She opened her eyes to shouts and barking. The dog with three heads had taken up position in front of the bower. Its two artificial heads were beginning to droop and the one in the middle mournfully regarded the young courtier who’d told Barbary to shut up. He had drawn his sword at the dog and was addressing it as ‘Cerberus’ during the course of a long poem. At the end of it he raised his sword and the dog lay down. The courtier stepped over it and handed out the queen, who said: ‘Well delivered, Sir Philip.’
Trumpets blasted, cheers sounded, a lady-in-waiting who’d got over-excited burst into tears and everybody knelt down and began proffering the queen presents.
There was feasting after that. Hidden musicians among the trees played as the guests ate. Tables under trees from which dangled lanterns in crystal stars and moons were spread with food that Barbary had not imagined possible. Unable to appreciate how great an honour was being paid her, she was seated at the queen’s table, though well down the far end. For most of the meal she gawped, in between stuffing her mouth as full as possible as fast as possible on the Order’s principle that you got it while it was going. A maid of honour on her left – it was the one who’d gone behind the bushes – was as curious about Barbary as Barbary was about the other guests. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Important,’ answered Barbary. ‘Who’s everybody else?’
It was a stunning list. The fair-haired man running to fat up the top of the table was Robert, Earl of Leicester, Galloping Betty’s hero and Lady Sidney’s brother. There were bishops, Sidneys as thick as rabbits – the one who’d told Barbary to shut up was Sir Philip, eldest son of the house. Barbary fitted faces to what had been household names. Sir Christopher Hatton, a good-looker, drank too much.
‘Who’s that dangerous one? With the earring.’
The maid of honour giggled. ‘Sir Walter Raleigh.’ He was the one she’d gone with behind the bushes. Barbary could see why.
‘Why’s that Lady Sidney got no face?’
‘Ah, poor lady. She nursed Her Majesty through the smallpox but then contracted the infection herself. The scars are honourable but, they say, dreadful. Now she wears a mask to cover what was once most fair.’
The better light showed Lady Sidney’s mask, a tight-fitting shape of black velvet gashed at the mouth and eyes. Watching food disappear into it, which it did sparingly and with neatness, was horribly fascinating. The eyes continually checked the guests and food supply like a good hostess’s should, but they did it so slowly as to make the terrible mask even more sinister. In fact, Barbary realised after a while, the creep of her gaze came from exhaustion. The queen sat near Lady Sidney, talked to her, but never once looked into the mask. There’s some debts don’t bear regarding, thought Barbary.
But compelling as Lady Sidney’s non-face was, it was the queen’s who got most of Barbary’s attention. That’s the queen, she kept telling herself. That is The Queen. She might have been disappointed; the face, for all its animation, was lined, the hair was definitely a wig and the behaviour was disgraceful. Barbary had known bawds comport themselves better. Lashless lids fluttered, the snow white hands coquetted – Barbary could have sworn she saw one of them reach over and goose Sir Christopher Hatton. At one point Her Majesty, shouting Latin couplets at Sir Walter Raleigh, backed them up by throwing rolls of bread down the table. Barbary put it all down to the mystery of regal fun.
She had never seen an unbounded woman before; even Galloping Betty had been subject to the Upright Man. But when they had made Elizabeth queen, they had unleashed a spirit that was virtually uncontrollable. Intelligence, ego, style whipped out on a scale that the world couldn’t reconcile to womanhood because no woman had ever shown it before. ‘She’s a better man than any of them,’ was the Order’s verdict on its queen, echoing a belief that Elizabeth had a masculine soul, which was held right up the social scale, even by Elizabeth herself.
Barbary was spellbound. The power of the night came out of Elizabeth. It was her personality that suspended them all in this ridiculous magic, made viable by some appalling, addictive element that gave them their reason for being. Barbary saw the diners, even the gravest ones, vying like children to catch the queen’s attention. Their compliments were so flowery as to be ludicrous, but it wasn’t only time-serving; they were desperate for her approval, the men wanting it with something that approached lust. You’re worth treacling, you are, Barbary thought. There’s not another like you.
When Lord Burghley beckoned her to the top of the table and the moment had come to be introduced to this phenomenon, Barbary’s legs had trouble carrying her across the grass.
