Enter the Falcons….
A story gyrfalcons, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Ryan Tubridy
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A few years ago I was writing a scene one afternoon in a novel called Dark Forest. Falcons were attacking the villain, the Count of Alsace. They managed to hurl him into the River Boivre, at the behest of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Needless to say the rotten Count floated to the surface and continued to capture the unicorn, which would be sacrificed to the ailing Louis VII, who needed a bit of a boost. He was partial to unicorn`s blood.
After writing this scene, a strange thing happened. I went down the road and along a little road which I frequently walked, I found a peregrine falcon on the farm gate to a field, staring at me. It was haunting, but lifted me out of my slight misery into bliss: I was on the right track. This might have been Eleanor herself, sending me a message.
I haven`t yet published that novel, Dark Forest, as I think it slipped out of the YA category. Too young for the old, too old for the young. It staggered between accurate and inaccurate history. It was neither epic nor mundane fantasy, it was history peppered with my imagination that dragged witches, unicorns and ghosts into the story. (Louis the Fat, VI, was a ghost who lusted after unicorn blood). And it involved time travel- from 21st Century Vancouver to Aquitaine, 1173. I wrote this book simultaneous to writing a biography of Kevin Barry. That might sound weird, but it was the only way I could survive the continual weirdness of writing the book about the martyr.
It was the most traumatic project of my writing life. I couldn`t wait for the 1st November 2020, the centenary day, when I could be free of the story, which had turned into a nightmare. But things only got worse after that date. For another blog, another time. If you want to read about the book or indeed read it, itself, go here.
But Dark Forest with its winding story of the Rebellion of 1173-74 in Aquitaine and Normandy, led by Eleanor and her sons against their own tyrannical father and (her) husband, with fantastical elements woven through, became my salvation. I loved every moment of writing this story and dreamed of the day it would be published. Here is an extract from Dark Forest, just as the heroine (Marie de Champagne) has time travelled back to the Rebellion, where she meets the mysterious Poet, who has arrived with her half brother the Young King who has come to pledge fealty to her father (Louis VII) and to betray his own father (Henry II Plantagenet):
The Baron scowled and left, tripping over a hound near the door who was chewing on a large bone. The people gasped, and the Young King stared into his wine. The King remained standing. With a flat hand, he commanded the rest of the poets to be silent. He looked around like an eagle, and cleared his throat.
“These are dark times.” he said, holding his goblet as if it was a Grail. “And where there are dark things, there is light. The unicorn is among us again. At dawn, we will begin the hunt.”
“Oh! Unicorn in plum sauce!” cried Dragon de Mello. “A great feast for the Princess! More music! More wine!”
The King glared at Dragon. He was too excitable.
“Yes, Your Majesty. It is true. Forgive me for doubting you.”
“It is the Bible you doubt, not me!” he roared. The King’s face turned red, his finger swelled beneath the ruby ring, the one that Marie had kissed that day in the Cabinet. He hissed at the people in the Great Hall- those vassals and boorish knights who were desperate to begin their war and take back what they thought was theirs from the red haired tyrant.
“The blood of the Unicorn is silver.” continued the King. “My reign will be long if we capture him. I give this rebellion my blessing, but only when I have the unicorn.”
“We will hunt him, Your Majesty.” said the Count of Alsace, holding his goblet into the air, staring at Marie with a lean and hungry look. Everyone raised their goblets, and cheered.
“To the blood unicorn’s blood, Your Royal Highness! To the rebellion!”
But the cheer did not last. The vassals grunted and scowled, took bones in their hands and gnarled them, guzzled back wine, frowned, their faces set with worry and resentment. The Young King pushed his goblet to the edge of the table so that it almost toppled over, just before a servant caught it.
“Your Majesty King Louis, I have pledged you my fealty and you declare war on a unicorn.” He turned, and left the Great Hall. The King did nothing.
“That King is mad.” Whispered a broad, mustached knight who sat across from Marie. “War, and all he can think about is unicorns. Bloody mad.”
“They say he hasn’t forgiven the Queen.” said another.
The King sat back down, and stared into his goblet. A hound laid his silver grey head on his lap. The King looked into its brown, forgiving eyes. Marie was sure she saw a tear fall into her father’s goblet. He looked at her. She smiled. She felt sorry for him, despite his obsession. He looked away. The smoke from the fires stung her eyes, and soon she found tears falling down her cheeks.
Marie went over to join the ronde that had started up again where the harp wove its spell again and the ladies began to whisper and giggle and dance. Their eyes were on the poet who was in front of Marie.
They were two bound together
As the honeysuckle binds
To the hazel that it finds.
When it’s caught and enlaced
Around its branches traced,
They can stick fast like glue,
But if anyone parts the two,
The hazel is quickly gone
Honeysuckle then follows on.
‘Sweet love, so it is with us, too:
No you without me, no me without you
- Marie de France
She knew his eyes and his slender hands, his voice from somewhere. She tried to remember the name she’d carved on the hazel tree in the Dark Forest- it niggled at the back of her mind but it was gone like a dream swallowed at sunrise. She looked at the King’s fist clenched around his goblet, barking something at the Count. The Count leaned over, took at long look at Marie over the King’s shoulder.
