Sir Owen received a prompt reply from Lord Burghley, but little satisfaction. Reduced to essentials, it said that Prisoner Betty could stay where he was and sweat it out. It gave no indication of what, if anything, Prisoner Betty was accused of, nor how long his sweating must continue. Knowing the many burdens the Lord Treasurer was carrying, Sir Owen feared it might be a long time.
The governor was right. Physically, Barbary had never known such luxury, hadn’t dreamed it existed. She had privacy, so she could go on concealing her sex. Her room was small but wood-panelled, with a four-poster bed and a mattress, though no other bedding. Underneath the bed was a chamber pot which a woman servant, accompanied by the keeper, took away to empty and returned every morning. There was a chest for clothes, a table and stool, an aumbry in the wall which contained a bowl and pitcher. No fireplace, but a brazier, unlit. The window was minute and high and she had to stand on the stool to see out of it to the yard below, but it was glazed and the view was of a well-kept green where richly varied men and women passed to and fro. Food came regularly; bread and ale for breakfast, a hot meal in the afternoon which, if it wasn’t of the highest quality, knocked the spots off anything Will Clampett had ever cooked.
But there were bars inside the window and the room’s door was locked. It was a cell. Unscalable walls and gates, rearing buildings, vertical drawbridges, iron and stone made a monstrous Chinese puzzle of which her body in this small room was the centre. Something stirred behind the mist in Barbary’s mind as she was thrust in and heard the key turn on her for the first time. This was out of her class; she couldn’t cope with it, it was too big, too grave, too reminiscent of something evil that dodged just beyond the edge of her memory. She couldn’t cheat this.
Panting, she controlled herself. ‘Battle the watch, Barb.’ She’d give it three days and then she’d tell them she wasn’t Robert Betty. He’d be far beyond their grasp by then. Friendship could demand no more.
One thing sustained her; the Order knew where she was. The seven-sided barnacle and his mate had brought her to the Tower by river and she’d seen Walles’s skiff follow them all the way. She doubted whether even the Order could procure an escape from the Tower, but it made her feel less isolated.
She used cheek to ameliorate her terror. Standing on the stool with her nose to the bars of the window she called familiarly to anyone crossing the green within her vision, or sang them dubious versions of ‘Salinger’s Round’. When the keepers brought her meals it was to find her lounging like a sultan on the bed. ‘Place the vittles on the board, my good man, and don’t slop the gravy.’
On the third day she demanded to see the magistrate. ‘Old iron britches,’ she explained to the bewildered keeper. ‘Him what met me when they brought me.’
‘If you mean the governor,’ said the keeper, ‘he don’t come at the beck of any young snot-nose.’
‘Snot-nose yourself,’ said Barbary, ‘and many of ’em. You fetch him. Tell him there’s ointment for him, forty nobles to let me go. I got friends.’ It was a sum she couldn’t imagine anyone turning down. ‘Tell him I been wrongful arrested.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ said the keeper.
Her necklet had gone with the seven-sided bastard, and her winnings from the game with the students was in her secret cache back at the cottage on the marshes, but tucked into her trunks was the stolen tinderbox.
She brought the box out and slyly balanced it on her hand. ‘This for you if you fetch him,’ she said. ‘Tell him I’m not Rob Betty.’
‘Got one,’ said the keeper, ‘and he don’t care who you are.’
‘But I can’t stay here, I ain’t done nothing,’ shouted Barbary, suffocating. ‘How long before they let me out?’
The keeper shrugged. ‘Most of ’em stay here for years and some of them ain’t done much either.’
He went out and the key turned on the other side of the door.
Having bruised her toes kicking the door and torn her fingernails trying to open it and rasped her lungs with screaming, Barbary lay down on the floor, curled up like an imprisoned beast, and surrendered the will to live. Food came and went untouched. The chamber pot was taken away and returned. Keepers tramped in and out on their regular inspection and Barbary’s breathing became shallower as her body temperature reduced.
