‘Our own dear queen. One momentary chime of the same bell. Faults by the bushel, and a quality to quicken the blood.’
‘Well, well,’ said Barbary. She was unused to a mention of the Irish that didn’t traduce them. ‘I’ll tell Her Majesty you’re equating her with an Irish pirate, shall I?’
‘An Irish pirate with a treacherous grandson. Now if you will mount that amble-pad you call a horse, we’ll go home for dinner.’ To get Barbary used to riding, Sir Henry had been forced to send out for a pony to which, ordinarily, he wouldn’t have given stable room. It had a leg at each corner of a square body and a tendency to doze while walking. Philip said he’d met more exciting stick-insects. Barbary called it Spenser.
She was now dissembling so well that she was considered sufficiently civilised to move on to the crux of her education: lessons with Sir Henry Sidney on Ireland.
Sir Henry’s purpose, like Lord Burghley’s, was to turn Ireland into another England, same divisions into counties, same administration, ruled by the same Common Law.
In this they were being liberal. Ireland was too close. England could neither risk its falling into the hands of a foreign power nor, which might turn out to be the same thing, its independence. It must be an English colony. Harsher men advocated the genocide of its rebellious people and their replacement by English settlers. Burghley and Sidney stopped short of this, partly from humanity and partly because they didn’t believe it to be practical.
If they could have kidnapped every baby boy likely to turn out an Irish leader and brought him to England to train in English ways, they would have done so, convinced that once he saw the superiority of the English system over his own he would return to his country full of zeal to begin its Anglicisation.
They were bewildered that it wasn’t Anglicised already.
‘You see, my boy,’ Sir Henry told Barbary, ‘many of the Irish barons are the descendants of Normans who invaded and partly conquered Ireland in the twelfth century. One would have expected them to develop as this, their mother country, developed.’
‘Why didn’t they?’ asked Barbary.
‘If I knew the answer to that,’ said Sir Henry, ‘there would be no Irish problem. Myself, I believe there to be some infection in the Irish air which turns men native. Even Englishmen who gained lordship over there as recently as the last century or two are now indistinguishable from the true Irish with their cloaks and their wild hair and no stirrups to their horses.’
Barbary had no opinion of the Irish herself. For as long as she remembered she had been told they were treacherous and ignorant, and believed it. Such Irish men and women as had attached themselves to the Order had reinforced this belief by being more degraded than its lowest of low members. They were invariably drunk and lachrymose with homesickness. From the superiority of his uprightness, the Upright Man had called them ‘Papist shit’ and used them like dogs, which had served them right for being Irish.
‘D’you hear the one about the Irishman and the hen?’ she asked Sir Henry. She saw at once she’d made a mistake in manners. Irish jokes were low and Sir Henry did not subscribe to them. She was confused by his refusal to join in the general view of the Irish as subhuman. As far as Sir Henry was concerned, they were merely ‘in error’. Not to have had the advantage of Roman invasion had been their first error, which had been compounded by their refusal of Norman rule and had gradually led to the greatest error of all, their obstinacy in clinging to the Roman Catholic faith when England had shown them the way to Protestantism. ‘A people who walk in darkness.’
‘Though indeed,’ he added, ‘the churchmen who were sent to bring them the light were not good examples. Nor do I think they would have clung to Papism if we had not mistakenly persecuted them for it. It was their way of retaining their Celtic nationality. The quarrel between us is not basically religious, though it has become so. It is the age-old misunderstanding between Celt and Anglo-Saxon.’
Sir Henry’s true hatred was for the English settlers who ruled in Dublin. ‘Backbiters and bigots.’ They had made his job as the queen’s deputy in Ireland a burden with their opposition to his every reform.
And that, with a confusing picture of a country divided into areas which were dominated by Old Irish, Old English, Anglo-Irish and new English, was Barbary’s education on Ireland.
Everything changed with the coming of the O’Neill.
That day she and Philip and Philip’s best friend, Fulke Greville, had gone to Gamage Copse to enjoy the St Luke’s Little Summer which was making the October glorious. Philip and Fulke had strolled away through the trees, arguing abstractions, and Barbary was ploughing through Philip’s translation of Xenophon for an examination Harington was setting the following week.
