The Earl of Tyrone was a divided man. A man who desired to be one and whole, who believed that in some way he was whole, though more often he felt himself not to be. He felt division, or complication, in himself, within every part of him: his mind, his spirit, his language, his hopes and fears and ambitions, his love and his hate. He knew who, or what, had divided him, and he sought within for the singular self he believed he was: but like a ship tacking to avoid the rocks on one side, then the shallows on the other, seeking a harbor, he remained cleft in two.
Once as a young man, not yet an earl, not yet the O’Neill, he had watched two men wrestling in a London market, both powerful, neither the stronger; one a pale-skinned hairless man, the other a black man from Atlantis or Africa, his muscles rolling like a horse’s beneath his gleaming skin, the other’s reddened where he had been gripped. Hugh felt his own muscles tense as the wrestlers tensed theirs, their bare feet stamping in the blood-flecked sawdust. They seemed one beast in the intensity of their bonding, but at length one threw down the other and held him down to a count, then leapt up victorious, arms high, and those watching cheered and tossed pennies toward him. All this Hugh remembered. What was odd was that he couldn’t recall which man, the pale red man or the heavy-limbed dark man, was the one who outlasted.
The English knights who had first come to the Irish island with King Henry the Second, the founders of the families of Burke and Desmond and Thomond and Kildare, had never settled and remade the North as they had the South; in Ulster there were no Old English earls whose ancestors had come from what John Dee called the Isles Britannicæ. Hugh, despite his English title, was not of them; he had come from this soil he stood on. Yet though an Ulsterman, he was in other ways more English than they. Few of the Irishmen he knew best, and almost none of the women, could speak or understand English; he could speak English well, and read it to a degree; he dictated his letters to Pedro Blanco, but the sentences were his own. His childhood friend Philip Sidney had considered him to be English, a gracious knight like Philip himself; his father Sir Henry had attributed Hugh’s rebellious spasms to the old Irish Adam coming forth.
Hugh loved them both, but neither knew him: not in full.
Late in that summer, the summer when he became the O’Neill by the acclamation of the people to whom he belonged, and in full knowledge of his sin against the spirit of his dead wife, he set out to wed again. The woman who’d captivated him was the daughter of the Englishman Nicholas Bagenal, who had been Marshal of the Queen’s army in Ireland for decades. Henry, son of Nicholas and now his successor as Marshal, was the brother of the woman Hugh set out to win. Henry Bagenal despised the Irish, and O’Neills in particular. Not so long before, old Turlough Luineach O’Neill, then still abroad and claiming titles he had no right to, had sued for the hand of this young woman. The young Marshal was said to have answered I would rather see her burned.
Her name was Mabel. Just twenty in this year, old for marriages among the Gael but not the English. Her brother Henry had arranged the marriages of her four older sisters to English colonials: two Plunketts, a Loftus, a Barnewall. Hugh was forty-two years old; there was gray in his red beard. It was an impossible match.
He had first seen her at Dublin Castle, a meeting of the Queen’s Council to which he had been once again summoned, a summons that he had often postponed or refused: Henry Bagenal being the summoner. On this occasion, afraid he might be clapped in irons (as his Dublin spiall or circle of informers warned him he might be, English patience tried), he had come in at the head of a band of mounted armed men, lancers and musketeers, bonnaght running at the stirrups, enough to inspire caution but not alarm.
Looking up from the courtyard of the castle on that day, he could see a woman leaning on the sill of a window above, long loose hair, red-gold like her complexion. Amused, he thought she looked; or interested somehow. He lifted his hat to her, as he ought, and she might have smiled. He turned to his followers, gave orders, and when he looked back she was gone.
