by K. T. Tomb
Cash frowned. She had sort of expected something like that, but she didn’t think anyone could be so certain of that without doing the research on her specific family.
“The name could be of Norse origin,” Professor Harvey explained. “Which means western Scotland or even further afield... That is if you have to get into it as deeply as your books suggest you like to get.”
Cash smiled as she took that information on board. To hear the man speak of her books and research like that was great. She had positive reactions from readers all the time, but few from academics who read her work. “If that's where the rabbit hole leads...”
Harvey chuckled again. “Good afternoon, Miss Cassidy.”
“And you, Professor Harvey. Thank you for your help.”
Chapter Seven
It was a clear bright morning when Cash said goodbye to Taidgh and Inga. She got into the car and drove past Vinegar Hill to the north.
She had decided to drive via Gorey and Arklow, rather than Carlow. That way she could do two things on her way to Fermanagh and the place where she would hopefully find the ancient home of her family. From that scenic coastal route it would only be a small detour to see the valley of Glenmalure, the place where a famous battle took place between the O'Byrne clansmen and their allies and the English. A famous ballad had been written about it, which she knew by heart and she had always been intrigued by the battle because of that song. Another reason for that route was the approach to Dublin. Driving up to the city from the Wicklow Mountains meant she could go straight through to Terenure, on to Harold's Cross Road and find the new place Jack and Makeda would be living in for the foreseeable future... if they’d bought the place that was. If that were indeed the case, she knew Makeda would be glad to show her around. A quick call to her friend settled all those details.
She hit the coast just past Arklow and looked to her right. In the clear morning she could see the coast on the other side of the Irish Sea. She felt a sudden pang of regret for how she had left things back in Barry. Her baby kicked and seemed to move around a bit for a while. Cash looked down at her belly and smiled. “You're going to be wearing red, aren't you?”
She thought about Tim for a moment, then banished the thought from her head by softly singing hymns and arias. “Too bad it'll be red and not gold. But at least you won't be swinging low.” She grinned at that and thought about her husband again. “Your daddy will be disappointed at that though.”
Then her thoughts drifted again, drifting to how the Welsh had believed the Irish Sea was the domain of Manawydan, the sea god. The Irish had believed it the domain of Manannán mac Lir. She wondered what the Norse had thought about that sea suddenly. She knew the Isle of Man had been a Norse stronghold, as it had been with the city of Dublin.
And then she had a flash of an image. It was strange, but she seemed to recall flying over that sea. She couldn’t have, of course, it must have been a dream, but she never remembered dreams beyond a few hours.
The main road left the coast and at Kilbride, Cash took a left, driving her Land Rover into the mountains. The hills were green, gray and brown. The grass and trees covered the sides of the hills, the tops and sides of the mountains were covered with the stones dislodged when the glaciers retreated. In the valleys the soil was a dull brown, showing where the moss covered the turf that had fueled millions of hearths in Ireland for centuries, even helped to build their houses.
When she finally reached the valley she was impressed. It was a site carved deep by the retreating glacier. She immediately saw how the place had been used in the famous Battle of Glenmalure. She began walking down a path she saw and sang the ballad she had heard so many times.
“Lift Mac Cahir Og your face,
You're broodin' o'er the old disgrace
That Black Fitzwilliam stormed your place
and drove you to the ferns
Gray said victory was sure,
And soon the firebrand he'd secure
Until he met at Glenmalure
with Fiach McHugh O'Byrne
Curse and swear, Lord Kildare,
Fiach will do what Fiach will dare
Now Fitzwilliam have a care,
Fallen is your star low
Up with halbert, out with sword,
on we go for, by the Lord
Fiach McHugh has given the word
‘Follow me up to Carlow’
See the swords of Glen Imaal,
They're flashing o'er the English Pale
See all the childer of the Gael,
Beneath O'Byrne's banner
Rooster of the fighting stock,
Would you let a Saxon cock
Crow out upon an Irish Rock,
Fly up and teach him manners
Curse and swear, Lord Kildare,
Fiach will do what Fiach will dare
Now Fitzwilliam have a care,
Fallen is your star low
Up with halbert, out with sword,
on we go for, by the Lord
Fiach McHugh has given the word
‘Follow me up to Carlow’
From Tassagart to Clonmore,
There flows a stream of Saxon gore
And great is Rory Og O'More
At sending loons to Hades
White is sick and Gray is fled,
And now for black Fitzwilliam's head
We'll send it over, dripping red
to Liza and her ladies
Curse and swear, Lord Kildare,
Fiach will do what Fiach will dare
Now Fitzwilliam have a care,
Fallen is your star low
Up with halbert, out with sword,
on we go for, by the Lord
Fiach McHugh has given the word
‘Follow me up to Carlow’”
It seemed so fitting to be in a place like this when she had spent weeks researching the Irish rebellions against the English. She had not done it to learn about that, or even for a book, but purely for the sake of finding her ancestor, and even though none of her ancestors could ever have been present in that valley, she felt a bond. And she felt something else.
