The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (24 page)

"I love history, myself."

I turn to the bartender, who is rubbing at the lipsticked rim of a glass. "Why is that?"

Her blue eyes, behind her glasses, seem surprised by the question. "Well, it makes you feel more complete, doesn't it?" A pause. "Knowing where you're from, as it were."

"Does it?"

"Reminds you there's more to the whole business than you own little life." She gives me a wholly unmerited smile. "I like to think that no one ever really dies as long as their folks remember them."

"Perhaps they'd prefer to."

"Remember them?"

"Prefer to die."

"Oh. Oh I don't think so," says the woman, as if to reassure us both.

I ask to be directed to the Ladies; this seems the best excuse for poking around. For all the dark wood, most of these walls look new; these smooth beams have never had a sconce stuck in them. I hitch up my tights, careful not to tear them. I take off my heavy ring to wash my hands. My face looks back at me with a hint of defiance: no new lines today. On the wall, a Kondo-Vend machine offers me a Quality Range of Luxury Lubricated Sheath Contraceptives. I can tell I won't find what I'm looking for in Kyteler's Inn.

As I cross the narrow elbow of St. Kierán's Street, I find myself humming a tune, a very old one; I realise that it has been stuck in my head since Dublin. The words slide onto each other like water over worn rocks. Voice on anonymous voice, disciplined in melancholy resignation.

Quiconques veut d'amors joïr
Doit avoir foy et esptrance

Such patience the singers had back then, giving every melancholic syllable its own line of music, a full half minute to a phrase, as if they had all the time in the world.
The seeker of love must have faith and hope.
Faith to keep you longing, hope to relieve your despair.

The town has become a maze of gift shops and boutiques; I can't tell where anything used to be. As I step off a kerb, a car roars by, inches from my handbag.
Labhair Gaeilge,
says the bumper sticker, as if simple encouragement to
Speak Irish
could set my tongue to talking the language I've long forgotten.

What was Petronilla's first name, I wonder? The one she knew herself by when she was a raw servingmaid who could speak only two tongues and both of them with a County Meath accent. When her hair still fell loose under her white coif, not yet having been tucked away as the mark of womanhood. When she came in a cart to Kilkenny, telling her beads, before her mistress renamed her for the saint whose day it was, the Roman Virgin who tended Peter: Petronilla. What went through the girl's head those first months, I wonder, as she ran to order: "Fetch my Venetian brocade, the rayed one you fool," or "Strap on my pattens if you would not have me wade through every puddle in town," or (in a low voice) "Have you fetched candles of beeswax for the ceremony?"

Petronilla was Dame Alice's loyal bondswoman from the start; she was a dagger thrown back and forward between those ruby-weighted hands. The first Sabbath made her retch in a corner, but she said nothing, told no one, never broke trust. The girl had no malice of her own, but her mistress's orders girded her like chain mail, and obedience made her brave.

The most inexplicable thing is that at no point in her eventual imprisonment and trial did Petronilla try to run away. Did she keep hoping Dame Alice would return from England to burst the doors, with all the force of law or simply a click of her stained fingers? Or did the maid simply keep her garbled faith, offering herself as ransom for her vanished mistress, waiting on the pleasure of the dark master? Or, more likely, did some portion of her drugged conscience feel her execution to be a proper end to the story?

What is clear is that she was not one of the weeping, piteous victims who flock across the pages of history. She embraced her death as a final order. Does that make her mistress's betrayal better or worse? All the records have to say on the matter is that at the hour of her death, Petronilla declared that Dame Alice was the most powerful witch in the world.

I feel slightly faint. I am standing on a street corner with a slightly crazed expression on my face. A small girl leaning against a lamp post watches me; she has a purple birthmark the shape of a kidney. "Lights changed ages ago, Mrs.," she points out.

I cross without answering her. I should be looking for the gaol, but I can't face it yet. I wander up the hill, past Dunnes Stores, a stall selling local fudge, a poster inviting costumed revellers to a Quentin Tarantino Night.

