Book Read Free

The Pirate Queen

Page 5

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)


  They could hear Foll squeaking and the grunting of the simpler. ‘Now, Dick,’ begged Barbary. He didn’t want poor Foll boarded.

  But Dick was an artist. ‘I told you and told you, Barb,’ he breathed, ‘give her time to get his prats bare. A simpler with his hose up’s still got advantage.’

  He pressed his ear to the door, swaying his hand like a choir conductor, then he gave a downbeat, pulled in a breath and lifted the latch. ‘I’m home, my dear. Why, what goes on?’

  Peeking through the gap between the door hinges, Barbary saw the simpler’s hoisted flag go into immediate droop. Cuckold Dick was as superb as ever, moving from surprise to outrage to incoherent anger. Foll adjusted her bodice and sat firmly on the man’s clothes. Sometimes they made a run for it.

  But this one, now that he’d got over his first shock, was protesting. He hadn’t known the lady was married, she’d led him on.

  Barbary adjusted his wig. A clincher was called for. He pattered into the room. ‘What is the rumpus, Father? Who is this gentleman? Has he attacked Mother?’

  The sight of the bewildered angel, a chorister like his own son – a fact Foll had marked when he’d boasted of it – pierced the simpler with its innocence. The poor lad was tugging at his father’s sleeve, as his own boy had done a thousand times. ‘Shall we report him to the Arches, Father?’ Mention of the Arches, the episcopal court where adultery was punished, and publicised, broke the simpler into a sweat. From then on he was wax.

  Cuckold Dick was difficult to pacify. Did the gentleman think his honour as a husband could be bought off by a man who’d dishonested his wife? But gradually, as more and more coins clinked out of the simpler’s pockets – Foll, who’d been through them, knew when to give the signal they’d been emptied – it appeared that it could.

  The simpler finally made his escape, poorer but of purer resolve. Behind him the broken family wiped its eyes. ‘As nice a bite as I ever saw,’ said Cuckold Dick, ‘and deserving of a drink all round. Better get out of them cheats first, Barb. Just in case.’

  When Barbary got down to the street, Robert Betty was waiting for him. ‘I need the neck-cheat, Barb. I’m sharping fish tonight.’

  ‘Where?’ Robert had begun to go outside the Bermudas to play his card games instead of enticing his victims onto home ground and Barbary thought it unnecessarily risky.

  ‘None of your business. Give.’

  Barbary handed the necklet over. It had always been their communal, secret property and had proved itself valuable as a lure in their gaming, earning them extra money that they appropriated for themselves.

  ‘You’re a good fellow, Barb. Beneship.’ Although he couldn’t see his face, Barbary could tell that by relapsing into the abhorred slang of the Order, Robert was apologising for his bad temper.

  As he watched the tall figure go off down the street, Barbary saw that even Robert’s gait was no longer the Order’s. Unless they were cony-catching or versing, Order members never walked like confident men and women; they kept to their toes so they could make a dash for it. But Robert’s boots clicked with arrogance, like the gentry’s. Nor was he aping. It was as if he were returning to a natural style that was true to his personality. ‘Whoever spawned you, lad,’ thought Barbary sadly, ‘she wasn’t one of us.’

  He was turning once more into the Pudding when a movement caught the edge of his eye and he looked back. A shadow was following Robert. When Robert turned out of the street, the shadow turned off as well. Barbary trotted silently in the direction they’d taken. Unless he was mistook, the cove who’d been marking Robert in the Pudding was still marking him. ‘And what are you up to, barnacle?’ wondered Barbary. If Robert didn’t want even his best friend to know where he was going, he certainly wouldn’t want a stranger in on the secret.

  Whoever the barnacle was, he’d followed people before. He was softly shod and he timed his footfalls to coincide with Robert’s. Behind him, Barbary timed his to coincide with the barnacle’s. Like different-sized dolls controlled by the same puppet master, the three figures moved in concert, each twenty yards apart and heading west.

  Because of the pace Robert was setting, they were all going at a lick and it wouldn’t be long, Barbary realised, before they were out of the Bermudas. He must act fast. At the next corner he turned off the route the others were taking and pelted down Cutty’s Lane into Fenner’s Yard, whistling shrilly as he went.

