The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  Rob unlocked the attic door an hour later, having designated that amount of time as sufficient for his wife to see the error of her ways, and found himself staring down the barrel of a Clampett snaphaunce.

  ‘Sit down, Rob. We’re going to have a talk.’

  He sat down. He knew she wouldn’t shoot him, but the gun had transferred authority. You can’t deny the personality of someone holding a primed snaphaunce, however different you might wish that personality to be.

  ‘I don’t want you to call me Margaret any more,’ said Barbary mildly; she had been doing a lot of thinking. ‘I ain’t Margaret. I’m Barbary. If I wasn’t Barbary I’d be no precious use to you because I wouldn’t be inheriting anything. You can be Lord Rob or whoever you like, but I’m going to be myself. That’s one thing.’ She didn’t ask him if he agreed; she no longer cared if he did or didn’t. Now that marriage had turned into adversity the old Barbary was back, bib unwetted.

  ‘The other thing is, Dick might be a mountebank, and me a cony-catcher, but you’re a canter yourself. On a scale him and me never dreamed of. You tricked me into marriage.’ She raised the gun towards his mouth, which had opened to speak. ‘I don’t want to discuss it, I just want it out in the open. Whatever you like to pretend to outsiders, this is an Order marriage, and you ever cony me again and we go the dead donkey.’ Divorce among Order members was as casual as the marriages and consisted of both parties standing by a dead horse or donkey saying ‘I renounce you’ and walking away. She stood up. ‘Now I’m going to find Dick, and if he wants to come with us he’s coming with us.’

  Dick was in his favourite tavern, the Anchor, along the quay. He was sitting by himself staring into a tankard of ale. She sat down beside him and put one of her hands over his. He sighed. ‘If he don’t, he don’t,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t go, I don’t go,’ Barbary told him. ‘Where’d I be without you?’

  ‘That’s daft, Barb. He’s your cove.’

  ‘He versed me for the gelt.’ Gentry might marry for gain, but Order members married because they wanted each other, however briefly.

  ‘He loves you in his way. Even if he don’t know it.’

  ‘In his way,’ she said bitterly. He certainly withheld his love when she was the real Barbary and was only affectionate when she adopted the character of what she had begun to think of as a milksop. Their nights together were still unpleasant. God knew who he made love to, Barbary thought, but it wasn’t her. Their sexual encounters left her humiliated and lonely. But she supposed Dick was right. For better for worse, Rob was her cove now.

  ‘What’ll you do?’ she asked. ‘Go back to England?’ The thought made her miserable.

  Cuckold Dick scratched his head, showering dandruff. ‘Reckoned I’d stay on a bit,’ he said. ‘The landlady here’s a bene mort. Remember Davy Jones, the counterfeit crank? Turns out she’s his cousin. It’s a small world, Barb. She’s offered me a libbege.’

  Barbary looked around. The Anchor was smaller and less well appointed than the Pudding-in-a-Cloth, but, now that she examined it, the clientele came from the same mould as the Pudding’s. The dice were falling as well for a man and a woman on the next table who were playing a noisy game with a couple of seamen as they had for Dick the Dicer back home. The motherly-looking woman at a table across the room was sewing while she watched the men around her play cards. From time to time she also glanced in the looking-glass on the wall behind two of the players and what she saw there seemed to make her needle ply sometimes fast, sometimes slow.

  Barbary turned back to Cuckold Dick. ‘You old sod,’ she said.

  Dick nodded modestly. ‘Home from home. And Barb, you remember that younker of Lord O’Neill’s? The one with the hand on his glove? Popped in the other day and gave me a bung of gold. Just like that.’

  She nodded. So the escapees from the Castle had got word to the O’Neill and paid their debt.

  ‘And he said,’ continued Dick, casually, ‘as there’d be more where that came from if I was to keep me hearing-cheats open for anything as affects O’Neill.’

