Enchanting Cold Blood

by Petya Lehmann

  Again, there was the younger brother. Sir John of Desmond — Sir John of the Pikes, as he was affectionately called by his followers — after the Earl, the most powerful member of that famous house. Well, Sir John was hardly a satisfactory ally to deal with either. If the craven-heartedness of the elder brother promised to be embarrassing, the courage of the younger one seemed to be at present of the mad-dog order, considerably more dangerous to allies than to enemies. He had rushed to meet them on their arrival, followed by two or three hundred half-armed galloglasses.* Although it was quite early in the morning, he appeared to be already drunk. His demeanour, at any rate, was not merely that of a drunkard but of a raying maniac. He had shouted, had flung up his arms in the air, had embraced the perplexed Spaniards, assuring them in alternate English and Irish that they were glorious fellows, dear fellows, splendid fellows; that he loved them like his own heart, his own soul, his own blood! Blood, indeed, had filled the greater part of his talk. Blood, he told his cousin and the Legate, was all that was needed. Let enough of it be shed, and all would go well. His brother, the Earl, would be forced to join in the rising! Munster would join; all Ireland would join! Blood was all that was wanted, all that anyone cared about, all that he himself cared about!

  (* Heavily armed retainers or mercenaries in the service of an Irish chieftain.)

  The Legate wrapped his cloak more closely around him and coughed with an accent of displeasure. A bitter expression came into his face, as he looked round at the melancholy scene and mentally surveyed his own hardly less chilling and discouraging prospects. With nose disdainfully sniffing the sharp salt breeze, with robe gathered about him to escape the unpleasant contaminations of the shore, there was about his whole appearance an air, not merely of pedantic displeasure, but of a sort of pedantic foppishness, perfectly natural to the man, but at the same time exceedingly curious when we consider for a moment what he was — one of a desperate band, the associate of rebels, of outlaws, of desperadoes; absolutely certain, like them, to be himself hung whenever and wherever he might be caught. A man of books, a man accustomed to a certain share of leisurely ease and comfort, loving the sharpest of dialectical weapons, detesting all weapons of a more tangible and carnal sort.

  Meanwhile, the leader of the expedition, Sir James Fitzmaurice, was bent upon expounding his plan for the fortification of a small rocky promontory not far from where they were then standing. Before he had had time to get far in his explanations, they were joined by a second priest, who came out of one of the tents and walked over to where he and the Legate were standing. This was a Jesuit, Father Allen by name, an Anglo-Irishman of the Pale and a very old friend of Sir James, whose outlaw hospitality amid the Waterford forests he had often in earlier years tasted. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a clear, well-opened grey eye and an eager, indomitable face. It was the face of an enthusiast, but not at all the face of a Jesuit, as the word is commonly understood. A patriot of the same vehemently Quixotic type as his friend, a singularly faithful man, an extraordinarily brave one, a good friend, a furious enemy, an indifferent politician. Such was Allen the Jesuit.

  The two churchmen stood and listened while the knight laid his plan before them. It was an odd one for a man, not devoid of military sagacity, to have hit upon and would have stood instantly condemned in the ears of any hearers less absolutely ignorant of military science than the two whom he was addressing. The bay of Smerwick is closed in to the south by a tall, irregular peninsula, on the inner or sheltered side of which rises a small rocky point, barely four hundred feet long and one hundred wide, known to the Irish as Dun-an-oir, or the Fort of Gold, though whether from the colour of the sand or from vague reports of secret hordes seems still undecided. An ancient Cyclopean fort, of the usual mortarless pattern familiar to archaeologists, already crowned this rock, and there were traces here and there of a former dry stone circumvallation used by the early inhabitants as an outer defence.

