Barbary was still calculating the ploys necessary to cony information from an imprisoned woman pirate, treasure out of wild Irish and non-interference from Sir Richard Bingham as they boarded.
The Elizabeth Gallant’s name was more impressive than her appearance. She was styled a warship, though the only warlike things about her were her high, old-fashioned fore- and stern-castles. She was small, as broad as she was long and stank of her last cargo, hides. Sir John Perrot didn’t take to her, shouting at Lord Burghley, whose Treasury had provided her: ‘A warship do you say? Last damned war she saw was the War of the Roses. A fine figure I’ll cut arriving in Dublin in this worm bucket.’
But all true galleons were confined to port, ready to defend England from the Armada that Spain was threatening to send against her, which was another sore point with Sir John. ‘They should be out on the high seas attacking the bloody Spaniard’s ships before they get to us. Is that sister of mine so quake-buttocked that she must defend rather than attack?’
Barbary looked round Bristol’s immense harbour and decided that, worm bucket though the Elizabeth Gallant might be, she was a safer bet for the crossing than the collection of traders and tubs, some of them not even decked, which were to take the undertakers over. She also had a hold capacious enough to accommodate the piles of equipment, the retinue of servants, grooms and horses Sir John was taking with him, as well as Sir Richard’s smaller train.
Sir John recoiled at the sight of Barbary’s Spenser tethered among his own chargers and hunters. ‘God’s balls, what’s that?’
Barbary had to admit the pony didn’t look his best; he hadn’t enjoyed the journey so far and was sulking at being below decks. She brazened it out. ‘Mine,’ she said, ‘and I’m sorry, Sir John, but he’s not for sale.’
‘I wouldn’t offer for him,’ the Lord Deputy assured her, ‘if he crapped gold through a trumpet.’
Finding all Mistress Spenser’s missing luggage and settling her, the miserable servant Barker and her baby in the stern-castle cabin tested Sir John’s patience. ‘I’ve provisioned armies in less time.’ But eventually he gave permission for his ensign to be hoisted and instructed the captain to set sail or, as he put it, ‘Set this haystack under way.’
Barbary stood with the others at the taffrail, searching the quayside for a last glimpse of Cuckold Dick. Although she had tried to put out of her mind the Irish dimension that had attached itself to her past, this moment brought the full realisation that she was leaving everything she knew for a land where bad things had happened to the child she had once been. She was being returned to the place that lay behind the fog wall and, fully as she intended to leave it as soon as possible, she was frightened. England had never seemed dearer, and dearer still was Cuckold Dick. She was at the point of apprehension where her mind chose one event as a portent. If it happened she would have good luck; if it did not, she was heading for disaster. The portent she had picked on was a farewell wave from Cuckold Dick, but she couldn’t see him.
Lord Burghley was standing on the quay as if willing the seeds of Munster’s plantation to succeed by watching them blow out of sight towards their seed-bed. Along the other quays crowds cheered the rest of the fleet on its way, but nowhere could she see a brown-clad, drooping, pot-bellied crossbiter.
By her side at the taffrail a figure was contemplating a diminishing Bristol as gloomily as she was. ‘Ireland better be worth it,’ it said.
Barbary sighed in agreement, then jumped round, ‘You old scobberlotcher, you swapping great shifter.’
‘Couldn’t let you go by your own, Barb,’ said Cuckold Dick calmly. ‘I didn’t like the cut of that Sir Bingham. A vinegar-pisser if ever I saw one.’
‘I don’t like him much myself,’ said Barbary, patting him, ‘but you’re still an old scobberlotcher.’ She was overwhelmed with affection and relief. The portent had turned out excellent.
