‘About time you caught on,’ said Dick, aggrievedly for him. ‘I been telling you and telling you, Barb. They’re suitors. The Spensers don’t like it. Got you earmarked for Sir Walter, I reckon. But word’s out you’re worth something.’
‘Worth something?’
He plonked her on her bed. ‘Latch on, Barb. They’re eyeing you up like the favourite at Smithfield. I heard John Bingham’s put in a bid already. If the queen takes it up you’ll soon find Sir Richard’s your brother-in-law, and then where’ll you be?’
The full extent of the danger hit her at last. Worth something. They thought she was politically and financially valuable. She’d been laid out on a slab for buyers. She’d be bought and used, made an excuse for the appropriation of land. Personally dominated, bedded, impregnated. She was more frightened than at any time in her life.
She caught Dick’s sleeve. ‘Get me out.’
His doughy face was concerned. ‘Where, though, Barb? You ain’t been looking out the window but the weather’s krap awful. Seas are closed and we wouldn’t get no boat.’
She tugged at him again and again. ‘Get me out. Get me out.’
That night she dreamed she was in a cage and the bars of the cage were men’s penises.
Other men came, and one woman. Barbary hadn’t met Mabel Bagenal before, but Maccabee had been full of the latest gossip about her and the request the Earl of Tyrone had made to the queen for her hand. Barbary found herself greeting with interest the girl O’Neill had decided was sufficiently apple-cheeked, napkin-using and aristocratic to qualify as the English wife he wanted. Mabel was all those things as well as being very young and very pretty. Her clothes were stunning and Barbary, with her new appreciation of fashion, studied with pleasure Mabel’s tall, crowned hat with its jewelled hatband, the sleeveless velvet blue gown which complimented her fair hair and blue eyes, the diaphanous ruff and sleeves of her kirtle. She had all the mannerisms of court – it was rumoured that the queen might make her a maid of honour, if she didn’t marry, of course. Once she’d paid her courtesies she dismissed Maccabee with the cruel confidence of the well-bred: ‘I am sure you must have things to do in the kitchen. Mistress Barbary shall entertain me well enough.’
When Maccabee obediently retired, Mabel drew her stool close to Barbary’s settle, her chubby face full of secrets. ‘I know all about you,’ she said. ‘You-know-who has told me. He wishes me to tell you he is sorry that you were caught up in you-know-what, but he had to get them away.’
Barbary blinked. O’Neill must have limitless trust in this girl to tell her about his part in the prisoners’ escape; she was, after all, daughter to the queen’s marshal in Ireland and her brothers ranked high in the queen’s army.
‘Isn’t he bold?’ breathed Mabel. ‘What daring he has.’
Barbary caught hold of her hand. ‘Has he heard if they got away?’ There had been a terrible furore over the escape but no real news of the escapers since the snow had swallowed them. Rumour had at one and the same time flown them to Spain and frozen them dead.
‘He told me yesterday he’d got news. One of them died of the cold. Mistress Barbary, you are hurting my hand.’
‘Which one?’
Mabel Bagenal rubbed her fingers. ‘Now which one was it? He did tell me.’ Obviously the fate of the escapers concerned her only so far as they were pieces in the game being played by the man she loved. ‘One of the minor O’Neills. That’s it. Art O’Neill froze to death, Red Hugh just lost a couple of toes.’
‘The others made it back safely?’
‘Yes. So did Red Hugh.’
Barbary let out her breath. They’d gone to their earths; Grace O’Malley to her seaboard kingdom in Connaught, Red Hugh to Ulster, Conn O’Hagan to the fastnesses of his Wicklow Mountains, Art to his grave. Three of them alive, no doubt to cause more trouble to the Crown, but alive. They’d got away. Joy went through her. Grace was safe, Conn O’Hagan was safe…
‘I’m told you’re thinking of marriage,’ Mabel said, smiling. ‘My brother has asked me to speak well of him to you. He is greatly attracted.’
‘Tell him not to bank on it,’ said Barbary, but Mabel had introduced the subject of marriage only in order to speak of her own.
‘Why do you think Her Majesty is delaying her permission?’
Barbary could think of several reasons; Mabel’s father’s opposition to the match, O’Neill’s Catholicism. ‘Perhaps she suspects O’Neill,’ she said.
