The moment Wingfield and his artillery arrived, Grey set them to bombarding the fort. ‘Monday it was, the seventh of November,’ said Will. ‘We began firing at dawn. Captain Zouche and Captain Raleigh was warding the trenches against light attack…’
‘Sir Walter Raleigh?’
He didn’t hear her, his ears filled with the crash of loading and firing. ‘Their return fire killed Captain Wingfield.’ Will was quiet for a moment. ‘By two o’clock of the afternoon we’d silenced their sakers, by three o’clock whole sections of their earthworks was collapsed on top of them. No more casualties our side, ’cept that John Cheke who was Lord Burghley’s nephew. Came galloping up on his horse, waving a sword like an amateur to get a ball on his head.’ Will grunted. ‘We heard Grey itching his britches because the Lord Treasurer’s nevvy was killed and dictating a letter that the boy’d made “so divine a confession of his faith as no divine in Her Majesty’s realm could match it”. That boy never had no time for confession, not with his brains spurted.’
By evening on the Monday the Smerwick garrison had surrendered. ‘Some of their officers came out to parley. Turned out they wasn’t Spanish at all, Italians, mostly, and Basques, all sent by the Pope, the old bastard, to defend the Catholics of Ireland. Poor, draggly things the lot of them.’
The commander of the garrison was a Bolognese, Sebastiano di San Joseppi, who asked for guarantees of safe conduct. ‘Grey wouldn’t give him any. Said him and his men was pirates. San Joseppi said he wasn’t no more a pirate than Drake was when he burned Cadiz, the which made Grey powerful angry.’
In the cold and wet the victorious but exposed English soldiers watched the parley. At one point San Joseppi fell to his knees and pleaded for the lives of his men. There were women in the fort, he said, Irish camp followers who had harmed nobody. Could they go free? Grey remained adamant. The garrison must surrender at its discretion.
‘At its discretion,’ repeated Will, ‘meaning no quarter.’
There was nothing San Joseppi could do; the garrison had been without water for forty-eight hours. ‘A fort without a well,’ snorted Will. ‘Amateurs.’ Nevertheless, as the Bolognese went back to lead out his men, he’d looked hopeful, unable to believe the English wouldn’t show mercy at the last.
‘They came out dragging the Pope’s banner, crying “Misery-cord”, or so it sounded, and begging for water. The Irish among them was silent. They knew it was misery-cord for them. Some of the women, though, they pleaded their bellies and maybe some of them was pregnant, I don’t know.’
The foreign troops were stripped of their armour and weapons and sent back inside the fort. Gallows were hastily erected outside it and the Irish men and women hanged at once. ‘Excepting three priests as was with them,’ Will said. ‘Those three died slow.’
It was so still in the glade that a red squirrel flowed down the trunk of one of the trees, scrabbled in the leaf mould, picked up a chestnut and scambered off with it, unaware of human presence. Barbary doubted if Will saw it.
‘Grey used us artillery men, leaving the pikemen ready in case there was still an Irish attack on the rear,’ he said at last, suddenly. ‘Two parties, one led by Captain Mackworth, one by Captain Raleigh. There was six hundred of the enemy in the fort. There’d be two hundred of us, so he said, and all we had to do was go in and kill three each, hew and paunch. Not to think on them as surrendered soldiers but captured pirates, like to the Papishes who’d murdered good Protestant men, women and children on St Bartholomew’s Eve. Serving the queen and God, we’d be, with reward to be expected here and on high. Spirits was handed round. That Spenser spouted poetry at us.’
Will wasn’t questioning the orders. He attached himself to Captain Raleigh who, like him, was a Devon man and spoke his language. ‘Took a pike and followed him in, shouting for Good Queen Bess.
‘They ran when they saw us, but it was a small fort and they piled up at one end. We made those as would sit down and then a thrust to the neck and another one low into the belly, dragging up and out. Hew and paunch. They didn’t die straightways, but they didn’t get up again. The others wouldn’t stay still and we had to run after them. The officers used the sword. Captain Mackworth, he was a man to steer clear of, a dirty bastard. And he laughed. Captain Raleigh went at it workmanlike.’