It didn’t seem momentous that she had chosen to sit under a beech with a pile of its leaves as a back rest, nor that her legs were covered with her cloak against the first nip in the autumn air. But she had taken off her cap and the colour of the leaves matched her short hair and gave the impression of extending it so that a wave of it apparently flowed round her head. To a first glance the spread cloak looked like a skirt.
The earth thrummed with vibration from hooves. A very large horse cut out the sun and a voice said: ‘Now why is a pretty young woman wasting her lovely eyes on a book?’
She was up in a moment, slamming her cap back on her head, stamping her boots and swearing in the masculine.
Philip and Fulke came up at a run and threw themselves into slapping the new arrival on the back. ‘Hugh, may I present a countryman of yours, Master O’Flaherty, better known as Boggart. Boggart, this is the Earl of Tyrone.’
Hugh O’Neill twirled off his hat in an ornamental bow. ‘Desolated,’ he said, ‘to have insulted this lively young gentleman by taking him for a dryad. Blame it on me ageing eyes.’
There was nothing wrong with his eyes, which were dark, though his hair and beard were red. They weren’t ageing either.
‘Hugh,’ said Philip, ‘why are you speaking in that ghastly accent after all the trouble we had beating it out of you?’
The O’Neill smiled. ‘My dear fellow,’ he drawled, in perfect upper-class English, ‘you must give a pagan time to adjust. I’m straight off the boat.’
‘A long stay, I trust. This is always your home.’
They got on their horses and set off at a walk back to the house, three of them talking, Barbary silent and bringing up the rear. There was a whiff of the alien about this O’Neill. He wasn’t quite right. Gaudy as Elizabethan court dress was, his went a shade too far, literally. His crimson doublet was over-bright, over-pinked and overslashed, its peascod belly stood out an inch too far over what was otherwise a slim waist. His black and gold trunk hose was outrageously bombasted and his silver Dutch cloak had too many blue tassels. Barbary, having spent enough time with the Sidneys to know what was tasteful and what was not, jeered at this provincial caricature aping the dernier cri, because that was better than the discomfort of feeling that the apes of the dernier cri were being caricatured by this provincial.
Discomfort was the word for the presence of this young man, and not just because for a moment he had acknowledged her as female. Thoughts at odds to what he was saying glided behind his eyes like the fins of sharks. He reminded her of cony-catchers at work. There had been a second back there that had established an odd recognition between them. ‘And when I trust you,’ she told the Earl of Tyrone’s back, ‘will be when two Sundays come together.’
At that moment the O’Neill wheeled his horse. ‘I see it,’ he shouted, spreading his arms to her. ‘No doubt of it. Heir to the O’Flaherties, with the looks of the O’Connors and the colouring of the O’Malleys.’
‘Have you had your spies out again, Hugh?’ asked Philip. ‘Boggart’s supposed to be incognito just now.’
‘He’s to be a surprise to my poor countrymen, is he?’ The O’Neill grinned. ‘And a surprise he will be. No, no spies. Your father wrote to me. He thinks the young gen
tleman will need an ally in Ireland.’ He gestured to Philip and Fulke. ‘Go ahead to your lofty purposes,’ he said, ‘while we bog Irish bring up the rear, as we should. We will commune, Master Boggart and I.’
He slowed his horse to Spenser’s pace so that the other two went ahead. Again Barbary was uncomfortable. The ease with which he had apparently accepted her as heir to the O’Flaherties was nearly as unsettling as if he had challenged her imposture. Did he truly believe she was a royal Irishman? Was he in cahoots with Burghley? Was he playing some game of his own?
‘How’s the training going?’ he was asking companionably. ‘Has Harington graduated from the bum-beating school of philosophy? Is Sir Henry still advising God on where he went wrong?’
Her lips twitched, but she refused to be drawn into a confederacy. ‘I am learning a great deal,’ she said.
‘So did I,’ he said, ‘so did I.’ Every damn thing he said resounded with double meaning. ‘And what’s your given name?’ he asked. ‘Even in Ireland we don’t christen a baby Boggart.’ It was a reasonable question; there was no excuse for not answering it, but each piece of given information drew her deeper into some baffling conspiracy.
‘Barbary,’ she said. ‘Jesus, what’s the matter?’
Hugh O’Neill had fallen forward onto his horse’s neck, banging his head against it. She put out her hand to help him, and felt his shoulders shaking. The bastard was silently, helplessly, laughing.
