He rummaged among the clothes on the chest and brought out a canvas-wrapped parcel, chucking it onto her bed. ‘Came for you by messenger from Penshurst,’ he said. At the door he turned and winked at her: ‘I’ll say this,’ he said, ‘you’ve got the prettiest little red parsley-bed as I’ve seen in a month of Sundays,’ and went out.
‘You might’ve said you was grateful, Barb,’ admonished Dick. ‘We can’t have too many friends in that class.’
‘I am bloody grateful,’ Barbary shouted at him, ‘but he wouldn’t have mentioned my Mary-Jane if I’d been a boy, would he?’ That was it. Sir John’s attitude towards her had changed from the well-met bonhomie he’d used to her at first, to a nudging, knowing, vaguely hostile patronage now she was a girl. It had nothing to do with her imposture. The English apothecary who’d been called in to check her leg, and who had no idea who she was, displayed the same attitude. His examining hand had wandered too far up her thigh, considering the break was in her shin. He’d only desisted when Barbary told him: ‘Go any higher and I’ll break your fokking wrist.’ Womanhood apparently meant being open to insult.
Cuckold Dick was struggling with the parcel. ‘Letter with it,’ he said. ‘Read it, Barb.’
It was from Sir Philip Sidney and began: ‘Dear and worthy Boggart,’ so presumably it had been written before the news of her change of sex had reached him. She scanned it. ‘He says Will is turning out cannon like a warren produces rabbits and what’s in the box is from him, with his love. Philip says Will says after use it’s to go back to him for refurbishment.’
‘What’s he mean?’
‘Philip doesn’t say. He does say he’s going to marry Frances Walsingham, having decided after all that she is his only true love. So much for Penelope Rich. He wants the queen to let him go to fight in the Low Countries.’
‘God keep the good gentleman safe.’
‘Amen to that. Let’s see what’s in the box.’
There was a layer of russet wool which Barbary recognised as part of Will’s old jerkin. Below that was straw and nestling in it… ‘Oh, God bless you, Will.’ It was a handgun.
‘Powerful strange-looking object,’ said Cuckold Dick. ‘What is it?’
‘Bless him, oh, bless him. It’s the Clampett snaphaunce. I knew he could do it.’ It was strange-looking, being the only one of its kind in the world, as far as Barbary knew. Dutch poachers were credited with the recent invention of something similar, a wheel lock using flint on steel rather than pyrites, because they were dissatisfied with the glow from the matchlocks giving their position away at night. But Will had taken the idea, refined it and, with precision craftsmanship, produced a version eighteen inches long. Its stock curved downwards and, typically Will, was unornamented. Underneath the steel barrel two hooks held a miniature rammer and mop. A string of small wooden cylinders like a clumsy necklace held the cartridges, tiny sausages, each containing exactly the same weight of powder and ball as the next.
Dick picked one out and pressed the stiff paper at its ball end. ‘Bit pea-sized, Barb,’ he said. ‘You won’t stop a cavalry charge with that.’
Barbary peered down the barrel at the rifling. ‘Maybe not, but the next bugger who insults me’ll get the shock of his life.’ Her morale was back. As Dick said, the Clampett would be useless at long range against armour, it wouldn’t even do for wildfowling – unless the bird sat still while she got up close. But that wasn’t its function. It was personal defence, her own secret weapon; carefully aimed, it could drop a man at a dozen paces. And that, Barbary knew, was what Will, concerned for her safety in Ireland, had intended it for. They’d taken away her manhood; Will Clampett’s gun had given it back.
She puffed out her breath. ‘Let’s get those bloody clothes on.’
The difficulty was not the comfrey cast on her leg, though it didn’t help, but the fact that neither she nor Cuckold Dick knew about women’s attire. If anything, Dick was the better guesser.
‘I don’t credit that bit for the leg, Barb. I think it’s a sleeve.’
‘A sleeve? How can it be a sleeve? I got a bloody sleeve on already.’
‘And these wood bits in here, Barb. They goes to the front, not your back.’
Barbary stared at the wooden stays with horror. ‘They look like they’re out of the Inquisition.’
Eventually most of the sections had been assembled, and they were left puzzling at what was left over – a long, stuffed, bolster-like roll. ‘It’s a draught excluder,’ said Barbary, hopefully. ‘It got into this lot by mistake.’