The falcon suddenly rose from the entrance of the cave and soared over the hill. It swooped down into the valley below and stopped. It slowed and kept hovering, circling back up and then down. It didn’t want to go down into that valley. Not now. It would later. There was carrion to be had.
It didn’t like carrion, preferring to kill its own prey, but when easy pickings like that were available, it would take them. The valley was filled with fighting men, but mainly the ones in uniform were doing the dying. The men in colorful cloaks and trousers were hacking into them without mercy and with terrible anger. They had fired volleys of arrows and bolts down and were descending from the sides of the glen unto the soldiers with great fury. The howling shocked the falcon and it rose up, out of the valley. It could come back when the battle had died down.
It flew out of the valley and suddenly, it was over a hill outside a town. It knew the town, and it knew the hill. It liked the place, but not now. The smell of blood reached all the way up to where it flew and the filthy sulfurous smoke of gunpowder drifted slowly in the wind.
The falcon banked and flew away when the cries of the dying began. It saw pikes being dropped below and it sensed blind panic as men began to run and soldiers in red coats began putting anyone they could find to the bayonet.
The falcon blinked and suddenly the lush green fields had made way for reddish sand and strange trees. It knew them, those trees and that soil, but it didn’t know this place. There was a hill there and it was encircled by more red coated men. It saw a lot of men coming down with their hands above their heads, led by a man holding a handkerchief that must once have been white. It swooped down and saw a single man there, in the same torn clothes as the others, tending a man who was bleeding from a wound in the chest.
The falcon blinked again and soared up, only to swoop down to green fields and a lush
forest again.
Half an hour later, Cash was back in the car. She looked at the map, completely ignoring the use of the navigation system and headed toward the famous site of Glendalough. She stopped to wander around the old monastery for a while, not wanting to miss out on seeing the place as she passed it and then raced on toward Dublin. She entered the metropolis at Sandyford's industrial area, which was littered with old villas on the hillsides, gyms and spas that looked deserted and desolate as nobody visited them anymore and empty office blocks that gave her an eerie feeling. She skimmed Dundrum, seeing the big new shopping mall as she drove past that suburb and soon turned onto the Terenure Road. Then Terenure Road changed into the Harold's Cross Road and she took a left to reach a housing development behind the Mount Argus monastery. At the very end, in a corner perched between the monastery and the Eamonn Ceannt Park was the house where Makeda and Jack would be living for now.
When she pulled up outside the house, Makeda ran out the door, happy as a clam. She immediately showed Cash the house.
It had a big kitchen right off the hallway and a huge living room at the back of the house, with a small sunroom to the rear of that. Makeda had made sure there was a fire burning in the fireplace.
Upstairs were two big rooms, a bathroom and a small room. The small room was already set up as an office where Jack would be working if he would be working from home. The smaller of the two big rooms had a big bed in it, where Cash could imagine it would be a delight to wake up with a view of the park. Even now she could see children playing there. The other room, which had probably been intended to be the master bedroom had been turned into a library. A hearth had been built into the chimney breast and it would be an amazing place to sit, she reckoned.
Makeda was incredibly proud of the place, though it was certainly not the most luxurious accommodations to be had around the city. But it was hers, and that made it incredibly important.
Cash smiled at that, and recalled how she had fought tooth and nail to stay in Barry. Because that house was hers. It had never been her husband's home, it had been hers. She had bought it, she had done everything and it was where she felt at home.
After lunch, she hugged Makeda and headed out of Dublin. She went south out of the city, then turned onto the motorway and sat back for the two hours to Enniskillen. It was a long drive, and she was glad she had just eaten and had plenty of gas in the tank. But still it took well over two hours as she had to make several pit stops to use the restroom. It was unavoidable now, it seemed. It irritated her that she couldn’t control her body in the same way as she could before, but where she had gotten angry over that earlier, she had begun to feel resigned to it now. It was not a big struggle really, and it was only natural.
She was annoyed, however, by how tired she got from driving most of the day. She would not have shied away from driving for days in Australia, and had never thought anything of a long drive through Britain either. She could walk or even run miles in dense jungle and be perfectly fine, but she was tiring even just from the driving now.
At dusk she reached Enniskillen, the main town in County Fermanagh, ancient capital of the clan Maguire, and home to one of the great fortresses of Ulster. Her immediate instinct was to head straight for the castle and find out everything there was to know, but when she checked into her hotel and lay down on the bed, she drifted off to sleep straight away.
When she woke up in the middle of the night, she was starving. There was no room service, so instead Cash grabbed her travel bag, in which Makeda had stuffed some fresh fruit. It was not what she craved, but it would do.
Munching on an apple, she grabbed her tablet and dug up her research again. She also grabbed the copied file from Professor Harvey and began to look through the pages. It was there that she found something interesting. Something she had missed before.
