The Legacy of the Lynx: Three people, two murders, one oath... Read online

  Estimated rebel deaths at the Battle of New Ross: almost half their number. One thousand, four hundred and sixty eight, by Malloy’s later count; all left to rot in the early summer sun on the streets of New Ross.

  Some were later buried, most kicked into the waters of the River Barrow that obligingly carried off their carcasses, clogging up the one against the other at its bends, snagging on tree roots and boulders, straddling over weirs and shallows. There were a few loyalists too – but only a very few – dotted in amongst those of the insurgents, stinking and rotting all the same.

  A small chance of survival for the wounded who managed to drag themselves out, or were dragged out by their bloody collars by their bloody comrades, quickly ensconced in a makeshift hospital in a nearby barn, the end of last year’s straw making do as pallets. There’d been nothing to give them but encouragement and water and tying up the holes in their bodies with strips of their own clothes. Surviving then, until the English coming in from Waterford got word from their scouts what they were about, and the barn swiftly barricaded and set alight, the smoke and flames of the communal funeral pyre funnelling up into the afternoon air, singeing the wings of the rooks and crows who blackened the sky, drawn in their thousands by the delicious scents of so many dead and dying in so small a place. It was watched from the oak knoll by Malloy, Fergus and the other survivors, sickened to the heart by such cruelty and waste, men wanting to fling themselves down the hillock to attempt a pointless rescue had not Malloy’s barking held them back.

  ‘It will not go unpunished,’ Malloy said later, his anger as hot and vicious as the flames that were eating his men alive half a mile distant and nothing he could do to save them. By Christ and His Holy Mother, Malloy swore they would be avenged.

  There was no victory here, and his men would need to be redeployed the moment night came down to hide their going off to Vinegar Hill to join the rest of the defeated. But Mick would not go with them. He had other ideas, none of them good, and Fergus – though he didn’t know it yet – would have his part to play.

  16

  BEHEMOTHS, AND THE WONDERS OF THE DEEP

  WALCHEREN, HOLLAND

  It came as a surprise to Ruan, though not to Caro, that the complicated network of ostlers and horse-rent so common in Scotland was in little evidence here. Rivers and canals took the place of roads, folk jumping on and off the many flat-bottomed barges that coursed their slow and ponderous lengths. Nothing like Scottish rivers, that tumbled hurriedly down the sides of mountains to empty themselves gratefully into the peace of a loch before spilling on just as eagerly out the other side.

  Three days in, and hardly a word had passed between them. Ruan bought bread and the strangely smooth and waxy stuff they called cheese hereabouts, shoving some of it at Caro, who nodded his thanks. Caro, for his part, steered Ruan right when he was about to go in some catastrophically wrong direction. Ruan knew the language, but spoke with an antiquated accent that many of the folk he asked directions from completely misunderstood. Whenever Caro pointed out a mistake Ruan would sigh deeply.

  ‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’ he would say, Caro keeping his mouth zipped because yes, he did think Ruan was an idiot, but at least he was an idiot who took Caro’s directions, not that he ever thanked him for it.

  Once they’d passed Zutphen, Caro mentioned casually that they could probably save themselves a deal of time by taking one of the vessels going up the Ijsseldyk River that went directly into the heart of Deventer.

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Ruan replied testily.

  The fact that he didn’t know it irked him, not that he was going to let Caro see it. But he took up the boy’s suggestion and managed to hail one of the fishing boats that plied its length, happy to take passengers for a few coins. Even then Caro hadn’t been able to resist butting in. The fact that Caro managed to bargain the price of their passage down to half of what had first been suggested didn’t impress Ruan a whit. Effectively he’d saved Ruan the same amount Ruan had had to shell out to keep Caro in food on their journey, so that was enough to call it quits. He did reward Caro with a short nod of his head, which Ruan deemed generous in the circumstances.