St. Canice's seems almost small after the great cathedrals of England. Its walls are gray and serene; beside it, the round tower pencils the clouds. I look for the grave, but they must have moved it. Inside the church I finally stumble across the headstone, one of the dozen propped against the walls. With difficulty I make out the old French letters framing a fleur-de-lys cross.
Here lied José de Keteller,
they say.
Say thou who poddest here a prayer.

José de Keteller came to this town in chain mail with a long sword, I remember, an old-style legitimate killer. Learned Gaelic, grew a long moustache, finally even rode without a saddle in the native way. A peaceful settler, shaping himself to the island on which fate had placed him, he was hardly to know how his surname would be immortalised by his iron-willed daughter. Why is it so much worse to execute husbands than infidels, I wonder? Most of us are descended from killers, one way or another.

None of this is telling me anything I don't already know, and my ankles are beginning to ache. In the Museum, I take my shoes off for a moment to stretch my feet on the smooth wooden floor. What a motley collection we have here: grisset and candle-mould, cypress chest and footstool, a copy of a will specifying what a certain widow would inherit from her husband if she did not remarry or have carnal knowledge of any man willingly (this last bit makes me smile), and an ancient deer skull with antlers six feet wide. On a dusty shelf I find huge metal tongs, for stamping "IHS" on holy wafers. My heart begins to thump again.

Downstairs in the bookshop, I calm myself with a collection of photographs of Irish lakes. The salesgirl assesses me as a browser, and turns back to the phone, demanding (in an accent that I have not heard in a long time) to know who said she'd said she fancied that spotty eejit. I turn the pages, recognising the heads of birds on the water. I move on to the small history shelf, where I learn that the town's most famous witch was, in fact, framed.

"Alice Kyteler (possibly a misspelling of Kettle, a fairly common English surname)," I read in one hardback

was a victim of a combination of the worst excesses of fourteenth-century Christo-patriarchy. Threatening to men by virtue of her emotional and financial independence, this irrepressible bourgeoise, who always kept her maiden name through repeated widowhoods, aroused the hostility of avaricious relatives and a misogynistic Catholic establishment. As in so many other "witch trials," powerful men (both church and lay) projected their own unconscious fantasies of sexual/satanic perversion onto the blank canvas of a woman's life.

I can't help smiling:
blank canvas,
my eye. There is a grain of truth there, of course: before she ever trafficked with darkness, the citizens of Kilkenny resented the Kyteler woman's fine house, her bright gowns, every last ruby on her finger. But that hardly makes her innocent.

The girl on the phone is eyeing me wearily. She is letting her friend speak now, the faraway voice winding down like clockwork.

How the late twentieth century loves to issue general pardons. At this distance, it cannot distinguish the rare cases of serious evil from those of farmer's wives burnt out of neighbourly malice. Dame Alice should not be lumped in with the victims. She was the real thing. She could be said to have deserved the punishment she never got.

Unlike Petronilla de Meath, not mentioned in the historical analysis. Petronilla, who should have been set free when the whole sony mess was concluded. Why could she not have been shaken out like a wide-eyed cat from a sack, to run across country and live some ordinary life?

It is too hot in here, all at once; too cosy, with a tub of Connemara Marble Worry Stones going cheap beside the till, and remaindered Romance stacked high on a table between the symmetrical stares of Décor and Archaeology. I replace the books neatly and leave.

Outside it is cooler, at least; the edgy breeze of late afternoon fills the town of Kilkenny. I walk along the main shopping street, wondering where the gaol could have got to. A hamburger carton impales itself on my heel; I kick it off. My toes feel crushed; my head is beginning to pound. Anything could have been built on the site of Petronilla's last months: a hardware shop, a B&B, a public toilet. A gaol is by nature anonymous; all it requires is four walls or a hole in the ground, a barred square of light if you're lucky.

I pause outside a pub offering Live Trad To-Nite. I stare at the five narrow bars just above ground level, the darkness behind them. All they hide is a cellar of beer barrels, but if I close my eyes I can almost see her pallid hands caressing the iron. Petronilla in the shadows, crouched in her dirty smock, once good linen, a present after her first year of service. A face like a drop of honey, looking out of a bedraggled wimple—unless they shamed her by leaving her head naked. Did her pale hair come down at last, escaping coif and cap and veil, falling back into girlhood?

