Last night she had stood on top of a painted wooden castle, the ‘Fortress of Perfect Beauty’, playing the part of Virtue though the front of her dress was open showing her bosom, and pelting with petalled bombs the attacking forcese of Desire (Sir Philip Sidney) and his foster children (the Earl of Leicester and Sir Christopher Hatton) as they tried to assail the Fortress from scaling ladders decorated with flowers. She had screamed with pleasure and mock fright at the firework display – Sir Henry had hired the Italian firework expert, Ridolfo, for this final lavishness.
Now it was raining, dampening her wig and spotting her white cloak, but royalty had descended on her. She was patient, attentive to the boring mayor, gentle and gracious to her commons. A rustic choir insisted on singing their much-rehearsed ‘Come Again’ so many times that its listeners got to know it by heart. Barbary saw three women and a man go into a faint at being in the queen’s presence. Ailing children were held up above the heads of the crowd to benefit from her gaze. Some of the people were hysterical. It did not matter that the Virgin Mary, whom their grandparents had worshipped, had been set aside by the new religion. Here she was, replaced, accessible in their midst.
Barbary’s heart surged with adoration. Impossible that she should have hobnobbed so familiarly with this deity. Impossible and wonderful.
The previous night the queen had suggested taking Barbary back to London with her, and for a moment Barbary hoped wildly, but Burghley argued against it and won, though only just. ‘Our young prince needs schooling, Phoebus.’
‘Is our court so unlettered, Burghley, that he cannot receive it there?’
The Lord Treasurer swallowed, and leaned closer. ‘You are the greatest scholar of our age, madam, but even you cannot protect him from the jealousies and intrigues to which he might be subject.’
Elizabeth nodded and turned to Barbary. ‘It appears we must part for now, Master Boggart.’ She became the frail little woman. ‘I am so set about with plots by those who hate me that for your own safety you must remain here. Pray God that intrigue does not invade this so-called sanctuary and that I leave you among friends, not enemies.’ The long royal hands cupped Barbary’s face and the royal lips kissed her forehead. ‘Be true to me, my Boggart.’
In the rain, watching her queen, Babary vowed again, as she had vowed then, to be Queen Elizabeth’s loyal subject for the rest of her life.
The sixth rendering of ‘Come Again’ arrived at its close, and before the choir could begin a seventh, Elizabeth urged her horse forward, thanked her people, and the royal progress towards London had begun.
The Sidney household, Barbary in its midst, ambled back up the avenue, past trampled flower beds and lawns churned to mud. ‘Are we ruined, Henry?’ Lady Sidney asked. She was swaying in the saddle with tiredness.
‘Nearly, sweetheart. I shall have to borrow.’
Lady Sidney moaned.
‘And for all that, I have offended her,’ continued Sir Henry. ‘This morning she asked me to go back to Ireland.’
‘Oh God, not again. You told her no?’
‘I told her no, unless I went on my own terms. With the title of Lord Lieutenant, not Lord Deputy. She must retract having called me too costly a servant – costly, by God, when I spent my own money to feed her army which she thinks can provision on thin air. She must send me with enough money to do the job properly, and publicly admit that I was the best governor of that country she ever had. There’s more to ruling Ireland than hanging rebels.’
‘She won’t do it.’
‘No. We are out of favour again.’
A sob came out of the black mask. ‘How can she? How can she?’
Sir Henry put out a hand to steady his wife. ‘The ingratitude of princes, my dear. She owes us too much to bear. You, more than me.’ He looked around at the dilapidation of his estate and his stoic dignity cracked. ‘And I gave her fireworks,’ he snarled.
Chapter Seven
‘He kicked you where, Master Harington?’
‘Between the legs, mistress.’ Harington’s eyes were still watering. ‘For mere correction of his hand, which is vile, he attacked me like a devil.’
The black mask turned on an unrepentant Barbary, who shouted: ‘He came for me with that stick thing.’ In Barbary’s book assault was assault.
‘It is a rod,’ came the voice from the mask, ‘and, by God, you shall be ruled by it. No pupil shall injure his master in this house. Bend over.’
