The Posy Ring Episode 16

At last, when it became clear that only Mateo and Francisco were left alive, and when Mateo feared that his cousin might pre-empt the swords or nooses of the soldiers and die of fever or starvation or even terror, they had sought shelter from a night of driving rain in a remote graveyard. Did the rain never cease here?

He remembered the white limestone slabs peeping through the turf, as though some massive skeleton were buried there, and the smaller human bones scattered on the surface of the graves, where the soil was too thin to cover them properly.

The building at the centre of the burial ground was small, plain and strange, built of the same flat grey-white stones that littered the landscape, corbelled to form a roof. They took shelter inside, bedding down on the earth floor in front of a rudimentary altar consisting of a slab of limestone on two upright rocks.

Shelter

Well away from this altar was what looked as though it might have been a fireplace, although the smoke would only find its way out as best it could, there being no chimney. Looking at Francisco shivering, Mateo thought he might have risked a fire, but having neither fuel nor flint, the question did not arise. The place seemed more pagan than Christian, but it was the only shelter they could find in this remote and hostile landscape.

Surprisingly, they slept, and at the first light of day, were awoken by the unexpected arrival of a young man, riding on a donkey. They had thought the place abandoned. As though to avoid any antagonism from two ragged strangers, however travel worn and weary, the man immediately confessed himself to be a priest, Father Brendan.

He seemed more afraid of them than they were of him, but they communicated in a mixture of fractured English and Latin. It struck Mateo that the gestures for a lack of aggression, for innocence, a spreading of open, weaponless hands, the act of backing away, a shrugging of shoulders, an ingratiating smile, were the same, even between such foreigners as they were.

Peaceful intent established and the need to speak in English likewise, the priest told them that there was to be a burial in the graveyard the following day.

“I have to make some preparations. A gravedigger will follow, although the graves here are very shallow. The place is no longer suitable for a good Christian burial, but an old woman of my parish has died, her husband is buried here and it was her dying wish to lie alongside him. Who am I to deny her? Besides, it will be easier to hold a Catholic requiem here, well away from prying eyes and ears.’” Explanation

Mateo explained their situation as best he could, without going into too many details. He gave their names, Mateo and Francisco de Tegueste. The priest thought they were brothers, and he was tempted to agree, but then he remembered the word cousin.

Father Brendan was clearly struggling with his own conscience. The tradition of his country and culture demanded a measure of hospitality to strangers, but how far should that hospitality extend when those strangers were most certainly the enemy, about whom so many dreadful tales had been told?

Mateo had heard some of them himself, repeated and enlarged upon when he was aboard the Santa Maria de la Candelaria. Word had been put about that the Spanish carried torture chambers aboard their ships, specifically for the purpose of tormenting captured populations. Tortures and mutilations on a previously unknown scale had been rumoured.

Well, having witnessed what had happened in Ireland, it seemed to Mateo that both sides in this war were equally capable of hideous extremes of cruelty and depravity. But some of the tales had bordered on madness: some vessels were said to be filled with wet nurses to suckle the hundreds of war-orphaned children.

Any women at all would have been acceptable, said some of the sailors, ruefully, but in the same breath they always acknowledged that there was little space even for the men themselves, never mind demanding mothers.

People would believe the most incredible tales, and consequently their fear and hatred of any deemed “foreign” grew, measure for measure.

It was clear that the priest had heard some of these stories himself, but could not reconcile them with the two half-drowned, starving rats taking shelter in his oratory. At last, he took bread from the panniers on his donkey’s back and a leather flask of ale, and encouraged them to eat and drink.

They accepted gratefully, and watched while he made such meagre preparations as he deemed fit for his funeral service, sweeping away the white dust and accumulated dirt, the dead insects, the droppings of birds, mice and other small creatures, from the rudimentary altar, placing a couple of candles and a wooden cross there.

Coffin road

Mateo offered to help, but he shook his head firmly. He found the grave that was to be redug, and left a marker there in the shape of a twisted hazel staff. Then he covered candles and cross with a shabby piece of linen, remounted his equally shabby donkey and beckoned to them to follow him.

“I dare not give you any real shelter,” he said, addressing his remarks to Mateo, who was managing to keep up with the very slow pace of the elderly beast, while Francisco followed in their wake, along a narrow track that wound away from the oratory and, if Mateo was not mistaken, towards the sea.

This, the priest explained, was all that remained of an old “coffin road” from a time many years ago when the oratory and the burial ground had been more used than now.

“It was once the cell of a blessed anchorite,” he said. “Perhaps you don’t know what that is? A holy woman. Her name was Niamh. People would come here and bring her food, drink, fuel, offerings of various kinds, and, in return, she would pray for the souls of the departed who were buried here.”

Mateo thought that it must have been a lonely and chilly existence, but a peaceful one. A peaceful existence seemed greatly to be desired at this moment, however lonely and chilly.

Having witnessed what had happened in Ireland, it seemed to Mateo that both sides were equally capable of cruelty

More tomorrow.

The Posy Ring, first in the series The Annals of Flowerfield, is written by Catherine Czerkawska and published by Saraband. It is priced at £8.99.