The governor of the Tower was informed, tutted, and called in the Tower’s doctor who prodded the body on the floor with his foot and declared it moribund. ‘Remark the hair,’ he said. ‘It is often the case with this complexion that the humours are drawn into the hair, leaving the body unable to withstand circumstance. We doctors call it incardinitis.’
‘Am I to inform the Lord Treasurer that his prisoner is dying of red hair?’ demanded Sir Owen irritably.
‘In layman’s terms, layman’s terms,’ said the doctor, a man whose gown smelled of too many slopped urine samples. ‘We can introduce a moiety of belladonna to stimulate the heart if you wish, but in my opinion the boy will not survive.’
The door slammed and locked behind them, leaving the smell of urine to linger with the echo of the doctor’s last word.
A patch of sun came through the window on to the body on the floor and warmed it. Its nose was tickled by a sprig of tun-hoof caught in the rushes, and its hunger awakened by a bowl of congealed soup on the table, still awaiting the return of the prisoner’s appetite. The doctor’s words lanced round Barbary’s unconsciousness with sharp, refreshing pain. ‘Survive.’ ‘Not survive.’ Her eyelids moved, then opened. So did her mouth. ‘You got that wrong, old pisspot,’ whispered Barbary. She was ashamed of herself. She drank the soup.
* * *
There were English towns with smaller populations than the Tower’s at full complement, and life in all its aspects came through the bars by smells and sounds. Keepers’ boots echoing, jingling keys, the night and morning stamp of soldiers drilling, handgun fire, cannons booming outside the armoury, prayers, hymn-singing and sermons. Horses on cobbles, blacksmiths’ whoo-up, the sighing of forges, pungency of hot iron on hooves. Bread-baking, brewing, mummers entertaining the married quarters, trumpets, the hoop-la of acrobats. Songs, sack-buts, lutes. Sewage, rain, sun on dust. Men swearing and shouting, giving orders, taking them, children playing, washing flapping in the wind, flags slapping on flagpoles, women gossiping and laughing, the calls of itinerant sellers, meat roasting, porridge boiling, lovers whispering, babies giving their first cry.
The Tower was England, a red-cheeked, sweet-smelling English apple with a worm-hole in its core where a clerk sat beside a rack and recorded the words of the man whose joints were being pulled from their sockets.
The keepers were proud of their Tower. At first they reacted to Barbary like old family retainers whose lord had invited an unmannered guest to the house. Like the governor, they were used to a higher class of prisoner. But as Barbary’s behaviour improved – she’d get nowhere kicking against the pricks – they unbent, some even becoming friendly. ‘’Course you ain’t got a fire,’ Keeper Pobble told her when the autumn turned cold. ‘Fires is extra. Exercise is extra. Writing utensils is extra. Candles is extra. Visits extra. Extra food extra.’ He looked at Barbary’s numb fingertips. ‘But I’ll see what’s to do with a blanket.’
The least pleasant of the keepers was one she never saw. He came round in the early hours when the Tower was deeply quiet, long after the last check had been made on its prisoners.
Barbary woke up to hear someone at the squint in her door. ‘What now?’ She hated the squint. She heard breathing. Then whispering. The whisperer wanted her to take her trunks down, it told her what to do when they were down. It told her what happened in the torture chamber, it spoke in rhythmic jerky well-used sentences. Foetid words streamed into the room like a smell.
‘God’s nails,’ sighed Barbary, ‘one of them.’ The bawds had customers like this. She clambered off her bed and went over to the door. ‘Want me feared, do you? Gets you proud beneath your navel, does it? Well,
listen to me you beef-headed, mutton-mongering, pizzle-pulling whoreson, I live too close to the woods to be scared by owls. So put that up your pistol and piss it.’
The whispering stopped. Barbary heard disconsolate footfalls retreat down the corridor. She went crossly back to bed. ‘Is this what we pay our taxes for?’ she asked, who had never paid a tax in her life, and went to sleep.
