The Devil to Pay by Hugh Ryan

Author:Hugh Ryan [Hugh Fitzgerald Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512387
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bishop Richard de Ledrede climbed the winding stairs to the top of the tower. He lighted his way with a horn lantern. His leg pained him, but it was of no great importance. He knelt and prayed in the darkness. He watched the passage of the stars overhead. He thought of Simeon, the Stylite, a man who lived on a pillar for most of his life, a man so close to God both corporeally and spiritually that he allowed his own mother to die at the foot of his pillar, rather than give in to her pleading.

Bishop Ledrede scratched at the bandage covering the suppurating sore on his calf. Saint Simeon spent the last twenty years of his life standing on one leg. It enhanced his mortification and his piety. It undoubtedly gave him more influence with God. It was not a choice open to Richard, Bishop of Ossory. He had work to do on the ground.

He watched as light crept into the eastern horizon. The grey of dawn took on a warmer tinge. He thought, as he always did, of the Resurrection. A grey and pallid corpse, inert in a tomb. A pulse begins. A warm pink suffuses the corpse. The chest begins to rise and fall as the Spirit returns from darkness. The limbs stir. He is risen. It is a miracle. Richard prayed in gratitude that he was there to see the day and to be trusted with God’s work.

He saw the orb of the sun creeping above the mist. It glinted on the curve of the river and the long diagonal of the castle weir. The dark bulk of the seneschal’s castle rose out of the river mist. There were problems in that quarter, and danger. There were voices muttering against him. ‘Uisce faoi thalamh,’ one of his canons had advised him, an expression used by the Irish. It put him in mind of the river Mole of his boyhood. That river cut a cleft through flinty chalk, sometimes diving below ground, like any mole, only to emerge as Emlyn stream and retreat, after running some distance in the sunlight, to the infernal regions. The sneering Bicknor laughed when he splashed him at the ford. Richard de Ledrede never forgot an injury or a slight. Bicknor wasn’t his match in intellect, but now, by a grotesque caprice of fortune, he was Metropolitan Archbishop of Dublin and king’s justiciar. Worse still, he was Richard de Ledrede’s superior in all matters relating to Church lands and Church law. He was in league with the De Spensers and, consequently, with the defiant seneschal, Arnaud le Poer. They were combining to do him down. ‘Uisce faoi thalamh’ indeed.

Smoke was rising from chimneys, forming a pall over the town. He surveyed the battlemented walls peeping above the mist, Hightown and Irishtown, like twin yolks of the one egg. He had an aversion to eggs. Once upon a time, he climbed to the swaying top of a high beech tree to steal an egg from a crow’s nest.

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