  Sir James was bent upon holding and fortifying this point. There had been great talk in Rome and elsewhere that spring of an Irish Calais, and this was the Irish Calais he had set his mind upon. It was a small beginning, he admitted frankly, but if he could fortify the place so as to make it tenable — and he had no doubt upon that head — it would serve as a starting point, and a starting point was really all that was wanted. Beside it, the next consignment of Spanish troops, so ardently expected, would be able to encamp upon their embarkation; around it, the wild levies of the neighbourhood could be drilled into something like proper shape and discipline; in it, objects of value, especially bullion, might safely be stored and guarded. The upper part of the neck of sand connecting it with the mainland he proposed to cut away, and in its place to erect a withdrawing bridge, over which the defenders could pass to and from the shore, and by the lifting or lowering of which, the rock would become an island or peninsula at will. This done, with proper military curtains, with a ditch and a couple of bastions, he had no doubt of being able to render it defensible against any force likely to be brought against it. It was work, moreover, that his Italians were particularly expert at. And it was highly desirable, as he pointed out to his hearers, that some immediate occupation should be found for them, before idleness and the contaminating influences of the place began to rust their courage and eat into their discipline. Already, they were beginning to grumble, to complain of the hardships to which they were exposed, to curse the country and the climate, from which they would probably presently pass to cursing those who had brought them into both. The sooner they were got to work and the closer they were kept at work, the less time would be left to them for any such unprofitable exercises.

  To all this and a good deal more the two ecclesiastics listened, Allen with a friendly air of acquiescence, the Legate with one of ill-concealed impatience and irritation. Had his military knowledge been equal to his other attainments, he might at least have had the satisfaction of picking holes in his coadjutor's project, which was only too patently open to many objections. Unfortunately, from this enjoyment he was cut off, by lack of the necessary technicalities, and had to fall back upon silence. It was a silence, however, so chill and discouraging, that Fitzmaurice after a while became affected by it and brought his discourse to an end:

  “That under God and with His omnipotent help we should endeavour to depend upon ourselves, rather than upon either the allies we have left behind or those others whom we hope to win to our side in this country, I need hardly, I am sure, point out to your Reverences. And touching that man who ought to be chief of the latter, 'twere useless for me to conceal that my cousin, the Earl of Desmond, is not at present such an ally as we can lean on with any comfort or satisfaction to ourselves, nor will be until time and the necessities of the case bring him, with God's grace, to a better judgment. That either his many imprisonments or the cruelties of that tyranny under which this land groans has broken down his spirit, I seek not to deny. Nay, my belief is that, sooner than lend us a single horseman at the present time, he were capable — I blush to have to admit it — openly to betray us to our enemies and thereby bring down their accursed soldiery suddenly upon our backs.”

  “All this, sir, and more even than you have stated, I am only too well aware of now,” Saunders replied, breaking silence at last and speaking in a tone of acrid displeasure. “But may the blessed hosts of Heaven be my witness if one word or one hint of any such meaning ever reached me ere I set sail from Spain. Had it done so …” He stopped, and his angry glance sought the distant horizon.

  Fitzmaurice looked at him for a moment, then glanced aside at Allen as if for sympathy. Finally, having waited for the Legate to finish his sentence and finding that he did not do so, he presently himself resumed, speaking in a tone of gravity, which was not without its dignity:

  “That your Reverence was misinformed upon these points, I deeply regret to learn,” he said, with a low bow. “It may well be so, for such was the hurry of our departure, and so little time was there for any lengthene
d discourse, that much must necessarily have remained both misapprehended and unexplained. Moreover, that our enterprise savours of rashness, especially in the eyes of those who judge by the appearance of things rather than by their inner reality, 'twere foolishness for me to deny. Nevertheless, that enterprises so begun have before now prospered better than others undertaken in a more cautious and niggardly spirit, history, I feel sure, will avouch. Does it not seem better that we proceed upon our road with a good though modest confidence, trusting in the favour of Almighty God for the result? And, above all, does it not seem unwise of us now to repine, or still more to reproach one another, seeing that it will take all our strength to oppose the enemy before us? And that this is no vain or foolish hope, however dark and untoward may be the present hour, I fervently believe. I can in no wise believe that an enterprise undertaken solely for the glory of God, under the direct guidance of His Holy Pontiff, and in simple faith and dependence upon His mercy, will ever be allowed utterly to miscarry and to come to nothing!”

