To Barbary’s surprise Maccabee, whose relationship with the girl had been conducted mainly in shrieks, displayed not just shock and irritation but genuine grief, and went daily to church to pray for Barker’s safety and return.
‘First Master Dick and now Barker,’ she wept. ‘They say the mere Irish are abducting people and eating them.’
‘They’re hungry enough,’ said Barbary.
‘Cousin, don’t be bad. You don’t really think so?’
‘No.’ Privately, she feared that Barker had been assaulted and thrown in the Liffey. Or had seen a chance of escape from drudgery and gone off with a soldier. She didn’t express the first possibility and nothing would convince Maccabee that Barker had gone off on her own volition, so they were left with the cannibal theory, which turned Maccabee’s fear of the mere Irish into downright hatred.
With the loss of Barker, and until Maccabee could hire another servant, Barbary had to help out more than before, especially in amusing the Spensers’ child, Catherine. She was intimidated by this chore at first, never having had to do with small children. Catherine, however, was a grave, obedient toddler and listened intelligently while Barbary told her the story of how Well-Arrayed Richard had fallen in the vat of porridge while burgling the lavender-maker’s ken, or sang her the Pudding-in-a-Cloth’s more respectable drinking songs.
‘What’s that you’re playing?’ Maccabee asked, coming in unexpectedly from shopping.
‘Cousin Barby’s showing me the Three Card Trick,’ piped Catherine.
‘We don’t know that one, do we?’ said Maccabee. ‘It’s kind of Cousin Barbary to play games with you, isn’t it? Perhaps after dinner we’ll all play it.’
At last the English apothecary was called in to remove the comfrey cast. He did it warily, his hands sticking strictly to their job, and pronounced Barbary’s leg perfectly mended.
Barbary took Maccabee to one side. ‘I have to go away on State affairs for a while,’ she said. ‘I wish to leave my good clothes here until I come back,’ God knew if she would see those delights again, but business was business, ‘and if possible I don’t wish anyone to know that I have gone. Can you keep it a secret?’
‘I can keep secrets,’ said Maccabee with dignity. ‘Haven’t I told everyone that you are my cousin?’ She began to cry. ‘And indeed I was glad to do it, for apart from dear Edmund and Catherine I have no relatives. Must you go?’
Damn the woman, thought Barbary as she went up to her attic to pack, why can’t she stay uniformly awful? Why does she have to be touching now?’
Into the wicker hamper went all her finery. She was reluctant to part with O’Neill’s locket, but if she knew prisons, and she did, it would be stolen. She slipped the piece of card bearing the Red Hand of Ulster out of it and tucked it in her pocket. She’d wear the cloak he sent, though; the only certainty about the next few days was that she would be very, very cold. And the buskins. She put on a pair of Maccabee’s woollen socks and pulled the boots over them. A bit large. She took them off and put on another pair of socks. Now they fitted well enough. The muff. Gawd, she’d have to leave the Clampett behind; her fellow prisoners would assume she’d been searched and she wouldn’t be able to explain away a snaphaunce pistol. How could she explain away the torque? Well, she’d think of something; she had to have that. It was part of the plan.
She waited until it was dark and crept downstairs. Through the door of the parlour she heard Edmund saying: ‘But my dear woman, the Three Card Trick is a notorious gambling game…’ Definitely it was time she went.
She eased back the bolts on the door and went out. The cold gripped her like an enemy. Geometric shapes of white in the dark water showed there was ice in the Liffey and it was beginning to snow, flakes hissing as they touched the flare on Prickett’s Tower. She turned right and right again into Fishamble Street. For all her apprehension and the weather, it was liberating to be walking freely again; there was nobody about except some mere Irish crouched against chimney stacks and for the sheer joy of movement she began to run. Left into Cowe Lane, past the pillory and into Austin Lane which ran parallel to the Castle’s western wall. Somebody was sheltering in its shadow with a lantern.
