A sweeter nature would have commanded pity, but James was almost repulsively petulant, a fact which didn’t surprise Barbary, who had seen too many badly treated children in the Order to believe that suffering induced charm. He told Barbary almost proudly that he had been ill on the day he was born. With what she considered misdirected obstinacy he had continued ill ever since. It was the only obstinacy he had. His diseases were his sole claim to attention; without them he would have been ignored. Even his mother, except for short blasts of caring, forgot him. I’d forget him myself, thought Barbary, if he wasn’t all there was to talk to.
He was also depressing. He was convinced that sooner rather than later he would die in the Tower. ‘Like the Princes,’ he told Barbary. ‘They died in this very building, perhaps in my very room. Killed by the Plantagenet.’
‘There’s a lot of it about,’ said Barbary warily. Her knowledge of history was minimal.
‘Not a disease, ignorance,’ sneered James. ‘He was their uncle. It will happen to me.’ But why he would be murdered or by whom, he didn’t seem to know.
It was getting cold. In the mornings the green outside her window was frosted whiter than the sky. Never a warm place, the Tower seemed to stiffen in the winter like an old man’s bones. ‘Time for some extras, Barb,’ said Barbary.
So far, to the surprise of the keepers, she had bought no comforts with the nobles Cuckold Dick had sent her; instead she had converted them into small change which, during the short gaming sessions she and Keeper Morgan held when he brought her food, she was very slowly losing. Sometimes she won, but more often she lost. It was why Dick had sent the money: so that she could lose. No angler worth his salt went into a dice game to win every time, it discouraged the fish; worse, it made them suspicious. Morgan’s success had hooked him.
‘Shame to take the money, boyo,’ he said, pocketing another collection of pennies.
‘Too good for me,’ Barbary said, wearily. ‘Pity not to have more players so’s I could win sometimes.’
‘Well,’ said the soft-hearted Morgan, ‘there’s a gathering down in the guardroom some nights. No reason for you not to join in on that. At your own risk, mind.’
Discipline relaxed within the Tower during the winter as officers entrusted with overseeing the night round became reluctant to leave the warmth of their quarters. The Tower’s locks, chains, drawbridges maintained its security and within the impervious shell such prisoners as were liked, trusted or rich were allowed the freedom to relieve the tedium of the keepers’ night watch by their conversation and their contribution of a flagon. Barbary joined a company which consisted of night-duty keepers, three or four soldiers who dropped in regularly from their comfortless barracks to enjoy the guardroom fire, a couple of well-born recusants, a scholar-publisher named Stokes who had distributed pamphlets against the queen’s marriage to the Duke of Alençon and still hadn’t been forgiven, a Captain Askwith, friend to Frobisher, who had sailed too close to the wind, and Sir Philip Efferton, a minor courtier who had got one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting pregnant and was waiting for Her Majesty to forget it.
It was a jolly gathering. Under normal circumstances, the courtier, the recusants and even the scholar-publisher would have been constrained from hobnobbing with commoners like Morgan, Pobble, the soldiers and especially Barbary, but the reversal of prison imposed a democracy which turned them into back-slapping good fellows.
Usually in their fire-lit, ale-fumed gatherings there were chess games or a hand or two of cards. Sir Philip rendered ballads in his trained tenor and the soldiers responded with semi-pornographic campaign songs.
With the arrival of Barbary, and without the company quite knowing how, the evenings turned into a floating dice game.
Barbary kept it light-hearted. She contributed her version of ‘Salinger’s Round’ to the sing-song. Without giving away the source of her information, she told scurrilous stories about the bawds and their more famous clients.
As she contributed to the entertainment without pushing herself forward or attracting attention by holding back, the dice moved from Barbary’s cuff to her palm with the lightness of moonbeams; squariers when it was her turn to throw, generals when it came time to hand on to another player.
With equal delicacy she weighed the company in her mind, assessing who would take loss without suspicion, whom to keep happy with a win and when and how much, all the while allowing her own wins to mount up in sporadic and unspectacular spurts.
