She learned to read a sea card, the stars, and a staff and astrolabe, but most of all she learned admiration for the courage of English adventurers and great-hearted ships.
In late spring, just as she was becoming reconciled to her imprisonment, the summons came to deliver her out of it.
Chapter Five
They took Barbary out of the Tower at night and by Traitors’ Gate. A generation before, another red-headed girl had been brought into the Tower by that same route in order not to attract the attention of the streets.
Just as the Princess Elizabeth had been afraid of being put to death inside the Tower, Barbary was afraid of being put to death outside it. Without knowing that she was doing so, she reacted as Elizabeth had done. She made a fuss. If they were going to get rid of her, there would at least be people who knew about it.
She had to be bumped down the steps to the rowing boat and when she wasn’t shouting, she was whistling the Order pass notes. They had to haul her into the boat. It was as she was being rowed under the portcullis of the Gate that she heard three answering notes coming from somewhere along the bank.
Barbary looked at the size of the two liveried men who formed her escort, added it to the muscle power of the four oarsmen, and decided against escape. She whistled for rescue. ‘Too dangerous,’ was the answer. ‘We’ll watch you. Bene darkmans.’
A good night to you and many of ’em, thought Barbary and spat. The Order had failed her while she was in the Tower; it was failing her out of it.
It was a beautiful, spring-scented night but to Barbary it was doom-laden; the high, full moon, her friend on many escapades, focused its light only on symbols of death, glinting on the halberds of her escort, a cross in a waterside cemetery and on the heads of dead pirates licked by the tide along the Wapping sea wall.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she shouted at the men in the boat and sank back when they made no answer. ‘And why?’ There was no hope of finding that out; these men wouldn’t know. Keeper Pobble, who’d woken her up and accompanied her to the water steps, hadn’t known. ‘Interrogation, I expect,’ he’d said. ‘Tell the truth now, Barbary, and shame the Devil. No harm can come if you tell the truth.’
‘They tell me what truth they want and I’ll tell it,’ she’d assured him. She looked back to the massive shape of the Tower still blocking out the stars. Poor old Pobble, she’d miss him, and Morgan and all the others she’d been able to manipulate. Compared to the God-knew-what that lay ahead of her on this black river, the Tower looked like home. Well, keep the bib dry. She pulled her cap firmly down on her head. ‘Wouldn’t drop me off at Lambeth Marshes, I suppose?’
* * *
The bank of lights coming up on the starboard bow were the windows of Greenwich Palace. For a second Barbary thought they were going to free her after all and that some insane rule insisted they let her go in the same place that they’d picked her up. Instead she was rowed to the port side of a vessel moored at the palace’s water steps. She recognised it; every citizen along the Thames knew the royal barges.
God help, thought Barbary. She looked up at the elaborate stern cabin to see if the royal pennant was flying above it. It wasn’t.
She was made to scramble up a rope ladder and heaved over the brass taffrail between the rowers who were in their places, oars aloft. The moonlight made the royal livery colourless, but she smelled the metallic smell of the gold braid which emblazoned it. She was hurried along the deck and down some steps to the cabin.
Part of her hoped and part of her dreaded that the queen would be in it. It would be like seeing God. Instead the cabin bustled with clerks transforming what was almost a state room into an office, settling desks into place, unpacking writing implements, opening chests, selecting manuscripts. She was plonked on a stool facing the largest desk. A voice said: ‘Tell them to cast off.’
‘Cast off, cast off.’ The order was repeated up the steps and along the unseen deck above. The cabin cleared, leaving Barbary, with a guard behind her, looking at two desks behind each of which sat an old man. She recognised them both and in the recognition was flattened.
One of them, the older, was the self-effacing but inevitable shadow behind the queen in every royal procession, the Lord Treasurer Burghley. The other was not so familiar on the London streets, but the Order made it compulsory for its members to know who he was. Early in her apprenticeship the Upright Man had taken Barbary to the gates of a house in Seething Lane to wait until she got a glimpse of its owner. ‘Burn that man’s h’image into your glaziers,’ the Upright Man told her, ‘for if ever you offends him nor any of his people, I’ll cut them same glaziers out your head and use ’em for marbles.’