Cuckold Dick considered it, and then her. ‘That skirt don’t look right, Barb. I credit this is the bum-roll what sticks it out from underneath like. We got to start again.’
‘Krap.’
Eventually the roll-farthingale was positioned. ‘How do I look?’
Dick walked round her. Even to his unpractised eye the clothes Maccabee Spenser had sent over were a job lot, and intended for somebody bigger than Barbary. The skirt was moderately fashionable, though made from a plebeian fustian, the high-necked bodice was of rich apricot-coloured velvet, but had seen good wear and was rubbed over the stays. Her hood belonged to another period altogether, being of the type favoured by the late, unlamented Bloody Mary. Its rigid gable roof, side pieces and back curtain covered every scrap of Barbary’s hair.
‘One laugh, Dick, and I’ll shoot you,’ she said. ‘Is it that bad?’
She looked diminished, overwhelmed by the alien clothes, suddenly deprived of colour by the hood; only her green eyes fought back.
‘You won’t frighten the horses, Barb, but that’s about all.’
She hopped back to the bed. Despite the over-large items, every inch of her felt pinched and restricted. ‘I can’t stand this,’ she said, ‘I can’t. What am I going to do?’
‘Not much until that leg’s mended,’ said Dick. ‘After that, well, that old besom in the cells down below still knows where there’s treasure, and we’re still the best there is in the cony-catching line. And there’s piracy.’
She nodded. He was a comfort.
The last item from Mistress Spenser’s ragbag lay on the bed, a long, old-fashioned muff made out of rabbits whose skin might not have had the mange while they were alive, but did now. Barbary picked it up, tore a rip in its lining, and slid the Clampett snaphaunce inside. It just fitted. ‘All right, womanhood. I’m ready for you.’
Chapter Nine
After two weeks of living with the Spensers, Barbary decided that womanhood had even less to recommend it than she’d thought.
Edmund himself was not the problem, he was kept too busy with his clerkships up at the Castle, the centre of Dublin’s administration, while at home he paid Barbary scant attention. He didn’t seem to recognise her as the Boggart he’d met at Penshurst, much to her relief. The problem was his little Maccabee, the well-intentioned, ubiquitous, constantly busy, ever-twitching Maccabee; Maccabee who talked as if in terror that God might stop her mouth at any moment, which Barbary began to pray He would.
At first Maccabee treated her lodger with distaste. She couldn’t remember under what name and title Barbary had been introduced to her on the boat, but she knew it was as a male, that she had been discovered to be female, that the authorities were shocked by it, and therefore so was Maccabee. There was talk of disgrace. Why had Sir John thought fit to quarter such a person on the Spensers’ God-fearing family? This continued until Edmund came home after an interview with Sir John Perrot to say that they would be receiving rent for Barbary. ‘I’m given to understand our guest is an agent of the State,’ he said, bowing faintly in Barbary’s direction. ‘Where necessary she is to be introduced as your cousin. We must treat her well, my dear. Sir John hopes you will teach her the requisites of domestic life in which she is lacking.’
That instruction, Barbary came to feel, was a mistake. Her stock with Maccabee had undoubtedly risen, but so had Maccabee’s need to boost her own. She exulted in possessing skills that Barba
ry did not. From then on it was: ‘Oh, can’t you cook? Now you sit there, poor soul, and watch me make a flummery. First two calves’ feet boiled for their jelly…’ Or it was: ‘Oh, can’t you sew? Then here’s how to turn a seam…’
It wasn’t that Barbary didn’t want to learn these things, though she found them hideously dull, but that Maccabee’s relentless instruction continued from the moment she got up until she went to bed. Barbary, who had once been independent, with time to herself, now had none. It was like being manacled to an ants’ nest. Maccabee was the one who expelled energy all day, but it was Barbary who went to bed feeling that she’d been bled by too many leeches.
Maccabee’s dedication to teaching Barbary ‘the requisites of domestic life’ was equalled only by her dedication to the memory of her father, the wool merchant Chylde, whose qualities and importance Maccabee never ceased to impress on Barbary.
Barbary got very tired of the Merchant Chylde. ‘My father, the Merchant Chylde,’ she mimicked as Cuckold Dick helped her up the stairs to her room in the attics – attics seemed to be her portion in Dublin – ‘he had a thousand oliphaunts, you know, and ate every one of them. Oh, can’t you cook oliphaunt? Stay there, my soul, and I’ll get a skillet…’
‘She means well, Barb,’ said Cuckold Dick.