She played the game and the company with the skill of a juggler maintaining four balls in the air, so practised that she hardly recognised how skilled it was. Nor did she feel guilt that she was cheating these men; she didn’t think about it. She’d made up her mind years ago that if God and society and the law and all the rest of them who condemned the Order as criminal had wanted it different, they should have offered its members an alternative. She hadn’t asked to be in the Tower, she hadn’t asked to be born. Survival was the game in progress in this guardroom just as it was outside and she was playing it by the only method at her disposal.
‘You win, Barbary,’ grumbled Keeper Pobble. ‘Gets to something when keepers pay out to prisoners.’
‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ That was Sir Philip showing off his Latin.
‘Pay me in coals, Master Pobble,’ said Barbary equably. She let the keepers settle their bets in extras which they procured through falsifying the accounts at no charge to themselves. Her cell was becoming cosy.
‘What shall I pay you in, Barb?’ asked Sir Philip, who’d adopted the modern mannerism of flirting with anything that moved.
‘Cash,’ said Barbary firmly. ‘What was all that fuss down on the green today? Fellow can’t sleep without disturbance in this place.’
‘Campion,’ said Pobble. ‘Damn, three and a one. Off to Westminster for his trial. Your throw, Master Askwith. Personally, I’d hang the bastard without it.’
‘And so should I,’ said Askwith, ‘by the Lord. I win, gentlemen. He was in on the Excommunication Bull, sure as God, deny it though he may.’
‘Hang the lot on ’em,’ said Keeper Dawson. ‘Cut their bowels out.’ Barbary cocked her head to one side; she listened carefully whenever Dawson spoke. There was something in his voice. ‘Telling ’em to assassinate our queen, the Lucifers. Well, since nobody else looks like moving, I’d better do the rounds.’
‘Good man, Dawson.’
Bad man, Dawson, thought Barbary, fondly watching the keeper pick up his lantern. Dawson was the pizzle-puller, she’d bet her winnings on it. When the time was right and after a judicious application of blackmail and bribery, Keeper Dawson was going to assist her out of the Tower; he just didn’t know it yet.
She smiled at the company. ‘Another game, gentlemen?’
The conversation turned to the concern that nagged them all: their country’s security and the threat of Spain. Something dire was about to happen, no doubt of it. The year had seen the great bell of Westminster toll all by itself. There had been the great thunderstorms of June. An eighty-year-old woman had given birth to a monster with a head like a helmet, eight legs and a tail half a yard long. A pack of hunting hounds had clearly been seen in the clouds over Wiltshire, while in Somerset companies of men dressed in black had marched in procession through the sky – Morgan’s second cousin had seen it himself.
Sir Philip Efferton became more and more restive as the auguries piled up and lost five shillings to Barbary without noticing it. ‘God’s wounds, if there is a war and me unable to fight in it,’ he burst out. ‘Has Her Majesty forgotten me? I’ll write another petition, now, this minute. Pobble, light me.’ He ran out of the guardroom, with Keeper Pobble hurrying after him.
‘Lovely petitions he writes, lovely,’ said Morgan. ‘Read me one the other day. In tears with it I was. Poetic. Pity you don’t write a petition, Barb.’
‘Hasn’t done him much good,’ Barbary pointed out. ‘Anyway, I haven’t got all me letters yet.’
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br /> ‘Learn then, boy. Young Sir Sulk-whine is getting a tutor, thanks to his mam’s urgings. Orders of the queen to the governor and four pound four shillings a year for his teaching.’
‘Four pound four shillings from the public purse for an Irish rebel’s runt to read,’ grumbled Stokes. ‘I’d letter you for half the price.’
Barbary teetered back on her stool, considering. Her original reason for taking lessons with the Jackman had been to keep some sort of track of the world in which Robert Betty had begun to move. He’d aspired to literacy, therefore she had too. Well, Robert would be coming back one day; she had to think so. And wouldn’t he be floundered to find her a scholar? And wouldn’t it be cheating on the grandest level to thwart those who kept her confined by advancing herself? Stokes, who was a rash gambler, was in her debt in any case. ‘Very well, Master Stokes,’ she said, ‘I happen to be at leisure this winter.’