Barbary’s glaziers had widened. There weren’t many people the Upright Man was afraid of. ‘Who is he, Abraham?’
The Upright Man spat. ‘He’s the rack, that’s what he. He’s as everywhere as the pox. Glim his smell-cheat. That smell-cheat can sniff out the queen’s enemies all over England, all over the world. Once sniffed, they’re cindered.’
‘But we’re not enemies of the Rome-Mort, Abraham.’
The Upright Man cuffed her head. ‘That, you little bastard’s why we don’t tangle with Mr Secretary Walsingham.’
And I done it, God help, thought Barbary. Tangled with Mr Secretary and the Lord High Treasurer of England. The queerest of all cuffins. But how did I do it? The barge began moving and the cabin lanterns hanging over the desks swayed in the sweep-stop, sweep-stop motion engendered by thirty oars rowing in unison. Their light shone on the desks and on something on the desk of the Secretary: the necklet.
Barbary panicked. The krap thing. It was that bloody necklet caused all her and Rob Betty’s trouble. It was stolen, must be. Years ago, long before they’d acquired. It must have belonged to somebody great, maybe the queen herself, and at long last Her Majesty’s nose in the shape of Walsingham had caught up with it. What was the penalty for prigging the queen’s neck-cheat? Hanging? Quartering? She’d always been wary of the necklet. Now it had become unfamiliar; somebody had cleaned it so that its curves and twists glowed in barbaric opposition to the tasteful chains of office round the old men’s necks.
All the sounds around her were rhythmic; the deep beat of the time drum, the clunk of the rowlocks on deck, and the scratch of quills in the cabin – both the old men were writing. No word was spoken.
Despite her terror, Barbary realised something. They were trying to sweat her. She blinked. They might be gentry, but they were using the old Flemish bite ploy, sweating the cony. Doing it effective, and all.
The necklace grew bigger in the swinging light and glowed a deeper gold.
‘Is this yours?’
Barbary jumped; Mr Secretary Walsingham had spoken. He was tapping the necklet. His very face, now that it was turned to her, was terrible; it was thin and agonised with temper and pain.
She tried to control her breathing and prevaricated: ‘Can’t say it is.’
‘Did no one ever tell you to doff your cap to your elders and betters?’ asked Walsingham irritably.
‘Can’t say they did,’ said Barbary, still cautious.
‘Do it.’
Reluctantly Barbary took off her cap. There hadn’t been time for one of Pobble’s haircuts; her summons to interrogation had come too quickly, so her hair was curlier and longer than she’d have liked. Dragged by her cap it stood up and out from her head. Its colour was alarming, catching what light there was in the cabin and making everything else darker by its intensity.
Lord Burghley thought: A burning bush. He was reminded of a tree at Theobald’s which surprised him every autumn by its deepening red. Each day until the leaves fell off he would think, It can’t get redder, and each day it did. He glanced away from the boy and then looked back, to be amazed once more. The hair appeared to have drained all colour from the thin face which, the Lord Treasurer noted, was beardless, making the boy only thirteen, fourteen perhaps. He looked older, a result, no doubt, of the d
epraved life these street urchins led. He sighed at such depravity, but the sigh was automatic. He found it difficult in his old age to feel disapproval; he found it difficult in his old age to feel anything. Besides, if the boy were venal, so much the better. It was a relief when Walsingham told the boy to re-cover.
‘Now then, what is your name?’
‘Harry Smith, your worship,’ said Barbary cheerfully. ‘Market trader of Cheapside. At your service.’
‘Also known as Jim Pettit, Harry of Holborn and Barbary Clampett,’ snapped Secretary Walsingham. ‘Falsehood is useless.’
‘What you ask for then?’ Impertinence was the only way she could fight off the fear that threatened to disintegrate her.
