The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  She hadn’t understood him. She could not have understood him. It was some inflection in his voice as he spoke the Irish that must have indicated to her the terrible meaning. She could not have recognised the words. If she’d picked up the sense of one here or there it was because she knew a little Shelta, the patois used by Irish members of the Order and sometimes by the Order itself.

  Behind her she heard tables being moved in the hall and musicians striking up as the company prepared for dancing. She moved away from the sound and held her head as she walked. Out here nightingales were singing but they could not restore normality. ‘Oh God,’ she said out loud, ‘I am Barbary Clampett. I’m not Irish.’

  ‘You are,’ said a shadow.

  She screamed at it: ‘Get away from me.’ He was standing in her path with his fantastic clothes made black and white by the moon.

  ‘You understood.’

  ‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’ She turned away from him, illogical in her panic. ‘I’ll tell them.’

  She heard him say: ‘They’re too sure of themselves. They wouldn’t believe you.’

  She knew they wouldn’t. In her mind she said to Sir Henry: ‘The Earl of Tyrone has offered you and the queen the grossest insult,’ and heard the words bounce off his impregnable self-assurance like peas rattling against armour. She could have wept at the Sidneys’ certainty of their own rightness. ‘You’ve no right to hurt them.’ The music was in its stride now, tinny with distance, but audible.

  ‘Oh, I have.’ He came closer and took her fingertips in his, raising them. ‘I have a million rights, all of them dead in Ireland. That’s a nice measure they’re playing.’ He was walking her between the yew shapes, their two hands raised. They were dancing. She jerked her hand away, but he went on, one elbow akimbo, the other arm elegant in the air as if she still accompanied him.

  At the end of the stave he turned and advanced back to her, his high-heeled shoes with their over-large buckles pointing in time to the music. His hand took hers again and, because she could no longer fight the night’s improbability, she didn’t pull away. ‘They’re good people,’ she said, helplessly.

  ‘That’s what makes them dangerous.’ He was skipping now in the most intricate part of the galliard; Barbary’s lessons with the dance tutor had not advanced so far even if she had felt like skipping, which she did not. She stood while he jigged round her, flirting his long fingers. ‘They tell me your foster father works in the cannon foundry. That may be useful to Ulster. If it comes to it.’

  He was a weasel gyrating round a bird. She tore her eyes away from him to look around, to reassure herself that the grass was in place and not overhead, that the stars weren’t twinkling out of the ground, that this was solid, English, Penshurst. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ she screeched at him. ‘Will wouldn’t… we wouldn’t help you, you shitpot traitor.’ All these years she had prided herself on her swearing and now in her great need it was inadequate. Yet she couldn’t tear herself away. ‘You’re mad, you are. You’re mad.’ She spotted their leggy shadows stretching across the walk. ‘You’re unnatural Look at you trying to dance with a boy.’

  In the house the drums crashed. The O’Neill leaped in the air, crossed his feet and landed close to her. ‘But I’m not, am I?’

  She backed away from him until a hedge stopped her. He paced with her. ‘I’m dancing with as great a dissembler as myself, aren’t I?’ The music went back to the start of another round; she was beginning to hate it. But when he held out his hand this time, she took it, mesmerised, and together they paraded down the walk. ‘You see, Master Barbary, I was interested to see this new young chieftain the English had invented to inflict on Ulster’s western flank. And see him I did, sitting under a tree.’ They turned and began the parade back. ‘And I saw that for once, know it or not, the English weren’t cheating anybody. They couldn’t have invented the nose of him, nor the skin, nor the hair, and definitely not the eyes.’

  The drums crashed again and his hands came out to span her waist, throwing her in the air and catching her.

  ‘But the English weren’t seeing what I saw. And the question was then, was it poor old Hugh who was blind? Or the English?’

  ‘I think I’ll sit this one out,’ said Barbary. ‘I’m going back.’

  ‘You’ll stay and you’ll dance.’ His fingers were on hers like pincers. She stayed and she danced.

  ‘And so, politely, I asked this young chieftain’s name. And he told me. It was Barbary, he said.’