It took hours. ‘Either there was more of them or less of us, but we killed more than three each.’ They killed so many each that the iron of their pikes blunted and it took an increasingly heavy thrust, or more than one, to penetrate. Their arms tired. ‘And we slipped on the blood. And the ones we hadn’t got screamed, and the ones we had got coughed. That was the thing later, the coughing. Couldn’t work out why they coughed so much. Then there was only one left, a boy, and he just sat and waited. Captain Mackworth wanted to play with him, but Captain Raleigh cut his head off immediate.’
Barbary thought of when she and other urchins had run alongside the scarlet and blue columns marching through the streets of London in time to the irresistible sound of fife and drum on their way to the embarking point for war abroad. Bannerets flicking in the breeze, cuirasses glinting, bishops blessing them, women waving, God with them, glory ahead. She had cheered.
And ever since she’d known him, Will had got drunk on 8 November.
‘After that we were ordered down the coast to Youghal to beat off an Irish attack. And that was where the Mousetrap blew up.’
Little Billy, Will’s co-gunner, had been killed in the explosion along with two mates and a boy. A piece of metal had sheared off Will’s leg. Since his unit was now without a commander and since Grey, thanks to Elizabeth’s cheeseparing, had been forced to dispense with the luxury of army surgeons, Will had been lucky to receive any attention at all. He found out later that he owed his life to Captain Raleigh, who’d taken pity on a fellow Devonian and tourniqueted Will himself, had him shipped further down the coast out of the way of Irish attack and paid for a doctor to attend him. When Will became sensible again to things other than pain, he’d found himself in a cottage overlooking the Irish port of Kinsale.
‘And that’s where it all got mixed up.’ Up to that point the situation had been clear. What had been done at Smerwick had been war, the responsibility of his commanders, not his. It was war in which England equalled right, Ireland equalled wrong. Protestantism versus Catholicism. Anglo-Saxon good versus Celtic bad. But… ‘O’Kelly, he called himself, said he was hereditary physician to some clan or other. And his wife, Mary. Good people, looked after me something wonderful. He put moss on my leg for the infection, then when it was better rubbed it with spirit to harden the stump. Caring, my God, they cared for me.’
And they regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, and the little town of Kinsale was full of others like themselves. ‘All good subjects of the queen, and as Irish as shamrocks.’ And Catholic. To Will’s horror he had found himself lying on a bed over which was an idolatrous statuette of the Virgin Mary. A priest had called and swung a censer over him. Like the rest of Munster, even though it was in the Pale and under English protection, Kinsale was starving, but there had always been food for Will.
They had dragged his bed to the window so that he could look out as he got better and watch the boats coming in and out of the harbour. And that was when he’d had his revelation, his light on the Damascus road; everything had changed for him.
Barbary waited for a recital of the momentous, a vision, an angel, the word of God, but when it came it was anti-climactic.
‘I saw the soil was red,’ said Will simply.
On the south coast of Devon, and especially around the tiny fishing hamlet of Oddicombe where he’d been born, the iron-rich soil is flamboyantly red. Gaudy red cliffs run like a curtain wall against the sea, ploughs leave long red furrows in the earth which turn brick-coloured as it dries, ingraining red dust into the folds of the ploughmen’s necks. Devonians grow used to it yet never take it for granted and see the beauty around them as a sign
that God loves their country above all others. When, as he’d accompanied his cannon through the damp waste of Munster, Will had encouraged himself by the thought that he was doing it for England, into his mind had come the emphatic tapestry of God’s own land. Its symbolism had warmed him. When the Irish women, pale and screaming, had been strung up, it had been because God was not on their side as he was on the side of the rosy-cheeked women back home. When Captain Walter Raleigh had hailed him into the fort to kill foreigners, the man’s Devonian burr had sounded rich with assurance and familiarity. In a sense Will had killed for a landscape.