The whisperer came back, though not to her. She heard him two nights later at the squint on the neighbouring door, same breathing, same filth, but this time echoed by a whimper from within the room itself. She was about to call out to tell her fellow prisoner not to be afraid, when she realised that the whimpering was as rhythmic as the whispers. Barbary spat. ‘Two pizzle-pullers.’ Well, it was no business of hers how people chose to enjoy themselves.
She had been wondering for some time who her neighbour was. The rest of this storey was unoccupied, but food was carried into the room next to hers and chamber pots were carried out, yet she never heard a word spoken by its occupant.
‘Who’s next door?’ she asked Keeper Viney. Viney was the sort who disliked giving anything, especially information. He said: ‘Master Never-No-Mind.’ She’d have to wait until Pobble was on duty, or Morgan.
‘Don’t you worry your head about him, bach,’ Keeper Morgan said. ‘A mimsy, ailing old boyo, that one. Sulk sulk and whine whine it is with him. Irish, so what do you expect?’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Not even sure he’s got one, bach. John, is it? The Earl of Desmond’s lad, anyway.’
‘What, the traitor earl, him with his head on the pole? What’s his son doing here?’
‘No harm, that’s what. Out of the way of his father’s sin. Bring him up a Christian and keep him out of rebellion. Powerful little rebellion in that boy by there, though, mind. Pitiful he is and no one to visit him.’
Barbary was indignant. ‘I’m not crowded out with visitors neither.’
‘Nothing pitiful about you, bach.’ Keeper Morgan, like all the other keepers, never witnessed the moments when Barbary wept with worry for Will Clampett and Rob Betty and moaned for freedom.
Morgan was shutting the door and remaining in the room. Barbary eyed him suspiciously and got ready to fight, but Morgan was being careful. ‘Against regulations this is,’ he said, ‘but there was someone enquiring for you, and asked me very pretty to give you a present.’
Barbary clutched at him. ‘Who was it?’
‘Now, now. A respectable gentleman. Spoke me very fair when I met him outside, he did.’
Cuckold Dick. Lord bless him. Dick could spot who was bribable and who wasn’t at twenty paces. ‘What’d he give you?’
Morgan removed his bonnet and took out a nobbled kerchief. ‘No harm for you to have something to while away time, the gentleman said. And no harm I saw. Like a bit of game myself, and to hell with bloody Puritans.’ Dice, thought Barbary. Please let it be dice.
It was. Five of them, the best that Master Bird of Holborn could devise and as innocent to the unsuspecting eye as a quintet of young virgins. Nestling among them were two nobles.
‘Thank you, Morgan. Thank you very much.’
‘That’s all right, boyo. Have a game one day, will we?’
‘We will,’ said Barbary.
When Morgan had gone she rushed the dice to the remaining light and rolled them on her hand. Two of them were normal dice, for general use and known as generals. The other three were squariers, two of them langrets, infinitesimally longer on the forehead than the cater so that they would walk the board without turning up a five or a nine; the other a high-and-low man which was weighted to turn up a sice or an ace when it was wanted, depending on the skill of the thrower.
Barbary jumped on the stool and sang to a darkening sky the praise of Cuckold Dick and her Order. Dice? What dull eye saw them as dice? Dice? These five little cubes were fire and food, light and company. They were extras, money, they were power. Such was their magic that, given time, they would transform themselves into large, beautiful, door-opening keys.
But without the resources of education which would have given her brain nourishment, unused to silence and loneliness, Barbary might have degenerated badly, despite the gift of the dice, if it hadn’t been for the visit by Next Door’s mother, which occurred soon after.
Barbary had been asleep although it was full morning – she was becoming slothful – when she woke up to the first sounds of furious activity she’d ever experienced on her floor of the Princes’ Tower. A burst of energy had come into it and was raising its voice and stamping its foot.
‘Will you look at him,’ a woman was shouting. ‘Will you just look at that sad boy. Is that a lad in possession of his health? Are you getting him somet’ing for his ear?’