So far Lord Treasurer Burghley hadn’t said a word, which made him almost as frightening as Walsingham. His face was very old indeed, with a long straight beard, but, for all its wrinkles, it was forgettable. Suspicion, Puritanism and urinary troubles had made Walsingham’s face sharply memorable, but all Burghley’s experience had taken expression out of his rather than etched it in. His eyes were hung round with drapes of skin and looked out on everything, good and bad, with abstracted disinterest. The only comfortingly human weakness was in his hands, which were greenish-white against the beautiful velvet of his gown and had the same swelling of the joints as the Jackman’s had. Occasionally he rubbed the palm of one hand against the thumb joint of the other, just as the Jackman did.
You got the gout, my old Treasurer. She was getting her wits back. They were using the Flemish bite, by God. After the sweating came the hatchet and pap routine. Walsingham the hatchet, Burghley the pap. The one putting on the frightener, the other reassuring. She’d seen it a hundred times. Done it a few, too. All right, in some way she didn’t understand she and Rob were in trouble with these very queer cuffins. But somewhere, faintly, at the back of everything, was the scent of fish.
The Lord Treasurer spoke for the first time. Kindly, like a good pap should: ‘Pour the young man some wine.’
Wine was poured into a very nice goblet – she could have got a couple of nobles for it – and the aroma of fish became stronger.
‘I should like to tell you a story, Master Barbary,’ said the Lord Treasurer. His voice was as neutral as the rest of him. ‘It concerns a young prince of Ireland who some years ago became lost after a shipwreck.’ He decided there was no need to mention inessentials like hanged mothers at this stage. ‘It was thought he had died. But, a while ago, we received information that he was alive somewhere in London, unknown and unknowing as to his background.’
Barbary nodded. Perhaps the wine was drugged. Perhaps these two old men liked young boys for you-know-what. They’d start talking dirty any moment, or expose themselves.
‘Her woman’s heart being moved by this young prince’s plight, our great queen asked me and my lord Secretary here to set a search in train for him. All we had to go on was that he possessed red hair and a torque. Like this one.’
‘There you are then,’ said Barbary. Could she make the door before they nabbed her?
‘And one of my lord Secretary’s agents discovered just such a young man at an inn in an area of the City known as the Bermudas. He attempted to follow the young man but lost him.’
‘Incompetence,’ said Barbary heartily. ‘You boot that agent’s arse, your worship. But just because the young man got the necklet, it don’t mean he stole it. Perhaps he found it.’
‘Master Barbary,’ said the Lord Treasurer with patience, ‘you mistake me. The torque or necklet was a clue to the young man, not the young man to the torque.’
‘Right,’ said Barbary. Her eyes measured the distance to the cabin door. She could be on the deck and over the side before they could say God Help Us.
‘We issued what, I believe, is vulgarly known as a “seek-we” for this young man. We posted agents to look for him at the ports. The Pool, Deptford. Greenwich.’
‘Ah,’ said Barbary, ‘I expect your men saw him throw me the necklet from the boat. I can explain that. “Give this to Her Majesty,” he said to me, his very words, “Give—”’
‘Forget the necklet.’
The shout startled them both into staring at Mr Secretary Walsingham, who had made it. Blowing hard, he reached for a green bottle of physic that stood on his desk and poured himself a dose. ‘By the Lord, Burghley,’ he said, ‘one forgets how irritating the cunning of the criminal classes can be.’
Lord Burghley nodded reassurance at his colleague and then at his victim. ‘Forget the necklet, Master Barbary,’ he said quietly. ‘We do not believe it to be stolen and even if it were we should not proceed with the matter. No harm will come to Robert Betty through our hands. Nor to you. Do you understand that?’
Comprehension arrived in the green eyes and with it surprise: ‘Rob’s not Irish; he’s English as you or me.’
The Lord Treasurer sighed with relief. They’d said the boy was intelligent; he was quick as well, once he stopped looking at things from the criminal point of view. ‘Our information is that he is a foundling. Nothing is known of where he was born.’
How’d he know all this? Had Sir Secretary torn it out of Galloping Betty? Bribed it out of the Upright Man? The Order didn’t part with information about its own just for the asking. Well, but, Rob Betty? An Irish royal? Never. ‘What you want this prince for anyway?’