It was information in the file that made her realize it, but the detail she had missed came from her own research. It was the year the name Ó Caiside first showed up in connection to the Maguires. 1319 AD. It was the year the Maguire King of Fermanagh had to beat off a strong force of O'Neills from Donegal who were threatening to take over his capital of Lisnaskea. For that purpose he had hired the services of a group of mercenaries from the Hebrides and Orkneys. It was too much of a coincidence that the name first showed up at that moment, Cash reckoned. It confirmed that her ancestors were indeed Gallowglass.
She opened her search engine, looked up historians in the area and found a man called Cassidy in Lisnaskea, who seemed to be employed to look after Balfour Castle. She sent him an email, asking to meet the next day and then went to sleep again.
Chapter Eight
It was only a short drive for Cash the next morning. She took her time to run and then have a big breakfast before heading on her way. It was nice not to have to worry about time at all.
Lisnaskea struck her as a quaint old town. It looked and felt old. The castle just off the Main Street felt somehow odd and imposing to her. It didn’t belong, she felt. Her keen eye had noted already the town was an old fortress, probably from before the Gaels ever got to Ireland. And then the ruins of the Castle Balfour on top of that felt threatening and foreboding. It probably was meant to be so too. In the night she had done a bit of reading up on the town and she had found the castle had been built as a means to help subjugate the people of Fermanagh, or at least those who were allowed to remain and were not driven out into the wild and rocky lands of Connacht.
Peadar Cassidy was waiting for her in the courtyard of the castle ruins.
“Miss Cassidy, I presume?” he greeted her.
“Mr. Cassidy, I presume?” she replied in kind, shaking his hand.
“Indeed.” He looked around and nodded to the gate. “There's a pub down the road. Would you like to go there for a sit down?”
“Don't need to sit down. Not yet.” Cash felt slightly insulted again at the remark.
Peadar Cassidy grinned. “Not offering for your sake, but I'd like a pint.”
Cash looked at her watch, which she noticed was getting to be a bit too tight around her wrist now. “Bit early for a drink?”
Peadar shook his head. “It's not drinking, it's breakfast.”
Cash laughed. “Fair play then.”
Peadar quickly drank the first pint of Guinness, then sat down next to Cash for the second one. It had been a long time since Cash had witnessed any breakfast like that. A cousin in Australia had sat down to a stout breakfast a lot, usually when he was hungover, but she had not seen it even once during her university days. Of course, in university, other stuff went on quite frequently. She had friends whom she knew for a fact that they snorted a line of coke before going to bed so they could start their day properly. Instinctively, she laid a hand on her belly as she thought about that. It was almost as though she wanted to tell her child not to go down that route.
“You wanted to know something about the Cassidy family?”
“Yes,” Cash answered. “I've been tracing my ancestor, Pádraig Óg Ó Caiside.”
Peadar frowned.
“Rings a bell?” Cash asked him, surprised at the quick reaction.
Peadar nodded slowly. “Name does ring a bell. He was physician to John Maguire, son of the Maguire chief during Wolfe Tone's time. He disappeared though, and I don’t think anyone ever did find out what happened to him.”
Cash grinned, pulling her tablet and the file out of her bag. “Tell you what, if you tell me what you know about him before he disappeared and what you know about our family, I'll tell you what happened after he disappeared.”
Peadar thought about it for a moment, then smiled. “Deal, but only if you buy me another round.”
Over the next two hours, Cash and Peadar Cassidy sat at that table in the pub exchanging information.
It seemed Pádraig Óg Ó Caiside was the son of Pádraig Mór Ó Caiside, the physician to the Maguire Chief. He was baptized on the 21st of June 1773 in Lisnaskea's Holy Trinity Church, taught
by his father and sent to Rome at the age of fifteen to formalize his studies there. A few years later he returned to Fermanagh to begin serving John Maguire, even if he was still an apprentice to his father. At the age of twenty-four, he finally became a physician in his own right and began traveling around the country with John.
Maguire had been rumored to be involved with the United Irishmen at that time already. It was known he had met Wolfe Tone at that time, and Pádraig Óg had been with him when the meeting must have taken place. John Maguire had been involved in the rebellion from the start, and whatever Pádraig Óg thought of it, he had accompanied him loyally to all the battlefields in Ulster where John Maguire led small bands of Maguire warriors.
His father had left him free to support the rebellion in that way, as long as he himself and the Maguire name was not involved. They had suffered enough under the English rule in the last few years and there was no way they could afford to suffer the inevitable punishment again.
Then in early June 1798, John Maguire was asked by his fellow United Irishmen to take some men south and support the rebellion in Wexford. Naturally, Pádraig Óg went with him. When he got to Wexford town on the 4th of June, where he heard the rebels had moved out and marched on Waterford. That evening the messages of the massacre at New Ross began to come in and Pádraig Óg took it upon himself to get on his horse and go toward the fleeing masses.
He met up with John Maguire again a week later in Enniscorthy.
Maguire returned to Fermanagh halfway through the month of July, both he and his men shaken to the core. Maguire never got over what happened there, and the combination of his open support of the rebellion and his obvious trauma stopped him from becoming the new chief when his father died. But upon his return Pádraig Óg was not with him. The only thing John Maguire ever said about it was that he was lost doing his duty to his fellow man.
