‘They’re a friendly lot,’ Cuckold Dick said, ‘brew a nice drop of ale and all.’ There were more taverns to the acre than Barbary remembered in London. Cuckold Dick said the ale was good but different. ‘Browner, like the Liffey.’ While she was still bedridden he had gone out one night with a couple of Sir John’s footmen and been introduced to another drink called ‘whiskeva’ or something, so he told her, white and shaking, the next morning. ‘Don’t you touch it, Barb. It’s an Irish plot. The captains forbid it to their soldiers, they say it bloody near lost ’em the war.’ But she noticed that didn’t stop him going out to sample it again.
Most of the taverns were crowded with soldiers. The captains and captain-generals were gorgeously accoutred, but the men were a ragbag. Their only common denominator was their weapons and the red cross of St George sewn to the backs of their cloaks. Occasionally a band was in uniform because its commissioning officer had supplemented the Treasurer-at-War’s allowance to enable his men to look like soldiers. Generally, however, contractors to the army had undercut their competitors by providing such shoddy cloth that the men had bought, stolen, or borrowed civilian jerkins merely to keep themselves warm and any resemblance to the uniform patterns kept in the Wardrobe Office in London was purely coincidental. Most were conscripts who hadn’t wanted to be soldiers in the first place, even for eightpence a day, and certainly not soldiers in Ireland. The volunteers either hoped to make money by plunder, or had criminal records that made England too warm for them.
Dublin’s other surfeit, besides taverns, was in churches; Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominicans, Arrouasians, they had been emptied by the Reformation and their walls were being quarried for the new buildings that were going up everywhere. Barbary saw one lovely polygonal abbey in use as a stable. At an ancient nunnery, workmen were carrying carved panelling and ornaments out into the street and throwing them onto a bonfire. What drew her notice was a crowd of men and women silently ringing the fire and staring at an object licked by the flames. As she passed she saw what it was, a full-sized wooden statue of the Virgin Mary.
Already she knew who were ‘mere Irish’, you could tell them by the patched, voluminous, woollen cloaks fringed with fur that all of them, men and women, kept wrapped round their lean bodies as they loped through the streets, scavenging, begging, or asking for work in painful English. These were the natives who had been driven into the city by starvation outside it. They were the sub-class, the human dogs who moved through the crowds as if in a dimension of their own, aware only of food or each other. She felt contempt. There was nothing so low in London; even the Order wouldn’t admit human detritus like these.
A barber standing underneath the pink and white pole of his trade suddenly leapt at one of them, a male who’d been pushing a barrow past his shop. ‘That’s not legal,’ the barber shouted. Barbary pulled on Spenser’s reins to watch. What wasn’t legal? Pushing a barrow?
The mere Irish let go of the handles and slowly turned to face the angry barber, who was considerably smaller than he was, and who pointed at the Irishman’s hair as he shouted. ‘That. That glib of yours. Not legal.’
The barrow-pusher’s hair hung down over his face, his eyes peering out through the thick strands like a wild cat’s out of a clump of ferns. The barber reached up and gathered up the long fringe, which, Barbary presumed, was the offending ‘glib’, brought up his other hand containing large scissors and, in one practised movement, cut the hair across. He turned to the crowd that had gathered, throwing the hair into the gutter. ‘They’ve no right, no right. Against statute it is. Damned bastards.’ He hurried back into his shop.
The Irishman said nothing. He turned back to his barrow and trundled it off, but for one second Barbary glimpsed the exposed eyes, and shuddered. Some of the crowd laughed, one man picked up a round of horse manure and threw it after him. But the barber, thought Barbary, as she kicked Spenser into motion again, he hadn’t been laughing, his had been the anger of the uneasy.
Later, she found that unease everywhere. The Pale was afraid. It had conquered the natives but not got rid of them and, like conquerors everywhere, it credited them with hidden, mystical powers. The traditional Irish glib was forbidden because it was a symbol of the secrecy with which the Pale felt the natives worked against it, worshipping with their forbidden priests in caves, plotting with witchcraft in the hills which surrounded Dublin and beyond into the wild countryside where English law ran out. For all its learning, its inns of court, the schools of philosophy, the residences and the summer palaces of its chief administrators, Dublin was a frontier town.