  Out of dark doorways figures emerged and followed him. Immediate response to the emergency summoning by one of its members was one of the strictest rules of the Order. ‘Rob Betty’s got a barnacle,’ puffed Barbary as he ran. ‘Pick it off him, but no ruffling.’ He squinted down Caspar Cut to his left and saw Robert pass its mouth at the other end, followed twenty seconds later by his shadow. ‘We can get him just afore Long Acre.’

  Robert Betty, still unconscious of what was going on at his rear, stepped into Long Acre via Lamb Court. Behind him the barnacle attempted to do the same, but pillars which had not been there before sprouted across the court’s exit. In the poor light they were man-shaped effigies, unmoving, unspeaking, and they did not resemble the sort of men anyone would want to meet of a dark night in a dark alley.

  The barnacle paused and looked around, but similar pillars had sprouted at his back. He stepped to one side to pass through the obstruction, but one of the pillars moved to block his way. The barnacle spoke sharply, though there was a crack in his voice: ‘Let me pass. I am an officer of the State.’

  ‘Are you, now,’ thought Barbary to himself. ‘And what does the State want with Rob Betty, I wonder?’ He did his wondering in the doorway of the Lamb and watched the impasse at the mouth of its court. The click of Robert’s footsteps had faded in the direction of Drury Lane and silence had descended, except for the scuffle of a rat along the edges of the buildings and the shuffle of the barnacle as he tried a feint through the pillars and was stopped once more.

  At last Barbary whistled the ‘all clear’ and the pillars stopped being pillars and scattered, leaving the court to the barnacle and the unseen Barbary, who saw the barnacle’s shoulders sag in relief then square as he looked around. At last the man gained sufficient control over his legs to set off again and he ran into Long Acre like a hound trying to retrieve a scent. Barbary watched him cast about and listen, lose hope, and, finally, take the decision to go home.

  ‘And we’d better con where that is, my little State barnacle, hadn’t we?’ Soundlessly, Barbary loped after him.

  Encountering the pillars of Order society had shaken the barnacle’s nerve so that he kept glancing behind to see if they pursued him. Only an expert could have followed him without discovery. Barbary was that expert and the challenge to his skill made the pursuit through sleeping London a joy to him. He danced it. The heat of the day had ameliorated into a light warmth that welcomed the movement of his body through it. Stenches were such a natural part of the air that Barbary’s nose didn’t register them, though it twitched appreciatively at a window box of night-scented stocks as he froze into its shadow to avoid a glance from over the barnacle’s shoulder. His mind used the currents of the night to extend itself into the barnacle’s brain so that he could sense through them when the barnacle would look round and when he wouldn’t, giving Barbary the impression that he controlled the man.

  Omnipotence surged through him. He was a hunter, a cat allowing free play to a doomed mouse. He could track the stars to their hiding place in the firmament and they’d never know it. Did the queen think she governed London? Not tonight. Tonight she had abdicated in favour of Barbary of the Order who could stop men in their tracks when he wanted and release them at a whistle.

  ‘Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est,’ the Jackman had told him once. If Barbary couldn’t remember the Latin, he retained the sentiment. Knowledge is power. There was no one in this quiet city who knew it like Barbary, whose feet had traced every inch of it. He was its king. That barnacle before him, did he know that in this very Shoe
Lane along which they were passing, a jump from the steps of Miller Smith’s house could take you onto a first-storey windowsill and another would set your arms round a protruding pole of a sack hoist which enabled you by a swing of your legs to surmount the gable and reach the roof? He did not. Earthbound and nervous, the poor barnacle continued east and north while Barbary soared from leads to ridgepole across the roofs, occasionally hanging upside down to make faces only a few feet above the barnacle’s head.