That winter more than physical locks were turned for Barbary and other than wooden doors swung open. She was given the run of the Princes’ Tower with access to morning lessons in Stokes’s cell, to Sir Philip Efferton for dancing instruction in the evening and to share in the afternoon tuition of James, heir to the earldom of Desmond.
The keepers, Barbary decided, were generously interpreting their gambling debts into this somewhat surprising freedom.
In fact, her education was being connived at on the highest level. Keeper Viney had informed the governor of the arrangement between Stokes and Barbary and the governor had written of it to the Lord Treasurer: ‘My lord, it seemeth that Prisoner Betty doth aspire to a more gentle condition than befits him in that he would learn to read and letter from another prisoner who is in thrall to him from the vicissitudes of gambling, to wit dice, and has entered into a secret arrangement with him for this teaching. Since your lordship allows much latitude to this person, I dare neither approve nor disapprove the matter until I hear from your lordship how it should proceed.’
In the remorseless roll of official letters onto Lord Burghley’s desk the one from Sir Owen Hopton was light relief, giving a flavour of the young prisoner in whom Lord Burghley was taking an increasing interest. He answered it immediately. ‘Let all facility be given to the Prisoner Betty that he may zealously pursue learning even while confined so that whomsoever can offer advancement to his mind and spirit let him have access to.’ He paused, returned to the letter and added a postscript of genius: ‘Let it appear to Betty that this liberty cometh by his own enterprise and is not accorded at our command.’
So Barbary was allowed to pursue her various studies in the belief that she was nipping them from under Authority’s nose. Perhaps as Burghley guessed, she wouldn’t have stuck to them without it; she had no love of learning for its own sake, but the zest of stealing a march on society, that with it she’d be able to cheat a better class of person, gave a glamour to her lessons which they would otherwise have lacked.
James of Desmond protested when she insinuated herself into his lessons with the tutor, Jennings: ‘I’ll not be taught with commoners. I’ll complain to the governor. I’ll write to my mother. He’s my tutor, not yours.’ Face to face the young earl was even less prepossessing than his conversation had led her to suppose, unhealthy, yellow-skinned and spotty. His cell smelled.
‘I’m not prigging your rattle, Ear-Ache,’ said Barbary rudely. Increase of freedom was making her big for her boots. ‘I’m sitting in. Master Jennings don’t mind.’ Master Jennings didn’t; the two shilling ointment Barbary spread across his palm every week guaranteed it. The governor, on application, didn’t see fit to interfere, and the Countess of Desmond didn’t reply to her son’s letter, having paid him this year’s supply of attention.
But weakly as James was, he was strong on Latin. It was Latin that Jennings was teaching and it was Latin that Barbary mainly wanted to learn in the belief, garnered from sermons overheard at Paul’s Cross, that it was the language of high society. Oddly enough, she was more at home with it than with written English, partly because the Jackman, being a Latinist, had taught her its basics and partly because she had no trouble with the situation of the verb in its sentences as if, somewhere else, she had been familiar with it. With James providing competition, she was spurred to beat him and worked hard, squeaking declensions over her slate late into the night.
English, which she took with publisher Stokes, was a different matter. ‘Why don’t it spell like it sounds?’ she complained. ‘How can friend be fry-end when it ought to be frend? Latin’s got more sense to it.’
Stokes snorted with disgust. ‘Latin’s day is over. A Popish plot. The vernacular, my boy, English, that’s the language of good Christian men. And I don’t care a damn how you spell it as long as you use it. Next line on the primer if you please, Master Barbary, and another penny off my gambling debt.’
Not being a schoolmaster, there was no obligation on Stokes to make lessons either uplifting or boring; enthusiasm for the written word consumed him and for the first time it was borne in upon Barbary what a political power it was.
‘Didn’t I and Stubbs and others use the word to raise the people against Her Majesty’s marriage to that Catholic Frenchman?’ he chanted. ‘And didn’t we prevent it?’
‘And didn’t it chop Stubbs’ hand off?’ chanted Barbary back at him. ‘And didn’t it land you in the Tower?’
