Will’s eyes squinted on the kettle. ‘Bastards,’ he said, a term he used not for the enemy he’d been fighting but for his own side. Will’s bitterness for his queen and country went deeper even than the average war veteran’s. He had lost his leg and, therefore, his peacetime job as a military ironfounder in Her Majesty’s service. Other men had been similarly wounded, similarly displaced; the Order was full of crippled beggars who railed against the promises of pension with which they had been waved off to war and which had proved so empty when they’d come hobbling back. But even these men cheered the queen’s appearances, responded to her war speeches by shouting for the enemy’s blood, sparkled of eye as they heard the fife and drum. Will didn’t.
‘Krap on the lot on ’em,’ he’d say. ‘Her and all,’ he’d add, referring to the queen with a hatred which shocked the patriotic Barbary. But what the hatred stemmed from Barbary had never been able to get out of him. He warned her off now by shaking an unsteady finger. ‘Business arrangement,’ he reminded her.
He always said that. Their relationship was based on a commercial contract. He’d helped her so she could help him. She’d needed a guardian, he’d needed a fetcher/carrier. If a customer ever asked: ‘How do you manage with one leg, my man?’ Will would grunt: ‘Got one more than you got, anyway.’ By which he meant that he had the use of Barbary’s.
Owing to his rudeness and the high price of the raw material from which he made his guns, customers were few. It was Barbary’s earnings they lived on mostly.
Barbary had been happy enough in her male role as a rising young member of the Order. She’d been happy enough with Will; their business arrangement had grown to mutual trust and eventually, though they never embarrassed themselves by showing it, affection.
There was even happiness behind the fog wall. She didn’t pursue it because she was afraid of awakening whatever hideousness lay there with it, but occasionally, usually when she heard music, there was a thinning of the mist, an insubstantial horizon formed itself from the sparkles of a turquoise sea and a voice said: ‘Hug Adam, shun Eve.’ Then the ship always came into view. It was of a type she had never encountered before, with fifteen pairs of oars and a lateen rig; she had looked for it, hoping it would sail up the Thames one day. When she’d enquired of it among sailors and captains and shipwrights, they had jeered at her description and said no such ship existed except in her imagination.
There had been one sailor, however, a Hanseatic, who’d nodded and said: ‘Ja, I saw one like dat once. Great galley, oarship and sail both. Big fokker tried to ram us.’
‘Where?’
The man had scratched his head to think, as if being nearly rammed was an everyday occurrence. ‘Barbary coast? Ja, Barbary coast. You stay ’way from dere, boy. Pirates. Big fokkers.’
‘That’s my name. Barbary.’
The sailor had laughed. ‘You ain’t no Barbar. You little red fokker. These big black fokkers.’
So she was no nearer.
In the beginning, Barbary had not so much chosen to be a boy as had boyhood thrust upon her. Will Clampett, ever uneasy with personal matters, among which he numbered everything to do with the female sex, had kept her for a year in the male clothes in which he had first found her, coping with her growth by cutting them where necessary and inserting crudely stitched patches. With equal lack of expertise he kept her hair cropped.
It was no blame to the Upright Man, therefore, when he looked into the cellar which was their residence – in those days they lived in the Bermudas – that he mistook the sex of the minute tatterdemalion he found there.
‘Just the article,’ the Upright Man said, and offered Will a penny for the use of his ward in a day’s begging. At the time Will was suffering from one of his recurrent bouts of ague and was too delirious to give or withhold his consent. It was a desperate Barbary – they hadn’t eaten for two days – who agreed, though even then, young as she was, she held out for a wage of two pennies.
On that day and all the days that followed, her instinct told her to keep her sex a secret. On the road the Upright Man urinated wherever he happened to be when the wish came upon him, and he told Barbary to do the same. ‘Get it out, boy,’ he grunted, getting his own out, ‘give it air,’ but she insisted on relieving herself in privacy. ‘Will says it’s a personal,’ she’d piped up when the Upright Man jeered at her. Although Will was a newcomer to the Bermudas, his taciturnity commanded respect, as did his skill making firearms, and the Upright Man was not prepared to offend him even while he scorned him for a ‘Puritan’, a term of which Barbary was ignorant, since Will either regarded religion as a personal or had none at all.