Barbary liked it, she decided; it was invigorating, and its hint of fear made it oddly exotic.
They rambled out of the city to Hogges Green where the Dubliners went to play skittles and bowls or practise their archery at the butts. It was a large area of open country, grazed by sheep and edged by the ever-present Liffey. Spenser liked water and took it into his head to go down to the tide edge. Barbary dropped the reins and relaxed, enjoying the smell of the estuary, the seagulls and waders. For the first time there was no human noise around her. Except for a child who was crying somewhere. The sound was coming from a clump of alders on the bank. Annoyed that humanity was intruding even out here, she might have ridden past, except that there was a note to the crying that disturbed her, and an activity under the alders that made her curious.
She urged Spenser towards it. In a gap between two trees a woman was being raped. A soldier was standing by, watching, holding a struggling little boy. The woman was silent, but she was kicking, trying to dislodge the soldier who was on her, heaving, pinioning her arms with his own.
Always, afterwards, Barbary remembered the face of the child. She drew her pistol out of her muff and aimed it at the watching soldier. ‘Get him off her,’ she said. She called over her shoulder to Cuckold Dick: ‘Go and get the watch.’
She hadn’t time to load the pistol, but the soldier didn’t like it. He didn’t like the look in Barbary’s eye either. He kicked his companion, who jerked himself out of the woman and looked round, into the barrel of the Clampett snaphaunce. Grabbing his trunks up, he got to his feet and the two men ran off.
The woman lay where she was for a moment and then scrambled towards the child, holding him and murmuring in Irish. She was a typical mere Irish, tall, thin and good-looking. Her face was bruised. She glanced at Barbary, nodded, picked the boy up and began to limp away.
‘Stay here,’ commanded Barbary. ‘The watch will need a description of those men.’
The woman looked at her curiously, trying to understand the English words. She said slowly: ‘You’ll be new here. No, they were kind men.’
‘Kind? Kind?’
The woman came up to her, putting her face up to Barbary’s as if she was going to tell her something of importance. ‘The kind ones,’ she said, ‘are the ones who don’t kill you after.’
Barbary let her go. The two constables of the watch who came up with Cuckold Dick some minutes later were unimpressed by the story. ‘You wouldn’t understand, mistress, being a respectable lady and one that’s new here. She wasn’t being forced at all, not at all, so don’t distress yourself. That sort, they ask for it. She was probably doing it for pay, if you’ll pardon the expression. What’s that grand word for them?’
‘Sex mad,’ suggested his companion.
‘Licentious, that’s what it is. Them women have no morals at all, so don’t be worrying about it. How did you get your poor, green leg now?’
They accompanied her back to the city walls, talking all the way. She shook them off at Dames Bridge and turned down for Wood Quay. The damned woman and her child had soured her day out, she was tired and her leg was beginning to hurt.
It was then that a man who’d been lounging against a wall, watching her, came forward. ‘Mistress Barbary? My master would be grateful if you’d call on him. I’ll lead you to his house.’
Barbary looked at him suspiciously. The fellow was in
splendid livery but it had no emblazonery on it. This was probably a summons from Sir John, but you couldn’t be too careful. ‘Who is he?’
The man looked around at the people passing by. ‘Well, now, I was not to mention the name, ears being everywhere, but if I was to lead the little pony, perhaps you’d be looking at the back of my gauntlet.’
Barbary looked at it, reining Spenser in. Embroidered on the back of the glove was a red hand cut off at the wrist. ‘So?’
‘Ah, Jesus,’ said the man, shuffling his feet with irritation. ‘Are you coming or not?’
‘Very polite,’ said Barbary. She looked at Cuckold Dick. ‘Do we go?’ She knew she would; she was intrigued, and anything was better than an afternoon with Maccabee Spenser.
