The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  It was still early morning but the sun already flexed its muscles to pour down the heat that was turning the Thames sluggish and the city unbearable. Apart from the banging guns in the distance it was quiet in the marshes, ducks and moorhens having taken their broods out of sight into the reeds. She’d be hot in the velvet cap, the velvet doublet and woollen hose she’d chosen to wear today. She’d hooked the entire outfit from a fuller’s clothesline in Westminster back in her curbing days and kept it for best. The only reason she wore it now was that its bunched knickers would hide the shape of the new encumbrance between her legs. Barbary paused and shook her fist towards heaven. ‘You and your poxy cousins,’ she shouted at it.

  Her patience was further tried in Southwark as she approached the bridge to see the usual queues of carts and people waiting to get on to it; not as bad as on a weekday, but bad enough. For the thousandth time Barbary wished that Will Clampett’s professional pursuits were less explosive and didn’t require living in an area which disadvantaged hers. The bridge was undoubtedly one of the great wonders of the world; nowhere else, said Londoners proudly, did a bridge of similar scale span so wide a river as the Thames. But its undoubtedly magnificent 350-yard length wasn’t the problem. It was its width. What with the houses which lined both sides of it, and the shops and stalls which lined the frontage of the houses, there were parts of its roadway that were less than twelve feet across, making it one of the world’s smallest bottlenecks into one of the world’s greatest cities. As the volume of traffic from the Continent across it increased every year, so did the congestion and the bad temper of the traders and foot passengers who used it. You could hear more blasphemy in more different languages on London Bridge than anywhere outside hell.

  Usually Barbary used one of her alternative routes across the river, but today she was reluctant to submit her best clothes to a wet, dirty boat or to the exercise involved in leaping across the starlings which supported the arches at river level.

  While she was pondering she was overtaken by a greater worry in catching sight of a stout, respectablelooking man emerging from the bridge. Cuckold Dick. He was so out of context that for a second she couldn’t remember who he was; to see him on this side of the bridge was as disconcerting to Barbary as it was to an adulterer when Dick burst in on him. Cuckold Dick was a city man and to set foot outside London’s walls made him so nervous that in all the years they’d known each other, Barbary had never seen him south of the river. He was mopping his face and looking around as if the population of Southwark might suddenly turn savage and blow poisoned darts at him.

  He sighed with relief when he saw her. ‘Bad news, Barb. There’s a seek-we out for Rob.’

  ‘A seek-we? For Rob? You mean Rob Betty?’

  ‘Shh.’ Dick dug Barbary in the ribs with his elbow. Like most of London he credited Secretary Walsingham with having spies everywhere. The official notifications that the State was seeking a malefactor were posted up in Paul’s churchyard and known as ‘seek-wes’ from their first two Latin words, ‘Si quis’, which further down the notice were translated into English: ‘If anyone knowing the whereabouts of…’ Their publication was reserved for top-class offenders like traitors or seditious priests. The most recent seek-we had demanded the handing over of the two recusants, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, who were on the run and spreading their Catholic doctrine from the shelter of sympathetic households throughout the country. Only a few days before, Campion had been captured at a house in Berkshire and was even now undergoing interrogation in the Tower.

  Dick and Barbary joined the queue for the bridge while he told her what he knew, using cant in case they were overheard. The seek-we had been posted up soon after dawn and within minutes news of it had reached the Bermudas and within minutes after that every member of the Order was searching for Robert Betty to warn him. The Order looked after its own.

  ‘No tour of him,’ Dick said. ‘Cut he libbed the dark-mans at your ken.’

  No, Barbary told him, he hadn’t spent the night at her place.

  ‘Why’d the cuffins smoke him? Has he contraried?’

  ‘Gerry gan,’ snapped Barbary. To go contrary was to turn traitor. Whatever the authorities suspected Rob Betty of having done, she’d stake her life he hadn’t betrayed queen or country. ‘He’s being barnacled though.’ She told Dick about the night’s doings as, at last, they crossed the bridge.

  ‘What like barnacle?’

  ‘Tall, lank, face to piss vinegar.’ Barbary summoned the man who had followed Robert Betty into her mind with absolute clarity and saw what hadn’t registered in the stress of following him. ‘Swipe me, Dick, he’s sevensided.’ The man was blind in one eye.

  They made straight for the Pudding-in-a-Cloth.