  To such an expression of opinion there could be but one reply. The Legate in his turn bowed — outwardly acquiescent, inwardly in a fume of irritation. After a few minutes, the three leaders returned to the neighbourhood of the tents, there to prepare for the start about to take place.

  Chapter XIII.

  While the higher powers of the expedition were thus engaged in council, the inferior ones squatted about in groups upon the sand, waiting to know what they were to do next. Some of the soldiers were cooking their food, others occupied in cleaning their arms, but the greater number were doing nothing — sunning themselves, that is to say, in the momentary gleam of sunshine, tossing pebbles into the sea, or from sheer wantonness ill-using the prisoners nearest to them, while not a few, wrapped in their cloaks, were snatching a few last delicious moments of sleep.

  Hugh Gaynard kept as close as he could to the side of the big seanchaí, guessing that no one would care to meddle with any person whom Maelcho, the son of Murglas, had taken under his protection. He was not the least in love with his protector. On the contrary, now that his first terror was over, he felt towards him exactly as he had done towards all of the O'Flahertys — as towards a being utterly foreign from himself, whose words were not his words, whose ideas were not his ideas, whose whole ways and notions were to him either mere folly or else riddles impossible to guess at. He was not so dangerous apparently as Muredagh, not quite so revoltingly ugly as Flann of the Mouth, but that was all.

  It was nine o'clock before the word was given to start, and the whole party began to move round the bay to the point where the rock ran out to sea which Sir James Fitzmaurice had decided to fortify. Sir James himself directed the proceedings, and, the new camping-ground reached, he at once set his men to work. Some were ordered to collect firewood, others to run up temporary huts, with the aid of loose spars and sod cut from the nearest turf. But the greater number were at once started upon the important business of fortification, each of the English prisoners having his bonds loosened for this purpose, a shovel or pickaxe thrust into his hands, and himself thrust between a couple of Spaniards, whose congenial task it was to prod him on, should he show any signs of laziness.

  Maelcho the seanchaí alone took no part in all this activity. He had carried the two little girls round from their nest upon the other side of the bay. Having set them down upon a dry tussock at some distance from the sea, he stood scratching his big head and twisting it from side to side, as he scanned the scene about him with an air of intense dissatisfaction.

  Certainly, whatever its merit as an Irish Calais, it was not the spot one would have selected by preference to sleep in. A yet barer bit of the coast than the one they had left, there were no sandy cliffs even to cut the force of the wind, which whistled over the naked shingle and threw up small flurries of sand, in a manner that was far from encouraging. Beyond the rock which was destined to be the coming citadel lay another smaller sweep of loose sand and shingle, while beyond that, again the cliffs rose above the waves, not perpendicularly, but in a succession of more or less broken slopes.

  Suddenly Maelcho uttered a loud snort of satisfaction and started at a quick trot towards this point, pausing after he had gone a few yards to turn and, with a jerk of his head, signalling to Hugh Gaynard to follow him. Hugh obeyed. Pending the arrival of some more comfortable patron, he was bound on peril of his life to obey him without protest.

  They made for the nearest piece of cliff and climbed it nearly to the top. Following at the heels of his leader, Hugh presently found himself embarking at a breakneck pace down a track which ran at a steep incline along the face of it. Suddenly, his leader stopped and stood looking downwards with an air of perplexity. Then, with another loud yelp of satisfaction, he set off again at the same headlong pace. Hugh followed, but this time less closely. But before doing so, he too paused and looked down to see what it was that had so suddenly attracted the seanchaí's attention. He saw that immediately before him, some fifty or perhaps sixty feet lower down, a small ledge or shelf of rock jutted out from the face of the cliff, and that upon this shelf, which was covered with a thin growth of weeds, stood a tiny tumble-down shanty or hovel, with stone sides and a roof evidently of sods, for it was nearly as green as the ground below. Above this shelf, a loose shingly slope stretched up to the top of the cliff and was covered like it with flowering weeds, tufts of lesser celandine and campion predominating. Lower down, it dipped in an ugly treacherous slope to where the rocks began, and the grey teeth of a low reef of limestone ran out far into the foam.

