killer. Learned Gaelic, grew a long moustache, finally even rode without a saddle in the native way. A peaceful settler, shaping himself to the island on which fate had placed him, he was hardly to know how his surname would be immortalised by his iron-willed daughter. Why is it so much worse to execute husbands than infidels, I wonder? Most of us are descended from killers, one way or another.
None of this is telling me anything I don't already know, and my ankles are beginning to ache. In the Museum, I take my shoes off for a moment to stretch my feet on the smooth wooden floor. What a motley collection we have here: grisset and candle-mould, cypress chest and footstool, a copy of a will specifying what a certain widow would inherit from her husband if she did not remarry or have carnal knowledge of any man willingly (this last bit makes me smile), and an ancient deer skull with antlers six feet wide. On a dusty shelf I find huge metal tongs, for stamping "IHS" on holy wafers. My heart begins to thump again.
Downstairs in the bookshop, I calm myself with a collection of photographs of Irish lakes. The salesgirl assesses me as a browser, and turns back to the phone, demanding (in an accent that I have not heard in a long time) to know who said she'd said she fancied that spotty eejit. I turn the pages, recognising the heads of birds on the water. I move on to the small history shelf, where I learn that the town's most famous witch was, in fact, framed.
"Alice Kyteler (possibly a misspelling of Kettle, a fairly common English surname)," I read in one hardback
was a victim of a combination of the worst excesses of fourteenth-century Christo-patriarchy. Threatening to men by virtue of her emotional and financial independence, this irrepressible bourgeoise, who always kept her maiden name through repeated widowhoods, aroused the hostility of avaricious relatives and a misogynistic Catholic establishment. As in so many other "witch trials," powerful men (both church and lay) projected their own unconscious fantasies of sexual/satanic perversion onto the blank canvas of a woman's life.
I can't help smiling: blank canvas, my eye. There is a grain of truth there, of course: before she ever trafficked with darkness, the citizens of Kilkenny resented the Kyteler woman's fine house, her bright gowns, every last ruby on her finger. But that hardly makes her innocent.
The girl on the phone is eyeing me wearily. She is letting her friend speak now, the faraway voice winding down like clockwork.
How the late twentieth century loves to issue general pardons. At this distance, it cannot distinguish the rare cases of serious evil from those of farmer's wives burnt out of neighbourly malice. Dame Alice should not be lumped in with the victims. She was the real thing. She could be said to have deserved the punishment she never got.
Unlike Petronilla de Meath, not mentioned in the historical analysis. Petronilla, who should have been set free when the whole sony mess was concluded. Why could she not have been shaken out like a wide-eyed cat from a sack, to run across country and live some ordinary life?
It is too hot in here, all at once; too cosy, with a tub of Connemara Marble Worry Stones going cheap beside the till, and remaindered