‘Will you shut up?’ she hissed. ‘Shut up,’ and immediately was even crosser for the alliance her rudeness made with his.
‘Barbary.’ He wiped his eyes on his horse’s mane. ‘Isn’t that the fine name, and common on the west coast of Ireland.’
He was mocking her. Furiously, she tore away the upper hook and eye of her doublet and whipped out the necklet. ‘You want proof?’ she shouted at him. ‘Here’s proof.’
He turned it in his hands, no longer laughing, making it seem that he was exchanging secrets with the thing. He nodded as he handed it back to her. ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘I saw it round the neck of your mother.’
He was going to say something else or had said it. Barbary’s mind blinked. They were in the avenue that led to Penshurst house and in that one subliminal second the flanking trees became leafless and ugly, the house a ruin.
O’Neill said, or was going to say: ‘I’m told the English hanged her.’
* * *
There was a feast to welcome Hugh O’Neill back to his foster home. As usual Penshurst was entertaining other visitors; a secretary to the King of Navarre, Dr Dee, the queen’s scientist and magician, a Venetian botanist, Baron Alasco of Poland, whom Philip had met on his Grand Tour, assorted poets, courtiers on leave and Mary, the Sidneys’ eldest daughter, who was now the pregnant Countess of Pembroke.
The jewels, metal-threaded ruffs and embroideries of the aristocracy at the top of the table graded further down into the unglittered, less fashionable cassocks of the merchants and higher servants, until, like a partly unsloughed snakeskin, it reached the dull russet and home-made linen of the peasantry whom Sir Henry, with his immaculate courtesy, always invited to his festive table.
Barbary was excused the duties of squire and sat in honour next to the countess, across the table from the Earl of Tyrone. Sir Henry was out to reminisce with the O’Neill and wanted his new protégé to hear at first hand the advantages attendant on eschewing Irish savagery for the refinement of Renaissance England. Since his voice was loud and commanded attention, everybody else could hear too.
‘Make this lord here your exemplar, Master Barbary,’ he boomed. ‘Regard him now, yet when I found him he was no better than a horseboy hiding in the bogs of Dungannon, hunted by his uncle, Shane O’Neill, Shane the Grand Disturber, who had already killed Hugh’s father and cut the throat of his brother. Such was the ignoble feuding of the O’Neills of Ulster.’
‘Barbarians,’ smiled O’Neill up and down the table and Barbary wondered that nobody else noticed his knuckles were as white as his teeth.
‘I hope, sirrah, that Shane’s heirs are kept under control so that they cannot now threaten your position,’ said Sir Henry.
‘They have been suppressed, my lord,’ said the O’Neill and smiled again and Barbary, still watching his hands, saw them gripe as if he had tracked Shane’s children down one by one and with those same hands torn out their throats.
‘And here he now is,’ expounded Sir Henry, ‘the undoubted lord of the north of Ireland, Her Majesty’s trusted servant, friend to her friends, and as good an Englishman as ever turned his weapons into ploughshares.’ There was a great deal more of this as Sir Henry demonstrated, without actually boasting, the Pygmalion role he had played in turning the rude clay of this Irishman into a desirable Elizabethan. And all the time Hugh O’Neill smiled as Galatea might have smiled.
The light coming through the tracery of the tall windows dimmed and servants lit candelabra on the table and applied tapers to the torches on the walls, deepening colours and scenting the hall with rosemary and resin.
Barbary kept blinking, trying to dislodge the flash of mental image which had distorted the proportions of Penshurst that afternoon and which still warped everything she saw, so that the walls of this hall where she had learned reason and manners lacked symmetry, bloating Sir Henry’s handsome red face, insisting that Lady Sidney’s mask covered a grinning skull. She tried to believe some baleful influence emanating from Dr Dee, the queen’s necromancer, had turned this night abnormal when it should be like other nights. Or that it was a trick of the flickering light.
She knew it was neither; it was that ginger-headed, dark-eyed man sitting across from her who had brought something from Ireland with him that had infected her, and only her, so that her surroundings seemed diseased.
He was saying regretfully: ‘I could wish Her Majesty trusted my advice and yours, Sir Henry, on the administration of Munster. Have you seen this?’ He passed over a piece of paper on which there was dense printing and heavy capitals in the manner of a fly sheet.