  The barque they alighted on had two triangular-shaped sails, one huge – draped like a theatre drop-curtain drawn in at its apex – the other much smaller, narrower and taut, leaning in towards the centre of the boat. Ruan had never seen the like, and he toyed with the idea that maybe he should start writing some of these experiences down. Travel books did well these days, and if he went on as he meant to do then maybe there was a book in it for him to write.

  He was aware of Golo’s copy of Behemoths, and other Wonders of the Deep that was nestled inside his pocket. He’d been looking at it ever since they’d left the Servants, not for its actual content but because of the notes Golo had obviously spent his days at sea scribbling feverishly into its margins: an abbreviated history of the Lynx. Ruan knew it the moment he’d started flicking through its pages. Not that he cared about the Lynx. As far as he was concerned that chapter of his life was over and done with, and thank God for it. But he studied it anyway because, for all his truculence and bad humour, the pain of losing Golo was becoming greater with every passing day. He didn’t understand why, nor did he particularly want to, but he found that by trying to interpret Golo’s miniscule writing in the margins of Caro’s book he was comforted, as if Golo hadn’t gone away at all but was merely waiting around the next corner; that someday soon he would leap out and tell Ruan it had all been a big mistake and here he was again, and no matter Ruan’s short-fallings he was proud of what Ruan had, or would, become.

  It was ridiculous, Ruan knew. Golo was never going to be proud of him. Golo had only known this blighted Caro for a week but in that time the boy had obviously wormed his way into the place Golo had previously kept for Ruan. His nature was disinclined to harbour regret but regret was there all the same, and the only way Ruan knew to accommodate it was by accusation. How dare Golo write all his secrets in this little book and then give it freely to a nobody like Caro? The more Ruan read of the notes the more incensed he became. This was the Lynx, for Christ’s sake! Golo’s abiding passion, a legacy rightly Ruan’s and no one else’s.

  He was also regretting giving up the ring that had belonged to his ancestor. Ruan had never worn it, never valued it. He’d allowed Golo to give it to Fergus as part of his monumentally stupid plan of sending Fergus to Ireland to meet a man who might or might not have a part of the Lynx library, and who might or might not be able to help in securing the part that was France. He had Golo’s own ring, taken from Golo’s dead finger, but it was too big to fit onto any of his own, even if he could have brought himself to do so.

  The water of the river flattened out, and the boat soon had them the last few miles towards Deventer where they disembarked at a small landing stage beyond a bridge. The barge didn’t actually stop, only slowed down long enough for its two passengers to leap from barge to jetty, saved from a ducking by the men on the landward side catching at their outstretched arms and pulling them in, depositing both like ungainly fish.

  Exhilarated, Ruan began to laugh and, before he could stop himself, he lavished a great big smile upon his companion and Caro began to laugh too, a little manically, as if this was the start of something new. His newfound joy diminished somewhat once they were back on their way, Ruan resuming his sullen attitude, his too fast walking, Caro having to jog most of the length of a lane called the Zandpoort to catch him up. But once they’d reached The Brink, the huge plaza that pulsed away at the heart of Deventer, Ruan finally stopped and sat down on one of the stone benches there and Caro sat down beside him, catching his breath.

  They were surrounded by market stalls, bustle and noise. Ruan looked around him, spotting the ancient Weigh House opposite, a squarish building – of course it was – with a square outside-staircase leading to a square balcony above its solemn gates. Most impressive was the massive copper cauldron that hung from
the Weigh House wall, the large scroll emblazoned beneath it declaring that here was where counterfeiters would meet their end, their living skin boiled right off their bones.

  Now that would go well in my forthcoming publication, Ruan thought, and also made a mental note of the tall, flat-faced buildings on the opposite side of the plaza. They had the weird property of seeming wider at the top than at the bottom, all bearing large rectangular windows, several overhung by strange signs – The Three Golden Herrings, for one, though no explanation given for what it might mean. Other houses carried curious inscriptions upon their blank facades in the form of mottos or pithy, playful sayings. It was all so strange that Ruan broke his customary silence.

  ‘Ever seen anything like this?’ he asked the air, though it was Caro who answered.