  If proof were needed that the barnacle didn’t know his way well, they were now heading for Clerkenwell, which could have been reached ten minutes earlier. Peeking over the eaves of the Turk’s Head, Barbary saw the man pause to get his bearings and then make for Turnmill Lane, stop before a narrow-fronted house and knock on it, da-da-dit-dit-dit. ‘Signal,’ thought Barbary. ‘What a secret little barnacle you are.’ A series of leaps and clambers took him to the roof of the house. He heard its door’s bars being drawn and the creak as it opened. He waited for a password but to his disappointment there was none. The door closed, leaving the street below him empty. He spent some time crawling from window to window, but they were securely shuttered and he could hear nothing. Whose house was this? The barnacle’s? The man’s hesitation made it unlikely. Then whose? He could find out. Although this was well outside the Bermudas, there would be some member of the Order who knew. But he would leave his enquiries until tomorrow. ‘Done your duty for tonight, Barb.’

  He was suddenly exhausted, all power gone. A misery enveloped his back and he felt unusually weighted. He climbed down a lead pipe to reach the ground and set off home, aware that he had a long way to go and lacked the energy for it.

  Like many Order members, Barbary lived outside the Bermudas. He had bolt holes where he could pass a night, often without the occupants’ knowledge, all over the city, but only one place he could truly call home, and if he was falling ill – and he felt he was – home was where he must be; a sick animal was vulnerable outside its lair.

  The problem lay in that his home was on the south side of the river. Barbary knew ways across the Thames which did not involve paying a toll – over London Bridge, under it, hanging illegally onto the painter of a ferry, he’d even swum the river – but they involved an effort which tonight he could not spare. He trudged his way down to the river and then along it, waiting for inspiration. With a shock he realised that the time was the early hours of a new day; there would be no movement on the river this side of the bridge until dawn, and he couldn’t wait until then, he was feeling iller by the minute. Pain was dragging at his lower stomach.

  Then he remembered a profession whose members used the river in the early hours. A dubious profession, like his own; the Upright Man had once said it ought to be incorporated into the Order. Wearily Barbary forced his legs into a run which took him past the old Blackfriar’s monastery and into the wilderness of wharves and quays which lay beyond it. Sure enough, from one of them, dark-clad, dark-visaged men and boys were preparing to launch their barge.

  ‘Give us a crossing, master,’ begged Barbary of their chief.

  The man hit out at him without a glance in his direction. ‘Edge off, fuck-beggar,’ he said. Men of his line were not renowned for their honeyed tongue, but this was particularly offensive to Barbary.

  ‘Set yourself this riddle, Barb,’ he said aloud. ‘When does an empty collier set off from north of the river in darkness? And when is thirty sacks made fifty-six? And would the Cuffin like to know the answer?’

  He rose on his toes, prepared to run, as the man looked round. The answer to his riddle was that only false colliers set off in empty barges from the north bank to cross to the south during the day’s earliest hours. There they met the true colliers, the charcoal burners from the country, and bought them out, committing the indictable offence of cornering the market. They returned across the river before dawn and re-sacked the coal, filling the bottom of the sacks with dross and only the mouth with good pieces. Adopting the accent and dress of countrymen they then went through the suburbs, selling to the citizenry measures of two and a half bushels of coal dressed up as four. As Barbary had indicated, magistrates were keen to question such men.

  Barbary whistled the Order notes while the collier considered his position. Colliers might not belong to the Order, but they were sufficiently on its fringes to recognise its signal and to know, therefore, that they were dealing with a person of consequence.

  The collier snarled defeat: ‘Get in.’

  Barbary crossed the river perched on the stern, well away from the rowers amidships. He chatted to the steersman, the chief collier’s son, who was an acquaintance of his and whose eyes were frequendy blacked by more than coal dust.

  A lantern was lit once they got to the south bank and as Barbary was clambering ashore, his acquaintance asked: ‘Someone prick you in the prats, Barb? There’s blood on your trews.’

  Barbary rubbed his rump. ‘Got in a ruffle,’ he said, ‘and sat on the bleeder’s head.’

