‘Now give me your boots,’ O’Donnell was saying. Mumble mumble. ‘Well, it’s not as far as we’re going. And your cloak while you’re about it.’
They were off again, skirting the city wall, past St Nicholas Gate. Snowflakes stuck to their eyelids, making it difficult to see. Here and there a diffused glow showed in a window slit, but nobody was fool enough to be out on such a night. They crossed a meadow, a bridge, into country with only an occasional building. They were heading for the hills. Somebody would discover their escape soon and the hunt would be on. She glanced behind her and saw their footprints filling up, the ones further back already vanishing. But how far did these lunatics think they could get without horses in this weather? How long before that indomitable old woman dropped from exhaustion? How long before Art O’Neill froze to death? How long before she did?
Were they going to kill her once they were safe and had no use for a hostage? They wouldn’t need to. All they had to do was leave her and walk away. She’d be dead within the hour. She was dying now. She was dying a fool’s death because she deserved it. God, hadn’t she had enough clues as to who she was? Why had she fought it so long? Was it so terrible a thing to be Irish? Yes, it was. And if she needed proof of how terrible, here the Irish were fleeing through snow to their deaths.
They began to climb. O’Hagan gave the rope to Grace O’Malley and took the lead.
Somewhere a wolf howled. O’Hagan lifted his head and howled back. ‘A Wicklow wolf,’ he said, ‘come to lead me back to my own territory. There’s a hut ahead.’
A hump in the whiteness turned into a thatched hut. It was deserted, but to exchange freezing snow for freezing dryness felt like luxury. They were rubbing Art’s feet and hands. O’Hagan felt his way round the walls and cried out that there were some hides in a corner. They were bustling, re-dressing, making plans, speaking in Irish.
‘Do we go on?’
‘No, stay the night here. Art can’t go on.’
‘I’m all right, I tell you.’
Their voices moved in and out of her head, sometimes making sense, sometimes not.
‘We can’t stay here. They’ll pursue in the morning. We’d not outrun it.’
‘We go then.’
One voice came through clear. O’Hagan’s. ‘She stays here, Granuaile.’ Argument. ‘She’s no boots. She’ll die.’
‘She’s not fit to live. Taking our names in vain. Laying claim to the drowned.’
‘Was that Maire’s torque?’
‘It could have been anybody’s. There’s a thousand like it.’
‘She stays here.’
‘She’d only be a burden if we took her.’
‘Ach, the hell with her.’
They were leaving. There was a thump in the wall to her left, and one shape came back to kneel beside her. ‘If you feel along to your left,’ said Conn O’Hagan, ‘you’ll discover something to your advantage, as the lawyers say.’ She was lifted and woolly material, a fleece, wrapped round her. ‘There’s more hides in the corner. Get angry, Saxon. It’s anger helps you survive. I know.’ She felt the knuckles of his hand rub gently against her cheek. ‘I don’t know why you move me,’ he said, ‘but you do.’
She heard the rasping squeak of their boots in the snow and craned her neck to see through the window’s broken shutter the four shapes enfolded in whiteness. She felt to her left and discovered the sickle that O’Hagan had driven through the stones of the wall. She watched the snowflakes fall during the long, tricky, painful business of rubbing the rope round her wrists through against the sickle’s blade. She felt no anger against those who’d left her here. She would have given her soul to go with them.
Chapter Ten
The year just beginning had been prophesied as disastrous. Actually each year that arrived was prophesied as disastrous by some crackpot somewhere, but the coming of 1588 carried more forewarnings by seers with better credentials than most.
Regiomontanus, for instance, the mathematician who had provided Columbus with his astronomical tables, had predicted that the world would end in 1588, or, at the very least, suffer upheavals which would dwindle empires.
He didn’t predict which empires, but everywhere rulers struggled to reassure subjects that it wouldn’t be theirs. Queen Elizabeth was so nervous she had forbidden almanac compilers to allude to Regiomontanus.