‘Always got the Clampett, Barb.’
Their route this time took them towards a richer part of the city where the English administrators and lords like Ormond and Tyrone, the rich and loyal Irish, had their town residences. On the way they passed the King’s Inns, the crazily timbered houses from the time of Henry VIII, which were occupied by the legal profession. If anybody was flourishing in Dublin it was the lawyers, Barbary decided. Black-gowned figures with ear flaps on their caps scurried to and from court with their clerks following, carrying small hills of rolled documents. Edmund Spenser had said that the settlement of Munster was proving more complicated than its planners in London had envisaged. Irish and Anglo-Irish were contesting grants of their land to the undertakers, and while the court battles went on and the lawyers grew rich, the poor undertakers themselves were having to wait in Dublin until their licences were approved, and their money was running out.
A man Barbary recognised from the quay at Bristol – he was the one who’d been accompanied by the grandfather in the coffin – was hanging onto the arm of one of the lawyers. ‘I wanted to get my winter corn in.’
The lawyer dislodged him. ‘My dear man, I expect a settlement any day. You can sow it in spring when you get there, can’t you?’
The farmer watched him bustle off. ‘They call it winter corn because it goes in in winter,’ he shouted. ‘How’m we going to live?’ But that wasn’t the lawyer’s problem.
Though they went in through a side gate, the servant with the red hand on his gauntlet led them along a walk of rose trees to the courtyard of an impressive house, a Palladian frontage with a balustraded flight of steps leading up to the front door from a courtyard guarded by stone hounds. The servant helped Barbary off Spenser but instead of putting her down, carried her up the steps and into the house, calling over his shoulder to a groom: ‘Look to the small nag, will you?’ Cuckold Dick followed them into a flagged hall and then through double doors into a large room, so like the salon at Penshurst that Barbary was momentarily disorientated. Tall windows, screens, carved desk, carved mantel over the massive fire, similar firedogs, even the same Dutch bowls of potpourri. The servant lowered her into a large chair and left.
A man looked up from the desk. ‘Saints defend us, what are you wearing?’
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Barbary, rudely. ‘How the hell did you know I was here? I’m not dancing today, I can tell you that.’
‘Make your mind easy,’ said the Earl of Tyrone. ‘If I wanted to dance with scarecrows I’ve got them back in Ulster. Will you take that bloody fireplace off your head?’
Barbary grinned and took it off, feeling lighter – and not just from losing the weight of the hood. All the fascination and sense of risk which Ireland had engendered in her since her arrival was personified in this man. He was less fantastically dressed today, black velvet, white lace pointing; no longer posturing for the English aristocracy.
He got up to fetch a tapestried footstool and put it carefully under her foot. ‘How did you get your poor green leg?’
‘Your Irish Sea tossed me down the hold of the ship coming over. The bastards undressed me while I was in a faint.’
‘Fun for them,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t the sea. That was Ireland wanting the truth of you. You’re a woman here. You can’t cheat Ireland like you cheated England.’
That’s all you know, Barbary thought. Let me get my hands on that treasure and I’m away from both of them. Aloud she said: ‘What do you want?’
The O’Neill jerked his head at Cuckold Dick standing by the door. ‘You, out.’
‘You stay,’ said Barbary. ‘Dick knows all about you. I tell him everything.’
‘Does he now? Do you?’ He walked back to his desk and poured two glasses of wine, gave one to her and sat down. ‘Have you considered my little proposition?’
‘What little proposition?’
‘Guns, woman, the guns. I want you to persuade your friend Master Clampett to do business with me.’
She was sorry he was so insane, though he had lost the ability to shock her; among the walls and yew hedges of Penshurst his treachery had seemed momentous, here he was just a mad Irishman. But she wanted to prolong the interview; he was better company than Maccabee and she’d like to know a lot more about him. Deliberately, she yawned at him.
He flinched. ‘Will you oblige me by never doing that again?’