  ‘What’d O’Neill want another spy for?’ asked Barbary. ‘He’s got enough friends to tell him what’s going on in this town.’ She’d learned from Spenser that the city’s old guard were cleaving close to O’Neill now that Sir John Perrot, their pet hate, was voicing his suspicion that the earl was a traitor. It was one of those situations that made an assessment of Irish politics impossibly difficult. Here were the conservative Anglo-Irish Protestant colonists backing a Catholic Irishman against their own queen’s representative whom they disliked because he backed Catholic Irishmen in general. Out here, one remove from the sharp divides of England, concepts of patriotism, loyalty, treachery, were not so clear-cut. To Dick, amoral and apolitical as he was, they were downright fuzzy. ‘You be careful, Dick.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Barb.’ Tears rolled down his cheeks as he smiled cheerfully at her. ‘Don’t you worry about me. You’re the one going among the savages.’

  Sightless from her own tears she grinned at him. ‘Eat them for breakfast,’ she said. She couldn’t say goodbye. She got up and went briskly outside, walked briskly along the quay until she came to a deep deserted doorway and went in it to sob. So this was marriage, this friendless institution cutting you off from everything dear and familiar. For that moment she saw her husband as an enemy who had won the first battle of what looked like being a protracted war. She sobbed again. Well, he wouldn’t win ’em all. She wiped her face and set off again, not to the Spenser residence but to Dublin Castle stables.

  Two days later the undertakers from England left Dublin to take up their estates in Munster. An escort of soldiers went with them. At the head of the long train of carts and riders were Sir Walter Raleigh and his two protégés, Edmund Spenser and Rob Betty with their families, their goods ensconced in a better-class wagon than the rest of the train and their persons up on better horseflesh – except for Master Betty’s wife who, to Master Betty’s obvious displeasure, was mounted on a slow, square, lugubrious pony which definitely let the side down.

  * * *

  The officer in charge of the escort accompanying the undertakers into Munster announced himself to be Captain Humfrey Mackworth.

  Captain Mackworth? Captain Mackworth? Barbary remembered Will Clampett’s account of his Irish war. The Captain Mackworth who, assisted by Captain Walter Raleigh, had slaughtered the surrendered Spanish garrison at Smerwick?

  The same. She heard Edmund Spenser mutter: ‘Are you wise to be returning to Munster? The Irish have long memories,’ and Mackworth reply: ‘Long memories, but short lives.’

  He was a jolly-looking, round-faced man whose only visible scar was an old cut puckering his left eye into a somewhat saucy wink, the result of a hunting accident in his youth. Watching him and Raleigh ride together companionably at the head of the column, Barbary wondered if the remembered shrieks of unarmed men troubled their dark moments, and decided it did not. The memory had been excused and excised. They were undisturbed by the fear of reprisals either by men or by God. How was it that Will Clampett, so much more ignorant, so much less imaginative certainly than Raleigh, could suffer guilt for his part in the massacre and these two men, who had led it, were untroubled? Perhaps it was that Will had no vanity and could allow that he was a sinner, while Raleigh’s arrogance made him invulnerable to self-doubt.

  Mackworth, she decided after some study, was just a bastard. But an efficient bastard. Keeping some one hundred wagons, with their attendant families and livestock, rolling together over Irish tracks took some doing.

  His instructions on the first day were clear: ‘When we get beyond the Pale, nobody, nobody at all, is to leave the train. When we reach your various destinations you will disperse in groups. No family to live alone in any of the homesteads until each one has been made defensible and a system of warning beacons set up. Understood?’

  ‘Excuse me, Captain.’ It was Ellis, former Bristol pig farmer, who h
ad emerged as spokesman for the undertakers. ‘Excuse me, but why’s the precautions? We thought as how the Munster Irish was put down.’

  Captain Mackworth said: ‘Pacified, Master Ellis, pacified. The only sure way of suppressing the Irish is to hang them man, woman and child.’

  ‘Excuse me, Captain, but what’s wrong with that?’ There was a laugh from his fellows, among whom Ellis had established himself as a wit.

  Mackworth winked his already winking eye. ‘Nothing at all, Master Ellis. I am an advocate of it, not to say a practitioner. But our lords and masters in England and Dublin, never having been in the front line themselves, want us to love the Irish. Pat them on the head. Tuck them up in bed at night.’

  ‘So they can kill us in ours?’ It was a woman who shouted, the shrillness in her voice showing she was nervous.

  Mackworth rallied her. ‘They’ll not do that, mistress. Too afraid of us. Just never turn your back on ’em. You’ll be safe enough. Trust God and Humfrey Mackworth.’