‘Madam,’ came the voice of the Tower’s Lord Lieutenant, ‘his ears are costing this country a fortune, to say nothing of his nose and his bowels. Allow me to read the apothecary’s list: four ounces of unguent for his ear, four ounces of implaster also for his ear, two purgatives, two perfumed lozenges for his nostrils—’
‘And what good are they written down? It’s his own body they should be in, not a by-our-lady piece of parchment. And another t’ing, what of his exercise?’
‘Madam, he refuses—’
‘And his education? Is the claimant to the land of Munster to be brought up a brute beast, tell me that?’
‘His lands are forfeit, madam, through the fault of his father, as you well know.’ Sir Owen was getting agitated. ‘You yourself were fortunate to escape the ultimate punishment.’
‘Fortunate? Fortunate? Traipsing after the court and begging me very bread, is that your fortune? Me son in confinement and me daughters in penury, is that your fortune? And would you wish your wife less loyal to you than I was to me wayward husband?’ The accent became more pronounced with every question mark.
‘But I am neither a rebel nor a traitor, madam.’
‘You’re a damn disobedient servant, so ye are, and so I shall tell Her Majesty who has given orders, orders, for my son to be brought up an English gentleman and pity on the poor English gentleman who are brought up in soch a manner.’
She’d got Sir Owen on the run. Barbary listened to his ‘doing his bests’ and ‘under difficult circumstances’ retreat down the corridor with the woman in full cry after him. Barbary ran to the window; mothers both frightened and intrigued her. This was one to see.
The green was busy with women going to Aldgate market, but Next Door’s mother stood out in the crowd, though she was dressed like a common woman and shabbier than most. Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, might be down on her luck but she radiated a ferocity of purpose which made people get out of her way. Halfway across Barbary’s view she stopped and dusted her hands on her skirt. ‘Done that,’ said Barbary to herself, translating the gesture, ‘now for the rest of ’em. You’re a proper one, you are. Teach iron to swim, you could.’
By pressing her forehead hard against the bars she squinted along the wall to her left and saw an anaemic hand rise and fall in an unseen wave through next door’s bars. ‘That your ma?’ she shouted to it.
The hand withdrew, but after a time a weak voice said: ‘Who are you?’
‘Name of Barbary,’ shouted Barbary, ‘on temporary loan to the Tower. You Irish?’
‘Temporary?’ asked the voice in tears. ‘When are you going out? Why are you here?’
‘Don’t know to both,’ said Barbary, ‘but you can take it I’m confident. I got means.’
‘Confident,’ wept the voice. ‘I was confident once.’
‘Cut it,’ said Barbary. ‘With a ma like that? She’ll get you out, she will.’
‘She got me in. She and my father.’ The voice became pettish. ‘Why didn’t they stay loyal? God damn them both to hell.’
Barbary was shocked. Like most orphans, she had an idealised view of the parent-child relationship.
Still, there was no denying that with his father’s head u
p on a flagpole, his mother in tatters and begging her bread from the Queen of England, the boy was justified in assuming they’d taken a wrong turning somewhere.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked. ‘John, is it?’
But Next Door had exhausted himself and their communion was over for the day. It continued fitfully as the weeks went by, when Next Door felt like it, which wasn’t often. His name was not John, it was James, but he refused to answer unless Barbary addressed him as ‘my lord’, maintaining that if he hadn’t been cheated he would now be James FitzGerald, 16th Earl of Desmond, though why he insisted on a title he was ashamed of baffled Barbary.
She obeyed him because she was desperate for conversation and because she had all the English love of titles. ‘Wait till I tell the bawds I been chit-chatting with a real live lord,’ she said to herself, ‘even if I can’t see him, and even if he is a half-alive lord.’
There was no doubt the boy had grounds for grievance. When he was eight he had been taken by the English as a hostage for his father’s good behaviour. When the earl rebelled, James had been confined in Dublin Castle before being brought to England and the Tower.
He had been taught that his tribulations were the fault of his parents. Obediently he hated them. His English guardians told him everything Irish was savage and that Roman Catholicism was the religion of anti-Christ, so he abhorred his country, and its people, and expended what little fervour was in his soul on the Protestant faith.
The Pirate Queen Page 8