Three hours out from Lundy, Cuckold Dick began wishing he hadn’t come, but by that time they were all wishing they hadn’t come. The Irish Sea caught sight of the forty or so little English ships and grew furious, its cloud brows knitting into a mass of blackness that advanced on them at gale force. The old fashion of Elizabeth Gallant’s rig didn’t allow her to sail close to the wind and she heeled over on each tack as if dodging the colossal boots of some escapee from a giants’ Bedlam who stamped, screamed and tore its clothing. The sea seemed to alter its mass and hit the deck in solid chunks that made the planks tremble, only then dissipating into water that streamed back under the taffrail and down the scuppers. In the stern-castle cabin Maccabee Spenser clung onto her screaming baby and Sir John, who was clinging onto a rafter and swearing. The Spenser servant, Barker, had rolled herself into ball. In between bouts of vomiting, Cuckold Dick was re-acquainting with his existence a God he’d ignored for years. Barbary had jammed herself into a corner and was wishing fervently that she had Dick’s unsuspected command of prayer. Her eyes caught sight of Sir Richard’s face and stayed on it; the man’s lips were compressed but of all the passengers in the cabin he was the least afraid. Somebody had told her he’d once captained his own ship brilliantly. His eyes met hers and passed on with disinterest, but she kept her gaze latched onto him for comfort. A swine, but a brave swine.
The cabin door crashed open and a sailor stood in its frame, the water he’d brought in with him slopping about his bare feet. ‘Captain’s compliments,’ he shouted above the wind and the baby, ‘horses and cargo loose in the hold. Need every man to help.’ Barbary’s hope fastened on him; like Sir Richard he looked concerned without panic. Perhaps sailors had their peace always made ready with God, just in case. She wished hers was, but she still wasn’t sure who He was. She realised what the man was saying; he wanted them to go out on deck, into that; this was what men did, had to do, and for these purposes she was a man.
Cuckold Dick tried to rise, vomited again and was contemptuously pressed back by Sir Richard’s boot. He would be useless. Sir John Perrot disengaged Maccabee’s clutching fingers, transferring them to the cabin’s fixed table. His worry for his horses outweighed the weather. Barbary caught hold of his belt and with Sir Richard bringing up the rear they struggled onto the deck into the insanity of the wind and sea. For a moment Barbary remembered the rest of the fleet and wondered what was happening to passengers in the undecked boats; it was impossible to see. Then her own survival commanded her attention.
A line had been rigged between the cabin and the mainmast, but even clinging to this their feet kept being swept to one side so that they sprawled in the swirling water like drunks, staggered a yard or two and sprawled again. The rain was almost horizontal and lashed against their eyes. The sailor just stopped Sir John falling down the part-opened hatch over the hold. Between them he and Barbary steadied the Lord Deputy onto the ladder and he climbed down. The screams of men and horses down there vied with the screaming wind. The sailor jerked his thumb at Barbary to get onto the ladder. She knelt down, still clinging to the line with one hand, groping for the ladder rungs with the other. When she felt the rungs, she let go of the line. It was in that moment, before she could hold with both hands, that Elizabeth Gallant bucked as a giant wave came over her port bow. Barbary’s free hand reached for Sir Richard’s, but it wasn’t there. Time slowed between the second when she was about to fall and the second she actually did so, and she was able to think quite clearly: ‘That man will be the death of me.’ Then her head struck the edge of the hatch and she dropped twenty feet, one leg breaking as it hit the floor of the hold.
There was pain. There was noise, even more atrocious than the pain. The noise retreated but the pain went on, interleaving itself with a voice: ‘Lantern. Set it myself. Planking. Strip his clothes off. He’ll get the ague.’
Semi-conscious, but aware at deep level of the danger, Barbary began to fight. She tried to scream that she was all right, her clothes must stay on, but the pain and the voice were inexorable. So were the hands that pulled and unbuttoned. �
��Stop struggling, lad. No time for modesty. Get a knife to his shirt. And the trunks. There.’
She’d had nightmares about nakedness. Was this another one? She heard the silence, felt draught on her body, the appalling exposure. She heard the gasps. A laugh. ‘Great God. He’s a girl.’
* * *
In the palace at Whitehall Queen Elizabeth’s long, asparagus fingers showed their bones as they ripped up the communication from Ireland. ‘I’ll have his head. Her head. I’ll give her Master Boggart, the unnatural trollop. Jesus. Was there ever a prince so smitten by the snares of traitors as I am.’
The two men in the room with her cautiously stayed on their knees, assessing her anger.
‘I blame you, Burghley.’