‘She means to drive me mad, that’s what she means. Why in hell did Edmund marry her?’
‘Needhams, I think, Barb. She says he was a struggling poet when she met him. And she was the Merchant Chylde’s only kinchin so she probably got a nice little inheritance. Anyway, she seems to make his chimney smoke.’ The attics he and Barbary and the servant Barker occupied were over the Spensers’ bedroom and the sound of sexual rompings frequently issued up through the floorboards to disturb those trying to sleep above.
‘No accounting for taste.’
Cuckold Dick went back downstairs to sit with Maccabee as he usually did for a couple of hours in the evenings, before going off to the tavern he was beginning to frequent. He said he was ‘paying his politeness’, and rather enjoyed it. Nobody had explained Dick’s presence, Barbary just having introduced him as ‘my friend’, and Maccabee, presumably believing him to be another agent of the State, interpreted his usual mournful amiability as wisdom. She consulted him on everything from child-rearing to entertaining; his replies were necessarily guarded, but as Maccabee didn’t listen to them in any case, they got on excellently. It was difficult to bore Dick, and he found Maccabee’s deference a novel experience.
Barbary struggled onto a high stool set by the attic’s tiny window so that she could look out. This was the moment she looked forward to all day, away from Maccabee’s remorseless assault on her eardrums. It wasn’t peaceful exactly. Edmund Spenser was renting one of the tall, thin, lathe and plaster houses which fronted the city wall along Wood Quay, the busiest and noisiest part of Dublin. From here she looked down onto the artery of the Liffey. On this dark, November evening it was lit with flares and dinned with activity. Even the three ferries within her view couldn’t cope with the traffic to and from the other, north, bank and watermen looking very like the watermen of the Thames and crying the same ‘Westward ho’, ‘Eastward ho’ rowed up and down the ebbing tide. From Fishamble Street next door, which ran towards the river, stallholders were exchanging news of the day’s selling as they swept fish-guts and scales down the slip into the Liffey before shutting up for the night.
Upriver to her left the torches on Old Bridge showed the people leaving the city for their homes on the north bank. In front of her, ships were still unloading by the light of flares, jammed three or four deep out into the Pool so that shipmasters were remonstrating with dockers who had to clamber over their decks in order to get at the cargo in holds beyond, disputes which Barbary enjoyed overhearing.
What unsettled her was that many of the exchanges were in Irish, and that she understood them. Edmund, being interested in the native poetry, had hired an Irish-speaking clerk from the Castle to come to his home twice a week and teach him the language. Although there was an ancient statute, dating from an earlier English administration of Ireland, which forbade the Irish themselves to speak Irish, Edmund interpreted it as not applying to a scholar like himself. ‘Even her Gracious Majesty has taken instruction in the tongue,’ he said, ‘therefore it behoves us, who settle here, to do the same,’ insisting that the entire family, Barbary included, should attend the lessons with him in the parlour.
His own progress was slow but painstaking, Catherine’s somewhat better, while Maccabee’s was non-existent. It was Barbary’s which was so extraordinarily fast that it terrified her. Unlike the others, she had no trouble getting her tongue round Irish pronunciation; it took to the syllables like a snake released into grass. She hardly had to glance at the words and phrases set for homework to have them instantly secured in her mind where they joined others that floated up, unbidden from a memory she hadn’t known she possessed. It was uncanny, as if a ghost was whispering secrets in her ear.
She hid her unwanted expertise from the others and sat through the lessons in sullen silence. But she couldn’t hide it from herself. Here was confirmation of what Will Clampett had told her. Like it or not, she was Irish. The Irish language lay behind the fog wall, as intimately a part of her as her intestines. It had been no fluke when she’d understood those outrageous words the O’Neill had used to toast the queen and Sidneys at Penshurst. God help her, she and Hugh O’Neill were of the same race.
She began to wonder how she became so proficient in English, and decided that, since Will had not mentioned her as being unable to speak it, her unknown parents had been bilingual, as so many Dubliners were.
But they had not been Dubliners, of that she was positive. The city was completely unfamiliar to her, and surely she would have remembered it if she had spent her early childhood in it.
