A respectable figure was puffing up the hill and the Man raised his head with hope and difficulty; it was time for the constables to come and release him. But it was Cuckold Dick, clutching a stomach not shaped for speed. ‘Foll’s got a simpler, Abraham,’ he panted out. ‘We’ll be crossbiting in an hour, but he’s a big ’un and we might need a clincher. Foll’s asking for Barbary.’
‘Piss,’ said Barbary. ‘Must I do everything in this town?’
‘You’re the best, Barb,’ said Cuckold Dick simply. ‘Can we have him, Abraham?’
The Man dwelt at length on desertion, on the possibility of being left here all night at the mercy of any passing extremist, on the dereliction of constables who forgot their duty.
Dick cut in: ‘The simpler’s a rich ’un, Abraham. Gold buckles on his stampers.’
Uprightness struggled in the Upright Man’s soul against selfishness, and won. ‘Take him.’
‘Am I a boy or a girl?’ asked Barbary, loping beside Cuckold Dick.
‘Boy, Foll says,’ Dick told him. ‘Choirboy for preference. You got a singing-cheat’s rig?’
Barbary’s mind scurried rapidly through a wardrobe cached all over the city. ‘I got everything,’ he said.
* * *
The Pudding-in-the-Cloth, located in the bewildering back streets of the Bermudas, was what was known in Order cant as a ‘travelling’ tavern, not because of its mobility but because every so often it found it judicious to close itself down and change its name and tenant. But whatever its sign said it was called, its regulars knew it as the Pudding, knew, too, that whoever its official tenant might be, its real landlady was Galloping Betty, the terrifying bulk who supervised its every activity from a carved chair, big enough for a throne, set on a dais at the far end of its main hall.
The tavern was old but spacious – Galloping Betty claimed it had once been a town house of Henry Percy, the 4th Earl of Northumberland. A gallery ran round its upper storey leading off to many private rooms, its kitchen served unfancy but good food, it possessed an excellent cellar and its ale was strong. Less obviously, it contained two cupboards with false backs which led to secret stairways, more exits and entrances than a weevilled cheese and at least one underground passage which came out in another house entirely.
Difficult to find for those who didn’t know it, the Pudding was guarded by sentinels who could sniff a magistrate’s man at forty paces and misdirect him, as an island set about with lodestones deflects the needle of a compass. The really valued customers were those who only came once and were led to it by devious routes which they could rarely retrace, to be gulled, crossbit, simpled, cozened, versed, barnacled and otherwise parted from their money.
As for the regulars, only the higher ranks of the Order were allowed in. Galloping Betty stamped, sometimes literally, on mere curbers who stole washing, foins who cut purses, and the poorer bawds. These had to do their drinking and practise their illegalities with the common sailors in the stews nearer the river.
‘If he be not an artist, let him not near me,’ was Galloping Betty’s motto; only the Order’s aristocracy, the cousiners, the versers, the crossbiters and the beauties were allowed to use the Pudding for their trade. Even the Upright Man had to shed his beggar’s rags when he attended the tavern, despite the fact that he took much of its profit.
Barbary’s skills had upgraded him to junior status among this excellence and he still experienced pleasure in approaching the Pudding, anticipating the welcoming jerk of Galloping Betty’s chins at his entrance, an admission that, young as he was, he had joined the elite of his profession. Besides, it was an attractive place. With its doors and leaded windows open to encourage the circulation of the heavy August night air, it exuded the sounds of bonhomie and a lute. The smell of roasting capon, candles and scent counteracted the stink of the drain which ran outside it.
Poll and Doll sat in one of the casements, not in the vulgar way that common bawds attracted customers – Galloping Betty frowned on that – but laughing and talking, the flash of their white hands as they fanned themselves and the sweetness of their voices a lure. In this light the surfling water on their cheeks made them look fresh and pretty.
Barbary ignored the invitation of the open door, preferring to squeeze down the passageway between it and the next house, which belonged to the Upright Man, and into the yard behind. Here was the backside of the Pudding, a sinkhole where weeds grew between cracked paving and where flies clustered on human ordure and the faeces of the chained, panting, skeletal dog which lay among them.