“Where is the Duke of Champagne?” she heard the King say. “She must take his hand, if your rebellion is to succeed.”
More placating, more promising. She felt the force of those violet eyes searching for her, trying to ensnare her. But she turned around and found the poet, who had started to sing that story of the honeysuckle and the hazel.
Then she saw it wrapped around his wrist- a unicorn hair shining, silver-whitish, just like her own. She looked down at her wrist, pulling back her sleeve. Hers glowed. The poet knew and she knew that he knew. She knew then that he had been the one riding the unicorn that first morning when she looked out the cabinet window. Her heart thumped, her neck was hot. She stole another look and his eyes were already searching for hers.
The Count was now like a prowling wolf, circling the edges of the great hall, his eyes following from the Poet to the Princess: he saw the kind of gaze it was. He knew. The King turned his neck stiffly to watch the ladies dancing. Marie knew in that moment that she was becoming her own mother, drinking the poet’s words like mead, thirsty for more. The King flicked a large crust of bread from the table- it leaped onto the floor where a hound bounded over and licked it down, eyeing the King cautiously. She saw her father coming over, throwing his cloth to the floor, striding towards her. He leaned down, like a giant reptile, and whispered coldly in her ear:
“You disgrace me. The Duke has failed to come, and you know why.”
Marie turned around to face him.
“If you murder the unicorn, I will never marry.”
He rubbed his clenched fist. She saw his lower lids wobble, as if he was about to weep. The ronde had finished. The Ladies stood still, and stared as the King raised his finger, and snarled.
“You will marry. That is final.”
“And where is he, then?”
“You’ll be taken to the Abbey!”
"And how would I marry in an Abbey? I would rather be there than have a dead unicorn, a cursed Kingdom, and a greedy Duke for a husband.”
“Madame de Beauvais, take her!” the King barked back at Madame de Beauvais who rose up like a nervous little bird. His pale blue eyes were watery and bloodshot from the wine, a little sinew of boar meat dangling from his eye tooth. He clutched the edge of the table with his swollen, bent fingers. A hound twitched and slunk away to the kitchens. The King’s temper was foul, worse than November storms. It knew no bounds. He knew it, himself. He often prayed to be released from his own rage.
Copyright © Siofra O`Donovan 2019
So, since I wrote the novel, I`ve been followed by falcons. Or so I think, anyway. I think they are prompts from the muse of the book, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Now, all this might seem at loggerheads with Kevin Barry and the Cause. It was. It wasn’t difficult to write the two books together because one was a nightmare in execution, delivery and reception, a necessary duty to my ancestors- my father, my grandfather and my great uncle, who was hanged by decree of Court Martial on the 1st November 1920 during the War of Independence in Ireland. I`d even been to the very gallows he had been hanged upon in Mountjoy Jail, with my (now departed) sister Kristin. She sang the infamous ballad in the gallows of misery where Kevin Barry had his last cigarette, his last prayer with the chaplain, and dangled from the noose a few minutes after 8 o’clock in the morning on 1st November 1920, with thousands outside praying on their knees.
I’d grown up with all these stories of the cheerful, dandy, charming and incredibly brave young soldier of the War of Independence who went willingly, it seemed to the gallows, refusing all efforts of reprieve and escape. I had never, ever known, and neither did my father who died in 2009, that I was descended, on my mother’s side, via my Texan grandmother, from a line that went back to the treacherous Plantagenets. Ain’t my fault, it’s my blood…
Apparently the same thing happened to Ryan Tubridy, our heroic RTE cowboy ( the fall guy for all the of the RTE brown envelopers), who went in Who do you Think you Are ? In 2010. He thought, like I did, his blood was mostly Irish- and revolutionary, at that. (Not that he went on about it in recent years as RTE’s hegemony no longer supports such boasts) His grandfather Todd Andrews ( who wrote the brilliant memoir Dublin Made Me) was an IRA hero volunteer who hunger striked during the War of Independence and who was best buddies with my own grandfather Jim ODonovan, Chemical Director of the War of Independence. Anyway Tubridy nearly fell off his chair in Who do You Think you Are , when it was revealed that his mother was descended from the Plantagenets. Like my own father, his father had married the enemy … not that it matters at the end of the day of reckoning, because few of us are one thing or another, our DNA is a whirlpool of mixed blood and lines. Well in the case of Tubridy he might not have expected it but I guess I did because my grandmother was from Dallas, Texas.
But Tubridy did nearly fall off the chair on the show, because it turned out he was directly descended from Edward III via the Constable gentry family of Yorkshire, House of York. Edward, in turn, was descended from the 12th-century King John, who fought his enemies at Runnymede and sealed the Magna Carta, which limited royal power and influenced the drafting of the American Constitution.