  ‘Never!’ Caro replied with enthusiasm. ‘And look over there, between the fish seller and the dumpling monger. Isn’t that Korte Bischopstraat, where Brother Joachim said we should go?’

  Ruan’s good humour soured back into his habitual irritation with the boy. Why did this blasted Caro always feel the need to take the upper hand? Ruan shook his head and stood up abruptly.

  ‘Well then, Mr Man, who always has to wear the cleverest clogs,’ Ruan said, injecting every word with such venom that Caro winced. He couldn’t seem to get anything right. Just when things had been going so well he’d gone and spoiled it again.

  From now on, he told himself, just button up.

  They exited The Brink and walked in silence up the narrow ginnel that was Korte Bischopstraat, turning right and left according to Brother Joachim’s instructions. Finally they emerged onto The Singel – a promenade with a lagoon-like canal on its farthest side marking the boundary between the oldest part of the city and the new. The Singel was wide, the houses on The Brink’s side tall and narrow, several thin storeys going up into the sky, crowded but neat, like teeth in a well-kept jaw. None of the houses had names or numbers, so it took them a while to find the one they were looking for.

  ‘It’s got a bell outside,’ Joachim had told them, ‘like off a ship, and a bell-pull in the shape of a lion’s paw.’

  Enough description for Ruan and Caro to go by, and they went up The Singel looking at every door until they found the one they wanted. Ruan was unaccountably nervous, made more so because Caro was jiggling behind him like a flea on a hot plate.

  Goddamn children, he thought. Why is it not a one of them can ever keep still?

  He was unaware of the extra letter Caro was carrying, nor that it might release the two of them from the contract Joachim had forced Ruan to sign. If he had, he too would have been jumping for joy, as Caro was now. Instead he was irritated all over again and tugged so hard at the lion’s paw that the ship’s bell rang and reverberated as if it was about to bring the house down. Ruan involuntarily went back down one of the short steps that led from pavement to door.

  After half a minute the door opened to reveal a small woman tightly wound in black, her hair scraped back from her face and bound in a neat mignonette at the nape of her neck. The only relief given to this stern exterior came from the bright white pinafore edged with two inches of intricate lacework at its base.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, and Ruan went back up the step, took off his tattered hat and bowed briefly, not considering for a moment that he looked more like a rag merchant than the highborn person he considered himself to be.

  ‘I’m here to see Mijnheer Grimalkin,’ Ruan said in his oddly formal Dutch, taught to him by Golo, already by then fifty years out of date. ‘Sent by recommendation of his father, Joachim.’

  The woman looked at Ruan blankly, and then a sudden colour suffused her neck above her high-buttoned collar and she raised a hand, waving them in.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘But of course, you are very welcome.’

  She led them into a hallway that was pleasantly cool, if a little dark, every wall panelled with polished wood, and the floor likewise. She motioned them to a pair of chairs that sat near the base of a narrow staircase.

  ‘Please sit, please sit,’ she said. ‘Let me get you some bread, and I’ve mutton stew too, if you’ll give me leave to heat it through.’

  Ruan threw a puzzled glance at the woman but she was already turning away.

  ‘We’ve no need of bread, Mevrouw,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I’m here rather to see Mijnheer Hendrik Grimalkin. It’s of some importance, or I would not ask.’

  The woman stopped her quick sweep towards her kitchen domain and turned back.

  ‘Are you not mendicants of the Order, then?’ she asked, surprised. ‘In need of repast?’

  Ruan creased his brows, shuffled his feet, looking down as he did so to see his dirty, salt-rimmed boots, the poor quality of his trousers – cast-offs from the Servants, his own ruined by the storm and the rescue from the Collybuckie – and suddenly understood.

  ‘Oh no, Mevrouw, you misunderstand. We’re not from the Order at all. We were shipwrecked by Walcheren and sent here by Brother Joachim, to his son.’

  The woman didn’t move, except to lift a hand to her throat.

  ‘Brother…Joachim…sent you here to meet his son?’ she asked with obvious hesitation. Ruan clicked his tongue. He couldn’t understand why the woman was being so obtuse. It was an obvious enough request, and here she was treating them like beggars at her door.