Under the gaze of the mask, Barbary’s bottom received Tutor Harington’s revenge…
* * *
‘Get him on that ’oss, lads.’
Screaming, Barbary fought three stable boys at once: ‘I’m not getting on that fokker. It kicks.’ Order training had not included the equestrian arts.
‘It don’t kick. Get on it.’
‘No.’
The head groom expired. ‘The mistress said you was to learn ’orsemanship, and ’orsemanship you’ll bloody learn. I thought you Irish was supposed to be good with ’orseflesh. Now get on it…’
* * *
‘What do I have to kneel for? No other bugger kneels at dinner.’
‘You are Sir Henry’s squire,’ explained Thomas the Chamberlain, tonelessly. ‘It is your duty and privilege to proffer your knight and his guests the fingerbowl that they may cleanse their fingers.’
Disgustedly, Barbary slapped the napkin over her shoulder and rehearsed shoving the slopping bowl at the Chamberlain. ‘Why can’t they suck ’em like everybody else…?’
* * *
‘I’ve told you and told you, Boggart. Use the point. In rapier work you use the point, you don’t slash it like a damned scimitar. I can be under your guard on the instant. Like that.’
Barbary removed the rapier point from her doublet. ‘Waste of bloody time, this.’
Sir Philip Sidney closed his eyes in a prayer for patience and opened them. ‘You are receiving lessons in swordsmanship from, I may say without vainglory, one of the masters of the art. Hardly a waste of time. Suppose a Spaniard were to come at you, sword at the ready. What would you do?’
‘Shoot him…’
* * *
‘It’s no good, Henry,’ reported Lady Sidney.
‘Have patience, my dear. O’Neill was as wild when he first came to us.’
‘O’Neill had nobility, however barbaric. This… this… boy is a mannerless ruffian, a vandal. He has been in the gutter too long to be saved.’
‘Harington reports well on his reading. And on his Latin and navigation.’
‘Then let him navigate himself somewhere else. Back to the swine pens he came from. He is a disruption, Henry. He spat at Betsy when she tried to bath him. His language is disgusting. He has no more knowledge of his catechism than a heathen and I am afraid of his corrupting the staff. As for that awful servant of his…’ Sweating with agitation and the heat of the June day, Lady Sidney removed her mask to wipe her face. Sir Henry got up and went to the window. She had been beautiful when he married her.
‘One thing, my dear,’ he said, ‘there seems no taint of immorality; none of what went on between O’Neill and the dairymaid.’
Lady Sidney huffed. Seducing dairymaids was an aristocratic prerogative. She would not condone it but she could cope with it. Her own brother, Leicester, Robert, her second son… it was what dairymaids were for. She’d be less repulsed by Master Barbary if he showed some such tendency, though she would not say so to her husband who, having a lesser pedigree than her own, did not appreciate the laissez faire of the elite.
Sir Henry’s bulk loomed over her, blocking out the sun. ‘The boy will stay, Mary. Though Elizabeth might deny it, I am a loyal servant of England, and if I can shape this boy to England’s purposes as I shaped O’Neill, I shall have served her well.’
But I’ve got to shape his manners, thought his wife. ‘Yes, Henry.’
‘And Philip likes him.’ He saw Mary Sidney’s cavitied face soften before she tied the mask back on. At the door o
f the library she turned back. ‘Ireland,’ she said, ‘nothing but ruin from it. I wish it to Perdition.’
Sir Henry banged his fist on his desk. Nobody understood, not even his own wife. He controlled his voice. ‘If it goes there, my dear, England goes with it.’
* * *
‘Either we leg it soon, Barb,’ said Cuckold Dick, inexpertly dabbing salve on Barbary’s weals, ‘or your arse’ll be corrugated.’
Barbary clenched her teeth. She was dismayed by her ineptness in adapting herself to life among the Sidneys, but she found herself at such a disadvantage in this alien culture that she instinctively battled against it and, inevitably, was losing.
She cricked her head round to snarl, ‘You salving that skin or grating it?’
‘Never said I was a lady’s maid, Barb.’