‘Took your time, Barb,’ said Cuckold Dick. ‘Nearly froze me nutmegs off.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Bermingham Tower. Up there.’ He pointed to a round shape appearing and disappearing as the moon rode the snow clouds. Most of it was concealed by the Castle’s turret. Both were incorporated into the city wall. ‘It’s a bugger, Barb. Back of the tower there’s the river Poddle. When we go, we got to get across that, lessen we find a boat. Even the first time won’t be easy.’
There were to be two escapes. She had planned the first with Sir John Perrot. She was to be arrested and put alongside the Irish prisoners, the warders to be unaware that she was Sir John’s agent. With Warder Dick’s connivance, she would get herself and her fellow detainees out of the castle. The ploy was to convince Grace O’Malley that she, Barbary, was her grandchild and gain her confidence. When, according to plan, they were immediately captured and re-arrested and Grace was facing execution, Barbary was confident that she could cony the whereabouts of the treasure out of the woman, just as John Graye the Little had conied the goodies out of Swanders in similar circumstances. ‘Or my name’s not Barbary Clampett.’
Where Sir John’s plan and Barbary’s plan diverged was in the projected second escape, the one Sir John didn’t know about, which was to take place the moment Barbary knew where the treasure was. It would feature only Cuckold Dick and herself, who would then decamp, secure the treasure, sail back to England, pick up Will, and begin a new life. ‘On a tropic island, Dick,’ she’d said, ‘oliphaunts, and mermaids and coconut palms.’
Dick had been more doubtful. ‘Sounds good, Barb, but there’s some rough edges.’
Barbary, however, desperate to extricate herself from Ireland, had been confident that the rough edges would smooth out as they approached them. Now, here, in the cold, under the looming towers of Dublin Castle, the edges were looking not just rough but jagged. However, the die was cast.
‘Windows?’
‘Two, both backing onto the Poddle. It’s not nice, Barb. They’re not all in together like the good old queer-ken back home. Separate cells, no glim lessen they buy it, not much pannam and peck neither.’
‘Perrot keeping them short?’
‘Not him. The screws. Same old story, selling the prisoners’ food. They don’t like the mere Irish, Barb, I can tell you. But our lot’s getting cash from somewhere. They been stripped. Nothing. But the other day she was eating best porridge. Take my oath, one of the screws is in cahoots with ’em, but I don’t know which.’
‘O’Neill?’
‘No sign. But I don’t like it, Barb. They got something under their nab-cheats. They’re powerful cheerful for folk in Needhams like they are.’
‘Got the rope?’
‘Brand new.’
‘It better be. Let’s get going.’
Cuckold Dick left her. Their conversation had frozen her feet. She stamped them, then walked on up Austin’s Gate and stood looking up at the turret which hid the Bermingham Tower from this angle, getting colder and colder as she waited for the Lord Deputy’s agents to come and arrest her.
* * *
‘What’s the charge?’ shouted the night keeper over Barbary’s screamed cursing.
‘Treason and spying,’ shouted back the head keeper, holding fast to Barbary’s right arm, while a third keeper held her left. ‘Agents just brought her in. Hold her, she has the muscles, for all her size. Why they couldn’t keep her till morning. Waking me at this hour. Be quiet, you slut.’ He punched Barbary in the eye. With her good eye she absorbed the geography of the room. It took up the entire floor of the tower, but a third of it had been bricked off to form six cells, each with its own door in which were open squints. From the darkness of four squints, eyes were watching her.
&nb
sp; ‘Search her?’
‘Just feel for weapons. I want my bed. But I’ll have the boots for my collection. I know a young lady who’d fit ’em. Take ’em off her, Jack.’
The night keeper advanced on Barbary and got a kick in the stomach that whooped the air out of his lungs. The head keeper punched her again, this time on the jaw, and she went limp. When she came round the boots had gone, and so had her cloak. The head keeper had both. He leered at her: ‘Nice warm rooms in this hostelry,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t want you to suffer the over-heating now, would we?’ The other two sniggered. Prison-warder humour, Barbary decided, didn’t improve this side of the Irish Sea. ‘Put her in Number Five. They’ll examine her in a day or two.’
She was pitched into one of the cells. She lay, hurting, for a bit.