‘Virtue has its martyrs,’ Stokes said, amiably. For him his sentence to the Tower was an accolade. It had brought him attention; Puritan churchmen preached against his imprisonment and the printer, John Day, had sent him a copy of the first English edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs, signed with encouraging sentences by the author himself. So it was in the torture chamber of Foxe’s prose that Barbary, having conquered her primers, began struggling her way towards literacy, her hair rising to the screams of Protestant saints and her flesh creeping as theirs melted on their bones.
‘That would have been me,’ said Stokes, almost regretfully, ‘under Bloody Mary. God save Her Precious Protestant Majesty Elizabeth.’ He bore his queen no ill will.
‘Amen to that,’ said Barbary, ‘when she sets me free.’
There was another kerfuffle down on the green two days later when Campion and two companions for the scaffold, Sherwin and Briant, were tied to hurdles and dragged to Tyburn. Keeper Pobble, who managed to get a front seat, reported on the execution to the dice party that night and showed them his coat where blood splashed it when Campion’s entrails were torn out and thrown in the cauldron. ‘A fine execution,’ he said, ‘and deserved. No remorse and stuck to his religion to the last. The Dutchmen were there as well.’
The Dutch jugglers were the rage of London; one was seven foot seven in height, the other a midget who could walk between his legs and dance a galliard, ‘though he never had a good foot nor any knee at all’ and no arm but a stump on which he could balance a cup and toss it in the air, every time receiving it on said stump.
The sense of what they were missing cast a gloom over the guardhouse and the dice game ended early.
Later that night masked figures arrayed in court dress entered Barbary’s cell and hanged Will Clampett by his feet from a beam. His innards streamed out of his nose, leaving his body empty and withered like an autumn leaf which shuddered in the draught and detached itself. Barbary leapt and twisted to catch it before it blew out of the window, but the figures obstructed every move and in one lazy parabola the veined husk that had been Will Clampett swooped between the bars and out of her sight for ever.
Gasping, Barbary sat up in her bed. It had been a dream, but dreams were portents. They had killed Will. That was why there had been no word from him. Will was dead, the one substantial thing in her life had gone out of it. Even if they hadn’t killed him, she had; without the money she brought in he would surely have starved to death. ‘Oh, Will, don’t leave me alone in this awful world.’
And whose faces were behind the masks? Who in hell were ‘th
ey’ that killed people and put others in prison without reason? And got them used to it.
She sat up. That was what they were doing, getting her to accept it, like they had with the Ear-Ache Earl, whose enterprise had been taken away so that he doted on his captors. The weakening by imprisonment had begun, or else why had she left it so long to put the bite on Dawson? Them with their literacy and their wood-panelling and their coals and candles extra.
She scrambled out of bed, picked up her candle holder and beat on the door with it, yelling for the governor, for freedom, to save Will.
It was Morgan who came eventually to breathe aggrieved platitudes through the squint. ‘Now, Barb bach, is this nice? Will’s asleep, whoever he is, and the governor, and me, with your permission. The queen’s Majesty keeps you here – I don’t know why, either – and the queen’s Majesty will let you go in her own blessed time. Sleep now, or no extras. Dawson? You won’t see him for a bit. Transferred he is to the Catholic cells. Crowded out down there, bach, with the names Campion and the others gave out under torment.’
‘What do you want to get out for?’ asked Stokes at the morning’s lesson. ‘This is your university, boy, and a bloody sight more comfortable than some, believe me. You’ve got a brain, lad, use it.’
But when his pardon came through ten days later the publisher left the university of the Tower of London without a goodbye or a backward glance.
In place of English, Barbary, her equilibrium recovered, a little more defiance gone out of her, took up lessons in navigation with Captain Askwith.
Askwith’s crime had been to board a ship belonging to His Catholic Majesty Philip of Spain, whom Elizabeth was even yet trying to placate. As Askwith said: ‘If she’d had damned ducats aboard her I’d be knighted. Know what she was carrying? Leaves. Cargo of roots and leaves, I ask you. Threw the lot overboard.’
But if Captain Askwith was a poor judge of cargo, he was an experienced navigator, and through him Barbary’s spirit sailed to the seas of flying fish and great stars.
The Pirate Queen Page 9