He’d learn that it was unusual for her to come to the Court at Dublin with her brother, that she mostly remained in the Bagenal houses in Newry—strong but fine places in English style, furnished and decorated from London—or in the houses of her sisters, chiefly Mary Barnewall’s; Mary was her closest friend among them. He learned these things in bits from among Henry’s associates whom he spoke with, and put them together as best he could when (as he was, though rarely) invited to the Bagenals’ house at Newry. She’d appear at these meetings, usually with her mother, bringing news or household questions to her brother; only then did he begin to know her. And hear her speak. And speak to her: rising from his seat at the Marshal’s round table to bow to the mother, take her hand and bring it to his lips, and again bow, but less deeply, to the daughter, and ask her name: Mabel.
“My brother has spoken of your Lordship,” she said, her first words to him alone. Henry in his tall chair was motionless and unsmiling.
“I am certain that he has,” Hugh said. “I hope not in such terms as would make you my enemy.”
“I am no one’s enemy,” she said back to him, her look returning his. “But for those who think me theirs.”
“I could not be one of them.”
She dipped a slight curtsy and then turned away from him, body first and eyes last (he thought) and went from the room; he was careful not to watch her go; he returned immediately to the topic that was before the Marshal and the men, which he had momentarily forgot. How was he to speak to her again, and alone?
But it was she who next spoke to him, she who met him when alone.
Sir Patrick Barnewall, husband of sister Mary, was well known to Hugh O’Neill. A firm Catholic, unlike the Bagenals, but the English tolerated the fault if the man were steady and did not take the Irish side entirely. In his house was a freedom that Mabel’s house didn’t provide. When Hugh came to the house—having learned from Sir Patrick when she’d be visiting—he dismounted and stood at the door, and it was she who opened it.
“You ride well, sir,” she said. “I saw you on the road, from the window there.” She stepped out, and came to where he stood. “Sir Patrick is at his dinner.”
“But not yourself.”
“I live on air and the scent of roses.” She said it with calm conviction, then laughed lightly—at his own baffled look, he supposed. “No, no. I rose late and will dine late. It’s my constant habit.” Still smiling, a teasing smile. She walked away along the pebbled walk. Small trees, their trunks bare of branches and their tops barbered into perfect rounds, walked beside her. He followed at a small distance. When she stopped, and bent to a stand of flowers that might be roses of a kind, he came beside her. “How does it happen,” he said, “that no man has claimed your hand?”
“Oh, several have,” she said. “I denied the claims.”
He looked upward at the rosy brick of the wall, the window-glass that caught the sun. “It’s a fine house, Sir Patrick’s.”
“But it has no name,” she said. “That’s a flaw.” She looked then directly at him—he was no taller than she. “I know you have a castle to live in,” she said. “And I know its name.” They were face-to-face now, and Hugh was out of words. Pale man; dark man. They were hailed from the porch: Lady Mary, her children behind her, peeking out to see the Irish earl.
“Castle Dungannon,” Mabel said.
She was absent for the rest of that day at Sir Patrick’s, and didn’t appear at the late supper served him. But it had taken no more than the conversation on the path for Hugh to bear a petition to Henry Bagenal at his court in Newry, to ask for Mabel’s hand.
Hugh O’Neill knew very well what reply Sir Henry had given Turlough Luineach when Turlough sued for that hand; the story had been widely reported. But Hugh O’Neill, as Henry Bagenal knew, was the great force now in the North, an Earl created by the Queen, yet a man who could easily spoil English plans and send royal officials back to Dublin afraid for their lives. Sir Henry must perforce listen, and nod, and name a date for a decision—a date he intended to let go by. He knew what all the English knew, or thought they knew: that the Earl was easily angered, and when angered could be murderous. Shane’s fate had not been forgotten. In any case, the Marshal noted to the Earl—glancing upward as if in thought or speculation—that a marriage between a colonist and a Gael might require a royal benefice; the Marshal did not know for sure; he must put the matter before the Privy Council. The two parted with cold compliments.