Still, so far so good. The onlookers in the cells wouldn’t be able to doubt the authenticity of the head keeper’s punches. She couldn’t doubt them herself. Carefully she put her fingers to her eye and touched obtruded flesh. The Order would say she was in half mourning – full mourning was two black eyes. Well, she’d had her eyes blacked before. And they’d overlooked the torque – the watchers in the cells had seen them overlook the torque. Good. The only hitch was that the O’Malley woman wouldn’t have glimpsed her hair, one of the proofs of her supposed pedigree. Through all her struggles Maccabee’s damned gabled hood had stuck obstinately over her head.
She got up and began investigating her cell, mainly by touch since only miserable light came through the squint from where the night keeper with rushlight and tiny brazier sat on the other side of the tower room. The cell was about seven foot long and shaped like a wedge of cheese, of which the door formed the narrow end. A wooden shelf ran along one side to serve as table and bed. On it was a wooden pillow, a blanket stiff with dirt and a pail which, her nose told her, had served previous inmates as a chamber pot and not been cleaned since. Apart from some none-too-fresh straw on the floor, that was it. No window, but everything she touched was freezing. What the temperature fell to in the cells with windows was something she didn’t like to contemplate.
There was murmuring outside. She went to the squint and pushed her face against it sideways, peering to the left, where she could just see the doors of the other cells. Her one good eye opened wide. Her fellow prisoners were playing cards. One of them had attached a stick to a bricklayer’s hod in which was a dog-eared pack of cards and hands reaching through the squints were passing it back and forth so that each player could pick up or discard. The game was some sort of primero.
Their conversation was as unstressed as if they were sitting round a gaming table. It was in Irish, but so much of her knowledge of the language had returned to her by now that she could understand almost every word. All the reaching hands looked masculine. She tried identifying Grace O’Malley by voice, but their tones were getting softer, almost lulling. Across the room the night keeper was wriggling down under a blanket in his wicker chair. They wouldn’t start to question her until he fell asleep; Irish or English, no prisoners worth their salt gained or gave information in the hearing of their gaoler.
With the confidence of aristocrats they were playing for huge sums. ‘A thousand crowns,’ said the nearest voice – that would be Number Four, a man. Even pitched sotto the voice had an explosive energy. ‘A thousand to shame the Devil.’
‘The only shame,’ drawled another male voice further down – Number One or Number Two – ‘is to take your money. The O’Donnells never learn caution. I wager two thousand.’
‘Caution? Caution?’ hissed Number Four – from O’Neill’s description it could only be young Red Hugh. ‘Wash the dirty word from your mouth. Caution is for women. Ah, now, I’m sorry, Granny. I’ll be cautious in me coffin.’
‘And it’s me will be putting you in it. Will we get on with the damned game? I raise another thousand.’ That was Number Three or Two. The whisper was hoarse and aggressive, but it came from a female throat. Barbary had found Grace O’Malley.
They bantered softer and softer. She could feel their eyes on the night keeper, whose chin had slumped. In a minute he was snoring.
‘Number Five?’ It was the drawl of Number One or Two, who’d accused Red Hugh of incaution and bet even more, a sleepy voice. Speaking English.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Our apologies for the welcome. Over-lively, we thought. Would you have a name?’
She allowed her breath to catch, as if she’d been crying but was now being brave. ‘It was Barbary Clampett. Now it’s Barbary O’Flaherty. I think.’ Let them prove it for themselves. Cony-catcher’s law.
There was a silence. The night keeper’s rushlight was guttering. From long practice of keeping watch his head jerked up, he lit a new rush and went back to sleep. They waited until his snoring was regular.
‘Allow me to introduce you. The silent one on my left here is Art O’Neill. On my right is the Lady Granuaile O’Malley. The violent gentleman on your left is Red Hugh, tanaist to the Clan O’Donnell. I am Conn O’Hagan and tanaist to the O’Hagans. If it’s of interest to you, I have a bad cold. Too many draughts here. We’re going to speak to the servants about it.’
She allowed a sob to escape her. ‘Grace O’Malley?’
Red Hugh took over. His voice hit her ear with energy from a couple of feet away. ‘So the Saxons call her. What’s it to you?’
