Looking out from Castle Annaghs in Waterford, Ireland. This is the area in which the dearg-due is reportedly buried.
Elizabeth, the dearg-due in the Come Hell or High Water trilogy, has a starring role as the central Bad Guy in CHoHW, Part 2: Rising. She stalks the streets of Prague, killing–only!–men and helping reawaken the 1350’s curse that will threaten to destroy the city.
The dearg-due (Gaelic for “red blood sucker”) is an authentic character from the folklore of Waterford in the southeast of Ireland. Although the original story does not identify the dearg-due by name (I gave her the name “Elizabeth” and any Gaelic speakers will know something is amiss about the character from the moment we meet her in Part One: Wellspring because her surname is the Gaelic for “hag” or “witch”). In the original Irish folktale, a young woman in the countryside outside Waterford was in love with a local shepherd-boy and they wanted to marry. The girl’s father, however, struck a bargain with the local landlord and insisted his daughter into the arranged marriage with the landlord who was much older, as well as more wealthy. The landlord was an abusive husband (as we would now call him) and beat his young wife on several occasions, finally beating her death on one occasion.
Following her burial on the landlord’s estate — and the story is very specific that she was buried under or near the great oak tree that had stood on the estate near the river since the 1100s and was the site of the wedding of Strongbow [the first English knight to occupy Irish territory] and the daughter of the local Irish king — the girl rose from the grave to kill both her husband and her father (who had no doubt received great benefits from the marriage of his daughter to the landlord) and she continues to seduce and kill men — only men! — in revenge for the way she was treated in life. She kills the men during sex and laps up their blood or eats their organs, to sustain her own existence as one of the Undead.
The tale also stresses that the dearg-due is not effected by sunlight or garlic and cannot be destroyed but only forced back into her grave and pinned beneath the earth by the construction of a small cairn (“tower” or “pile”) of stones on her grave. The cairn will pin her under the earth until someone removes it, allowing the dearg-due to escape her grave and begin her rampages again.
There could well have been a young girl forced into an arranged marriage by her father and beaten to death by a rich, abusive husband near Waterford and that this gave rise to the legend. However, the story is also easily read as a shorthand version of Irish history: the young girl (poor, Irish, a Roman Catholic) is forced into an abusive relationship with the landlord (wealthy, English, a Protestant) in the very place where the English occupation of Ireland began centuries ago. She can be temporarily subdued but never destroyed and continues to rise again and again to attack her tormentor.
The dearg-due is a killer aligned with George and Fen’ka in the CHoHW trilogy but she could easily become a heroine in her own book or series, still coming to the aid of women in abusive relationships and slaying their abusers. What better way to honor both Women’s History Month and St. Patrick’s Day than by remembering the Irish female vampire, the dearg-due of Waterford?