There was more than superstition behind her unease. Her agents’ antennae were directed towards the monastery-palace laid out in the gridiron pattern on the edge of the Guadarramas, thirty miles from Madrid. Here a tireless man who had sworn to punish Elizabeth for her heresy and the murder of Mary of the Scots, and to reestablish the True Faith in her country, worked scrupulously on the finishing details of the Armada he was sending against her.
It was a curious example of public perception that Philip of Spain, at that moment pouring 4 million ducats into the risky enterprise of an invasion of England, had the reputation of being a colossus of caution, while Elizabeth, his sister-in-law, was seen by her people as charmingly capricious, yet was hoarding her ships like a miser. Her admirals and captains implored her to let them set sail, carry the war to the enemy, gun the Armada out of the seas before it arrived to gun them. But Elizabeth refused to let them move out of port. She wouldn’t even let Drake carry out what he called target practice and what she called ‘wasting shot’. Ships at sea were expensive, whereas ships at home remained undamaged, their sailors eating fresh food on half pay.
It was not a good time for telling the queen about an escape of Irish prisoners, especially as the chance of treasure had gone with them. Lord Burghley’s arthritic feet lagged more slowly than ever as he entered the royal presence at Greenwich to give her the news in Sir John Perrot’s letter.
‘It appears, Phoenix, that Mistress Barbary tried her best to trick the whereabouts of the treasure out of Mistress O’Malley, but was tricked in her turn. They left her to die in a hut in Wicklow where, by the mercy of God, our people found her in time.’ He waited for the onslaught. She stood with her back to him, watching the Thames as if from here she could look out for the Armada. She had grown calmer as the crisis escalated. She didn’t turn round, but a flick of her fingers indicated that he had permission to sit.
Her voice when it came was reflective. ‘My entire annual revenue is somewhat less than Philip of Spain draws from his duchy of Milan.’
‘I know, Phoenix.’
‘And now no treasure from Ireland,’ she continued.
‘I’m afraid not, my Phoenix.’ He flinched as she turned round.
‘Lackaday,’ was what she said, ‘I suppose we’ll have to do without it.’ Her eyes were cheerful. She had floored him and she knew it. She loved being unexpected. ‘And what shall we do with that Boggart person? Hang it?’
He gathered his wits. ‘I still maintain there would be advantage in marrying her off to the right man.’
She sighed. ‘Marriage, marriage. Do you know that Tyrone has written asking permission to marry the daughter of my marshal in Ireland, Mabel Bagenal?’
‘Yes, Majesty.’
‘And that Sir Nicholas has written saying that he’d rather see her dead than married to an Irish Catholic?’
‘I suspected he would, Majesty.’
‘Well?’
It was a tricky matter. ‘I confess to a certain unease about the Earl of Tyrone, Phoenix, but on the surface there is no reason for refusing the match. The girl is willing, I gather, and, Irish or not, he is her superior in rank. Indeed, to refuse him might cause trouble.’
‘Trouble,’ she said. ‘We are about to be beset by the biggest fleet the world has ever seen, and there might be trouble from a disappointed suitor.’
‘A suitor who might ally himself with the sender of that fleet.’
She tutted. She was amazing him with her mildness. She turned back to the window, as if the Armada might creep up the Thames unless she kept her eye on it. ‘When it comes, Spirit, I shall take my place with the army
at Tilbury.’
‘Oh, Majesty, I beg you—’
‘Burghley.’ It was a snap. ‘I have to be in the thick of it. I have to be. My subjects must not think that because their prince has the body of a woman she lacks the heart of a king.’
He found himself sobbing; if his knees had let him he would have grovelled to the hem of her gown. Countless times she had driven him mad, frequently insulted him, and always worked him like a dog, but in moments like these he knew that he loved her because when it came to it she had greatness that surpassed any he had known.
‘As for these marryings,’ she said, ‘there’s too much of it about. Let them wait.’
* * *
‘Her Matie is greatly displeased at the failure of Mistress Barbary to locate the treasure,’ wrote Lord Burghley to Sir John Perrot, ‘yet she is to be permitted to live for, under Common Law, the woman is natural heir to a turbulent princedom of Connaught, and should a husband of proven loyalty be found for her as would bring discipline and calm to that unhappy people, there may yet be some gain. Let the woman be close confined until there is resolve to the matter.’