‘They say I’m her granddaughter.’
There was another silence. Red Hugh’s whisper hit her again: ‘Who says?’
He was interrupted by Conn O’Hagan. ‘Should we not let the little lady explain in her own way? Sure, she’s got a story to tell.’
She didn’t like the way he put it and, anyway, she hadn’t wanted that; better if they got it out of her, question by question. In fact, she was beginning to dislike Master O’Hagan. A treacler if ever she’d met one. However, make a beginning and then plead fatigue. Leave them wanting more. Cony-catcher’s law.
So she told them and, as planned, she told them the truth; not all of it, and with a slight bend to what there was, but the truth. Cony-catcher’s law: if it’s verifiable, tell it. She began with her capture by the Lord Treasurer’s agents and the interview with Burghley. She left out the fact that Burghley didn’t care whether or not she was the O’Flaherty heir and had only picked her up because she fitted the role. They must not think her credentials questionable. ‘They thought I was a boy, you see, the heir, and they wanted to train me, like they’d trained O’Neill.’
‘What do you know of the O’Neill?’ That was Red Hugh, angry.
‘He’s my friend. He recognised me as the lost grandchild.’
Silence again. ‘We wouldn’t want to question your word,’ came the smarmy voice of the O’Hagan, the bastard. ‘But most people know who they are. Would you have an explanation for why you didn’t?’
‘Later. I can’t talk any more now. I need to sleep.’ Her eye and jaw ached and she was very, very tired. She piled as much straw on the shelf as she could and burrowed into it, pulling her knees up under her skirt and arranging the curtain of Maccabee’s hood round her neck and face, grateful that it was so awful the keeper hadn’t wanted to steal it as well. She fought sleep for as long as she could and listened; they might begin talking about her among themselves. They didn’t, it would have been impossible for her not to hear them, but she had an uneasy feeling that somehow they were communicating. Presumably they had been in alliance all their lives and here in prison they had formed the almost mystical bond of the isolated. O’Hagan had constantly used the ‘we’. They would know each other’s minds in a way that totally excluded her. Well, sod ’em. It wasn’t their company she was after. She fell asleep.
There was no dawn. The only sign that day had begun was a changeover of keepers. Thumping sounds from the other cells indicated that the prisoners were trying to exercise warmth back into their bodies.
She began jumping up and down, longing for breakfast. It didn’t come for about tw
o hours, and when it did it consisted of one hunk of bread and a beaker of water. The only cheering thing was that it was Cuckold Dick who brought it; she glimpsed his face, stolid and dull, as he pushed it through the squint of her door.
It was a long day. She heard Grace O’Malley tell Art O’Neill that it was snowing hard – obviously hers was one of the cells with a window. That was one very tough old girl, Barbary decided. Her few comments were foul-mouthed and caustic, but, though her sufferings must be intense, they contained no complaint. A different age and a different sex from the others, they still treated her as an integral part of their strange brotherhood. None of them complained, except Conn O’Hagan, who moaned about the service and his cold, but she noticed an anxiety for Art O’Neill. He rarely spoke and was plainly unwell, but neither he nor the others mentioned it. They spent the day in incessant games of cards and their equally incessant banter.
Once again, when the night keeper came on, he was lullabied to sleep by gambling calls that came softer and softer. Barbary braced herself.
‘Number Five?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you better?’ It was the bloody O’Hagan again.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s good, that’s very good. You were in the middle of a story last night, and as we Irish love stories we were wondering if you’d continue.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Well, sure, we’d be interested in hearing how you lost your memory.’
Again she told them some of the truth. Born at seven years old. The fog wall that hid the previous years. Trying to explain the inexplicable and surprised to find how much she resented exposing to these aliens deep matters she had never told anyone before. There was humiliation in it. That treasure better be worth all this trouble. She made no mention of the strange ship that came to her in the cherubims, nor the voice which commanded her to hug Adam and shun Eve – that went too deep. She gave them what and when Will had told her about finding her at Kinsale, but left out his part in the Smerwick massacre; he had killed these people’s allies.
The Pirate Queen Page 22