The Silver Stag of Bunratty (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

R
ICHARD
D
E
C
LARE

hatever Margaret had said to Fat John, it certainly worked, for when he returned, he led Tuan down to the Great Hall without tying him up again, though he said nothing and looked sulky, spitting on the floor as he opened the door to the hall.

Tuan gasped as he went through the doorway. The Great Hall was huge – bigger than the abbey church in Quin, the largest, highest place he had ever seen. Like the abbey church, as soon as you entered your eyes were drawn to the wall opposite the door. But here, instead of an altar, there was a great fireplace. Seated in front of it, at a table covered with food, were a harsh-faced man and a thin-faced woman, the woman holding a small child, who wriggled on her lap. So this was Sir Richard De Clare and his wife, the Lady Johanna. Tuan had heard all about them. All of them, it
seemed, were more intent on their trenchers of food than in paying any attention to the boy who was slowly making his way towards their table.

This gave Tuan the chance to look around him. There was a fire burning in the huge hearth and there seemed to be a chimney, so the room was clear of the smoke that filled most halls; Tuan had never seen a chimney before. The room was filled with trestle tables and benches, now mostly empty. Servants were dismantling them and standing them up against the walls. A few soldiers still sat astride the benches, spearing their food with their knives, while dogs sniffed around the floor for the morsels they dropped. The walls had been whitewashed with lime and they were covered with trophies of the kill – the heads of boars and wolves, huge antlers from the forest stags. On one wall there was what seemed to be a tapestry, showing a hunt in the forest, men in bright clothes with horns and hounds, all surrounded by green leaves. It looked real and yet not real; the birds in the branches were too still, the flowers that covered the forest floor were too bright and stiff. Tuan’s scrutiny was interrupted by a cool voice. It came from Sir Richard.

‘So, you are Sorley Mac Conmara’s boy! A small enough surety, I see.’ He laughed at his own joke, and there was a
polite titter from the others around the room.

‘Well, boy, you are a guest here for as long as your father holds faith with us. And you will be treated as such. Matthieu here is only a couple of years younger than you. He is my ward. He will look after you and you will attend lessons with him.’

Sir Richard paused, his eye lighting on a small, round-faced boy seated near him. ‘Matthieu, come over and greet the boy. You will show him the castle and where he needs to go. And tell Margaret to fit him out with whatever he needs. I am glad to see that he has already been given some civilised clothing.’

The chubby-faced boy scrambled down off his bench and came towards Tuan. As he came close, Tuan saw that he was smiling. He looked nice, with his fair hair cut in a slightly crooked fringe over his forehead and wide blue eyes. For a horrible moment, Tuan thought he was going to kiss him on the cheek but then, with a glance at De Clare, the boy seemed to decide against it. Instead, he took Tuan’s hand, as if to lead him away. But Tuan had suddenly remembered the lesson impressed upon him by his own father and mother. These people might be barbarians, but that did not mean that the son of Sorley Mac Conmara and Sive O’Dea had to act like one. He shook off Matthieu’s
hand and made a deep bow, Norman fashion, saying in his best English:

‘While I am in your house I am yours to command, my lord and lady.’

Sir Richard merely nodded. There was no expression on his face, with its long, thin nose and narrow lips, its heavy eyelids over dark eyes that seemed strangely blank. This man was older than Tuan’s father, and his reputation, that of Claraghmore, the Great De Clare, was known all over Thomond and far beyond. Tuan’s mother, trying hard not to cry, had told him all about the Lord of Bunratty. He had become lord of the castle when he was very young, for his father had died when he was a child and his elder brother, Gilbert, had only been lord for a short time before he too had died. Despite his youth, Sir Richard had held onto power in a part of the world where only the very strongest and wiliest survived. Even Tuan’s people spoke of him with awe, for no-one could deny that he was a great warrior and a dangerously clever enemy.

But now the Lady Johanna spoke for the first time. She was pale and thin and Tuan could glimpse blond hair under her headdress. Her clothes were very rich and fine, but her face was too stiff and her eyes set too close together for beauty. She spoke in English.

‘Indeed, it has vastly pretty manners for a savage! Perhaps, Maude, you could take a lesson from the wild Irish. Be sure to watch his ways.’ She gave a sneering laugh, and the child on her lap giggled too.

The dark-eyed girl she had addressed scowled, then shrugged her shoulders and gave Tuan a filthy look. At first he thought she was not going to bother to reply, but then she said, in English too but with an accent very different from the Lady Johanna’s: ‘I might as well to take lessons from the Irish wolfhounds that fight with each other around the fire, my lady. Did you hear that jest about the one that was chewing a bone and then stood up and walked away on three legs?’

Tuan drew a sharp breath. But Matthieu was pulling his arm urgently, and he allowed himself to be led from the Great Hall.

Once outside, Matthieu let go of his arm and said apologetically: ‘Don’t pay any heed to my sister; she never misses the chance to be rude to Lady Johanna. They can’t stand each other. She didn’t mean anything against you, you know.’

The boy spoke in English, but with an accent like his sister’s, an accent Tuan could not place. It was not Irish, that was for sure, nor straightforward English like
Margaret’s. Nor was it the strange crossbreed accent that the Norman-English lords and ladies spoke, though that was the closest to it.