  On the morning after Saturday night revelry the Pudding usually displayed all the animation of a corpse, but this Sunday it thrummed with the activity Galloping Betty was stirring up in the search for her adopted son. Men and women who’d been out since after first light trying to get news of him were returning with what they’d learned, most of it negative. Robert had been keeping his comings and goings secret lately. But there had been one positive contribution.

  ‘Ap Powell says Rob’s been sharping at the Prancer down at Greenwich these past nights,’ Wilkin told Barbary and Cuckold Dick as they walked into the hubbub. ‘Could be he’s there yet. He ain’t in the City, never trust me.’

  Barbary pushed through to Galloping Betty. ‘I’ll go, Bet.’

  Galloping Betty was chastising Ap Powell for not telling her about her son’s movements before. ‘It’s not nice this, Barb,’ she grunted.

  ‘I know, Bet,’ Barbary said, soothingly. ‘We’ll get him safe. Let Ap go.’

  Betty glanced up at the man held suspended above her head. She chucked him down onto a table and dusted her hands. ‘You save him, Barb lad. You love him, same as me.’

  ‘I do, Bet. I will.’

  Betty stroked her light beard. ‘Come along of me,’ she said. They went upstairs together to Betty’s bedroom, a place of hanging samite and cobwebs which Betty, who had entertained Saracens in her time, called her ‘Hair-reem’. She shifted her massive, carved bed by one of its legs and raised the floorboard it had rested on. From the compartment underneath she took a leather bag. ‘Give him this. Swear on the Earl of Leicester and what guts I’ll pull out if you don’t.’

  Barbary swore on her guts and Robert Leicester.

  ‘Tell him to make for France till I can make all vitty again. I’ll send a message to Monshewer Pusher.’ The Order was partly international and M. Pousser of Calais supplied much of the Pudding’s smuggled wine. ‘Best for you to go by river.’ Betty let the bed drop back on the replaced floorboard and raised her voice so that it carried down the stairs and, for that matter, into Bermondsey: ‘Tell Walles I maund his fastest water-cheat.’

  Due to the state of the roads which carried heavy traffic to and from Greenwich, it was as quick to get there by river in a skiff as it was on a fast horse, and definitely less noticeable than passing through the tollgates. Walles’s oarsmen bent their backs with the energy of men who had been told by Galloping Betty that the skin would be lifted off said backs if they didn’t. Walles himself was at the tiller to use to best advantage the currents and banks he knew like the back of his hand. Barbary slumped in the prow, for once unaware of the river life around her.

  If Robert Betty had been consorting with the sea captains who spent much of their shore time in Greenwich and Deptford overseeing the outfitting of their ships – and that, Barbary was sure now, was what he had been doing, in the hope of joining them – it might be that he had got into trouble, because the captains were sporadically in serious trouble themselves. Their policy was brutally simple: to win victory and wealth for their country, fame and riches for themselves. It was a policy which often ran counter to that of the queen, who had other considerations. ‘If you can call hers a policy,’ Barbary had heard one sea captain grumble. ‘More
like a veering bloody wind.’

  It was an erratic, fitful, blow-hot, blow-cold wind, praising a captain who raided Philip of Spain’s treasure ships one day, and the following week imprisoning another for doing exactly the same. Giving an order to sail in the morning and countermanding it that night. She wanted instant results from her fleet yet refused to pay for them, expecting ships to perform without victuals or crew, demanding daring, punishing rashness.

  And it was a wind they sailed close to. The radiance which had shone so recently on the golden, globe-circling Francis Drake had sent men like Raleigh, Frobisher and Hawkins mad to outdo him and into dangerous enterprises which might win or lose the queen’s favour, depending on their success. Frobisher had wagered his all on finding gold and the North-West Passage to Cathay. What he’d found was islands of ice and an ore which he’d thought was gold and had turned out to be pyrites. He was still in disgrace.

  When the queen had lifted the sword on Drake’s return, nobody had been sure whether it would knight him or strike off his head, so awful had been the insults he had offered to the Spanish during his circumnavigation. Elizabeth had no love for the Spanish, but she was not seeking war with them. Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to the English court, was still frothing at the mouth. But the Golden Hind’s cargo of a million and a half ducats made its captain a hero, not a pirate.

  It was likely, thought Barbary, that if Rob had been supping with gentlemen like these he hadn’t been using a long enough spoon.

