She had no time for her many problems, only for trying to assess whether he was as infatuated with her as she with him. Sometimes she thought he was, or why did he come so often? But something she wanted to find in him eluded her.
On the few occasions they were alone together he was eager to hear what she could remember of her Irish childhood. Did she recall her father? What had been his status? How much land had he owned? She was reluctant to talk about it, partly because she didn’t know – ‘I was only a kinchin, Rob’ – partly because of a mental prohibition that made her feel she was betraying some ancient loyalty, and partly because she wanted to recall their times in the Order instead.
But this he wouldn’t. ‘Those days are dead.’ He got cross when she talked cant, wanting to keep his new vision of her as a woman. ‘You’re a lady, don’t spoil yourself.’ So she assumed a different personality for him; softly spoken, gentle, unemphatic. It made her characterless, she felt, but he responded to it with warmth, and his appreciation was so wonderful that her independence evaporated under the sun of it. But she still kept the secret of the treasure, and one other thing. In response to some warning she saw no reason for, but obeyed, she repressed the meetings she’d had with the O’Neill. The deep, ambivalent mingling of her soul with that Irishman’s was unsayable, especially as Rob frequently voiced distrust and contempt for Irish lords.
Then came the day when Rob brought Sir Walter Raleigh to visit, sending Edmund and Maccabee into paroxysms of hospitality. ‘Take this chair by the fire, Sir Walter.’ ‘Another capon, Sir Walter.’ Mary, the new servant, was kept on the go between kitchen and parlour fetching Maccabee’s best refreshments.
It was difficult to associate this sophisticated, gorgeously apparelled courtier with the man in Will’s story who had hewed and paunched helpless men by the hundred at Smerwick. No good thinking about it either; like everything else Will had told her, that knowledge had to be consigned to the place that had once been behind the fog wall; a time out of life, horrific and mystical, nothing to do with the present.
She wondered if he’d remember the night of the Penshurst fantastical or whether he’d been too busy taking maids of honour behind the bushes to notice her. He remembered. He kissed her hand, giving her a wicked wink. ‘A magnificent transformation, Mistress Boggart, from elf to Queen of Faerie.’
She couldn’t help winking back. He was a bit magnificent himself. Killer he might have been, but it was small wonder Rob had modelled himself on the man.
For all he was a Devonian with a thick accent, he had the sharpness that reminded her of the London streets. He took the stage, eclipsing even Rob, who was happy enough to play second fiddle. While they listened to what was being done on his estates at Lismore and Youghal in the south of Ireland, and the strange-sounding plants he’d shipped from the New World for their gardens, Barbary watched Rob watching Raleigh and knew that, even if Rob came to love her as she loved him, she would never receive the adoration he extended to his hero.
She jumped as he turned the conversation to her. ‘You’re a true maid of Connaught, mistress, with your fiery hair and spirit. ’Tis a pity you’m to be given off to some old administrator as’ll not appreciate either.’
Terror. ‘What administrator?’
Infuriatingly, Raleigh produced a long, thin tube of silver with a bowl at one end, to which he set fire while sucking the other. Barbary was so frightened she barely noticed. ‘What administrator?’
Smoke came out of Sir Walter’s mouth. ‘There, there, maid. Don’t be frit. I shouldn’t have said, seemingly, but word is you’m to be used to bring your clan back under Her Majesty’s dominion. Connaught’s a wild land, as beautiful as you are, and ’tis time English writ ran there in fact as well as name. ’Twould need a doughty man with your help to do it, yet there’s none but weaklings at court nowadays.’
Married off. Sent back to that strange time and place with a stranger, as a stranger, to subdue it. ‘I’m not fokking marrying anybody,’ she said. Could they marry her off against her will? Raleigh’s shrug was not reassuring, nor were stories she’d heard in the past of heiresses being married, want to or not, to their father’s choice. ‘Fokking hell,’ she said, hopelessly, not caring that Rob shot her a disapproving glance. ‘Are you sure?’
‘That’s what they’m saying at court.’
At that moment Mary, entering the room from the door behind Raleigh’s chair with two tankards of ale, saw the smoke issuing from the front of this valued guest and emptied one of the tankards over his head. Amid the recriminations, the confusion, moppings and apologies, only Raleigh kept a resigned calm. ‘People do keep doing that,’ he said.