  By the time he had followed him, his leader had already reached this shelf, had kicked open the door of the hut and gone inside. There were no windows, Hugh found, on entering it, but there was a chimney, down which the light came in a cold white trickle. It smelt abominably of damp, but it was solid. As the seanchaí looked about, him his big brown face expanded with an air of satisfaction.

  “Then it is better, a great deal better, so it is,” he muttered to himself. “But it is a fire, a red, roaring fire, it wants. And it is much wood you will have to go down and fetch, so you will, young stranger,” he added, turning to Hugh and speaking in a tone of command. “Much wood, good wood, old ship's wood, you will have to fetch. And it is the driest pieces you will have to bring and set them ready to burn, so you will. Yes, and it is the floor you will have to clean and to stop up the holes in the wall. See, there is moss upon the top of the rock; get it and pack it in tight — tight, tight, tight, I say!” He was away, before Hugh had even begun to realize these various tasks he was to perform.

  He had only had time to carry out the first of them and had brought up a single armful of wood from the shore, before his task-master was back again, this time with the two little girls shouting and laughing delightedly upon his shoulders. Their mother next appeared, carried on a rude litter by a couple of men, their various possessions, tied in bundles, bringing up the rear.

  The unfortunate Lady Fitzmaurice looked woefully ill. She was coughing violently, and her face was drawn, yellow, and sickly. Maelcho seemed to take comparatively little heed of her, beyond seeing that she was laid upon a heap of cloaks behind a sort of rude wall of sods which ran across the hut and to some degree cut off the draught from the door. There she lay, just as she was put down, utterly supine, unable seemingly to take any part in the direction of her own affairs or even to notice what was going on around her. The children, on the contrary, ran about, chattering like a pair of puffins from the rocks, scrambling in and out of the shanty, helping to push the moss into the cracks, then pulling it out so as to be able to peep through at the sea, which twinkled up into their eyes — proceedings which were all alike hailed with rapturous admiration by their huge bearded nursery-maid, over whose brown face ripples of adoration seemed to flit as steadily and unremittingly as the ripples of light over the grey sea-face below.

  Once the fire was lit, and the scanty goods unpacked; once the children had begun to play in the red glow
about the hearth; once the floor was swept, and the chinks stopped, the metamorphosis had become complete. By the time night fell, the forlorn, rain-saturated little shanty had begun to wear all the semblance of a home and might have been believed to have been inhabited for ages.

  Just before this, a sudden increase of noise and the tramp of many horses' hoofs upon the sands below showed that a fresh addition had been made to the camp of the invaders. Hugh Gaynard, who was at the top of the cliff at the moment, where he had been sent in search of more moss, was able to look directly down upon the beach. On doing so, he saw that a considerable number of horsemen, mounted upon long-tailed garrons,* had come into sight and were careering across the sands, shouting to one another, thrashing their horses and waving pikes in the air as they advanced. He waited where he was till he saw them ride into the camp; saw two figures, presumably those of Sir James and the Legate, come out to meet them; saw the leader of the new band dismount, and the three stand together upon the shore. After a while, they went into one of the tents, while the rest of the band dispersed and, going a little way back into the sand hills, began to light fires, the noise of their shouting coming up to where he stood, mixed with the neighing of horses and the loud clashing of weapons in an unending din.

  (* Highland pony.)

  Puzzled as to what it all meant, Hugh descended the cliff, resolved, if he found the seanchaí in a communicative mood, to get some information from him with regard to various points about which he himself was still utterly in the dark. By the time he once more reached the shelf, the two little girls had been settled for the night and lay tucked up in a nest of cloaks a little to the left of the fire. Apparently, they were asleep too, for their chattering voices had at last ceased, and silence had fallen upon the shanty, broken only by occasional coughs or moans from the poor lady on the further side of the partition.

  Maelcho was not there. After searching for him a little while, Hugh discovered that he had climbed on to another projecting spur or knob of rock, smaller than the one upon which the hut was built and almost directly above it. Here he was half standing, half leaning against the cliff, his huge frame wrapped in its cloak and sprawled out against the rock like some sort of Irish Prometheus.