The Lord Treasurer had known she would. He had thirty years’ experience of the queen’s angers with which to judge this one. Definitely below the display at the revelation of Leicester’s marriage to Lettice Knollys – she had gone nearly mad – and well below her outburst of screaming and crying when they’d rushed through the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and she’d been appalled at what the rest of the world would think of her. No, this one was a stamping teeth-grinder roughly equivalent to the time when Catherine de Medici had told the world that Elizabeth was too old to marry the Duke of Anjou. This, like that, was a nostril-flarer, a thrower. It was temper, pure and simple, because she had been made a fool of. He could cope with it.
‘And you, Ormond. What plot are you hatching against me that initiated the search for this… this harlot?’
Black Tom bent his head as strips of the letter were thrown onto his shoulders and fluttered harmlessly to the floor. ‘No plot, cousin, I assumed… we all assumed that it was one of the boys who had survived the shipwreck, not their sister.’
‘You assumed. You assumed. Because we are the weaker sex, you assume we cannot survive life’s vicissitudes. But we can. I can. Even with your bungling. I shall see you both out yet.’ She leaned her face down close to theirs, so that they could see the cracks in the paint round her mouth and smell her remaining teeth. ‘I want her racked, Burghley.’
‘Could I suggest, Phoenix—’
‘Suggest me no suggestions, little man. Was the fellow Crumpet in on this deception?’
‘Clampett, Majesty. I fear he must have been.’
‘Rack him as well.’
They stayed on their knees while she stalked about. Allow her a minute to enjoy cracking Boggart’s bones, then begin the damage limitation. After the minute was up, Black Tom said gently: ‘Great Queen, this Master – Mistress – Barbary can still be of use. Obviously, if she is not the grandson of the O’Malley woman, she is the granddaughter and therefore may still have recourse to the treasure.’
The magic word slowed her down, as it had slowed her before. The Lord Treasurer picked up the ball: ‘And she is now marriageable property, Phoenix. We can find her a reliable English husband who would then have claim to the O’Malley-O’Flaherty lands.’
She whipped round maliciously. ‘I’ve caught you out, little man. Under Irish law women cannot inherit property, you said so yourself. Therefore her husband cannot claim it.’
‘Your memory is faultless, Phoenix. But, since we are establishing English Common Law in Ireland, it is our rule and custom that must prevail, not theirs.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘The creature made me a laughing stock.’
They knew her well. The Earl of Ormond rose and helped the Lord Treasurer to his feet. The worst was over. ‘Impossible, Majesty. You are the sun and the moon. And who is to know what she did? Thank God it happened before we introduced her to the clans as their prince. Her existence has been kept quiet. The man Clampett will say nothing for his own sake, and hers. The Sidneys were as taken in as I was myself, and will not broadcast the fact. Sir John Perrot keeps her secretly in his own house while he awaits your instructions.’
They dripped logic on her wounded pride until she was mollified. ‘Well, well, arrange it how you will. Just procure me that treasure.’ As they bowed themselves out she was positively smiling. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘the young freak made an even bigger fool of you than she did of me.’
The Captain of the Guard looked thoughtful as he opened and closed the doors of the royal chambers to them. The Lord Treasurer hoped that Raleigh had heard every word and been tempted by the carrot he had dangled. It was a considerable carrot, after all; an heiress to treasure, access to Irish lands and power that made even Sir Walter’s vast present estate look small. It was a prize that might induce this overweening pirate into rashness. ‘Go and marry her, my son,’ willed Lord Burghley, silently. ‘Try and make yourself King of Connaught, King of Ireland. That handsome head would look its handsomest stuck on a pole.’
Beside him the Earl of Ormond was swearing. ‘Are your agents blind, Burghley, that they can’t tell prick from pussy? I was made a fool of in there. And me only satisfaction is that, like Herself said, you’re a bigger one.’ He walked off to salve his Hibernian dignity, leaving the Lord Treasurer to hobble back to his office alone.
Deary, deary me. This preoccupation with whether or not one looked a fool, what did it matter? He had long outlived worry about whether people laughed at him or not. He’d survived bigger jokes than this one.