As his host and hostess, still apologising, saw him to the door, he suggested: ‘Let Master Rob take the maid to her room. She’m not too viddy.’
Viddy Barbary was not. Rob had to carry her up the stairs and she clung to his neck, begging him to take her away. ‘I don’t want to get married. I don’t want Connaught or any of it. I want to go home. Rob, take me home.’
He set her down gently on the bed and cupped her face in his hands. He’d never been kinder. ‘You could marry me,’ he said.
Marry him, her love. Be rescued from her rock by this Perseus. ‘Risk it,’ he was saying. ‘We’ll marry now, before they can stop us. I’ll be the one who helps you win this kingdom of yours from the savages. Make it an Eden where we can be king and queen.’
He was wonderful. ‘But the Rome-Mort’d punish you.’
‘The queen,’ he said, and kissed her. ‘Not the Rome-Mort, the queen. And Raleigh can win her over, he can do anything with her.’
There was one last proviso. ‘She’s not a savage, though, Rob. She’s my grandmother.’
He took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Where’s your romance, woman? Stop quibbling. Will you marry me or not?’
He must want her. He was the one taking the risk, the appalling risk, of marrying her without the queen’s consent. He wanted her and she wanted very much, very much, to be wanted. ‘Yes, Rob,’ she said.
* * *
It didn’t surprise Barbary that Raleigh and the Spensers were prepared to dare the queen’s displeasure by conniving at her marriage, but this was because she was so surprised at herself and the level of thrill which kept her feet suspended from base ground that she had no room for any more.
Raleigh himself procured the licence from some bishop’s commissary. Edmund Spenser had always intended to resign his post at the Castle and undertake possession of an estate down in Munster’s Awberg Valley not too far from Raleigh’s vast acres, and this was a good time to do so – before Sir John Perrot found out that the girl who had been put in his charge had been married off with his complicity.
She and Rob, to her relief, were not to go and claim her clan lands yet awhile. With his prize money, Rob had bought an estate which marched alongside the Spensers’ and they were to get this into working order before they moved on to the more chancy enterprise in Connaught. They were all to set off within the week in a wagon train with the rest of the undertakers. There was much heigh-ho-ing and nonny-no-ing for the life of soil and toil away from the corruption of court and castle. Shepherds’ pipes and flocks figured large in the conversation. Spenser harped on about the idyll of a couple of rustics called Corydon and Phyllida.
‘Are you happy to become a shepherdess, sweetheart?’ Rob asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sweetheart.’ Yes to being a proper woman, a wife like other women were. Yes to baking bread. Yes, yes to Rob and the stride of his thigh boots, yes to his smooth neck rising from its ruff, to the light hairs on his forearm when he rolled up his shirtsleeve. Yes to being as much in love as Mabel Bagenal, who had caused reverberation throughout this country and England by not waiting for the queen’s permission to marry the man she loved and running off with him.
They were married in the afternoon three days later in Maccabee and Edmund Spenser’s parlour by Master Tobias Bildon, a reverend gen
tleman careless in his personal and religious habits, who hiccuped the necessary words and put out his hand immediately for the five pounds Rob was paying him for his services. The witnesses were Sir Walter Raleigh, the Spensers, Mary their servant, and Cuckold Dick. Rob’s tokens to his wife were a ring and a bale of assorted silks taken from a Spanish galleon.
Maccabee had outdone herself on the wedding supper, partly to catch the attention of Sir Walter and partly out of genuine enthusiasm for the occasion. They began with a cod’s head in a sauce of oysters and pickled shrimps decorated with parsley, red cabbage and preserved burberries, and moved on to stewed pigeons and a collar of pig with mustard and sugar served with spinach tart. The wines, which were excellent, were a gift from Raleigh himself.
They were on the syllabub and junkets when Rob rose waveringly to his feet and announced that his wife had acquired not just one new name, but two. ‘Let you, my dear,’ he said, toasting Barbary, ‘henceforth be known as Margaret. Margaret Betty.’ He leaned down to her. ‘Barbary has an outlandish sound to it, smacks of boyishness and… and the past. Margaret, that’s a sweet, pretty name for a sweet, pretty wife. Let you be Margaret.’