‘So here’s our Irish foundling,’ said the Faerie Queen. ‘Small, isn’t it?’
‘Large enough for our purposes, ma’am,’ murmured Burghley.
Barbary knelt and took off her cap.
‘Also it seems to be on fire. Should we douse it?’ The witticism brought shrieks of sycophantic laughter from the listening courtiers. Sir Christopher Hatton handed a glass of wine to his queen as an extinguisher.
Barbary looked up into a face that had been painted as thickly as Folly’s at the Pudding-in-a-Cloth, and with less artistry, but which still compelled her to try and make her mark. ‘Don’t put me out yet, Your Majesty.’
‘Should I not? You, who joined with the most lawless in my city.’
While briefing Barbary, Burghley had said this would be a tricky moment; all monarchs were unsettled by lawlessness, Elizabeth most of all. Barbary answered, as Burghley had told her to: ‘Madam, forgive me. I had to survive.’
‘Ah.’ It was an appeal the greatest survivor of them all never dismissed. ‘And what recompense shall I have for not putting out your light?’ The queen held the glass threateningly over Barbary’s bared head.
Again Burghley had told her what to say. ‘Poor gifts, Your Majesty, but all I have – my heart, my soul and my loyalty.’
‘You Irish have offered them before,’ said Elizabeth grimly.
‘Well, but you see,’ Barbary was getting chatty, ‘they was Irish Irish, I expect. Now me, Your Majesty, I’m English Irish. Different again.’
‘And will you make your people love me?’ She’d put down the glass.
‘Buggers me, Your Majesty,’ said Barbary, ‘how they could do anything else.’
The queen looked round at a table that had gone suddenly still. ‘Buggersmee,’ she said, ‘an unfamiliar word. What does the lad mean?’
Sir Henry Sidney cleared his throat. ‘A derivative of “boggart”, Your Majesty, a pigmy sprite of Irish superstition; obviously the boy retained the word from his lost childhood.’
‘Boggart, boggart, boggart,’ savoured the queen. ‘Pigmy sprite. It suits him. Very well, Master Boggart, I shall accept your gifts.’ She glanced round with sudden malice. ‘Richer than many I have received this evening, I think.’ She turned back to Barbary. ‘And shall you be my own little boggart and spirit your tribe back to obedience?’
‘That I will, Your Majesty.’
‘Then, Burghley, equip him as befits a prince. He has our favour.’
The interview was over. Lord Burghley wiped his forehead. There had been some nasty moments, but it had gone better than he had hoped. The boy had won himself the accolade of a nickname. Nobody, unless it was the Irish themselves, would dare question his credentials now. He’d even wormed his way into the royal purse. And the entire Land of Faerie, Burghley thought ruefully, couldn’t produce a greater wonder than that.
* * *
The queen’s visit to Penshurst, which had already lasted two days, continued for a critical three more. Any royal stay over five days put the host, unless he was very rich indeed, into financial difficulty. Seven could mean bankruptcy. The Lord Chamberlain was often bribed to suggest that she stay somewhere else. Sir Henry’s joviality became more studied as the queen, who had indicated that she would leave in three, put off her departure, but there was no stinting of hospitality. There were more fantastical, th
ere was hunting, falconry, a pageant, recitations, poetry readings – the last three all extolling the virtues of the queen – a bear-baiting, some extremely lewd jesters, and a sermon on Sunday by a young local parson against ‘the vanity in decking the body too finely’. Halfway through he seemed to realise that an audience which included a queen who possessed 3,000 dresses and spent £405 a year on spangles was not receptive to the theme, and ran dry before he reached the end of his text. There was a masque, a ball, a tourney and a competition to judge which lady was the most beautiful and therefore most fitted to be Queen of the May. Elizabeth won it.
Only she remained inexhaustible. She led the hunt. She listened intently to every oration for the orator to make an error in his Latin or Greek. She danced until dawn. She capped poets’ lines with couplets of her own.