‘Which,’ snorted Sir John Perrot over the letter, ‘shows how much you know of the Irish, little man.’ Sneaking English rule into Ireland by way of intermarriage had never worked. Strongbow, Ireland’s first Norman invader, had married the Princess of Leinster, but had still been obliged to make his conquest by the sword. Under the Brehon Code women could not inherit, so the Irish ignored the claim of foreign husbands. If anything, it fell out the other way, foreign husbands being absorbed into their wives’ culture. Within a couple of generations the descendants of Strongbow’s invaders had adopted the saffron shirt, abandoned riding with stirrups and generally become more Irish than the Irish. His sister could choose a husband for Barbary O’Flaherty, but if she thought he could rule western Connaught, however proven his loyalty, she would need to think again. Well, well, there was no advising the royal bitch.
In his own mind Sir John was not sure whether Barbary had connived at the escape of Grace O’Malley, O’Donnell and the others, or whether the spurious escape which they had arranged had coincided with a real one arranged by someone else. Certainly it was a long and suspicious coincidence, but on the other hand, what had the girl gained except, from the look of her, her own death? Sir John, never a man to take orders, decided that Barbary was sufficiently closely confined by the illness that was wasting her and put her back into the care of the reluctant Spensers.
The Spensers weren’t pleased. ‘My dear one, should you not speak to Sir John?’ quivered Maccabee. ‘It is a disgrace to treat you like this, as if our home were some wayfarers’ hostel. Are we to be compensated for our hospitality? Are you to receive enhancement at the Castle? Who is Barbary really? What happened? Why must she be put on us?’
‘A leper,’ said her husband with gloom, ‘must put up with lepers. Sir John hates me, I have felt it.’
Maccabee shook her head in sympathy; it was a wonder to her that her husband, so clever, his poetry acknowledged by the queen, was always passed over for high office. He didn’t even have a royal pension, as many lesser poets did. Too honest, her Edmund. Too good for his own good. However, she had been over that ground before. ‘But what has Barbary done? Is it disgraceful?’
Castle clerks usually knew what was going on, but this time only that Barbary had been somehow implicated in the escape of the prisoners could be gleaned from a miasma of rumour. ‘Some say the Lord Deputy himself helped them to get away,’ said Edmund. ‘It would not surprise me, considering his laxity towards the Irish. Others say the Earl of Tyrone had a part in the escape, which again wouldn’t surprise me. However, I have it from Sir John’s secretary that Barbary, adventuress though she is, has her worth in the marriage market. So once more you must nurse her with care, my dear.’
‘But no gentleman, surely… not after she paraded as a man… such an unsavoury reputation.’
‘Quis nisi mentis inops oblatum repuit aurum?’ asked her husband.
‘I’m sure, my dear. What does it mean?’
‘That virtue is of no account nowadays if set beside the opportunity for riches and power.’
‘Barbary? Rich?’
‘There is no harm if we tell our patron of what goes on. We owe him that. He shall make up his own mind. I will say no more, Maccabee, but should she tell you anything when and if she recovers…’
‘I will inform you at once, my dear.’
‘And I shall inform Sir Walter.’
The whole matter was academic. The girl seemed to be dying.
Barbary’s constitution had proved tough just as long as her mental geography had been based on the certainty of herself planted like a flag in the middle of an inner circle, which was the Order, contained in an outer circle which was England. Like some dyed-in-the-wool cartographer, she had designated everything else Here-Be-Dragons country. Now events, like modern explorers, had redrawn the map and altered the landscape of her mind.
The hypothermia she was suffering from when the pursuit discovered her was not serious, hardly worse than that of Cuckold Dick, who had been knocked unconscious by the escapers’ accomplice and left lying on the open roof of Bermingham Tower. What was dangerous was her lack of will to fight it, the gaol fever which followed it, and the congestion of the lungs which followed that.