Barbary leaned forward on her fist to squint at the idea through a haze. It looked back at her squarely, a solid name with no risk to it, an English name growing daisies, a name that kindly served out ale to its labourers cutting hay in the meadow and gave orders to dairymaids. ‘I’ll have it,’ she said, ‘so long as no bugger calls me Betty Betty.’
Raleigh laughed at that, so everybody laughed, except Rob who looked discomfited. ‘Margaret doesn’t swear,’ he said.
There was the usual uproariousness as Maccabee and Mary escorted Barbary to the attic and the men poured wine and advice into Rob before leading him up. Cuckold Dick was beside himself, showering everybody with wheat and barley, tying horseshoes to Rob’s boots and trying to outdo Raleigh in a duel of barely articulate but filthy jokes.
In the attic, Barbary hugged Maccabee with gratitude; what the woman had done here had not been to impress Raleigh, but from the genuine sentimental benevolence of a wife to a bride. The shutters were open to a pattering rain that was ushering in the thaw, and a weak moon shone on a double bed strewn with herbs and with white ribbon tied in lovers’ knots on the pillows. A candle of scented beeswax was burning on the clothes press.
Maccabee helped her off with her clothes and tucked her into bed. ‘There’s dried marigold leaves in the mattress, that’s for constancy in love,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell Rob, but there’s some rosemary in there as well.’
‘What’s that for?’
Maccabee giggled. ‘Rosemary flourishes where the woman wears the trousers. May God bless your bed this night, Margaret.’ She went out.
As she waited for Rob, Barbary had none of the wedding night nerves that a virgin was supposed to have. It wasn’t the wine; she saw no reason for them. Sermons on the Puritan view of sex in marriage, as a function for the begetting of children and never as a source of enjoyment, had thundered into the ears of other girls but had left Barbary guilt-free because she hadn’t been in a church to hear them. If anyone had influenced her attitude to copulation it had been the bawds to whom it had been such an everyday, or often-a-day, activity that their casual references to it had robbed it of the burden it carried for a hell-fearing Christian miss. Barbary was prepared for a wonderful melding of bodies or a rumbustious slap and tickle, or any combination of the two. If she shivered it was from chill and anticipation.
She heard his step on the stairs and the last-minute rudery of the men calling up after him. The door opened and he stood there in the candle- and moonlight with his shirt open at the neck. His face was concentrating as if on some problem. Would he finish his poem to her? One line of it and she would melt. He didn’t look at her, but crossed to the shutters and closed them, came over to the bed and blew out the candle. ‘Rob,’ she said, ‘I love you.’ She heard him undressing briskly, almost businesslike. He got into bed and she opened her arms to his big, warm body, putting her face to his to kiss him. It wasn’t there, it was out of reach as he arched over her; no kisses, no fondling, no words, straight down to the main event, the penis into the vagina. ‘Ow,’ she said.
The shutters hadn’t quite obliterated the moon; she could see his face. His eyes were closed, intent on his own business. ‘Ow, Rob,’ she said again. He opened his eyes reluctantly, saw her, seemed to get cross and turned her over so that he could finish the function from the back. Which he did, with more enthusiasm but with minimal effect for her. After a quick, breathy climax, he heaved himself off her and turned on his side away from her.
‘Is that it?’ squeaked Barbary. Oddly enough, her immediate reaction was indignation. She couldn’t believe he’d been so rude; what she’d just experienced was sexual discourtesy. She hammered on his back. ‘Is that it? Why, Rob?’ Was that her wedding night, that… that exercise he’d performed?
Then into her disappointed surprise flooded misery such as she’d never hoped to feel, and she sank back, shaking. She had been wronged; she couldn’t say she’d been assaulted, or raped, but the cruelty of both was there. It wasn’t her he’d had sex with; it wasn’t the sexual act at all as she’d been led to understand it, just some task Rob had imposed on himself and might as well have carried out alone.