Servants began to stagger. There were panics in the kitchens, where catering on such a vast scale was causing supplies to run short, from which Lady Sidney emerged calmly but with rings round her eyes nearly as black as her mask. While the queen’s attention was engaged elsewhere, her courtiers took turns to steal away and have a nap. The Earl of Leicester pleaded a cold so that he could spend a day in bed. Involuntary moans came from the Lord Treasurer at the inflammation of his gout. The sanitary arrangements were strained to the limit and the scent of perfumes and potpourris was underlaid by the stink of sewage.
Even Barbary, to whom each entertainment was a discovery of wonders, began to flag. This was partly due to the sleeping arrangements, which had to accommodate more than seventy extra people, not to mention their squires, grooms and body servants. The queen naturally occupied what was usually Sir Henry and Lady Sidney’s bedroom, though she slept in her own bed, which always went with her on a progress. The Earl of Leicester had the next best, the Lord Treasurer and Secretary Walsingham shared the next, and after that it was a free for all in a pecking order in which, Barbary discovered, an Irish prince, even one of whom great things were expected, did not rank high. After two nights of sharing a bed in a crowded tent in the grounds with three male courtiers, she sought out Sir Philip Sidney, the eldest son of the house, with whom she was forming a friendship. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘I got promised a room to myself.’ It was the one concession she’d held out for, and gained, when she and Lord Burghley had discussed the terms of her apprenticeship. A room to herself and Cuckold Dick as her particular servant.
Sir Philip raised his elegant eyebrows. ‘The Order of Beggars provided a suite for all its members, did it?’
True, Barbary had slept in worse places, she’d slept in places rats found unwholesome, but none of them had risked the revelation of her sex, whereas here her fellow bedmates were beginning to demand that she change into a nightshirt when she retired instead of sleeping in her day clothes. One, who’d become violently insistent about it, she’d had to kick in the prats.
‘I was promised,’ she said doggedly. ‘Why can’t I have a billet in the village, like Sir Walter?’
‘Master Raleigh,’ said Sir Philip, his lip curling as all the Sidneys’ did when the queen’s Captain of the Guard was about or mentioned, ‘has been accommodated elsewhere because we didn’t want all our female servants impregnated at one time. It causes staff problems. However, our promise to you shall be redeemed, O copper-nobbed foster brother.’ Barbary amused him. ‘A cottage in the grounds is to be put at your disposal. In the meantime it may not have escaped your notice that we are in the middle of a visitation.’
‘When’s she going?’
‘God knows. Hold your patience until she does.’
‘Can’t I sleep in the servants’ hut?’ A large barn had been put up especially to accommodate the overflow of retainers. Cuckold Dick was in there, with a nice straw pallet all to himself.
‘No, you can’t. Allow your low mind to absorb the fact that you are now of high degree, an English gentleman of Irish princely extraction, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, and one to whom our blessed queen, God help her, has taken a fancy. Rank carries discomfort. I don’t know why you’re complaining; I’m sleeping in a vat in the dairy.’
The queen had taken such a fancy to Barbary that ‘Master Boggart’s’ phraseology became the immediate rage; courtiers could be heard referring to their legs as ‘pestles’ and their handkerchiefs as ‘wipers’, or using ‘pigsney’ as a term of endearment. As they took the air together on Barbary’s second evening at Penshurst, Elizabeth commented on the fineness of the night. ‘A night to run off with another man’s wife,’ agreed Barbary, surprised to find that the phrase evinced mirth from the queen, as well as a whack of mock reproof from her fan. Within minutes everybody was repeating it.
But there was no doubt that being the queen’s pet was wearing, demanding attendance on parade every moment of Her Majesty’s long and energetic day, besides constant sharpening of the wits to keep Elizabeth amused. Barbary had to keep reminding herself to what undreamed heights she had risen and to resist the temptation to fall down and sleep. She was given a complete new outfit of clothes to wear while others were being made to the queen’s own specifications – ‘gentle colours, Master Boggart, that will make friends with your hair.’
Her good offices were sought. The young cleric took Barbary aside to ask her to help him regain the queen’s regard after the misjudged sermon, and begged her to accept a ‘gratification’ for doing so. The gratification turned out to be a purse containing five angels. The Countess of Oxford, who felt she had offended the queen by praising the married state too warmly, gave Barbary a pearl brooch for her hat that she might smooth the way for her return to royal favour. Sir Walter Raleigh suggested Barbary capitalise on her new position by borrowing money to invest in one of the ships he was sending on another venture to the New World. A poet, Edmund Spenser, a protégé of Raleigh’s, begged most respectfully to dedicate a sonnet to her.