Barbary was a success as a kinchin co. The brightness of her hair combined with the white of her face to touch hearts and pockets. The Upright Man grumbled that they’d do even better if the boy lacked a famble and had a scar or two, but Will thundered ‘No’ when it was put to him, so Abraham contented himself by smearing the child’s hands and legs with noxious substances like crushed rose-hips, which caused scratching which in turn caused bleeding and had to do.
As she grew older and was drawn deeper into the Order, Barbary blessed the childish intuition which had hidden her sexual organs from the Upright Man. Abraham in his own words was ‘partial to ’em younger’ which meant he frequently pre-empted his droit de seigneur over the nubile girls in his section of the Order and raped them before they reached puberty. His predilection was for the defenceless and since he occasionally buggered the more effeminate and frightened among the boys – he’d been known to look lustfully on good-looking goats – Barbary developed aggression as protective colouring.
Being inarticulate, the Upright Man was daunted by words, so Barbary’s language became foul and fluent. While giving her chief no reason to complain of her as an Order member, she showed him she was unafraid by impudence. She swaggered, she boasted, she hawked and spat in a caricature of male bravado. She flirted with the bawds.
She backed all this up by becoming proficient in the art of self-defence. There was no lack of experts to learn from. By the age of ten Barbary could throw a knife and skewer a bumblebee from twenty paces. She knew which part to press on a man’s neck to render him unconscious, and which bit between his legs, when kicked, rendered him temporarily useless. Best of all, she knew how to avoid the situations in which these skills became necessary.
Gradually this second, male, nature overtook whatever her real nature might have been and enlarged it. Boyhood conferred the freedom of London on her. She could go where she pleased, released from the lacings and petticoats which cramped other girls’ bodies.
Having broken all the rules with success, she had come to believe there were no rules. Whoever governed the universe, Barbary thought, when she thought about it at all, she could cheat it like she cheated everyone else. There’d be an escape from the laws of nature as there were ways of escaping the laws of man. The tidal governments on women, ‘having the cousins come to stay’ as the bawds called menstruation, must surely pass her by. From the beginning of her time in the Order, she had seen how vulnerable to invasion the female body was. She had heard Goll die in agony after one of Galloping Betty’s abortions. She had watched Coll degenerate from a potential beauty to a tired old woman of sixteen, dragging kinchin around the streets. There’d be an exception in Barbary’s case, bound to be. They wouldn’t wet Barbary’s bib. She would go on as she was until she’d risen high in the Order and could kick the Upright Man’s arse for him.
Tonight she knew there was no exemption. She’d been nabbed by the celestial Queer Cuffin who’d put out His hand and imposed this humiliating and bloody torture on her. Sentenced her to life.
By morning the pain had lessened, and Barbary’s mind ranged its new prison, like the bear in the pit at Southwark, nosing for a way out. She could go on as she was; pad those stubs of breasts she’d pretended hadn’t been developing. Get away with it. But for how long? How long before her beardless face became a joke?
Yet there were beardless men. The Jackman was one. Get away with it, get away with it, get away.
For the first time she tried to envisage life outside the Order. Staying in it as a woman was a thought to make her retch. But was it better outside? Barbary squinted into a store of knowledge gathered from observation of market women, poor hard-working sluts that they were, women whose purses she had filched in her cut-purse days, gossip from servants about their mistresses with their forced marriages and their child-bearing and their disagreeable husbands, and decided that there wasn’t much to offer her there either.
The only person she’d liked to have been was the Rome-Mort, Queen Elizabeth herself. ‘And they ain’t going to offer you that position, Barb.’
Well, what?
Dawn came through the leather curtain of her chamber and with it Will’s voice: ‘You going to stay there all day?’
‘What if I am?’ yelled Barbary. If womanhood was going to be as enervating as this, she might keep to her bed for ever. Krap on the lot of them. But she got up because she was uncomfortable and hungry.