I rest my palms against the pub's gray slate, ignoring the glances of passersby, and try to conjure up the rest of her. Would there be marks of torture, the telltale insignia on wrists and soles? Probably not; there would have been no need, since she seems to have told the whole story freely once her mistress had escaped to safety. Besides, they probably preferred to bring the girl unmarked to the stake, a perfect sacrifice to the fire-breathing dragon. Where would they have done it, I wonder—outside the gaol, outside the city walls, or in the busy thoroughfare of the market square? Which supermarket sits on Petronilla's ashes now? Pressing my fingertips so hard against the cement that they turn gray, I ask every question I can think of. Was there anyone there that day who, remembering alms or a kind word or just the turn of her cheek, had enough mercy on the girl to add wet faggots to the kindling? Was there enough smoke to put her to sleep before flames licked the arches of her feet?

This is one of the times when I wish I still had the ability to cry.

Petronilla is not here. There is nothing left. I do not know what I was hoping for, exactly: some sign of presence, some message scratched for me on the prison wall, some whisper from her walking ghost. I shut my eyes more tightly, but all I can hear is an inane pop song leaking from a taxi window.
Hold on,
the singer begs,
Every word I day is true. Hold on, I'll be coming back for you.

I let go of the wall; the pads of my fingers are scored and pockmarked. As I stare at them they plump into their usual shape. The daily miracle, the return to the same healthy flesh. How long must it go on?

I stride back to my car, through a crocodile of French schoolchildren; in the car park, I have some difficulty remembering what colour Volvo I rented. Automatically I fasten my seat belt. I have never tried to kill myself; I am afraid to discover that it would not work. I shrug off my shoes and lean my head back on the padded rest. What on earth am I doing here?

My ring is cutting into my finger; I pull it off and stare at it. Rubies to stave off disease; this is my last one. Once in Birmingham someone tried to mug me, and I cracked his nose with this ring.

Time has not absolved me of anything. The clothes have been transformed, the name is different—I change it every fifty years or so—but the face in the rearview mirror is the same. And in almost seven centuries of exile I have not managed to forget Petronilla.

It is almost funny, is it not? One would think that a woman who in her esoteric researches had stumbled across the secret of immortality would feel free. Exhausted by life's repetitions, yes, starved for fresh food, tormented by the bargain she made, but in some sense free. To wander, at least, to move, to leave behind the quarrels of mortals. I never expected to be so haunted by one face that I would have to make my way back to Kilkenny.

More than any husband or lover or child; more than anyone I have hurt since I went into exile; more than anyone I left without warning (when they wondered why I was not ageing) or killed with my bare hands (when they deserved it). Petronilla's is the only death I still regret. Leaving her behind was the worst thing I have ever done.

I did no harm to my first husband, the richest moneylender in Kilkenny; I bore him a son and fed him tidbits of roast rabbit on his deathbed. As for my second—in my grandmother's time I could have followed the old ways and left him after a year and a day, but under Common Law I was his for life, to stamp his mark on. I bent under his weight like a reed, and in the pool of humiliation I brushed against my power. He was sick already—the beatings were getting feebler—but the poison sped him on. My third ... yes, I remember. I despatched him in a night, after I caught him in the linen cupboard ripping the skirt off Petronilla. The night before his funeral I dropped his heart in the River Nore.

As for my fourth, John le Poer, he was a loving man who shut his ears to the rumours circulating about me. But by then, you must understand, I had signed with my own blood, and the sacrifice was called for. His hair came out in handfuls, when I brushed it at night; his nails began to bend backwards. Petronilla never claimed to understand the rituals, but she knew that whatever Dame Alice said had to happen. When John, made suspicious at last by the gossip of my dead husbands' disinherited children, talked to Bishop Ledrede, it was my faithful maid, my flawless echo, who repeated to me every word they had said. When my husband wrenched the key from my belt and burst into my room, finding and forcing open the padlocked boxes, I kept one curious eye on Petronilla. She wept because the story was almost over, but she showed no shame.