  They twirled. She spat. ‘And what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s a fine name. And common on the very west coast of Ireland to which this young chieftain lays claim.’ He smiled. ‘Among girls.’

  He threw her up in the air again but this time, as he caught her, he kissed her. It wasn’t a romantic kiss, it was an induction; his tongue probed her mouth as his hands went down her waist, over her hips and under her buttocks, to prove to both of them that he’d guessed right, a tribal thing, a welcoming and an initiation. Nevertheless it moved parts of Barbary’s mind and body that she had not known were moveable, or even there.

  He released her. The music from the house had stopped, leaving the nightingales in command. ‘We’ll be in contact again, Master Barbary,’ he said. She watched him swagger away up the walk to the lights of the house. Then she sat down because her legs weren’t feeling very strong.

  The next morning Barbary informed the tutor Harington that she was taking the day off.

  ‘You shall not,’ he said. ‘Today is for mathematics.’

  When she told him where to stuff his mathematics he threatened her with the rod. She took it, broke it and handed it back. ‘I’m taking the day off,’ she repeated clearly. ‘I had a bad night.’

  In the stables she crisply ordered a groom to saddle Spenser and then surprised that lethargic pony by spurring him into a trot across the parkland north towards the church.

  ‘Bad night’ had been an understatement. All through it the events of the previous day and evening had re-enacted themselves in the solitude of her room like the aftershocks of an earthquake, so that each time exhaustion sent her into a doze she was jerked out of it by another wave of mental and physical tumult as if her brain could only absorb O’Neill’s revelations one at a time and had just reacted to the next in the series. There had been so many of them that they warred for priority of concern.

  That the poor Sidneys had nurtured a viper in their bosom was as nothing to the fact that she had joined that same viper in complicity. Was it treason to dance with a traitor? It was if you didn’t inform those against whom he was planning treason. At one point in the dreadful night she had got up, wrapped a cloak round herself and set off for Philip’s room to tell him everything she knew. But in the corridor the assertive eyes of Sidneys and Dudleys had stared down at her from their stiff-necked portraits, unprepared to take the word of a guttersnipe against that of an earl, Irish though he might be. Class was a stronger bonding than race. O’Neill was Philip’s boyhood friend; his Boggart was a newly arrived, and imposed, acquisition.

  She’d wavered about in the corridor, moving forward, stepping back, longing to rejoin the clean conviction of England against the dirty foreigners, to strike a patriotic blow for Queen Elizabeth, to know again where she stood.

  But she didn’t know where she stood. The O’Neill had destroyed that happy certainty. Suppose that she herself was one of those dirty foreigners? In the end she’d crept back to her room.

  She’d been left with only one move. She had to see Will. The fog wall that had protected her sanity for so long was shifting; it was a fine day to everybody else’s view, the sun warming piles of leaves that had been crisped by early frost, rose-hips sprinkling the hedges with bright red, dew glissading up and down spiders’ webs, but Barbary’s eyes saw it through a mist. ‘The English hanged her,’ was being twittered by blackbirds. A countrywoman with a yoke of milk pails curtseyed to her as she passed the lodge and called pleasant
ly: ‘Good day, Master Barbary. I’m told the English hanged her.’

  Hanged who? They hanged all sorts. They’d hanged Mary Cutpurse for killing her baby. Whoever she was, she’d probably deserved it. She wasn’t Barbary’s mother, Barbary didn’t have a mother. Then why was somebody’s mother hanging from the neck at the back of Barbary’s mind?

  Only Will knew for certain. She’d never had the courage to ask him before, but now she had to. Almost reluctantly, she admitted to herself that the courage to face the answer, if she got one, had been given her by the O’Neill.

  She hadn’t seen him before leaving the house, for which she was thankful. A sprinkling of that gentleman went a very long way. He was too disturbing and she pitied any women with whom he became involved. Nevertheless, he had been the herald of a new concept, a promise that womanhood, though a disaster, might contain its own delights. For all her worries, Barbary found herself grinning.