She went out into the yard at the back of the cottage and cranked up a bucket from the well which went down to a sweeter spring of water than the cattle-trampled streams which ran through the surrounding marshes. She poured some into a ewer for the day’s needs and the rest into a bowl so that she could wash out her blood-soaked clout. ‘Fokking cousins,’ she swore as she washed. ‘How long do you come to stay?’ She had no idea how long the bleeding could be expected to continue; it occurred to her that it would look odd if, in her male persona, she even asked. She wondered if Will knew, decided he didn’t and, anyway, would regard the matter as a personal.
In the distance the late dawn chorus of guns reminded her that it was Sunday, when the good went to church and wildfowlers came to the marshes to kill birds and make the marsh-dwellers’ lives miserable. For years Parliament had tried to stem the use of handguns by increasingly querulous statutes. In Henry VIII’s day it had been feared that Englishmen would forget how to use the longbow. Penalty £10 fine. More recent Acts had recognised that the handgun was here to stay but had tried to prohibit the use of hail shot, partly because it was wasteful and killed more birds than a man could eat at any one time, partly because it killed nearly as many Englishmen by accident, but mainly because it required no marksmanship. As the latest statute said: ‘It utterly destroyeth the certainty of shooting which in wars is most requisite… therefore shall no person under the degree of Lord in Parliament shoot in any place any hail shot or any more pellets than any one at a time.’
This prohibition was no more effective than its predecessors. All degrees of Englishmen, or all those who could afford a gun, came to the marshes to spray pellets like animated pepperpots. Their aim was generally awful. ‘Shooting birds that died last summer,’ as Will described it.
On this one matter Will took the side of the government. Hail shot was unscientific. The wildfowlers’ guns were more likely to injure them than the ducks. Not usually a cruel man, he took vengeful satisfaction on the quite frequent occasions when a wildfowler, bleeding from a missing nose or finger, was helped home by his fellows along the path past Will’s cottage, the man’s gun having blown up on him. ‘You get your money back,’ Will would shout after them, ‘and use a better gunsmith.’
Will’s handguns never blew up. The ones he’d made for Barbary and himself lacked the ornamentation so beloved by wildfowlers – ‘tarts’ guns’ Will called those, with their chasing and inlays – but seven times out of ten the ball they expelled hit what it was aimed at. Will used good metal when he could get it, bored the barrels to perfect straightness, measured out the powder for his cartridges with meticulous care and ensured that each lead ball coming out of the mould he had made himself weighed exactly the same as the last.
Widow Dawkins, the woman who came in every now and again in an attempt to clean up their cottage and get Will to marry her, urged him continually to make his fortune as a gunsmith. ‘Advertile yourself,’ she nagged in her thick Bristolian accent. ‘Stop living in this squalol.’
Will would do neither. Handguns were no more his interest than self-advertisement. It was true he was working on a mechanism he was going to call the ‘Clampett snaphaunce’ which would improve the wheel-lock gun by doing away with the use of pyrites, but that was only because the Upright Man was paying him to invent a gun which didn’t give the user’s position away at night by the glow of its match, as the wheel lock did.
All science fascinated Will. Whenever Barbary heard that there was to be a scientific lecture at Paul’s or the Exchange she told Will and Will went to listen, whatever its subject, mathematics, calculus, chemistry, navigation, bookbinding, drainage.
What distressed him was the lack of scientific thinking in the field he knew best, ordnance. For Will’s true love was the cannon, a passion Barbary regarded as odd, considering that it was a cannon that had deprived him of a leg.
‘The Italians is scientific about artillery,’ he said, ‘while we’m still hittin’ and missin’, mostly missin’.’ The out-of-date attitude of the English militarists bothered him. Their tradition of chivalry considered close combat more honourable than long-range bombardment. They had even persuaded the queen against giving the profession of gunmakers its own charter.
In Will’s opinion any other form of armament had been redundant for more than a hundred years, ever since the walls of Constantinople had fallen to the guns of Sultan Mohamet II.