  Both inspired confidence during the drive through Anglicised Leinster. An early spring sun shone on sheep and peaceable shepherds as the wagon train rolled over the grass plain of the Curragh which had once known the sweep of St Bridget’s chariot. Mackworth organised encampments for the undertakers near villages where the water was sweet, English spoken and Elizabeth acknowledged as ruler. For Raleigh, the Spensers, Rob and Barbary there was lodging in great houses, the finest of all being the Ormond castle at Kilkenny. ‘Where will we find the servants,’ worried Maccabee, ‘if Castle Spenser is as big as this?’ Edmund reassured her that it was not, but she went on asking the question.

  From the way it had been spoken of in Dublin, Barbary had the impression that the Pale was an actual fence, some sort of chestnut paling running through hill and valley to separate civilised English Ireland from a Celtic wilderness full of savages. There was no fence, no wall, no ditch. But though the demarcation between loyal Ireland and unsafe Ireland might be invisible, she was aware they’d crossed it. Something altered. She saw Mackworth quietly order his men to string out and form a phalanx along each side of the wagons. In the military cart the shot began loading their arquebuses. The pikemen became more alert. When a pheasant clattered out of a nearby wood they snapped their heads towards it and marched with their eyes on the spot it had come from. She watched Rob and Raleigh casually ease their cloaks away from their sword hilts.

  That night the gentry stayed with the train and encamped with the commoners. Rob, Raleigh and Mackworth strolled outside the circle of wagons, keeping the sentries up to scratch while the Spensers and Barbary sat on stools outside their pavilion and watched little Catherine playing in firelight with the other children. Maccabee was in conversation with Ellis, one of the few people who listened to her fantastical servant problems and he only in order that she should listen to him. Either pig farming had shaped Ellis’s looks and demeanour or his looks and demeanour had predestined him for the trade. His face was suffused, his eyes glared and his nose upturned to show bushy, aggressive nostrils. He attacked every subject with the authority of the pig ignorant and rejoiced in an age that presented men like him with opportunity for advancement. Elizabeth – he called her ‘that good old girl’ – had been raised to the throne, Desmond overthrown, Munster made available for settlement, all so that Ellis might flourish. ‘That good old girl understands Ellis and Ellis understands her.’ Poets, philosophers, scholars were out of their depth; it was Ellis, down-to-earth, spade’s-a-spade Ellis, farmer’s son and farmer, who would hold true communion with Elizabeth Regina if ever they met. Having wintered in Dublin he had become knowledgeable on the entire Irish question. ‘Lazy buggers, pardon my French. Need someone as knows how to drive ’em. Touch of the lash and they’ll work my fields well enough. They’ve not come across Ellis before. Ellis’ll surprise ’em.’

  What surprised Barbary was that Ellis’s wife was pretty, uncowed and apparently approved of him, while his two sons, whom he’d sent to grammar school, seemed amused and intelligent.

  ‘Well, my soul,’ Maccabee was saying delightedly, ‘don’t you know we’re forbidden to use Irish labour? Though how I’m to run Castle Spenser…’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ returned Ellis. ‘That good old girl, she’s got to say “No Irish” but she knows and Ellis knows it can’t be done. What she means is “Don’t raise ’em.” Use ’em like you’d train cows if there wasn’t no plough team. But don’t raise ’em above what you find ’em. They don’t know no different, don’t want no different. We understand ’em, that good old girl and Ellis.’

  A drizzle hissed on the incandescent logs of the central fire. The undertakers sat on, as if by staying awake they could outface whatever it was that lay in the blackness beyond the light. Deciding she’d feel better with the Clampett, Barbary went into the pavilion to prime it. Rob entered while she was doing it. On the trek they’d hardly communicated; their sexual encounters had been stopped by having to share beds with other people – a relief for Barbary and, she felt, for Rob as well. ‘Rob,’ she said suddenly, ‘it ain’t that I’m agin being rich. I want to get on as much as you. I just can’t put on the swank any more.’

  He didn’t look at her. ‘It never bothered you when you were crossbiting.’