Mabel’s big blue eyes widened. ‘Of what?’
‘Well, you know what.’
‘Oh that. But he had to help his vassal.’ Obviously to Mabel the treasonable act of aiding political prisoners to escape from the queen’s gaol was a philanthropic lark. ‘Hugh’s no traitor. He loves his country.’
Which country? Barbary was sorry for the girl, just to mention O’Neill thrilled her; it was why she’d come, to talk to someone who knew how daring her lover was. At home she wouldn’t be allowed to mention his name. But did she realise what she was in love with? How could a girl of the Protestant gentry know the cleft in O’Neill’s soul? Barbary could guess at it because she had a cleft in her own, but even she couldn’t plumb the depths of the man, never would, didn’t want to. ‘Have you been to his home in Ulster?’ she asked.
Mabel grinned. ‘Father would go for his whip if I even thought about it.’ She stopped smiling. ‘Why? Have you?’
Barbary reassured her. ‘No. But I was born Irish and I remember things. They’re not English.’ It was hard to find words because impressions of that long-ago time came in confusions too fleeting to be put into language, and touched baser senses like hearing and smell. ‘Music,’ she said, ‘and cow manure.’ The rampagingly bucolic mixed up with sea and spirituality. Warring with the Clanrickards and the Joyces because that was what they were there for. Cruelty and cherubims, intellect and arthritis. There was no common root, prehistory contained no Trojan War, no familiar legend of Arthur, only alien, mythical gods. These things were O’Neill’s. They were also Barbary’s, and even she found them uncomfortable. ‘You’d hate the life,’ she finished, lamely.
‘But that’s what’s so beautiful about him,’ Mabel said. ‘His poetry is so wild and sad and lovely and different. It’s… it’s enlarged, and yet he’s so kind.’ Looking at the girl, Barbary saw ecstasy. Wherever Mabel went from here would be a descent from a plane Barbary’s whole existence had never reached.
‘All right,’ she said abruptly. ‘Just remember you’re in love with the O’Neill as well as the Earl of Tyrone.’
After Mabel had gone Barbary wondered why she had inflicted home truths on the girl. Honesty, especially brutal honesty, wasn’t usually her line, but Mabel had offered her friendship and she’d felt she owed her something for the offer. She’d never had a female friend of her own age; she discounted Maccabee and the bawds. The O’Neill inspired many conflicting emotions in her but she knew that, win or lose him, Mabel was headed for grief.
Maccabee was out when the next visitor called, another male. Barbary heard a deep voice at the front door and turned her face to the wall. How many of these bastards were there? At least with Maccabee away this one would have to survey the goods while Cuckold Dick looked on as chaperone. That’d teach him. She heard Cuckold Dick come into the room and hiss: ‘Another suitor, Barb.’
‘Tell him to sod off.’
‘You might think different about this one, Barb.’ There was an oddness in his voice that made Barbary turn round. He was in the doorway, looking like a shell-game man about to reveal the pea. He was pushed aside by somebody who had to bend his head to enter the room. A lot of men had stood in that doorway, mostly young, a few handsome, all resolute on advancing themselves, but none had set the air tingling with triumph behind them and the intent of triumph to come like this one. His clothes weren’t as magnificent as some but the steel gorget beneath the ruff round his neck was a proper battle accoutrement, not merely a civilian’s sign of masculinity. His
cloak was over one shoulder and a pearl drop in his left earlobe. With his pickdevant beard he looked a younger version of Raleigh, less dark – there was a reddish tinge to his hair – equally superb. Just the eyes were different; they held command and confidence, but where Raleigh had enough of those qualities to be careless of them, this young man husbanded them with ineradicable wariness; he’d earned them, he hadn’t been born with them. It was when she reached the eyes that Barbary recognised the boy she’d grown up with.
‘It’s Rob, Barb,’ shouted Cuckold Dick, tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘It’s Rob Betty.’
Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. Simeon of the New Testament had awaited the consolation of Israel; Barbary, she knew now, had awaited the consolation of Rob Betty. The days of their friendship swept in to wrap her in a comfort that made the intervening time contrastingly bitter. Now there were three of them to share the good bad old memories of the Order and speak the intimate language of that extraordinary university. She had longed for him, he was here. And grown into himself to become the handsomest man she’d ever seen. ‘Oh, Rob.’