  And there had been something else. That tongue in her mouth last night, his hands, his bloody impertinence, his duplicity, the whole complication of the man, had tasted of another country. It was a terrible country, full of idiots and murder and sudden death, and he had come out of it jaunty. He’d joked and betrayed. The devious bastard was the most daring man she’d ever met. The woman hanging in the back of Barbary’s mind had the same quality, a plotter and fighter. It was time to make her acquaintance.

  * * *

  The larger Kent towns, especially the ports, loathed the iron foundries and furnaces which were springing up all over the Wealden countryside, mainly because they used so much charcoal. Regular complaints were sent to the queen from loyal citizens wailing that the woods of Old England were disappearing fast, that soon there would be scant timber for the building of houses, water mills, bridges, ships, gunstocks, barrels, arrows. Hunting would end for ever.

  Barbary had been with Sir Henry at court when weeping merchants had petitioned him to close down his foundry at Robertsbridge. Sir Henry’s answer was not only that he would not close it down, but that he was enlarging another at Panningridge. ‘If Spain comes against us,’ he told them, ‘your wooden walls will need cannon to mount on them. And if you knew aught of iron-founding you would know that birch makes a better charcoal than oak.’

  The Panningridge project was due to the advent of Will Clampett. Barbary sometimes wondered whether Sir Henry would have so readily agreed to take her as his squire/protégé if Will hadn’t been part of the bargain. Recognising the man’s ability, leg or no leg, Sir Henry had quickly promoted him to cannon master and recently moved him from Robertsbridge to Panningridge, where he was modernising the existing forge.

  Barbary had been delighted by the honour to Will and the fact that Panningridge was only a mile or so away. Sir Henry was delighted that he could soon sell first-class ordnance to his country. Will was in a seventh heaven.

  It took a specialised eye to see heaven in Panningridge; most people would have consigned it lower down. Its clear, brown stream, a tributary of the Eden, had once formed a deep, wooded ravine but, for all Sir Henry’s protestations that he was not raping the woods, the great trees had gone, to be replaced by scrub. The upper end of the stream had been dammed into a pen pond large enough to qualify as a lake; below it stood the furnace which, with its water wheel, looked not unlike a mill except for the lobster-pot-shaped chimney which stood beside it belching smoke and fire. Will’s two new furnaces for the casting of cannon were being built to his own design; scaffolding stood thirty feet high round objects like fat obelisks. Among the weeds were stacks of iron sows shaped like canoes, piles of charcoal and bricks.

  Most satanic of all was the noise. The valley roared with the sounds of rushing water, grinding wheels, fire, and vast, water-operated hammers, whose thud could be heard at Penshurst. All iron foundry men went deaf sooner or later.

  Spenser always balked at going too close, so Barbary left him in the pasture grazed by the foundry’s oxen and crunched her way up the cinder track. It was hard on the feet, but roads leading to ironworks had to be tough to take the tons of wood which went into them and the tons of iron which came out. One of the legitimate grievances against the foundries was the havoc done to the highways by their enormously heavy, ox-drawn wagons.

  She saw a familiar face and yelled at it. ‘Matthew, where’s Will?’

  Matthew doffed his ‘skull’, the foundry worker’s tin hat, and mouthed: ‘Morning, Maister Barbary.’ He pointed. Wincing, Barbary walked towards the obelisks where Will, the cannon master, was rowing with the iron master, Henri D’Arras, though how each was making the other hear him was a mystery. D’Arras, who’d been imported by Sir Henry – the French were experts in iron smelting – was using his stubby hands with Gallic emphasis, Will was thumping his wooden leg. Barbary had to pull at their sleeves to be noticed.

  ‘Trouble?’ she asked Will when she’d dragged him far enough away for a screech to be audible.

  ‘He knows his iron, that Frog,’ shouted Will. ‘What he don’t know is his cannon. Wants to cast ’em unbored. Old-fashioned. Unreliable. Nowadays we makes a bore mould and casts round it.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  The places where they could talk were limited not only by the noise but by the fact that Will’s leg tended to stick in soft earth. They kept to the track until it turned a hill and then went up a dry path into woods where the thick multiple trunks of coppiced hornbeam absorbed the noise of the valley and they could hear birdsong again. Will was silent, preoccupied with the problems he’d left behind him. They chose a glade surrounded by sweet chestnuts and sat down, Will on an old stump, Barbary among the ferns.