But now, as he looked out of a Papist’s window in an alien country, he saw the same landscape. The sea of Kinsale was as blue, the stone of the harbour walls was as grey, the hills nearly as red as back home. It resembled Brixham, where Will’s father had sailed his catches to the fish market. When the Papist doctor came in from digging the turnips in his garden, his red-dusted hands shook red earth off the vegetables before giving them to his wife to stew. God whose blood had coloured English Devon had equally coloured this part of Irish Munster.
‘I’d been tricked, do you see,’ said Will to his ammunition leg. ‘We weren’t special back home, or if we was, they was just as special in Ireland.’ They might speak another language and worship in another form but God took no notice of these minor differences and had made their lands alike. Perhaps even in Spain and Italy there were parts with red soil. At their deepest derivation all men were the same.
This new and appalling internationalism seemed so self-evident to Will then that he believed the leaders of all countries with their superior education must be aware of it. Yet still they egged on the ignorant with slogans and flag-waving and patriotism for their own ends. ‘Who profited?’ he said, suddenly raising his head and looking at Barbary for the first time. ‘Not the poor buggers who followed them. Not us, dead and left behind.’
Raleigh knew, Grey knew, Queen Elizabeth knew. They got the profit. Their enemy the Earl of Desmond knew and if he wasn’t getting the profit it wasn’t through lack of trying. They reduced to a simple ‘Kill the enemy’ the diversity of sameness that God had seen fit to introduce and to which this damned Catholic Irish doctor, who had saved Will’s English Protestant life, was a testimony. They imperilled the souls of their instruments. On their behalf Will had killed defenceless men and been a party to stringing up innocent women. He had offended against God. His reward had been the loss of a leg and abandonment.
‘A judgement on me,’ he said. But those on whom God’s judgement should have fallen far heavier were flourishing and rewarded.
In the glade the sun was overhead now and Barbary stared up at spear-shaped leaves so translucent that the shadow of chestnut clusters still unfallen could be seen through them. She was restive. Will’s personal had turned out so personal that she wished she hadn’t probed. She didn’t understand his philosophy; the world around her rested on the demarcation of classes and countries, goodness and badness, them and us. She tried to shift him on: ‘Let’s get to me, Will.’ But she had set something in train that had to complete its journey. Will didn’t hear her.
As the pain of his healing wound receded, his dreams became terrible, so close to delirium that he dreaded going to sleep. He didn’t dream pictures, he dreamed sounds which made inchoate shapes. Huge chokings advanced to asphyxiate him and a thin stick of a cough beat and beat until he woke up screaming. He wanted to get away from Ireland like a murderer wants to run away from his crime; his pity for it and his guilt repulsed him, the kindness of the doctor and his wife were repellent.
‘We heard Desmond was dead. A clan he’d despoiled killed him. Cut off his head and sent it to Dublin who sent it to the queen. The war was over, but they kept on hanging.’
The doctor padded Will’s stump and carved a wooden leg to fit it from a piece of bog oak. Will’s hand went to the acorn-cup-like top of his ammunition leg. ‘This one.’
To Barbary that leg had been an old friend. When Will was not wearing it, it had stood in the corner of their cottage, as familiar as a broom. She’d made jokes about it. And all along it had been alien. Like Will was. Like she was. ‘Are we getting to me or not?’ She had caught Will’s horror and wanted the story over.
When he was at last mobile he’d offered to do some fishing for the family and, because the harbour was overfished by too many hungry people, he had managed to make a rest for his wooden leg against the thwart of a rowing boat to give him purchase to row along the coast in search of richer waters. Out in the boat he was a better man. He re-accustomed his hands to the details of fishing. There were small moments of triumph when the lines bobbed and he could haul in fish. Above all, being away from land enabled him to consider what he should do with the rest of his life. The army had made no enquiries about him; he doubted if it knew or cared whether he was still alive. Raleigh had not come back to see if he’d survived and anyway was not an officer of his unit; having discharged his kindness, he’d gone back to England to find favour with the queen. ‘But even if the Lord Treasurer had bobbed up out of them waves with a pension in his hand, I’d a spat in his eye,’ said Will. ‘Taken the pension, mind, and spat in his eye after.’ His bitterness had nothing to do with his abandonment, veterans of war were always abandoned by their country and he should have expected no better. It was because Authority, from Elizabeth down, had led him into a sin he would never be rid of. He didn’t care if he never saw England again, but he couldn’t stay in Ireland, the land he had sinned against, either.