She dropped back. Losing. That was the rub. If she legged it now she’d be losing. Unacquainted with excellence, she reasoned that she’d be missing opportunity, education, the chance of riches. Besides, there was the threat of the gallows literally hanging over Will and Dick.
‘We leg it,’ she said, ‘and they catch us, they’ll trine you and Will. Maybe me. We stay.’
Cuckold Dick sighed. Such initiative as he had operated only within a tightly organised structure, which was why he’d been so worthy a member of the Order. Now that he was marooned outside it, the only regulation he could work to was laid down by Barbary. If she said they stayed, they stayed.
Barbary wriggled her trunks up, then got off the bed and went to look out of the window. They hadn’t, after all, given her a cottage in the grounds. Instead she and Dick had the two rooms over the archway into the courtyard at the side of the house. The window behind her looked out onto a cobbled courtyard with urns of geraniums and mounting blocks. From this window she could see Lady Sidney’s herb garden and the park. What was natural was lovely, what was man-made, as in her room here, was of simple good taste.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asked out loud. ‘And me?’ There was an element here at Penshurst that an element in herself resisted, and she couldn’t fathom why. She’d felt at ease with the Queen of England, she felt she’d weighed up Lord Burghley, even Walsingham. But the Sidneys, being neither tricksters nor victims, the only people she really understood, baffled her. They had a completeness which gave her no mental handhold to use on them.
Behind her came Dick’s mild voice: ‘Heard this preacher once, Barb, talking about some cony who was kicking against the pricks.’
‘Like I kicked Harington?’
‘Not that sort of prick. More a hedge with thorns sticking out.’
‘And?’
‘Well, the preacher said it didn’t do him no good. All he was doing was getting scratched. Like you, Barb. You’re kicking against the pricks.’
‘So?’
‘Well, don’t. Go along the hedge, like, not through it. Bend a bit. You’re bright, Barb. Best crossbiter’s aid I ever had. What’s it conies say we are? Dissemblers. That’s what you got to do, dissemble.’
She turned round to him. He’d regained weight and was in the brown, belted gown provided by the queen. She’d once thought his appearance the acme of respectibility; now she saw it was seedy, with foodstains down his front and dandruff in his hair. I wouldn’t change him, she defied unseen Sidneys, not for gold with knobs on. He was her link with the life of the Order, the only person, apart from Will, to know she was female and more comfortable in the knowledge than Will; his sexual neutrality was so complete that she could bare her backside for him to salve with no embarrassment at all. And he was right.
‘You’re not so green as you’re cabbage-looking,’ she told him. ‘I can treacle ’em, can’t I? Lead ’em on?’
‘None better, Barb.’
Then that’s how she would cope with it. She was a trickster, so she’d trick. Pretend, play-act, bow with the wind. She couldn’t understand how, with all her training, she’d been such a fool as to battle; as long as she hung on to the knowledge that they were just so many more conies to be caught, these Sidneys wouldn’t overwhelm her. ‘Battle the watch, eh Dick?’
She turned back to the view from the window to where the park stretched away in sunlit glades stippled by the great beeches. Some watch.
It was simple. Her ear picked up their phraseology, she shaped her mouth to use it as they used it. She aped Sir Philip’s walk, table manners, his address to the servants. With Lady Sidney she showed an interest in herbs and flowers, with Sir Henry she probed politely into politics. She charmed Betts, the parson, by requesting instruction in the Faith. On Sundays she kept her eyes down and read her Bible.
‘There is an improvement, Henry. The boy is showing signs of civilisation. Even Harington reports submission to discipline – I had already suggested a less rigorous use of the rod.’
‘Very wise, my dear. The Irish will respond as long as the iron fist is in the velvet glove. Never one without the other. How many times have I told Elizabeth, not one without the other.’
‘You’re right, Henry.’
Sir Henry Sidney nodded. He knew he was. O’Neill had proved it.