  ‘Things have happened, Will.’ She gave him an edited version of the O’Neill’s visit. When she’d finished she looked up at him. ‘It’s time I knew,’ she said.

  He’d taken off his hat to rub his scalp, a sign he was disturbed, and his curly greying hair stuck up on the top of his head. He stared down at his ammunition leg and said nothing; not as if he was refusing to tell her the truth, but because doing so would necessitate speaking of the personal for which he didn’t have the vocabulary. She helped him out to show him she was ready: ‘I am Irish, aren’t I?’

  He nodded. Barbary closed her eyes in a rush of misery; she had hoped hard that he would not confirm it. Well, they were on course now: no going back. ‘Is that where you found me?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Will,’ said Barbary in desperation, ‘if this is going to be ask-the-question-hear-the-answer it’s going to take a fokking long time. Tell me.’

  He frowned at her sideways – he’d never liked her swearing – but what he saw in her face demanded response. He turned his eyes back to his wooden leg and kept them there. ‘Master Jack Wingfield’s Ordnance,’ he said.

  ‘That was your company in Ireland?’

  He nodded. ‘Whole cannon, demi-cannon, some culverin…’ He was going to bog himself down in technical details where he felt safer. Barbary moved him on.

  ‘And you were a gunner?’

  He was, him and Little Bill, his co-gunner, with five gunners’ mates and five boys, the team in charge of laying and firing the huge, unwieldy cannon royal they called the ‘Mousetrap’, partly because her breech-loading took off unwary fingers and partly because the name was a euphemism for the female pudenda. She needed seven pairs of oxen to drag her. She weighed 8,000 pounds, fired seventy-four-pound shot from a bore of 8.54 inches and was a bitch to manoeuvre over the wet Irish terrain. ‘Orders from the Lord Deputy,’ Will said. ‘Join up with his besieging force at a place called Smerwick on the south-west coast.’

  Who was the Lord Deputy of Ireland then? Barbary did a quick calculation. Sir Henry? No, Will was going back eight or more years; it would have been Sir Henry’s successor, Lord Grey of Wilton. She didn’t dare interrupt for details like this; Will was beginning to speak, not to her, perhaps to something that had been waiting for him to talk for nearly a decade, but anyway speaking. It w
as almost in note form, like a man jotting in his diary, but the phrases were effective enough for her to follow him. ‘Mud up to the hocks, ours and the oxen’s… Never saw the natives, except skeletons and corpses… Not a cow lowing in the fields, not a sheep, not a pig… Enemy always out of sight… Yelping in the woods… Our men started to disappear.’ She began to go with him through the war-exhausted Munster landscape where a soldier in the column could call to a friend in the mist, only to find he’d gone.

  ‘Four hundred in our detachment when we started, about half that when we got to Smerwick. Two of my boys missing. Didn’t see them again.’

  He raised his head to Barbary, suddenly remembering her. ‘Your Spenser was there.’

  Instinctively Barbary looked towards the field where she had left him. Spenser? Will meant Edmund Spenser, but it was nearly as incongruous to imagine the enthusiastic poet who had sent her to sleep in those surroundings as it was her pony. Again she didn’t dare ask for explanation.

  Smerwick stood near the tip of Europe’s most westerly peninsula. It was there that what was thought to be a vanguard of a Spanish invading army had landed to help the Irish rebels in their fight. They had shut themselves up in a fort on a barren, windswept point of land jutting into the Atlantic, ready to join up with the rebel Earl of Desmond’s army and sweep the English from the land of Ireland.

  ‘They was a year too late,’ Will said. ‘Desmond didn’t have no army now. Couldn’t have fed it if he had. Our commons was short enough, he was starving.’

  But there the Spanish were, 700 of them, crowded into a formidable fortress and the Pope’s banner flying from its walls. The ocean was smashing the rocks below them, the English navy out at sea cutting off their retreat, and Grey’s army standing between them and the rest of Ireland.