  ‘Yes, well. I can’t do that any more either.’ Her trickery had left her, perhaps when she’d found she was an amateur compared with Burghley and his ilk, perhaps when she’d ended up versing her own grandmother, perhaps at the loss of Cuckold Dick, perhaps with the discovery that her marriage had been the biggest trick of all.

  Surprisingly, Rob said: ‘Raleigh likes you.’ There was puzzlement in his voice, and calculation. If Raleigh, courtier, adventurer, great sea captain, could take to Barbary there might be no harm for her to stay as she was.

  Yes, well, thought Barbary, he would. He’s aware of women, he wants to conquer them all. And sure enough of himself to appreciate a character, an odd’un like me. But you, Rob Betty, you’re rigid in your insecurity. You’ve got to conform and I’ve got to conform for you. And I won’t. There’s no trickery left.

  The next day they passed the Rock of Cashel. It silenced even Ellis who, until then, had jeered at Irish churches. ‘What they do, knit ’em?’ he’d said every time they glimpsed the angular little buildings of multi-coloured stone which nestled like abandoned pot-holders in the valleys. He was quiet for an hour as they moved across the plain dominated by the cathedral on its outcrop, squinting back to see if it had stopped being intimidating. ‘Bloody Papist, St Patrick,’ he said, when it finally went into the mist.

  As they came near the Golden Vale the countryside became more like England, but an England deserted for ten years. Hedges put in by undertakers of the First Munster Plantation had been left to sprout into banks of ragged bushes, untended by the Irish to whom the segregation of land was an alien concept. English-type farmhouses still stood in ruins, thatch burned off, cindered rafters exposed. Areas of forest that the English had begun to assart were going back to the wild. An old sawpit still had a partially logged oak across it where the Irish enemy had fallen on an English woodfeller before he could finish the job.

  But the mud churning beneath the hooves of their horses was rich, and the sun, appearing and disappearing between chasing clouds, shone on pasture of a scarcely believable green.

  ‘Didn’t the Irish farm it?’ Barbary asked of Edmund Spenser.

  ‘Only primitively,’ he told her. ‘A pastoral race. Nomads, taking their cattle to the high ranges in summer and to the valleys in winter.’ He spoke like an historian on an extinct people but his eyes searched the track ahead and his hand fidgeted inexpertly with the hilt of his sword.

  The calling began as they edged through the Glen of Aherlow.

  Attempts to clear the forest which had sheltered Desmond and his army for so long had been abandoned. Saplings and the stumps of a thousand trees had resprouted now that the sheep which should have nibbled them away had themselves been eaten.
The trees formed cover between the steep hills towering over the south side of the track; to the north was marsh. Rain dripped off the leaves to join the streams which splashed down towards a wagon train suddenly diminished by the unexpected size of the mountains.

  A fluted call from high up on their left was answered from bushes on their right. It came again, behind them. Again, this time in front. Maccabee cocked her head. ‘I can’t place that bird, Captain. Irish, I suppose?’ Mackworth waved to his men to keep the wagons close together. ‘The green-crested cutthroat, ma’am. Commonly called the MacSheehy.’

  ‘Really? There seem a lot of them round here.’

  ‘Too many, mistress. Time for you ladies to get under cover from the rain.’

  Barbary helped Maccabee into the wagon and settled her on a bed of bales. Her estimation of Spenser’s wife was rising; she might be too stupid to recognise danger when she heard it, but the cheerfulness with which she was enduring this journey into unknown territory with her baby due any day showed courage of a high order. She sat Catherine near her mother and diverted her attention from outside with games of cat’s cradle until the child slept, then crawled to the opening.

  The bird-like calls had stopped; so had genuine birdsong. Harness and wheels creaked, a baby near the back of the train was crying, streams rushed, but all these noises were absorbed into a landscape otherwise so silent it might have been dead. Alongside, men marched without talking, their shoulders rigid with attention, eyes scouring the defile.

  Then, somewhere high up, a new call began. It started in the lower register and ululated upwards, in a louder and louder crescendo, until it reached the scream of a maniac. It broke off, leaving its echo ricocheting back and forth across the glen. The woods erupted with frightened birds, rooks circled cawing over their heads, magpies rat-tatted alarms, pigeons blundered up out of the branches.