There was no patriotism in Will’s desire to see cannons improved, merely an angry conviction that improvement was possible and just wasn’t being attempted. He had taken the search for cannon betterment on himself. Lacking a foundry, he made small-scale models in his forge. Their cottage floor was a battlefield of miniature bombards, culverin, basilisks and falcons, all of them workable, though some better than others. One of the reasons Will and Barbary had left the Bermudas for the open spaces of Lambeth Marshes was because Will insisted on testing each piece, and though the resulting explosions were small they had inspired hostility from his neighbours.
‘Unscientific buggers,’ Will had grumbled when their landlord had acceded to complaints and evicted them.
Loyally, Barbary stood up for her guardian against Widow Dawkins’ attacks on the state of their cottage.
‘“Squalol?”’ she would imitate. ‘This ain’t squalor, you old bat,’ Barbary disliked Widow Dawkins and Widow Dawkins disliked Barbary, ‘this is scientific.’
Comfortless was the better word. A table and two stools were the only concessions to human need on view, everywhere else was a clutter of metal. Retorts, scales, measures, quadrants, astrolabes, globes, hammers, borers, chisels, pipes, wires, pulleys, a still – for 8 November – moulds, ingots stood everywhere, giving the impression of an untidy potting shed petrified.
Such cooking as they did, which wasn’t much, was carried out in the forge Will had built in the barn next door. Not for Will and Barbary the bread oven which warmed similar cottages, nor the homely cluck of hens. If they needed bread they bought it, if they wanted eggs they took them from the nests of wild duck and geese, if they had an urge for poultry they shot it.
But it wasn’t squalor. Barbary knew squalor: she worked in it. Squalor was the Upright Man. Squalor was what the bawds were forced to. She accepted squalor as part of the Order, which was pan of the order of life, but that she could recognise it for what it was came from living with Will Clampett. When she heard preachers extolling ‘cleanliness of the spirit’, Barbary was reminded not of saints, or virginity, or heaven, but of the untidy, rusted, be-metalled cottage in the scruffy Lambeth Marshes. There was cleanliness. When she entered it she left behind the cupidity, lust and foolishness she traded in and climbed onto an island of such purity that, familiar as it was, it remained perpetually exotic.
It contained things she couldn’t cheat, a situation she found intriguing. Here was the honesty of mathematics. Here she e
xperienced moments that equalled the most perfect crossbite in mental satisfaction. Here were eternal truths which could be proved, as when Will had helped her to understand Pythagoras’ theorem of the circle. Here she became one of the few people in England who knew that a cannon ball did not shoot out in a straight line and then fall down, but that it performed a parabola. Barbary might be having trouble learning to read, but she was aware that a cannon’s maximum range was obtainable at an angle of forty-five degrees. Even greater for the expansion of her mind, which tended to believe that foreigners couldn’t teach Englishmen anything, was the knowledge that it was an Italian mathematician, Tartaglia, who had discovered these things.
‘He had main silly notions,’ Will told her, ‘and he had great ones. That old Eyetalian invented the gunner’s quadrant.’
So divorced from everyday life was the purity of Will’s world, the only purity she knew, that Barbary at no point connected it with killing people. Neither did Will. Guns that blew up were what killed people, or took off their legs. Better guns were scientific.
‘I’m cutting off, Will,’ Barbary called now, and went out. She never told Will where she was going or why, and Will never asked. He disapproved of the Order, although most of the money for his experiments came from Barbary’s activities in it as well as the present patronage of the Upright Man.
There was lots to do. The Dummer was ring-falling at Paul’s, where the service attracted crowds, and she’d promised to mark for him. The tinder box she’d prigged from the conies at Lincoln’s Inn needed getting rid of; she’d have to do some strong bargaining with Dowzabell to get a proper price for it. First, though, was Robert Betty. Tell him he was being marked; find out who his barnacle was.
She was uneasy about that barnacle. A mere magistrate’s man they could deal with, but if the barnacle was an agent of the State, like he said, then a new and heavy element had entered the Bermudas and with it overtones of the rack.
The Pirate Queen Page 6