She thought she’d experienced despair in the Tower, but she hadn’t. She had still been able to scheme and plan in the Tower; she couldn’t scheme her way out of this comfortless, desolate lack of love. This was despair. For he didn’t love her, he had just told her as much. She had wanted him to and made the want into belief. What a fool.
She got out of bed and went to the window, stripping her mental landscape of the flowers and blossomed trees with which she had dressed it and investigating the crags that were left. ‘Who told you to marry me, Rob?’ she asked. ‘Was it Raleigh?’
Chapter Eleven
If they could have discussed it, Barbary felt, they could still have rescued something that approximated to a tolerable marriage, but Rob refused. There was nothing wrong. Why must she harp on these things? Damned women were always talking slops. Of course he loved her. They were happy. Nobody had suggested he marry her for gain. Was she sick to think such a thing? There was nothing wrong. He had more important matters to think about.
She was still sure that this wedding had been suggested to him by Raleigh. Sir Walter was not prepared to marry her himself but by pointing out its advantages to Rob, his acolyte, he would give himself a controlling interest in the enterprise to take over the O’Flaherty-O’Malley lands.
And Rob’s ambition to be the power over great estates had convinced him that Barbary was desirable. For he almost loved her, she was convinced of that. Rob was a surprisingly honest man, and not so lost to greed that he would have married her without feeling any affection. Perhaps he’d even made himself believe he loved her – desire following his ambition. Perhaps his reaction to the wedding night had been as big a disappointment to him as to her.
But affection, this almost love, was no good to Barbary. She lost character again, becoming unsure of herself, bewildered and unhappy as she waited for Rob to fall in love with her. He had to. Sooner or later.
There was a lot to do; agricultural implements and seed to be purchased, supplies to see them through spring. The instability of Munster’s economy after the Desmond Wars devastation left the area still underpopulated and stock unavailable. In its good days it had been possible to purchase sixty milking cows, three hundred ewes, twenty pigs and a good plough team for one hundred pounds. Fifty pounds a year enabled a man to keep up a house and life style that in England would have cost a lord four times as much. Edmund, Rob and the undertakers were out to re-create the paradise Munster had once been.
The problem was lack of labour. The only unemployed in Dublin were the starving mere Irish and these the settlers were forbidden by royal decree to take on. Raleigh promised to send some of his men over from Yo
ughal once Rob had taken possession of his estates and with that they had to be content.
‘Just as well we’ve got Cuckold Dick,’ said Barbary. ‘We’re going to need all the help we can get. Not that I can see him haymaking or milking cows.’ She looked round the parlour, where she and Rob had been making lists. ‘Where is he? I haven’t seen him today.’
‘I sent him packing,’ said Rob. ‘Gave him two guineas and told him to be off. He’s not coming with us.’
‘What did you say?’ asked Barbary quietly. She could not credit she had heard him right.
‘Margaret, it is time you realised where I am headed. We are going to be gentry in Munster, lord and lady of a manor. Then we shall go on. Raleigh will persuade the queen to forgive my marrying you without permission when we subdue your lands in Connaught in her name. Raise your eyes to what awaits us. Forget the old life. It never existed. And I am not taking into the new one a remnant who looks and talks like what he is, a mountebank.’
‘That mountebank,’ said Barbary, ‘happens to be the best friend I have. He saved my life. I love him.’ She got up. ‘I’m going to find him.’
‘Sit down, Margaret.’
‘No.’
‘You shall not go.’ Rob stood up and barred her way to the door.
She tried to push past him, terrified at the thought of how abandoned Dick must feel, how abandoned she felt in the artificiality of the life Rob was making for her. It was lonely. She couldn’t live in it without Cuckold Dick.
She whirled up in the air and came down across her husband’s knee. He was spanking her backside. ‘I. Am. Master. Here,’ he was puffing. ‘Time. You. Learned. To. Obey.’ In all the grief, anger and humiliation, she sensed Maccabee coming into the room and immediately going back out again. She was hauled upright and pulled upstairs. Even as she struggled, and partly it was why she struggled, she knew that Rob was being artificial in this too, obeying some standard of behaviour that wasn’t natural to him but which he thought conformed to the life of proper men. She was pushed into their attic and heard the door close and lock, and Rob’s footsteps going steadfastly downstairs.
The Pirate Queen Page 26