‘You are not English, are you?’ he asked Matthieu.

Matthieu shook his head. ‘No – and don’t let Maude hear you suggest that we are! I do not know quite what we are.’ He smiled. ‘Normans, mostly, I suppose. My family was a crusading one. You have heard of the Crusades?’

Tuan nodded. Everyone knew of the great armies that had been sent to the east to claim Jerusalem for the Christians of Europe.

‘Well, my great grandfather was a Frank, but he went to Jerusalem, to fight for the holy city. I don’t remember Outremer at all, but Maude sometimes tells me stories about it. I don’t think she can really remember it either, but our mother talked to her about what it was like there. My grandfather settled down there, and began trading. Then, after the Mamluks took over, we had to go away. We came westwards. We went to Italy, and then to France. My father is a soldier, so he has always worked for whatever army would take him on – though he only works for the most noble of lords. We always went with him, until Maman died. My mother refused to be left waiting and worrying as to what might happen to him and always travelled along
with him. But in the end it was not my father who died, but Maman. She got sick in Antwerp. My father said it was the cold did it.’

He stopped for a moment, drew breath and continued. ‘We were sent away. We went to England first, to cousins. But then we did something that got us into trouble, even though the person we did it to deserved it – and so we were sent over here. Sir Richard is only some kind of distant relative, so Lady Johanna says that it was really very good of her to take us in at all. But she and Maude don’t like each other, so it’s difficult. And now, if we are thrown out of here, there is really nowhere else for us to go after Bunratty. We have gone as far west as we can, unless we sail out into the western ocean and fall off the edge of the world.’ He laughed, but his voice shook.

Tuan got the feeling that he had made up the joke to hide his fear. It must be frightening, he thought, to know that you had no real home.

‘What about your father?’ he asked.

Matthieu shrugged. ‘Our father left us to fight with the Hospitaller Knights in Rhodes, and promised to come to fetch us as soon as he could. But that was over a year ago and there has been no word from him. It seems that he might be–’ He stopped and swallowed.

Then he said: ‘Look, this is the room where Maude and I sleep.’

They had been climbing up stairs and had now reached the door of a room in a side tower, and the boy was breathless. He opened the door and Tuan peered into the room. He had heard that the English had strange curtained things called beds, but there were none in here, just two straw pallets on the floor, a table with a jug and basin, a couple of wooden chests and a peg where a brown and a blue cloak hung side by side. The shutters of the narrow window were open and the air smelt much fresher than in his little room. Matthieu went over to one of the chests, and lifted the lid.

‘Come and see my treasures,’ he said. But he was interrupted. The dark-haired girl, Maude, was glaring at them from the door.

So, thought Maude as she looked at the two boys, now, on top of everything else, it looked as if Matthieu was making friends with the Irish hostage. He would desert her and she would have no-one. She would be even more lonely for Outremer and their past life. There were nights when Maude dreamed that she was back in Outremer, and woke up with tears on her face, which she would quickly wipe
away so no-one would see that she was crying. How she missed being there! How she missed the sun – ever since she and Matthieu had arrived in Bunratty there had hardly been a sight of it, nothing but rain and mist.

Maude was old enough to remember Outremer, though very faintly. Sometimes she wondered if the pictures in her mind were real memories or just her imagination, because the stories her mother had told her about living in the east were so very vivid in her mind. There were times when something very small could bring it all back to her. The smell of spices in the kitchen could do it. Suddenly she would be back there, she would see the colours, feel the heat on her skin, smell the scents that she had not realised meant home to her: cardamom and clove, ginger and nutmeg, grains of paradise and cinnamon and mace. Other smells meant home too – the rough leather of her father’s saddle and jerkin, when he would pull her up onto his horse and take her on one of his wild gallops through the desert. She would never forget those gallops, the hot sun on their faces, the warmth of the wind tangling her hair so that her mother would pretend to be angry when her father brought her back home. Her mother would laugh then, and bathe her face in rosewater.

The warmth was part of being with her father, Sir
Baldwin. When he had ridden away to fight against the Turks, he had told her to be brave and to take care of Matthieu. But it had been hard. In England they had been moved around their distant relatives like unwanted puppies, and finally ended up in the far north, in the household of Lady Margaret de Baddlesmere. Lady Margaret had not really paid much heed to them at all, which suited Maude quite well, for it meant that she was able to spend all her time practising archery with the soldiers of the castle. But then there had been the incident with a visiting squire, a horrible boy who had ill-treated his horse and had, in Maude’s view, richly deserved his punishment. He had ended up in the horse trough, the result of a well-deserved push from behind, jointly administered by Maude and Matthieu. But the result of
that
had been total disgrace. They had been shipped over to Ireland, to Lady Margaret’s brother, Richard. Maude had wondered why Lady Margaret had raised her eyebrows when she heard that Lady Johanna had agreed to take in the children. It was only when they arrived that Maude realised that Lady Johanna had wanted her as a nursemaid for baby Thomas and as lady-in-waiting for herself. All Lady Johanna’s other companions had deserted her because of her vicious temper and the discomforts of living in a draughty castle, in a state of almost perpetual warfare with
the wild Irish.