Sir Henry thought it would better secure his sister if she were moved closer to Dublin, to the Barnewall house; he hadn’t learned that O’Neill had already visited there, and conversed with the child in the garden. Nor would he know that she had entered the room where the Earl slept that night, and waked him. They’d talked softly and long there, the Earl in his léine, a long linen nightshirt, she in a robe de chambre of great luxury, whose price the Earl couldn’t guess; but for his part he took from his satchel a glittering snake of gold (whose worth he knew): the links of the chain were the heads of beasts that each bit the next, in a long circle. She said nothing when he brought it forth, nothing when he passed it to her, but she poured it back and forth between one hand and the other, entranced, watching the faces come alive in the candlelight.
“Yours,” he said.
She let it fall into his lap. “There can be but one reason you should give such a thing to me.”
“That’s true,” he said. “One reason.”
She knelt on the floor by his bed. “My brother despises you, and will never consent.”
“If you consent, his consent doesn’t weigh. If you will have me, you will, in whatever manner you choose, and Sir Henry may not say you nay.”
She rose then and went away to the fire, mere gray ash now and glowing coals. He thought he had offended; perhaps she thought he had belittled her love for her brother. But when she faced him again her smile was sly.
“It can’t be,” she said.
“It can.”
“What—would you steal me away?”
“Could you be stolen? If you could, yes.”
She prettily pretended fear. “You would not reive me from my house and family,” she said. “Would not, against my will.”
“I never would,” he said. “Never against your will.”
“Irish men in times past,” she said, “commonly took a wife in that way. So I am told.”
“Times past are times past.”
She returned to him in three long steps and knelt again by him where he sat, and put her clasped hands in his lap where the gold chain still lay. She wasn’t teasing now. “Find me a way to go with you and he will not dare come to take me back,” she said. “He may hate you but he is an abider of rules. He is in love with rules. Marry me in good form and there will be naught he can say.”
It happened in this way: the Earl paid another visit to Sir Patrick Barnewall some weeks later, bringing with him a few longstanding English friends he knew would entertain the family gathered at dinner there, and so they did. Mabel absented herself early on, complaining of headache, and went to her room, or seemed to. Outside in the dark, Sir William Warren, a man who (like Garrett Moore) was one among the few Englishmen in Ireland the young O’ Neill had come to trust as he found his feet in the swift currents of those years. Patiently Sir William curry-combed the fine horse he’d ridden here, and cleaned the glistening hide with a dandy-brush. Stable-hands came to offer help but he sent them away curtly, almost unkindly. He kept it up until he heard a door from the house opened and gently closed, and stowed his tools.
She was dressed sensibly in a warm hooded cape and good boots, and carried only a small satchel, as she’d known to do. Only a word or two passed between them, a smile and a nod in the dark, and Sir William mounted up, and leaned down to take her arm and lift her to the horse’s back. She gave a small sob—he heard it—and then took hold of his belt with both gloved hands. He walked the horse to the road, and then kicked him into a gallop; Mabel looked back once to see the glow of firelight in the windows of the house.
Inside, the wine and brandy—Hugh’s gifts—had the company telling tales true and not, handing off the japes one to another. It is just as though I was at an English table, Mary said, and though her husband hinted with his eyes that she depart, she stayed, and kept him there as well. The Earl—who had, as he said, the longest ride to home, where he was obliged this night to stay—rose, thanked his hosts, his friends, Lady Mary, and with no hurry went to the stables for his own horse, a tall roan that could run for hours. Spurring the horse toward the northward road and the meeting place at the gates of Drogheda town, Hugh O’Neill felt himself for this night to be one person, one being, and not two. He would not feel so again for many years.
He was careful of her in Dungannon, knowing that he could consign her to oblivion and shame in the Bagenals’ houses if he took her to his bed, to which she made clear in her witty sidewise speech she wanted to go, and now. No: they must be wed, and wed directly—as she had said herself, in proper form, with the proof of it in hand. Beside her he watched the nights come on, played at chess with her, rode with her, kissed and embraced—no more. He told her stories of famous elopements, translating as best he could the Irish in his head into the English of his mouth: of jealous King Conchobar pursuing Derdriu and her lover Noísiu, for Derdriu was raised to be Conchobar’s wife; of Diarmaid and Gráinne, who ran away from King Cormac, and slept together many nights in the greenwood, a sword between them so that there was no sin in it. “I don’t like these kings of yours,” Mabel said, head on his shoulder.