  As they neared Deptford the business of the river enchanted her out of her worry. Ignoring the third commandment – all except the fishing boats, which encountered bad luck if they worked on a Sunday – sea-coal barges, a hulk carrying grain and timber from the Baltic, a wine balinger from Brittany tacked their way up to London against what little breeze there was before the tide ebbed.

  Past the southern end of the loop in the Thames formed by the Isle of Dogs they were opposite the Royal Dockyards. The slips held the skeletons of keels being built to new, streamlined specifications. A couple of old galleons were being stripped of their ornamental fore- and stern-castles and banked for a bigger broadside of guns. A huge, finished warship, one-hundred-foot keel and weighing 800 tons if she was an ounce, floated in the harbour with her sailless complexity of rigging like an aberrant spider’s web against the sky, dwarfing with her size and fresh paint the shabby little hundred-tonner alongside. But it was the small ship that was getting the attention. Battered, badly in need of caulking, she had rowing boats encircling her like wasps and her decks were black with sightseers.

  As one man, Barbary, Walles and his rowers uncovered their heads and doffed their caps to the Golden Hind.

  The mile from Deptford to Greenwich was lined with ships. ‘That old clout-head Philip saw this lot,’ Walles said, ‘he’d know he couldn’t beat us.’

  A few were preparing to sail, cannons banging and sailors whistling to tempt a fresher wind out of the sky. Barbary’s eye was caught by an unfamiliar red and green ensign hanging limply above the poop of a large schooner bearing the name St Barbara. ‘Whose is that?’

  Walles knew everything on the river; he stole his living from it. ‘Martin Frobisher’s boat, Antonio of Portugal’s ensign. Bound for the Azores to wipe the Dons of their gold.’ He tapped his forefinger against his nose. ‘Only we ain’t supposed to know it.’

  So Frobisher was trying to get back into the queen’s good books by raiding Spanish shipping from the Portuguese possession of the Azore Islands.

  The Azores, thought Barbary. Tropic islands. She populated them with travellers’ tales: palm trees, camels, apes and ivory, oliphaunts and mermaids. Would she go off with Frobisher if he asked her nicely to come and bask in the sun and wait for the Spanish plate fleet to pass by? Would she?

  He was asking her. ‘Barbary. Barb. Come aboard.’ He changed his mind. ‘No, I’ll come down to you.’

  There was a rope hanging from the ship’s taffrail and shinning down it was the seek-we’d Rob Betty, still shouting. He hung just above them by one arm, one bare foot clamped to the ship’s side, the other leg and arm splayed in welcome like a starfish. ‘Halloo, Barbary. Halloo, Wall.’

  ‘Drunk as a rat,’ muttered Walles. Barbary didn’t think so, though she’d never seen him like this; Rob was in a state of joy. He showed no surprise at their being there.

  ‘I’m cutting off, Barb. Frobisher’s taken me on. We’re sailing the Portugal-co to the Azores.’ He let himself down so that his feet rested on the thwart next to Barbary, but he clung fast to the rope, grinning at her with more warmth than she’d seen in weeks.

  ‘I’d have said goodbye but Frobisher decided too fast. We’re sailing to catch the tide.’

  Dumbly, Barbary handed him Galloping Betty’s leather bag. He stuffed it in his waistband, barely noticing it. ‘I’ve left a letter for Betty at the sign of the Prancer. Take it to her, there’s a lad.’ A thought struck him. ‘Come along of us, Barb.’

  An angry head stuck itself over the side of the ship and in broad Yorkshire a voice shouted: ‘You’re not on deck instanter, you rust-pated booger, I’ll cut t’bloody rope.’ Sheer happiness suffused Rob Betty. ‘Coming, my lord.’ Barbary watched him shin up the rope as fast as he’d shinned down. As he reached the taffrail he paused, clawed something from his neck and flipped it down towards the skiff. Barbary put out her hand and caught it. It was the necklet. She put it on. Rob waved and was gone.

  The skiff feathered itself out of harm’s way as the St Barbara moved slowly out into the river, towed by two pinnaces and with only a staysail set.

  ‘Didn’t tell him he was seek-we’d then,’ commented Walles. Barbary grimaced; in the turmoil of emotion at finding Rob and then seeing him go, perhaps for ever, she’d forgotten why she’d been searching him out in the first place.