But now, as he passed one of the tall passage windows, he saw what a joke it was. From here, above the Privy Stairs at the bend of the Thames, he could look downriver past the frontages of the Strand palaces and glimpse Somerset House where he had been on that day. The head of Master Barbary came vividly into his mind’s eye with its freckles, its astonishing hair, its trickster’s eyes. He put it onto a female body and was surprised by a rush of admiration for the unquenchable daring of the human spirit. ‘I fear it will go hard with you now, young madam,’ he said to it, ‘but you conied us all.’ For the first time in years his chest contracted with amusement. He was still wheezing with it when he returned to his desk, and the clerk Percy became so alarmed that he ran for the medicine chest and a bottle of balsam.
* * *
She knew how a man must feel after castration: humiliated and lessened; cast out from the lords of creation’s marvellous company. The magic cloak that protected her had been stripped off, revealing shameful incompleteness underneath. Her courage had gone; it cowered at the end of the tunnel into her body, afraid of intruders.
She’d gone to pieces. She lay on the bed in the attic of Sir John Perrot’s quarters in Dublin Castle, her head sticking out of Sir John’s nightshirt as out of a tent, and refused to eat.
‘Come on now, Barb,’ begged Cuckold Dick, ‘have some of this nice jelly. Got carragreen or some such in it, so the cook said. Make you a big strong… lady.’ He tried to edge the spoon between Barbary’s lips and got showered with carragheen soup as she spat it out. ‘That’s not nice, is it? What good’s it going to do? I don’t like this any more than you, but we got to lump it.’ Actually, he was as terrified as she was, and as lonely. A helpless, panicking Barbary left him leaderless.
The door was flung open by Sir John, carrying clothes. ‘How are we today?’
Cuckold Dick said apologetically they weren’t so well. ‘Our head still aches, Sir John.’
‘Lucky to have a head to ache, my girl. Judging from Burghley’s reply to my letter, the queen’s impulse is to cut if off and Burghley says if you don’t find her the O’Malley treasure, she will. What about that, eh? You shall have until that leg mends, Mistress Barbary, and then we confront your grandmother with you. For your sake I hope she co-operates in the enterprise. What say you?’
He didn’t wait for an answer, which Barbary wasn’t giving him anyway, but flung the clothes down on a chest. ‘You,’ he said to Cuckold Dick. ‘Get her into those. Got ’em from Mistress Spenser. You’ll be staying with the Spensers from now on. That pious old fart, Archbishop Loftus, has heard word I’m keeping a mistress in the attic and is already complaining to Burghley of my improprieties. I’ll give him improprieties. G
od’s testicles, I’d forgotten what an envious, backbiting hellhole Dublin was. How’s the leg?’
He flung back the bedclothes and raised the nightshirt. Barbary’s hands clamped a fold of it firmly between her legs, causing Sir John to snort. ‘Good God, girl, too late for that, I’ve seen it.’ He poked at the cast, found it firm, and wriggled Barbary’s toes. ‘I spared you from damned butchering doctors at least. What do they know of broken limbs? I’ve had more breaks on the hunting field than hot dinners, and set most of ’em meself. It shall be as good as new, what do you say to that?’
If Barbary had been less depressed she might have said thank you. Cuckold Dick was full of praise for the way that, after her fall, Sir John restored order in the hold, pronounced the break in Barbary’s shinbone a clean one, yanked the leg until the two ends fitted and then clamped it between two pieces of planking, all before she had recovered consciousness and in a boat that had, in Cuckold Dick’s opinion, been trying to toss itself into hell.
When at last the Elizabeth Gallant limped into Howth harbour Sir John ordered his servants to go ashore and obtain comfrey root. The Lord Chancellor, the Mayor and Corporation of Dublin, and all the other civil and military notables, having ridden hastily from the city in full regalia to welcome the new representative of their queen, had to wait; the Lord Deputy designate was busy pouring pasted comfrey root onto an encasement of splints round the broken leg of a miserable, red-headed young woman. The cast had dried into a plaster that itched furiously but held the leg like a clamp. Sir John flicked it. ‘Hard as the Devil’s dick,’ he said. ‘We’ll find you some crutches.’
The Pirate Queen Page 18