Barbary ran up a wooden staircase to a first-floor door which led to a storeroom which in turn led to the Pudding’s gallery. where a watcher could spy through the balustrade at the hall beneath without being espied. The room was crowded, the noise at roistering pitch but no louder. Through the carving, Barbary’s eyes reconnoitred the hall in a second, assessing situations, docketing the unknown customers. The fat cove in the corner with Foll would be the simpler, to judge from the gold buckles on his shoes. The young conies playing cards with Soth Gard and Harry Agglyntine looked gentry in possession of gelt; well, they wouldn’t have it by the time they left. Gybbin was explaining his alchemy to a provincial who seemed capable of believing that gold could be made from goose grease. The two coves Poll and Doll were fascinating elderly merchants; Barbary, who never forgot a face, recognised one as a grocer from Shoreditch. All correct there.
The only person in the room whom Barbary couldn’t place, and whom he therefore found disturbing, was the cove with Moll. He was dressed in good black, thin as a barber’s cat, a mole on his nose and something on his mind. And it wasn’t Moll. The man was acting lechery, pawing at her arm and smiling, but his eyes were roving the room. Barbary could see that Moll was disconcerted. Galloping Betty was regarding him with the suspicion accorded to those whose presence in the Pudding couldn’t be accounted for. She didn’t know who he was, and he worried her.
Keeping to the shadows so that the simpler shouldn’t lay eyes on him prematurely, Barbary moved quietly down the stairs. Down in the hall was somebody he wanted to speak to, someone he always wanted to speak to. Cuckold Dick’s arm came out from a darkness to pause him: ‘Got the cheats?’
‘Yes.’ He moved on. All things were ‘cheats’ in the Order. The canting – its language – reflected a profession in which nothing was what it seemed, a distrustful patois in which rings were famble-cheats, aprons belly-cheats, hats nab-cheats, pigs grunting-cheats, ducks quacking-cheats and a garden or orchard a smell-cheat.
Using the crowded tables as cover, Barbary moved close enough to listen in to Foll and her companion. The simpler was drunk and had got to the can’t-we-go-where-we-can-be-alone stage and Foll was countering with if-only-we-could-but-what-of-my-husband in her best never-been-unfaithful-before giggle. Barbary passed on; Foll was his favourite among the beauties, skilled in her trade. In half an hour she’d make her move. He whistled three notes as he slunk past to tell her that he and Cuckold Dick were ready to take their posts. Foll smiled into the simpler’s eyes.
Cautiously, Barbary reached his destination and slid onto the floor to sit beside his friend, Robert Betty. ‘Who’s the foreign cheat? He was marking you.’
‘He’s been marking everybody. I don’t know who he is.’ Robert wasn’t interested, being intent on a book. ‘Long says he’s a spy.’
‘Who for? Queer Cuffin?’ Queer Cuffin was the chief magistrate.
‘Dunno.’ Robert was getting irritable. ‘Long says he doesn’t know who the fokker is. Cut off, I’m reading.’
‘I’m going to read and all. The Jackman’s giving me lessons.’
‘What in? Ale swilling?’
The Jackman, an ex-monk, had received a pension after the dissolution of his monastery and had ever since been spending it on an attempt to dissolve his liver, an enterprise supplemented by forgery. Barbary devoted much of his lessons to sobering the old man up, but nonetheless the progress he made surprised them both
.
Barbary was aggrieved. ‘Oh, I forgot,’ he said, mincing, ‘you nosegents is so fokking pure.’
A nosegent was a nun, and the uniform worn by St Olave’s Grammar School in Southwark, where Robert Betty was a pupil, so closely resembled the habit once worn by monastics that it contributed to the hell the boy was enduring.
Robert’s large hands clamped round Barbary’s head and began banging it against the wall. ‘Say sorry.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Say sorry, my lord Robert.’
‘Sorry, my lord Robert.’ Robert was dangerous when he was angry, as he was now, and Barbary saw no virtue in pride or stoicism, especially if he was being hurt. Besides, the two of them were as close as brothers. Both were red-headed, though Robert’s was a darker, more respectable red than Barbary’s, and both were foundlings.