It was Mabel who instructed Hugh in how their flight might be proven sinless, like Diarmaid and Gráinne’s, and how a marriage in proper form might be done, and Sir Henry not know until too late. Hugh laughed in delight when he heard, watched her walk up and down the room tapping a forefinger of one hand into the palm of the other, explaining. She was right, and he said to her that the story of Hugh and Mabel would one day be as often told as that of Derdriu and her Noísiu. And since she had been ready to flee her house and family to ride with him, had urged Hugh to be quick, then leapt from the back of William Warren’s fast horse and thence onto Hugh’s roan, her arms tight around him, her cheek against his back, skirts pulled up to sit astride, then perhaps he had not broken his vow to Siobhan: he had not sought a new wife, only taken a woman who had first taken him, and to whom he’d played the maid’s part.
In Rome, years after, when his long confessions to Peter Lombard had reached this time and these events, the Archbishop had called it casuistical, the way Hugh had persuaded himself that a wrong (the breaking of the vow he had made to Siobhan) was not a wrong. But in any event—Peter told him—you did marry; and though that was indeed a breaking of your former vow, it was not a sin. What was perhaps a sin, or an offense to God, was that Mabel and her Hugh were married by the Protestant bishop of Meath, a man named Jones who was known to Hugh O’Neill and beloved by Mabel and the sisters, in his episcopal palace at Drumcondra; but then again, that bishop was a wise man and later explained to Henry Bagenal—who was furious with him for what he’d consented to do—that he had fully examined Mabel and her motives, and her chastity, before acceding. She told me that unless she had agreed to that device and the manner of her escape (as she termed it), it would never have been attempted. That Protestant marriage was uncanonical and void, of course, but Mabel whispered to him as though it were a secret never to be told, that she was, herself, a Catholic, and had become a Catholic in childhood, and no one in her family knew of it but she and her favorite lady’s maid, an Irish girl who prayed with her. Hugh O’Neill, his cheek in his hand where he lay beside her, smiled upon her in wonder.
The morning after their wedding night Mabel discovered on her husband’s breast a strange thing on a chain that in the darkness she hadn’t seen. She tried to lift it off, but he wouldn’t let her; he only turned it to her and asked her what she saw. The third soul ever to look in. She studied it, brow knit, and said she saw herself, but dimly.
Himself was never what Hugh O’Neill saw there, not since he first looked in. He turned it back again to himself. “It was a gift,” he said. “From a wise man in England. To keep me safe, he said.”
Mabel looked into her husband’s face, which seemed to seek itself in the black mirror, though she was wrong about that; and she said, “May God will that it do so.”
In that winter Hugh O’Neill, room by room, floor by floor, rebuilt his house. It was no longer the place he had come to as a boy; what had been timber was now stone; fireplaces were masoned and real chimneys built to draw off the smoke. For the cold flags of his floors, Queen Gráinne O’Malley got him carpets from faraway places that had somehow never reached their markets in the English isles, and rich hangings for his walls as well, all at a cost he was glad to pay. It was the fine house in the English style he had long imagined, which he believed Mabel needed and wanted, where wardrobes of glossy wood held his velvet English suits and hats, Mabel’s dresses and coats; where wax candles glowed in the place of pine torches, where good wine was drunk from vessels of glass and silver, where dead persons near-related to Mabel looked out from gilded frames as though they spied through curtained windows. When he could get no lead for the leaking wooden roofs, he appealed to his friends at the Court in London; Lord Burghley saw to it that a shipment of some tons of sheet lead were sent to him, a wedding gift; some was laid on Dungannon’s roofs, and the rest lay for years in the pine woods until a different use was found for it, in the different world to come. Each morning before his lie-abed wife awakened, Hugh walked out to the place where Siobhan lay buried, and sat by her awhile. He was given no word, felt no reproach; but (though less and less often) he continued to sit by her there; pluck the grasses at his feet; speak in his mind to her, about her sons, about the horses, about the folk.