Sir Henry called for his spectacles and read it. ‘“A Note of the Benefit that may grow in short time to the younger Houses of Gentlemen if they do accept Her Majesty’s offer to undertake the Settlement of Munster… to be the chief lord of a great seignory… homage… corn, cattle. The Plot offers many advantages to the younger children and kinsfolk of gentlemen of good families and those of inferior calling and degree… To preserve the English nature of the undertaking none shall marry but with persons born of English parents… no mere Irish are to be permitted in any family there, nor land rented to them, to employ them, nor shelter them… a goodly land.”’
He looked up. ‘This is madness. Unless Munster has changed since last I saw it—’
‘It is a wasteland still,’ said the O’Neill, ‘just as it was after the Desmond rebellion, eight hundred thousand acres of starvation. And how it is to be tilled without the “mere Irish” I do not know.’ He added casually, ‘And Sir Walter Raleigh is to get forty-two thousand acres of it.’
Sir Henry stared. ‘Forty-two thousand?’
‘From Lismore to Youghal.’ The O’Neill shrugged. ‘After all, he did lay down his cloak for the queen to step on.’
Sir Henry’s fist hit the table and made the plates and tankards jump. ‘Madness,’ he shouted. Lady Sidney put out a hand to stop any treasonable statement, but he shook it off. ‘I told her not to do it like this, I told her.’
‘Never mind, Sir Henry,’ said O’Neill. ‘Good Sir Walter may have trouble enjoying his acres. Some of them are, or rather were, the MacSheehys’ ancestral land.’
Sir Henry recovered with difficulty. ‘The MacSheehys,’ he muttered, and then he remembered. ‘The MacSheehys,’ he said again and a look of amusement passed between him and the Earl of Tyrone. ‘He has my prayers.’
‘What I am afraid of,’ said the O’Neill, ‘is another rebellion. It may be feasible to fill up the void of Munster with English settlers,
it may not. You and I know it isn’t exactly Somerset, or Kent. But to displace the native population from a quarter of Ireland…’
‘Madness,’ repeated Sir Henry. He lifted his hand: ‘However, do not interfere, my boy. Ulster is enough for you to cope with.’ He had spoken.
The O’Neill bowed in his seat and changed the subject. ‘I fear that I must be on my way tomorrow.’
There were protests from around the table. Lady Sidney said: ‘But my dear boy, we hoped you would stay.’
O’Neill kissed his hand to her and shook his head. ‘This is a buying spree; I am off to London to purchase tableware, tapestries and other good English things. I want to turn Dungannon into a typical English manor, re-create Penshurst in Ulster. And I want Lord Burghley’s permission to import some lead. As you know, there is a special embargo on lead for Ireland in case it is turned into rebellious bullets, but I need it to roof my Dungannon Penshurst.’
He stood up. ‘Before I go, may I propose a toast as a loyal Irishman to Her Glorious Majesty and to the adornment of her realm, the family Sidney.’ He raised his glass: ‘To Queen Elizabeth, may the worms eat her flesh while she is still living. And to you, my dear Sidneys, may your stinking patronage choke you.’
Gradually Barbary unstiffened her neck and looked first up and then down the table. Sir Henry was smiling and lifting his glass. Beside her the Countess of Pembroke was saying, ‘How charming.’ Down the length of the table unperturbed, jolly men and women were uttering ‘The queen, God bless her’ and ‘To the Sidneys’. Everything was normal; it was she who had gone mad.
Desperately she looked up at the O’Neill to find him gazing at her. He nodded. ‘I see the young gentleman remembers his Irish,’ he said.
Eventually the countess beside her said: ‘Father, Master Barbary is not feeling well. I recommend fresh air for him.’ To Barbary she said: ‘Shall I come with you?’
Barbary shook her head. Sir Henry gave his permission for her to leave the table and she slipped out of the hall which was becoming uproarious as the O’Neill told funny stories against his countrymen: ‘…And Patrick said: “Bejasus, I can’t tell you how many miles it is from Waterford to Cork, but it’s eighteen miles from Cork to Waterford.”’ She could hear the laughter as she went down the terrace steps to the yew walk where the long shadows of the hedges made geometric shapes in the moonlight.
The Pirate Queen Page 14