Robert was the elder and his life was the harder because he fought against it, loathing it, contemptuous of the Order, wanting better. His introduction to the Order had been the occasion of a quarrel between the Upright Man and Galloping Betty which had never properly been resolved. It was still legend among the Order members.
‘Our Betty’s big at the best of times,’ Cuckold Dick would say, ‘but, Barb, you should have seen her then.’ Cuckold Dick had played a commendable part in the story, which was why he retold it often. He it was who’d seen the red-gold cap in a mound of snow that winter’s day outside St Benet’s near Paul’s Quay. He didn’t really think it could be gold; miracles didn’t happen to Cuckold Dick. But he was an optimist. He went and pulled it out and found the red-gold cap to be hair, beneath which was the face, then the shoulders, then the arms, body and legs of a small child who was quietly getting on with the business of dying. What had kept it alive until then was the sheepskin jerkin and woollen trousers of good quality it was dressed in.
It was while Dick was searching the child for valuables that it began a weak crying and Dick, afraid the St Benet’s priest would come out and accuse him of something, shoved the child under his own jerkin and took it to the Pudding to continue the search in comfort.
Being early still, the only person downstairs was the Upright Man and on being consulted he’d immediately suggested cutting the child’s left hand off.
‘There was logic in it, Barb,’ Dick would say anxiously. ‘Like he said, the kinchin was dying anyway. Relieve it of its left famble and it could only die the quicker. But if it should survive – and we was going to lavish care on it, Barb – then think what a career would be open to it.’
There was no doubt about that. A begging, handless child attracted sympathy and more money; a begging, handless adult, purporting to be one of Elizabeth’s injured veterans, attracted money as a form of guilty reparation from those who knew how heartlessly such men were often abandoned. The Upright Man would take a big percentage of such earnings. But just then had sounded a thundering footstep in the gallery, a shriek, and downstairs came Galloping Betty shouting that the kinchin was her long-lost child who’d had red hair.
‘Well, Barb,’ Cuckold Dick would always say, ‘we all knows as how Galloping Betty has had kinchins in her time and lost most of ’em somehow or other, but this one was only about six or seven and she’d have been past childbearing long before.’
With his usual logic Upright Man pointed this out to Galloping Betty, backing the argument with blows. ‘Says he: “Go you, Dick, and get a carving knife and some pitch.” But I was held back by Galloping Betty swelling. She gets bigger like. You ever seen an oliphaunt, Barb? Nor me. But imagine one. Imagine something huge, then make it huger. She takes me round the neck and throws me against the wall and she takes the Man and throws him against the other and then she takes the kinchin and puts it in her bosom and challenges us to take it away from her. I wasn’t going to, Barb, I can tell you that. And the Man wasn’t either. Says he: “Your long-lost kinchin, eh? Have it and the ruffian cly thee.”’
Slowly warmed to life in Galloping Betty’s bosom, then fed on meat rendered to a pap by Galloping Betty’s own gums, the child had lived to be illegally baptised by the Jackman, taking the surname Betty from his acknowledged mother and the Christian name Robert after the Earl of Leicester for whom, having seen him once in a procession, Galloping Betty had a romantic fondness.
Nobody showed much curiosity about what circumstances had brought a little boy near to death in a snowdrift. For one thing, Order etiquette frowned on questions about its members’ pasts, a delicacy so deeply ingrained that it was even extended to children. For another, London was littered with abandoned children, some whose parents had come to try and find work in the city and died of its diseases, some whose fathers had gone to the wars, leaving them with mothers unable to feed them. Then again, Galloping Betty had discouraged speculation. She had woven her own provenance for young Rob, a hazy myth in which he’d freed himself from kidnappers to return to her, his true mother, and if anybody felt this version lacked a certain authenticity they weren’t about to say so.