Barbary accepted the gifts, said ‘Certainly’ to all requests and took no action. As she said to Cuckold Dick, in one of the brief moments they had together, ‘I’m not making their shoes till I know the length of their feet.’
Dick, too, was finding Penshurst financially rewarding. Although cards and dice were not his speciality, he was still a master-gambler compared to the servants to whom he was introducing new games. ‘I don’t even have to grim ’em,’ he told Barbary, almost aggrieved at there being no necessity to cheat. ‘Money for old rope, this is.’ But he advised making a run for it. ‘There’s too much grass, Barb,’ he said uneasily. ‘Let’s get back to the streets. Streets is natural. Goose-turd green wherever you look, makes me ill.’
‘Goose-that-lays-the-golden-eggs green this is,’ said Barbary. ‘We can’t go yet. It’s Will would suffer.’ Cuckold Dick had managed to slip away and visit nearby Robertsbridge, where Will was employed. His visit temporarily allayed Barbary’s fears for Will as it allayed Will’s fears for Barbary, though Dick reported that the ironworks closely resembled hell. ‘Steam, sulphur and rumblings,’ he said, ‘but old Will’s happy as a dog in a doublet. The cannon master thinks the world on him.’ Barbary could imagine it. Once he knew she was safe, Will would be able to apply himself to his passion without troubling himself as to how or why he had been uprooted from the Lambeth Marshes to a factory in deepest Kent.
‘Barb, I still think we ought to leg it,’ Cuckold Dick persisted.
‘Leg it then.’ Barbary was impatient. The entertainment this afternoon was a tourney, and it promised to be spectacular. ‘But while they’re pissing money against my wall, I’m staying.’ She slapped him on the back. ‘Battle the watch, Dick. This is clover, and we’re in it.’
He watched her figure in its dandy new suit of masareene blue run towards the house. ‘Clover’s green, Barb,’ he muttered, ‘I don’t like it.’
The way in which Barbary was capitalising on her popularity was by gathering intelligence. The Order always took great care to keep itself informed about the political situation, who was in, who was out, who had power, what laws were go
ing on the statute books, who was bribable, who incorruptible. ‘When you’re after the cheese,’ the Upright Man would say, ‘it pays to know where the traps are.’ If she was to spend time in the Sidney establishment, she too needed to know what was what. There was no lack of informants; the court seethed with gossip.
Mr Secretary Walsingham, she learned, was here to try and arrange a marriage between his daughter, Frances, and the young Sir Philip Sidney. Sir Philip, said the courtiers, was in love with another, but she was married.
Sir Henry Sidney, she learned too, had been out of favour with the queen for some years and the present royal visit was in the nature of a reconciliation. Sir Henry had incurred the queen’s wrath during his term as Lord Deputy of Ireland during some of its worst rebellions by reputedly dealing too gently with the rebels and, even worse, spending too much of the queen’s money.
The use of harsher methods by subsequent Lord Deputies spending just as much money had only promoted even greater rebellion, thereby causing the queen to reconsider her original condemnation and giving the Earl of Leicester the opportunity to persuade her to put her relationship with his brother-in-law on a sweeter footing and pay Sir Henry this dubious honour of a visit.
It was going well. Excellent gauges of the royal temperature that they were, the courtiers reported that Elizabeth was genuinely enjoying herself. The Sidneys were back in favour.
Barbary was relieved to hear it. You don’t want to be apprenticed to a family of losers, Barb, she told herself.
The queen’s actual departure seemed nearly as long as her stay. Sir Henry, Lady Sidney, their household, the guests to whom they wished to say farewell stood or sat on their horses at Penshurst’s gates for nearly three hours while Elizabeth listened to a loyal address from the local mayor on behalf of a large crowd which had gathered in the lane to get a glimpse of her. She distributed alms, touched the scrofulous and accepted gifts from her people, many of them just bunches of flowers, with more grace than she had accepted the jewels and gold of her courtiers.
The Pirate Queen Page 12