  He swaggered until he was out of the colliers’ sight and then he began to moan. Pain had come back to his stomach redoubled, but it was agony of mind that made him cry out: ‘I never thought it. God, God, what shall I do now?’ His voice shifted unseen waterfowl in the lush, soggy-based undergrowth and brought a duck flying out of the reeds, but no comfort from God or man, for this part of Lambeth Marshes was an empty place, as yet no more than partially drained and home to only water-fowlers and outcasts. The few hard paths that ran through it were obscured by August grasses, but Barb’s feet knew them of old and carried him mechanically along their tortuous routes towards a slight rise in the landscape where a rushlight burned steadily in the window of a hut, beckoning him home.

  Retching with pain, Barbary lurched through the open door and flung himself on the figure which stood inside, knocking it off the balance of its only leg. ‘Get off, will you?’ it said as it clutched the wall, but Barbary put his head on the man’s chest and panted with humiliation and pain.

  ‘Will, oh God, what am I going to do? The monthlies are come upon me. I don’t want ’em. I’m finished. Oh Will, they hurt.’

  Will Clampett’s face became remote, more through embarrassment than surprise. Barbary might not have been expecting the monthlies, but obviously Will had made preparation for their arrival. Disentangling himself, he went to a shelf, took down some tolerably clean linen strips, handed them to Barbary, stumped to the leather curtain which separated Barbary’s sleeping quarters from the rest of the hut, lifted it and pointed. Like a dog commanded to its basket, Barbary crawled onto her straw paliasse. The leather curtain swung back into place. A few minutes later it was lifted again and Will handed in a beaker of foul-smelling dark liquid. After that Barbary was left alone.

  There would be no further reference to her menstruation. In referring to it at all, Barbary had broken a house rule. Will Clampett would, on rare occasions, discuss firearms, gunpowder, ballistics, metallurgy, the weather, and even, when pressed, their financial situation. Everything else was ‘personal’ and therefore taboo. Barbary knew the situation, had expected nothing more, but it did little to relieve her loneliness, just as the vile concoction in the beaker didn’t do much for her stomach cramps.

  She squirmed out the night in oppressive heat and pain, but most of all at the prospect of a future which was, it seemed, to be dominated by a ruthless and totally disbelieved femininity.

  Chapter Three

  As far as Barbary was concerned, she had been born seven years old.

  She had no recollection of time further back than that and only possessed four bits of knowledge about it. That her nationality was probably Hollandish. That she was an orphan. That Will Clampett had found and adopted her while he was a soldier serving Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in the Low Countries. That she had suffered brain fever which had wiped the slate of her previous memory clean.

  She’d come into possession of these slender facts only as she had become older and even then at
the rate of one a year on the annual night when Will got drunk. It was always 8 November and he always got drunk. He was a temperate man for the rest of the year, but on 8 November he got drunk. Barbary didn’t know why, and she hated it. It wasn’t that Will got nasty drunk like the Upright Man, or silly drunk like Cuckold Dick, or incapable drunk like the Jackman, but he became amenable to the extent where he would answer a personal question, and Barbary was always in terror of what the answer to it might be but was compelled to ask it anyway.

  She wasn’t sure he told her the truth even then. When she’d asked him why she couldn’t remember her past and he had said: ‘Brain fever. Wiped your memory clean,’ he had been wrong. The brain fever, if she’d had brain fever, had wiped nothing, but it had set up a wall of fog in her mind between her life with Will and everything that had happened previously. Behind the fog was something so appalling that her hands sweated whenever circumstances forced her to approach it. ‘Don’t ask,’ Will had told her from the very first, nor had she wanted to. Being in the Order, where nobody asked questions about anybody’s past, was a help. Nevertheless there were occasions when the sheer untidiness of being without origin irked her into trying to discover it.

  ‘Where’d you find me, Will?’ she’d asked, on 8 November three years previously. Will’s head lolled as his eyes roamed the cottage looking for something to fix on and found it in the kettle. ‘Low Countries,’ he said. It had been a relief in being unexpected. She didn’t feel Low Country. That would do for one year. She switched the subject to Will’s own past, which was nearly as big a mystery to her as her own. ‘That where you got your ammunition leg, Will?’

  Will Clampett’s loss of his right leg, she knew, occurred when a cannon he was sighting blew up in a war. He’d never told her which war, whether it was land or sea or what.

 

‹ Prev