  ‘Grimalkin,’ Ruan said loudly. ‘I’m not mistaken. This is where I was sent, and this is why I’m here, and I will not leave until I see him.’

  The little woman in her black dress and white pinafore blinked. She wasn’t sure she liked this interruption to her calm kingdom and took a few moments before she spoke, her voice hardened, knowing she had the upper hand, whatever this upstart in his ragged clothes thought was going on.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, after a few moments. ‘I will thank you to bide here while I ask my husband if he is able to entertain visitors.’

  Ruan bristled and she noticed it but was not inclined to pander to the brash young interloper taking up room in her lobby. Instead, she cast a brief glance at his younger companion who had sat on his seat at her command and was now swinging his legs back and forth, as if he was bursting to add something to the discussion, but didn’t have the nerve.

  ‘I presume you have names?’ Mevrouw Grimalkin asked, looking not at Ruan but at Caro.

  ‘Mine is Ruan Peat,’ Ruan spoke up in a moment, needled by the woman’s inability to grasp how important his visit was. ‘And I’ll thank you to remember it.’

  The moment these last words left his lips Ruan knew he’d made a strategic error. The woman appraised him without warmth, before turning her gaze back to Caro.

  ‘And you. What is your name?’

  Caro stopped swinging his legs now he’d been asked a direct question. He glanced at Ruan, saw the thunder gathering on his brow and knew this was not someone he could bide with any longer that he had to. Abuse on ship was one thing. He hadn’t expected it when he’d started out but was somewhat inured to it after several years, and by Christ he wasn’t going back if he could help it, but all this shite with Ruan Peat ignoring him and bullying him was about as much as he could take. Sea or poverty had been his choices up until now, but he had Brother Joachim’s letter of endorsement in his pocket and here was the woman to whom it should be delivered, and she’d already noticed he was a person, an actual person with a name.

  ‘Caro,’ he whispered. ‘My name is Caro, and if it’s not too late to ask, I’d really like some of that mutton stew. I’ve a stomach hollow enough to swallow an ox.’

  17

  BURNING BARNS, BURNING MEN

  Fergus never understood what it was about this particular battle of New Ross that led to such brutality, but brutality there was, and of a type he’d never before experienced. The battle itself had been bad enough, and he’d done things in the awfulness of the moment that he’d never believed he was capable of. Less than twenty minutes after they’d run for their
retreat they heard guns firing in the square, the Loyalist garrison tidying up and shooting dead any of their enemy still breathing on the streets of New Ross.

  When an escapee from the town joined their forces they learned that things were worse than they’d supposed and that many of those shots did for the remaining inhabitants of the town, condemned as collaborators by the mere fact of their being there when the battle had taken place. Nor did it take them long to understand what soon happened to the makeshift hospital that was housing the sick and injured rebels dragged from the field of battle. They all saw the barn going up in flames, every last person in it caught like hedgehogs in a woodpile, no possibility of escape. It was cruelty beyond compare and had the inevitable consequence of Malloy’s men retaliating in kind, executing the few captive prisoners they had at their disposal as well as returning the favour and burning alive several Loyalist sick housed in their own little hospital in nearby Scullabogue.

  Too much for Bagenal Harvey, short-time Commander-in-Chief of the United Irish, a man co-opted and never in love with the cause - sprung from Wexford gaol by Malloy’s men partly in response to the unreasonable execution of Mordeciah Crook and the burning down of him and his house - Bagenal Harvey resigning his commission a bare two weeks after being gifted it, taking to his heels, fleeing the whole mess as fast as he could, the repercussions of New Ross too much to deal with, leaving Malloy and his men – and the whole of the United Irish – without direction or a nominal leader.

  Malloy received the news with equanimity. The only hint on his face of his seething anger at this betrayal was the unnerving worsening of his squint, his bad eye drifting a few millimetres left of centre and staying there. He’d already instructed his men to get out as soon as darkness fell.