This was new; his voice had gone thin with dislike. Stepped beyond the mark, had she? Chit of a girl annoys the great lord by over-familiarity? She almost welcomed the change, even as she resented it; at last she knew where she was, where he put her, and this terrifying intimacy of his was just an attempt to charm her into doing what he wanted.
She became more pert than ever. ‘Insolence, was it?’
‘It was time-wasting.’ He came up to her, standing between her and the window so that the afternoon sun outlined his black figure and shone through his ginger hair; she had the impression of a lighthouse. ‘Sooner or later, you are going to get me those guns and sooner would suit me best.’
She didn’t say she couldn’t if she wanted to. She was too experienced a card player to reveal her hand when she didn’t know his. ‘Why should I?’
‘For the same reason I want them. Come on, O’Flaherty. Where’s your patriotism?’
‘Where’s yours?’ she shouted back at him. ‘You’re the queen’s subject. You want to fight for Ireland against her, you get your own bloody guns.’
He looked down at her as if amazed. ‘Fight for Ireland? You think I want to fight for Ireland?’
She was confused. ‘What are we talking about?’
He went back to the window and pointed beyond it, still looking at her. ‘You think I want to avenge those skeletons out there? Get justice for the scum of Munster? Fight for the True Faith? I stood by and watched while Elizabeth and Desmond reduced Munster until there was nothing for its people to eat but grass. Ask your Edmund Spenser, he was there taking notes, the bastard. The corpses had green stains round their mouths. They died on a diet of shamrock.’
He put his hands on his desk and leaned towards her. ‘Do you know who killed Desmond at the end?’
She shook her head.
‘An Irishman. His name was Moriarty. He was a small farmer and he was cross because Desmond’s men had stolen his cow. He went out looking for it in the Phantom Mountains and came across a hunted, broken old man sleeping in a hut and cut off his head. So perished the great Earl of Desmond. Don’t talk to me about Ireland. There’s no such thing.’
She looked around for help at the familiar furnishings, but this wasn’t Penshurst. She didn’t want any part of it.
‘Who am I, O’Flaherty?’
Dick would have to get her out of here in a minute. ‘The Earl of Tyrone, my lord.’
‘You’re right. I am the Earl of Tyrone. That bitch over in England thought up the title herself and gave it to me. And very happy I’d be as Tyrone. I like England, I like its ways. I even like Elizabeth.’ He picked up an ornamented dagger from his desk and flipped it so that it stuck into the panelling of the wall. He stretched before walking over to pull it out, musing. ‘My next wife will be English,’ he said. ‘Nobility, I think. Blue blood, apple cheek
s and nice with the table napkins.’
‘Yes, my lord.’ She didn’t take her eyes off him. He was pointing the dagger at her.
‘But who else am I?’
‘I don’t know, my lord.’
‘I am the O’Neill. The O’Neill. I eat with my fingers in the open air at tables made out of tussocks and my milk comes out of dirty pails and my hereditary harper sings me songs that were old a thousand years ago. And great savages called O’Donnell stride up to me and say: “O’Neill of Ulster, we call on you as the aid of our ancestors to help us. The English adventurers have come to Dundalk and taken our ancient castles and ravished our women.” And who answers them, O’Neill or Tyrone?’
He crossed the room and knelt in front of her, taking her wine cup and holding her hands in his own. His eyes were darker than she’d thought, and the pale skin of his face more freckled. It had tears on it. ‘Who answers?’
‘I don’t know.’
He drew in a deep breath and got up, briskly. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, the Earl of Tyrone did. “Hang on, old fellow,” he said, “I’ll just go and ask them nicely in Dublin.”’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes, I did. The Earl of Tyrone did. And Sir Jolly Jack Perrot says: “Yes, Tyrone, those English adventurers are naughty, unauthorised men. But they are English. And just in case your Irish O’Donnells move against them, I’ve taken their chief’s son, Red Hugh O’Donnell, by a trick and I’ve put him in prison as a hostage for their good behaviour.” And what does Tyrone say? He says: “Oh, right ho.”’
The Pirate Queen Page 20