Hugh believed that Mabel would soon be with child, and Mabel believed so too; but as winter deepened there were none of the signs that she knew to look for. Their night-times were intense and gratifying, but nothing came of them, which saddened both. He wanted sons: his sons with Siobhan would be men in time, but in the world now coming to be, more sons would be needed. Mabel applied dutifully the prayers and helps that her sister Mary had offered, and (out of her husband’s hearing) other advice from the women of the castle: but still she didn’t conceive. When spring was born out of winter’s dark womb the whole world began producing young: the women, the horses and the cattle, the dogs, even the trees and the grasses. Mabel looked out at the burgeoning land and felt herself the only one empty.
She told her husband that she must return to Newry, to her mother and her sisters, to tell them of her happiness, and reluctantly he got her a good horse and a companion; and she did go to Newry, but not at first to the Bagenal house. She turned away from the main way and took a short road to the Killeavy Old Churches—two ancient piles joined in times past to make one long edifice, too little visited to be worth the stripping of its great altars, yet never closed. Mabel had sent for her beloved servant Niamh, to meet her here, to wait in the churchyard, where flowering bushes gave off their May odor. She kissed the girl and went in through the big door, never locked, and down the wide corridor that led through one church and into another, seeking the figure of Mary, Mother and Child, fearful that it might have been removed or shattered by Protestant fanatics, but it was there, just as it was when Mabel had first come here as a child with Niamh, in secret, wrapped in black like a spy.
She knelt there. Ave Maria gratia plena: all she knew of the prayer in Latin. In English she entreated: The fruit of thy womb. Bless me, Mother of God, so that I may not be left barren. She began a rosary, beads that her father had never discovered in his searches of her room and clothes when he sought to purge her of her mad choice of the old faith over his new faith. Why have you chosen this? he’d cry. But it was not what she had chosen but what had chosen her.
After a time in silence, words rising to her lips but not spoken, cheeks wet, she rose from the stone floor. She was level with the Child in Mary’s arms, the Child reaching outward to whomever came near, impatient perhaps; his mother, eyes lowered, smiled down upon him. Both mother and child had suffered wounds long before Mabel had first come here: bits of the plaster had fallen off, the blue and white paint was crackled and flaking; Jesus’s finger raised in blessing or forgiveness was broken at the knuckle. It didn’t matter. The love and power flowed unhampered through these human things. When a child, she hadn’t known this; the plaster child was the Child, and when she dared to touch it she had felt a touch in return.
She’d told her family, calmly but with certainty, that she intended to join the Augustinian nunnery that was then still attached to Killeavy church, and a storm of objection and hilarity broke over her. Did she not know that the Irish who followed that religion sought the deaths or expulsion of her family? Was she aware that as a nun she could never marry or bear children? And have to wear those absurd wrappings and not the pretty clothes she loved? She mustn’t ever go there again; the devil, or something more human, could surprise her there. And Mabel in peace withstood it all: she knew by then the stories of the martyrs; she rejoiced in her brother’s beatings. The sweetness she had felt when the Host was first placed on her tongue was so great as to make her family as good as invisible, though she prayed for them each by name and for Niamh every day.
She thought now on this May afternoon, wrapping her light shawl around her shoulders and spying the face of her servant at the open door, that in that wondrous and fearsome time they’d both been eleven or twelve years old. She crossed herself, and genuflected at the altar as she passed it, thinking that if she could she would pray for that long-ago child she had been. She didn’t wish to be a nun; she hadn’t wanted to for long and she no longer thought of it, she wished to ride and laugh and lie with her husband, and be a mother: that was her prayer.