‘Barb?’ He saw the curls of hair beneath her cap, the second-best nightgown, the new femininity, but he was having trouble with them. ‘Raleigh said it was you turned into a girl. I couldn’t believe it.’
‘How did Raleigh know?’ She didn’t really care, it was just something to say as he crossed the floor and knelt by the settle to peer at her.
‘Are you really female?’ he asked. He smelled of perfume and Rob and salt-ingrained leather. ‘You’re not catching some cony with this?’
‘Rob,’ she said reproachfully, and found herself fluttering her eyelashes. ‘I’ve always been a mort.’
‘Why? Why fool me like that?’
Bless him, did he think she’d impersonated a boy just to deceive him? ‘I didn’t want the Upright Man breaking me like he broke Foll and the others.’
‘But you could have told me. Weren’t we friends?’
Bless him, bless him. ‘Aren’t we friends still? I’m in sore need of one, Rob, I can tell you that.’ Though she tried, she found it difficult to convince him of how natural the assumption of a male role had come to be, to the point where she had barely acknowledged her true sex to herself, let alone anyone else. He seemed to think it had been duplicitous of her.
‘You always did fit in with the Order,’ he said, and she saw that his hatred for his past life had grown rather than diminished since he’d been away from it.
‘It kept us both alive, didn’t it?’ Amazing, they’d been apart, undergoing volcanic changes, and here they were snapping at each other just as they had on their last night together at the Pudding. But the spat warmed her; it indicated the intimacy of people who knew each other too well to watch their manners. Unless in Cuckold Dick’s company, she’d been unable to relax like this since she came to Ireland.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s your fokking fault I’m in this position. The powers-that-be thought you were the prince of the O’Flaherties. They only took me for second best.’ She told him everything that had happened since he’d escaped that fate by the skin of his teeth. The Tower, Lord Burghley, Penshurst. ‘I bloody near became the Queen of England’s favourite.’ He was fascinated now, occasionally laughing, showing beautiful white teeth. ‘Oh, yes, Master Betty, I’ve mingled with the great since you saw me last.’ She told him about the boat to Ireland, how her sex was discovered, Sir John, the plot to get the treasure, and its failure.
He kept screwing up his eyes as if trying to adjust his vision of her out of the old focus and into the new. It must be difficult for him, she thought; somebody he’s known all his life turning into somebody else. As difficult as it was for her to come to terms with an unexpected nationality.
‘And are you really this O’Whatever?’ he asked. ‘Or is this just another cony-catch?’
‘I wish it was.’ And she did. Viewed from the complexity which now embroiled her, Order life was imbued with a sunny simplicity. ‘She’d scratched the shape of a ship on the wall of her cell. It was out of my cherubims. I knew it. Ironic, ain’t it? I was conying her and all the time I was telling the truth – and she still thinks it was a cony.’
‘So you know where the treasure is?’
There was something in his voice. ‘Leave it, Rob,’ she said, sharply. ‘You don’t want it. Believe me.’ She couldn’t remember with what words her mother had sworn her to secrecy but they bound her. To tell would be to betray something her soul instinctively guarded, too precious to the clan women. Clan women? Where were these shibboleths coming from? In these last few days they had welled up as if from something deeper than her own memory, more like a primaeval haunting.
He got up and walked away from her and she was afraid he was cross until he said: ‘I envy you.’
She was astonished. ‘What for? Did you want to be this Irish prince then?’
‘Good God, no.’ That was an insult. To be a low-born English adventurer measured several classes above the Irish aristocracy as far as Rob was concerned. ‘No, but you know who you are, even if it is Irish. And your people didn’t abandon you, not deliberately.’
‘Did yours?’ This was ground they’d never trodden. She’d never dared to ask what he recalled of the time before the Order took him up.
He shrugged. ‘Yes. And the hell with it.’ It was still forbidden territory. He drew up a stool near her settle to bring her up to date with his own doings, but he had to get up again and stride about because it was such a grand story. ‘God, Barbary, but it’s been a man’s life and an honest life. All the filth of the Order blown away in a clean sea wind.’ He glanced at her. ‘And nobody knows it ever clung to me. I am the son of a poor but respectable tailor now dead.’