* * *
Long afterwards, when Barbary remembered Penshurst, it was as a background to some image of Philip Sidney. Philip playing tennis. Philip drawing a bow at the archery butts in Long Meadow. The stables illuminated by a shaft of sun coming down through the hay-speckled air to wash Philip in light as he rubbed the blaze of his favourite war horse. Philip’s pom-pommed shoes crossing twice in mid-air before landing from a leap that, in Barbary’s opinion, made other dancers look ridiculous but not him. Philip illuminating Caesar’s Commentaries out of the greyness that Harington made of them. Philip sucking a piece of hay and teaching her, of all things, Turkish politics.
Most of all she remembered their visits to Gamage Copse, a hangar of beech trees which had been made a sanctuary for the park’s fallow deer and where they would cluster round and feed from the hand. Philip, lace-collared, lace-cuffed, gartered above the knee, leaning negligently against a green trunk, talking or reading her his latest poem to Penelope Rich:
When Cupid, having me, his slave, descried
In Mars’s livery prancing in the press:
What now, Sir Fool! said he – I would no less:
Look here, I say! I look’d, and Stella spied.
Who, hard by, made a window send forth light.
‘I haven’t finished it yet, but it promises well, eh young Boggart?’
Barbary sighed. ‘It’s not as bad as “Arcadia”, but it’s still krap.’
Sir Philip Sidney rolled up his manuscript and hit Barbary on the head with it. ‘I am rewarded for casting my pearls before unlettered swine.’
‘Nobody else will listen to them. Why don’t you do more like “My love has my heart and I have his”? That was good.’
‘This is the modern style.’
‘Over-elaboration,’ she was learning the vocabulary, ‘like bloody Spenser.’ She had taken against Edmund Spenser on the night she’d had to sit and listen to that poet recite an interminable something he called ‘Shephearde’s Calendar’. Lady Sidney had kept pinching her every time her head nodded. ‘Him and his iambics.’
‘You’re a Philistine, Boggart.’ As much as he could be on a day when the bees thrummed in the thyme and beech leaves made penny-shaped shadows in the sunlight, Philip was disapproving. ‘Cloth-maker’s son he may be, but Spenser will be a great poet. Greater even than me.’ He cocked his fair head in judgement on his last sentence and decided against it. ‘Or perhaps not.’ His humour came back as he unrolled the scroll and considered his poem again. ‘She will like it. Oh God, Boggart, what agony it is to love without attaining. “Desiring nought but how to kill Desire.”’
‘If she wasn’t married, you probably wouldn’t desire her,’ said Barbary. Philip winked at her and began a dissertation on Aristotle.s
Sitting on the grass and watching him, Barbary resisted the temptation to hug his ank
les. She wasn’t in love with him, but if God ever needed a deputy she reckoned Philip Sidney would do.
She supposed he had faults. He believed that no one without the bluest of blue blood should hold authority, yet he addressed beggars as his equal. He hated Roman Catholicism – he’d happened to be in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve, an appalled witness to the massacre of the Huguenots – but numbered Catholics among his friends.
Only Elizabeth refused to hitch this star to her wagon. Perhaps because he’d admonished her against a Catholic marriage, more probably because she was frightened of being eclipsed, she kept him kicking his heels at home, using his undeniable talent as a diplomat only on the most minor occasions, forbidding him to go off and explore the New World, as he wanted to.
And that was all right by Barbary because it meant she had his company and, with it, all the company of poets and mathematicians and ill-tempered philosophers and important and strange men and women his presence attracted. While Penshurst contained Philip Sidney, the world came to Penshurst.
His voice interrupted the reverie into which Aristotle and the scent of grass were sending her. ‘Did I tell you I once met your grandmother?’
She stretched and yawned. She didn’t have a grandmother. ‘Sir Henry said you’d received her in Connaught or somewhere. He seemed to think she was a battleaxe.’
‘Perhaps.’
She looked up at him, attracted by a timbre in his voice. One of the deer was nuzzling at his sleeve, leaving its slime on his coat. ‘Wasn’t she a battleaxe?’
‘Oh yes.’ He scratched the deer between its stubs of antlers. ‘I think in the end that to have quiet in Ireland we must kill all the Irish, but do you know, Boggart, there was something to her. I was reminded of Elizabeth.’
‘The queen?’
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