Now, put that in your pipe and smoke it. Is that why Tubridy fled to England? Did his Anglo Norman blood get the better of him? Why, when he went on and on about how much he loved history, did he not say a thing about Kevin Barry nor any revolutionary, during the Decades of Centenaries, the time of Kevin`s 100 year anniversary? At least, as far as I know. But I was watching him like a hawk in 2020, and not a word about Kevin Barry nor indeed his own grandfather Todd Andrews who was quite the hero of the the War of Independence himself. They, RTE, dared not invoke rebellion. Except very carefully, making sure everyone knew that the unforgiveable violence of the revolutionaries was in the distant past and that they would never condone the men and women who created the Republic. We were all locked up, anyways. To challenge that nonsensical imprisonment was tantamount to Catholic sin. Clare Byrne, saint of the lockdowns, locked herself in her garden shed in Bray, because she got the dreaded lurgy. It turned out, however, that the shed was on the grounds of RTE. How very, very strange.
So, back to ancestors. I’m not going to go into my maternal genealogy, for fear of boring you to death. (But, if you did get bored to that extreme, you would become and ancestor yourself). Anyway suffice it to say that I also have direct descent from Plantagenets on the maternal line. Not that I am proud of it but it does tie me in very directly with Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is the muse of the books I am writing now, all set in 12th Century France and England. I’ll venture into the Norman conquest of Ireland at some point too (to appease my guilt for writing about Anglo Normans).
So, I do have to tell you about my grandfather, Raymond McGrath, an architect from Sydney, Australia who sailed on the Osterley ship to Southampton (took a couple of months) and started a PhD in Chinese Architecture in Clare College, Cambridge. This was all in the 1920s and 1930s. Anyway he met my grandmother Mary Catherine Crozier who was over from Dallas, Texas studying French and Spanish in Cambridge and he married her. They had heaps of interesting friends in Cambridge and London, such as Henry Moore, who my mother loved as a father figure, because Raymond was a bit remote. A good friend of my granddad was T.H.White (The Sword in the Stone, the Goshawk) who came to stay with my grandparents in Dunlaoire, Co. Dublin during the war because they had fled London in 1940 in a Ford Model T. I know it’s all a lot of information but the point is that as you might already know, White was obsessed with hawks and hawking. He continued this in Ireland. He lived in Trim, Co. Meath for a time and my grandad took photos of him at the castle.
Once, I found a picture of my uncle (mother’s brother) as a young teenager, with a falcon on his arm. And I even found a jess and a falcon’s hood in the house. I thought it was a faery’s hat but my mother told me it had been my uncle’s hawk’s hood, and that T.H.White had given it to him when he was training him in a bit of falconry. Now, T. H. White is one of my favourite writers and stumbling on the story of his time in Ireland with my grandfather was a lovely shock. The story of Wart (young King Arthur before he was King) in training with Merlin, is a beautiful depiction of nature, history, wizardry and mentorship.
My grandfather designed the maps for T.H.White’s ‘Mistress Masham’s Repose’ and was paid the grand sum of $50 by the American publishing house, G.P. Putnam & Sons, for the map of Malplaquet, apparently a ‘top fee for a map of this sort’.
Anyway the point is that White was an avid hawker. There is a wonderful portrait of grieving by Helen McDonald in her portrait of grief called `H is for Hawk’ The grieving writer buys a falcon to train, to remove herself from society and to recover from the loss of her father (I’d identify). It is a bit of a rambling book, but she is genuine in her attempts to for connect with this hawk, and she reflects throughout the book on T.H.White’s ‘Goshawk’ and other books of his, throughout the memoir.
So, White taught my uncle how to hawk. My uncle doesn’t look unlike a hawk, to be honest. So, this (sort of) family interest in hawking may have influenced these books I`m writing set in 12th France and England. Gyrfalcons were the top of the range in hawks, usually only owned by nobility and royalty. Apparently Henry II robbed a few when he was marauding around Ireland, starting the beginnings of his divide and conquer onslaught on this island, 800 years ago.
Finally, I had the great opportunity to paint for a whole weekend recently at a workshop with Red Wolf. It was an amazing experience, and Lusi Elliot supported and guided us through painting our talisman animals in the beautiful Gorse Hill retreat centre that overlooks the sea in Wicklow. I think the gyrfalcon was a little messenger from my maternal ancestors, perhaps even Eleanor of Aquitaine herself…
By the way, if you’ve had the patience to get this far, and if you have enjoyed reading this blog, and you happen to know how to master the paid subscription thing without alienating those who can’t pay, please contact me. I have been trying to figure it out for ten months. Other Substackers said they`d show me how to, but ran out of time. At least could you like and share…all my work is for free…. But it mightn’t be forever, because it can take days for me to write a blog and I’m in the middle of writing my new novel, The King of the North Wind….
In order to support my work, please consider buying me a coffee. That would be nice. ALL my work is free because I know people can’t give extra for reading stuff these days. Follow this link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/faq35zdxo2
Wonderful stories, very engaging and enjoyable 😀 💖🌿🌞🦋
Oh wonderful Síofra every bit had me entranced. I had things to do and just didn’t. Kristen singing at his place of execution - leaping from reality to reality. I loved it. I’m listening to some French medaieval music now 🥰🎶🌹🍃