Then, one day when he was spinning for mackerel among a shoal that had gone in close to shore, he saw some soldiers searching along the clifftop. They were English troops; Will recognised the military livery of their bright blue base coats which made them such excellent targets for Irish snipers. ‘Bloody prancing bluebells,’ he said. They were stabbing into gorse bushes with their pikes and sweeping aside bracken.
Will saw what they couldn’t. Twenty feet below them a small boy was clinging crabwise to the cliff face. Though he was dressed in buff jerkin and trousers, the colour of his hair clashed marigold against the brick shade of the cliff, making him as easy a target as the soldiers. As Will watched, he lost one handhold and swung down like a pendulum, dislodging puffs of red earth. Will’s eyes went instantly back to the soldiers; there would have been the sound of dislodged pebbles, but they hadn’t heard, they were too busy calling to each other. Now they were calling to him. He feathered in closer to the beach and cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Fugitive, fu-gi-tive,’ they were yelling, confident that all foreigners could understand English if it was shouted slowly enough. ‘Seen him, Paddy?’
The boy had scrabbled another handhold and had his head twisted round, watching Will. He was very small. Will pointed towards Kinsale. ‘Saw somebody hiding by the river,’ he shouted. Assured by Will’s English accent of his good faith, they began running towards the Bandon.
Will beckoned to the boy and pointed to his boat. Slowly the boy completed the descent, every so often stopping to rest his head against the cliff face, as if to stop it swimming. When at last his legs reached the horizontal, they crumpled and he fell. He began to crawl over the beach towards the boat. One of the soldiers was running back along the clifftop and now the child was in the open, but there was nothing Will could do except make hurrying gestures; his manoeuvrability was still minimal. The soldier began to yell to the others to come back, and began to climb down the cliff.
Will knew what he was going to do, even if he didn’t know how he was going to do it. That child crawling towards him so weakly but so doggedly was the expiation of his sin. If he could save that one small morsel from this boiling pot he would have one entry on the credit side of his soul’s ledger. He had never in his life wanted something so much as he wanted this little boy not to join the pile of corpses that was Ireland.
The first soldier was on the beach now, others swarming down the cliff. The boy was splashing into the water’s edge. He could swi
m well, that was one thing; the water had revived him. Will began to throw his catch at the pursuer. A well-fleshed mackerel hit the man’s face, knocking his helmet off and making him pause. Will leant over the thwart and scraped the boy into the boat. Then he was rowing as he’d never rowed before. Somebody on the beach was loading a flintlock but Will, with his contempt for army small arms, doubted if it was a danger. Anyway, by the time it was fired they were out of range and he could turn his attention to the child. The boy was panting with more than exertion, his face so white that his freckles looked dark green.
Will was prompted into using one of the few Irish phrases he knew: ‘What’s your name?’
The child’s eyes were closing. ‘Barbary,’ it said.
‘I reckon it was lucky I asked then,’ Will said to his ammunition leg, ‘for you went into a stupor after that, the which lasted weeks, and when you come to you didn’t remember a blessed thing. I’d might have had to name you myself.’
Barbary shook herself and took a deep breath. ‘What would you have called me?’
Will’s face went very grave as it always did when he was going to make a joke. ‘Mackerel.’ He had a new lightness about him; the shadow that the Smerwick episode had left in his memory had been faced for the first time and, through the process of recounting, dissipated. Words had given it shape, hung it out to dry, and he had become fluent to the point of volubility.
But in abandoning the taciturnity which had made him seem so wise when Barbary was growing up, he had revealed himself as a different man to the one who had been her prop; a man of errors and guilts and nightmares, more vulnerable, braver, and definitely more complex. She could have wished the old one back; this one needed re-assessing, and she was suddenly too tired to do it. ‘What happened after that?’
The Pirate Queen Page 16