  ‘Na,’ said Walles. ‘No time. Proper Scarborough’s warning that was. Asides, he can lie low as good in the Azores as France. Better. Earn himself some prize money.’

  She watched the ship limp down the river. Rob was leaving her behind; a relationship which had meant so much to her was being thrown off by Rob with the rest of his past. She was afraid of the pain she began to feel; if she gave way to grief, any sort of grief, some dam would breach and burst into a flood that would sweep her mind away. Wearily, she brushed the pain under a carpet. To be coped with later. His loss. He’d not wet Barbary’s bib. She spat grandly. ‘Stuff him. And his ship. She’s not the one I’m waiting for anyhow.’

  ‘Bring your arse to an anchor. Let’s make back.’

  In the gap left by the schooner they could see inshore to Greenwich village, huddled round the river edge of the palace grounds and consisting almost entirely of ship’s chandlers and inns. It reminded Barbary of Rob’s last request. ‘Better find the Prancer and get Betty’s letter,’ she said. ‘The lads want refreshment, Wall?’

  Walles shook his head. He wanted to get back to the Pool of London before dark, and in the matter of refreshment and his crew, one thing frequently led to another. ‘You cut along and get the letter and cut right back.’

  Wandering miserably along the quayside, Barbary checked the inn signs for one bearing the outline of a horse. The Nag’s Head. That would be the Prancer. Rob was still enough of an Order member not to call anything by its right name.

  She was making for the inn’s door when it became blocked by two tall figures, one thickset, the other thin. A thickset hand grabbed her shoulder and a thin hand tore her necklet off so roughly that it took some skin with it.

  ‘Red-headed, all right, never redder,’ said the thick one.

  The thin man was checking the necklet against some information written on a slate. ‘Gold.’ He bit at the metal. ‘Twisted ends. It’s him. Robert Betty, I detain you on the orders of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth.’

  ‘Get off,’ shouted Barbary, wriggling, ‘I’m not…’ She slumped. Jesus, it was serious if the queen was posting men at all the river ports in order to
arrest a young man with red hair and a gold necklet. So they’d got the wrong one, but if it was pointed out they’d got the wrong Robert Betty they’d go on looking for the right one. The rate the schooner was going, thought Barbary, they could still stop her at Tilbury. But if these shifters were kept busy over mistaken identity for an hour or two, Rob would be safely out to sea. She allowed her mouth to sag in bovine ignorance. ‘…guilty of nothing.’

  ‘That’s what they all say. Come along now, you’re coming back to town.’

  ‘The Bridewell?’ asked Barbary. She’d been in Bridewell before. And got out of it.

  ‘The Tower.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘In accordance to Her Matie’s wishes and your instructions, my lord,’ wrote Sir Owen Hopton, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower of London, to Lord Treasurer Burghley, ‘I have lodged the Prisoner Betty in the poor Princes’ Tower in accommodation such as to meet the comfort of a better sort of person. For, though I have held off as you stayed me in examination of him, the general enquiries such as are meet for all who enter here reveal him to seemeth a rapscallion of the lower orders with no knowledge of the Christian catechism nor deserving of it such as I am unused to lodging.

  ‘It pleased him to accuse your agents of mistaking him for this Robert Betty, saying he knows no person of that name and to offer me forty nobles for his release, whereof he assured me certain friends of his would bring it.

  ‘Your pleasure in all things, my lord, yet to expedite the examination and despatch of this person would be to the relief of your humble and most admiring servant, O. Hopton, Kt.’

  In effect Sir Owen Hopton was complaining that Prisoner Betty was lowering the tone of the Tower.

  The very name of the great, columned colossus crouching over the city might inspire fear in Londoners, but it was a royal palace even if the queen did not choose to stay in it, Her Majesty being sensitive that it was also the site of her mother’s execution; it was also an armoury, and the main barracks for the City soldiery, as well as a place of detention. Though its prisoners had been many and accused of various crimes, they had almost invariably been of good birth. Edmund Campion, he who was at this very moment receiving the attention of the Tower’s rack masters, might be an accursed massing priest, but he was lettered and courteous. Yet he was lodged in ‘Little Ease’, the worst cell in the dungeons, where a man could neither stand nor lie at full length, while a gutter rat barely speaking the queen’s English was lodged where royalty had been pleased to await their appointment with the block.