She was reliving grief. The fog wall had blown away in that cell in Dublin Castle and the terror that had lain behind it, waiting to wrack her, rampaged through her delirium. Her mother. She had left her mother to hang. Maire’s face looked into hers and said: ‘Survive.’
‘But I should much prefer to stay and die with you, Mother.’
Maire’s face became stern. ‘Survive,’ she said.
But she didn’t want to survive, not without Maire, not if survival meant hiding in unfamiliar streets, pursued by men who wanted to kill her. I should much prefer to stay and die with you, Mother.
She screamed for the mother the English had hanged, feeling only now the agony of pity and loss that the fog wall had protected her from all this time.
It was a double loss. Time and again, in her fever, the little drawing of a ship scratched onto a stone cell wall became alive and rowed towards her to take her back to where she now knew she truly belonged, to western Ireland and her grandmother. Time and again she tried to clamber aboard it but that same grandmother kept pushing her back in the sea. ‘Get away from me, you little whore.’
‘It’s me, Grandmother. I’m telling the truth this time.’
But the ship sailed away, leaving her to drown.
Maccabee attended to her, sometimes enthusiastically when she was trying out a new physic to improve her patient, exasperatedly when it didn’t. The real nursing, the turning, washing, feeding, soothing, was done by Cuckold Dick. His presence was the one solid thing in Barbary’s limbo. She clung to it and slowly dragged herself away from death into a consciousness that seemed little better.
She lay, thin and exhausted, in her attic bed and stared out at a pointless life. Not English. Rejected Irish. Not enough energy and wit to be either. A cony-caught cony-catcher. Tears of inertia and shame and grief kept coming out of her eyes. She wanted her mother.
‘Carragheen soup, Barb,’ said Dick, spooning it into her. ‘Don’t wet the bib, Barb. We’ll find that treasure yet.’
‘Treasure?’ whispered Barbary, ‘Oh. Treasure. I know where it is. I just don’t want it any more.’
At the door Maccabee, who had been about to enter the attic, turned back and went downstairs to her husband.
Some days later, still weak and uninterested, she was washed and her hair brushed by Maccabee’s new woman servant, arrayed in Maccabee’s best nightcap and second-best nightgown with a shawl over it. Dick carried her downstairs and laid her on the settle in the parlour under a patchwork quilt.
People who had never called on the Spensers began to call then. Fine horses halted outside the door of Wood Quay and we
ll-dressed men dismounted and told their servants to knock on it. Poor Maccabee had to hire a second maidservant because she was forced to spend so much time chaperoning Barbary during their visits. They were the sort of men Lord Burghley had wished to see on the quayside at Bristol boarding ships for Ireland. But these men were in Ireland already, their fathers had led the way as soldiers and administrators. Already their families owned chunks of Munster; they loved the land, if not its people, and they wanted more. Barbary kept being woken up from fitful naps to be introduced to names that were an inventory of new Ireland, St Leger, Wallop, Maltby, Bagenal, Fitzwilliam, Fenton, Gardner. The faces were those of speculators.
They looked her over, but their talk was of the new Lord Deputy, whom they were learning to hate. He was creating chaos. The man didn’t know how to deal with the Irish. He wanted – imagine it – an equable tax system, he defended Irish land rights against good English undertakers. He’d actually knocked down Sir Henry Norris for opposing him. In the very chamber of Dublin’s Parliament. He’d sworn to do the same for Archbishop Loftus, had called that worthy cleric an ungodly bastard for not carrying the Word to the Irish, as if the Irish could understand it if he did. How could he preach to a nation whose language could include a phrase like ‘Div dav duv uv ooh’, a phonetic version of the Irish phrase meaning, ‘The black ox ate the raw egg’? Sir John was a drunk, a blasphemer, possibly even – they lowered their voices – a traitor.
Barbary hardly heard them, aware only that they made her tired. She was glad when they went. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she said wearily to Cuckold Dick when he carried her upstairs after the Bagenal brothers had gone home, ‘but in that parlour I feel like somebody’s lunch.’
The Pirate Queen Page 24