It enabled her to go on trying to ignore the revelations of her Irishness, to persist in being Barbary of the Order, trickster extraordinary, attempting to extricate herself with profit from a difficult situation. The Barbary of Penshurst, who had once sworn loyalty to the Queen of England, had paled into the background. It was difficult to retain loyalty for a woman who was threatening one’s head. As soon as she could, she’d investigate this business of the treasure, filch it, and try her new proposed career as a pirate. Until then she was in thrall to her broken leg, Maccabee and Dublin.
Believing, like the typical Cockneys they were, that London was God’s own capital city and all others were provincial and inferior imitations, she and Cuckold Dick had been prepared to sneer at Dublin, but Barbary was beginning to be impressed, while Dick had already fallen in love. ‘Imagine the Bermudas with a brogue, Barb, and you’ve got it.’ Even from this window she could see what he meant; it was like a small-scale London and different. Its wharves and streets had the same overcrowding and enterprise, the same men and women sold brooms and mousetraps, she heard the same English calls, ‘Buy my dish of great smelts’, ‘A hassock for your pew’, ‘New oysters’, ‘Whiting, maids, whiting’, ‘Rock samphire’, ‘Hot, fine oatcake’, and all in an Irish accent. The smell of wood and coal fires, so reminiscent of London, mingled with the scent of peat and drifted up into an air that gave a special outline to the roofscapes. She longed to get out and explore it, away from Maccabee.
Being the main city of the Pale – the areas of Ireland amenable to English administration – Dublin had escaped much of the famine caused by the Desmond Wars, though wolves and plague had prowled the streets during the worst times. The uneasy peace of the last few years had given it breathing space in which to recover, and the influx of the undertakers was bringing back its prosperity. Yet there was still famine in the city. Only yesterday evening, Edmund had come home to report that Treasurer Wallop’s stables had caught fire in mysterious circumstances, and several of his horses had burned to death.
‘The mere Irish fell on the carcases in the instant,’ he told Maccabee, ‘gnawing at the half-cooked
flesh.’
‘Who are the mere Irish?’ asked Barbary. She found the strata of Dublin society confusing. There seemed to be Old Irish, Old Anglo-Irish, old-established English, all of them contemptuous of the newly arrived English, who in turn looked down on the lowest order of all, the mere Irish.
‘Scum,’ answered Edmund, shortly.
The bastards better not eat Spenser, she thought, and had an idea.
The next morning Cuckold Dick was despatched to fetch the pony from the Castle stables. ‘That’s a nice horse,’ said Maccabee whose judgement of horseflesh was as unreliable as her judgement of people. ‘My father, the Merchant Chylde—’
‘Get me up,’ Barbary told Cuckold Dick. If she could swing the damned cast over…
‘My soul, you’re not going to ride him, are you? It would be most unwise with that leg… Edmund wouldn’t—’
‘We have State business to attend to,’ Barbary said loftily, having managed the mount. Why hadn’t she thought of this escape before? ‘We’ll be back for dinner.’ No more embroidery, no more flummery, no more Merchant Chylde.
Carefully, with Cuckold Dick at her side to protect her leg from the traffic, she allowed Spenser to pick his way through the activity of Wood Quay.
Immediately, a group of dockers shouted to her, ‘A fine, soft morning for your complexion, mistress.’ Barbary frowned at them.
Cuckold Dick, beginning to pick up local customs, murmured: ‘They mean “Good day”.’
‘Why don’t they say good day then?’ She felt edgy and exposed to insult in her female clothing. Anyway, it wasn’t fine at all, it was drizzling.
Following the city wall up towards Dames Gate, past the windmills, she was informed time and again by men and women that it was a fine, soft morning, a morning to rinse the Liffey, a morning to put water in the ale. ‘These are still “good days” are they?’ she asked Dick.
‘They like words, Barb.’
There must be something in the air, she decided, that infected those who breathed it with chronic love of language and curiosity. The greetings were often followed up by questions. ‘And how did you get your poor, green leg, mistress?’ They seemed to know everything about everybody else. Told she was Maccabee Spenser’s cousin, they asked: ‘And wasn’t there a strange happening on the ship the lady came in on?’ Barbary said she had been too seasick to notice, which led to a general discussion on seasickness cures which mysteriously but invariably led on to the political situation.
The Pirate Queen Page 19