If young Rob himself remembered much of his early years, he didn’t discuss it. Barbary knew that for a long time he suffered from nightmares and gathered that, however much he hated the Order, life within it was still preferable to what had gone before. The acquisition of a child in her dotage brought satisfaction to Galloping Betty, but the Upright Man didn’t forgive Robert for his humiliation and did not fail to abuse him verbally and physically whenever he got the chance. The rest of the Order would have been more tolerant of the boy if he’d met them halfway, but as he grew up he became surly and treated both them and their way of life with contempt. The only cheating he showed talent for was at cards, leading some to believe that perhaps he had indeed originated among the gentry. Others said Galloping Betty spoiled him. This she did to such an extent that when the boy made the outrageous suggestion that he receive schooling, she had blackmailed one of her customers who was on the board of St Olave’s Grammar School into including Robert among its yearly quota of pupils from the ranks of the ‘respectable poor’. Being a late pupil, older than the others and with an inadmissible background, Robert was an outcast there as well. But he persisted in his studies, knowing that they were his only passport to a different and better life.
Apart from Galloping Betty, the only person who loved him was Barbary. Surviving childhood together had given them insights into each other’s character available to nobody else and Barbary knew that the outwardly taciturn, surly Robert had an adventurous, amused and amusing side to his spirit.
Left to himself, Barbary wouldn’t have questioned the Order training; it was what he knew, he was good at it. It enabled him to take on protective colouring that avoided trouble, and avoiding trouble was as much as Barbary asked of life. In his opinion, Robert’s rebellion against it was perverse, a kicking against the pricks, but at the same time he recognised that perversity as admirable, even exotic. And Robert was the one living soul who knew and understood when Barbary ‘went into the cherubims’ and experienced those strange moments of feeling on seeing a ship or hearing music.
It was at such times that the words ‘Hug Adam, shun Eve’ came into his head, from far away. He’d asked everybody what they meant, but everybody had a different interpretation. The Jackman said it was a warning against sin.
Robert was similarly enraptured by ships, but his other passion was literature, especially poetry. He spent as much time as he could at the playhouses, having been shown by Barbary the various loose boards in their walls which allowed him in without paying.
As for ships, he explained to Barbary, they were magical to them both because they were transport out of the Order, to far-flung Cathay, to El Dorado, to gold, advancement and fame such as they had given to Robert’s heroes, Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh and Frobisher.
Their friendship had been of value to both; Barbary had cheated and stolen double in order to cover up Robert’s lacklustre performance, and in return Robert had expanded Barbary’s horizons. But now Robert was growing out of the alli
ance as quickly as he was growing out of his clothes – he was already a head taller than Barbary. His beard sprouted contempt at Barbary’s smooth chin and the breaking of his voice mocked Barbary’s persistent soprano. He had become a stranger. Frequently, as now, he repulsed Barbary’s presence.
Barbary’s response to hurt was to pretend to himself and everybody else that he didn’t feel it. ‘It don’t wet Barbary’s bib,’ he said with dignity – and indeed he had never been seen to cry for real – and moved off to join Cuckold Dick.
Later in the passageway between the Pudding and next door, Barbary changed into his chorister’s rig. Keeping out of sight with Cuckold Dick, he could hear Foll’s protestations titillate the simpler along the street to the trugging place, which tonight was to be the Upright Man’s house. ‘But, sir, if my husband should return… Hold yourself, sir, for you turn my head with desire. Oh, for my virtue that have been an honest wife till now…’ They heard the simpler puffing.
‘She’ll brim him too soon if she don’t watch it,’ whispered Barbary.
Dick, who’d crossbit more customers that the sea had herrings, shook his head. ‘Trust her.’
‘You ever been wed, Dick?’ asked Barbary, when the couple had gone into the house. Dick shook his head again – ‘Cuckold’ indicated his profession, not his marital status.
In the Upright Man’s house a bedroom door slammed, and on feet which avoided every squeak in the treads, Cuckold Dick and Barbary climbed the stairs and took up their station outside on the landing. Dick whispered: ‘No clinching, Barb, lessen it’s called for.’ It was the first rule of Order work: when possible keep your face in reserve for another day.
The Pirate Queen Page 4