‘We wish to restore him to the estate that is rightfully his,’ said Lord Burghley carefully.
In course you do, in course you do, you lying old Treasurer. The smell of fish was very strong now. The buggers wanted this Irish prince for their own purposes. Nobody did nothing for nobody without a motive. This might be the Queen of England’s barge, but it had a whiff of the Bermudas. She was on home territory. A cousiner among cousins, a cony-catcher among cony-catchers.
If they’d known it, the faces of the Lord High Treasurer of England and Barbary Clampett at that moment, separated by a desk and sixty years, looked not unalike. Masks of indifference. Tricksters’ faces. ‘Missed him, then, din’t you?’ Barbary said. ‘The boat sailed and him on it.’
‘No.’ It was the acidic voice of Secretary Walsingham. ‘We didn’t miss him. We found him on the quayside at Greenwich. A young man with red hair and a golden torque. We’ve been keeping him safe in the Tower.’
* * *
Eventually, to bring the boy to coherence, the guard had to slap him. The Lord Treasurer shook his head to stop Walsingham slapping him as well. Nervousness, greed, ambition he had anticipated, but he had not expected that the guttersnipe would react by kicking his legs around and laughing himself sick. Did the boy know something they didn’t?
Barbary fought for control and wiped her eyes. It was serious really. Her, an Irish prince, God help us. Where did they get them from?
She sobered up. It was serious: if she’d really been a boy, if she’d qualified sexually for the role of this royal bog-trotter, she’d be panicking now at being forced into something that boded no good. As it was she held the winning card. She could get out of the situation any time she liked. She could show her hand – well, not her hand but, given the decencies, another part of her anatomy – and prove she wasn’t a male, Irish or otherwise.
Not yet, though. First she’d see what profit was in it.
Her eyes met the curtained eyes of Lord Burghley across the desk. He was the one she related to, as she was meant to. But in any case her instinct told her that he was the prime mover behind the whole business. I know you know I’m not this lost prince of yours. You know I know you know it. Walsingham’s men saw Rob throw me the neck-cheat. Therefore, you got a powerful reason for wanting to produce this prince and you’ll use any ringer to do it. Rob Betty for choice but with him gone, me.
She was reminded of Matt the Clapper who discovered his wife had been left money only a few days after he’d done her in, and made Foll pretend to be her and claim it. Lord Treasurer of England you may be, she thought, but you’re doing a Matt the Clapper or my
name’s not Barbary Clampett.
‘What’d I do as this Irish prince then?’
‘Claim your rightful inheritance.’
There you are. Matt the Clapper. ‘And hand it over to you, I suppose?’
She heard Walsingham hiss: ‘Why are we wasting our time with this sewage rat?’ The Lord Treasurer sighed again. He had a lot of work ahead of him; he could have managed the whole business more amiably without the presence of his colleague, indeed he had been surprised when Walsingham had asked to come along on the journey, although he supposed the Secretary had his own, personal affairs to settle at the house to which they were going. Walsingham had very little patience with Burghley’s plan for this boy, had very little patience with Ireland come to that, his sympathy lying more with the exterminate-the-lot-of-them school of thought.
Lord Burghley said gently: ‘My son, you are the heir to vast tracts of land, the leader of a people who have fallen into error. We wish merely that they be reunited to their gracious sovereign and yours, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, to serve her in peace and amity. As their leader and her loyal subject, you shall bring them back into her fold.’
‘Oh,’ said Barbary. Politics. Still, there’d be gelt to be got somewhere before she made her escape. She’d play along for now. But first she’d better know what cards these old buggers held in their hands. She said: ‘Begging your pardon, your worship, but I’m not Irish. I’m Low Countries. My foster father served there. He found me there.’
Secretary Walsingham intervened: ‘Clampett served in Ireland. He found you there.’
‘He knows where he served, don’t he?’
‘He is lying.’
It was the first occasion on which she experienced history being rewritten. It took her breath away. Lying was her very own art form, but this was something else, a fact erased to be replaced by a political expedient.
The Pirate Queen Page 10