‘With a poor but respectable mother?’
‘Also dead.’
Poor but disreputable Galloping Betty, thought Barbary, sloughed off without a twinge of pain. Will he slough me off too? ‘Tell me,’ she said.
She absorbed the details later; at the time she was too busy absorbing him and his splendour as he strode about the room, making it very small and cluttered, to take in more than the gist. Piracy and slaving was what it boiled down to, this manly, honest life. He’d swarmed the ladder of promotion like rigging. ‘Jesu, but I am a fine seaman.’ Attacking Spanish treasure ships under Frobisher had given him prize money, which he’d invested in part share of a ship which he had sailed for Hawkins who was too busily engaged in overhauling Her Majesty’s fleet at home to take a personal part in the trade he’d set up in slaves from West Africa. ‘There’s riches in it, Barbary, but oh Lord the stink. And if you’re unlucky the death rate can wipe out your profit.’ With the money from that he’d gone in for a bigger ship and joined Carew’s enterprise, sailing to Virginia and bringing back tobacco and potatoes to Carew’s cousin, Sir Walter Raleigh, in Ireland, where he had succumbed to Raleigh’s spell.
‘I’m his man now, Barbary. We’ll fall or rise together, and if I judge character, it will be to rise. How the queen can bother with those frisking courtiers when she has him to advise her… He could rule the world, Barbary. He could rule Ireland for her and there’d be no rebellion by the bastards then. They wouldn’t escape Lord Deputy Raleigh like they escaped fat old Perrot.’
He fell quiet, his elbow resting on the high mantel over the fire, and studied her. ‘It was Raleigh told me about you. I would have looked for you anyway, but Raleigh said as how there was this young rapscallion called Barbary Clampett who’d turned into an Irish heiress.’ He cocked his head on one side. ‘I like the result.’
‘Do you, Rob? Do you?’ She was thrilled. ‘But how did Raleigh know? I’m supposed to be a secret to all but the Queer Cuffin.’
He winced. ‘I wish you’d not use cant. We’re out of the Order now.’
‘But how did Raleigh know?’
‘Good God, isn’t he Captain of the Queen’s Guard? And one of her favourites? There’s not much he doesn’t
know.’ Abruptly he took up his cloak. ‘I must go. I’m supposed to be about his business.’
She went into a panic. ‘Don’t go, Rob. Take me with you. I can’t stay here. They’re trying to marry me off. They say I’m marriageable property.’ She struggled up to her feet, but swayed. She was still weak.
Something moved in Rob’s face and she realised that for the first time, in showing weakness, she had become truly feminine for him. Gently, he pushed her back on the settle. ‘Sweetheart, I’ll be back.’
Nobody had called her sweetheart before. Dumbly, she watched him swirl his cloak round him. As he got to the door he turned and said: ‘Since first I saw your face I resolved to honour and renown ye. If now I be disdained, I wish my heart had never known ye.’
Barbary swallowed.
‘I forgot to say,’ he said, finishing her off by a wink, ‘I’d become a poet since we last met. Good, ain’t it?’ He grinned. ‘The change of gender suits you. Keep it for when I come back.’
He went, leaving a woman who until now had remained unwooed at a time when she was ready for wooing, to whom love poetry was something directed at others, who had never thought of herself as desirable.
‘Oh Jesus.’ She’d always loved him. She’d thought she loved him as a brother, but she didn’t think it was legal to think about brothers the way she was now feeling about Rob Betty.
He came often after that, welcomed by the Spensers because he was a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, and welcomed by Barbary to whom he was spring and summer. Every time he came through the door, Maccabee’s parlour became a place of energy and excitement, transformed by his traveller’s tales into a rocking ship or an African coast. The world had opened up for him and he’d had the wit and courage to take advantage of it. All the frustrated ambition which had made him a surly adolescent had been freed to allow full tilt to the charm and humour she’d seen in glimpses when they were children. Her bad dreams went and were replaced by images of his magnificent throat, his long legs in their beautiful boots, the stretch of his body when he put his arms behind his head.
The Pirate Queen Page 25