‘What was that?’ called Maccabee.
Barbary blew out her breath. ‘Irish calling the cows home, Maccy. Try and sleep.’
The world around them settled again, then from a clump of trees ahead came the low moan that began another call, this time louder, more insane. It looped across the pass like a thrown rope uncoiling. Some of the front pikemen broke ranks and ran towards the copse, Mackworth shouting angrily at them to come back. Barbary could see them jabbing with their pikes at branches and clumps of fern and sympathised with their need to throw off fear by activity. Eventually Mackworth’s barks of command recalled them and she watched them lope sullenly back to the column. She counted them as they came, three, four, five. There had been six.
‘Where’s Crane?’ demanded Mackworth. The men looked round at each other, bewildered, turned to go back.
Mackworth stopped them with his sword. ‘I’ll run through the next man that leaves the wagons.’
‘But Crane, Captain. He was with us a minute ago.’
‘Crane’s gone. Forget him. Get in line.’
Another call was beginning. It was joined by another, then another, mingling screams until the train was entangled in whips of sound that scarred the brain.
‘Lot of cows,’ muttered Maccabee sleepily.
Barbary primed the Clampett. The green-crested cutthroats wouldn’t get her and Maccy and Catherine as easily as they’d got Crane. Rob and Raleigh were wheeling their horses to go to protect the back of the column. At that moment they looked like versions of the same man, both faces intent, not with pleasure, certainly not with fear, but with interest in the situation and their own reaction to it. They’re showing off, thought Barbary, and doing it well. Rob caught her eye and she gave him the Order’s thumbs up, at which he grinned for once. Well, if the only time we can make contact is in moments of danger, it’s going to be a funny marriage.
Pebbles came bouncing down some scree. Captain Mackworth danced his horse out of the way as a boulder tumbled after them and rolled over the spot where he’d been, hitting a pack mule and breaking its leg. Mackworth called for an arquebus to shoot it, and himself helped to tear off the panniers. ‘Courage,’ he was shouting, as the wagons moved on. ‘They think they can frighten us.’
‘You mean they’re not sure?’ asked Barbary. She was getting cross as well as frightened. The mule might have been her pony.
There were screams of agony – Crane? – howls that ended in the giggles of the insane. Barbary leaned down to put a hand over Catherine’s exposed ear and heard the canvas of the wagon tear. A spear point was sticking through where her head had been. Even that was less terrifying than the noise. It was assault, aural artillery. They were bracketed. The whole valley reverberated with the sound of hatred, poison gas streaming through holes in the mountains, a forest of shrieking trees.
Barbary stopped being cross, flattened herself into the bales and gave herself up to terror.
A kindly god had made an end to the pass and towards the end of the longest afternoon of their lives they reached it, less three undertakers, two killed by spears and one small boy by a slingshot. Another slingshot had broken the arm of one of Ellis’s sons and another pike-man had disappeared, nobody knew how. Some of the stock had died nastily and a hen coop had been broken, releasing its occupants to the wild.
The undertakers felt they had been through a major battle; Captain Mackworth assured them it was a mere skirmish, the MacSheehys showing nuisance value. He was invigorated, almost proud. She heard him tell Raleigh: ‘I have been well and truly announced back to Munster.’ She supposed he knew best, but what had happened in the Glen of Aherlow seemed to her more impersonal and terrible, the hatred of a landscape for its new possessors.
The next two days were rain, darkness and fatigue. Mackworth insisted the entire train accompany each group of undertakers to their settlement. ‘For one thing to ensure that each of you knows where the others are situated.’ They crossed and re-crossed the swollen Blackwater. All the bridges were down, some through disrepair, others deliberately destroyed. Even when they found a ford, there was difficulty urging the wagon teams into tumultuous water, and more difficulty getting them out.
Barbary lost count of the times she got soaked to the skin as she helped families carry their belongings into farmhouses and cottages while soldiers nailed canvas to roofless ceilings to provide some shelter from the rain. The undertakers were silent and exhausted. The land they had come to was grey with drizzle and, as they already knew, hostile, but their determination to settle in it had grown with their adversity. As one family, the Biddlecombes, stared round the ruin they were going to live in, a small child burst into tears: ‘I want to go home.’ His mother smacked him: ‘This is home.’
In intensifying rain the rest of the wagon train moved west to the valley of the Awbeg around which the remaining undertakers, including the Spensers, were to settle. Blinded by the drizzle, without signposts, and in what appeared to be abandoned countryside, it was not surprising that even the assured Captain Mackworth kept losing his way. He wouldn’t admit it. Every decent road they struck he said: ‘Ah ha, this leads to Mallow in the minute.’ It didn’t. It led to small collections of cottages where the inhabitants, dragged into the rain by Mackworth’s soldiers, insisted it was Michelstown. At Buttevant they said it was Buttevant. At Doneraile, Doneraile.
‘Nonsense,’ shouted Mackworth, ‘this is Mallow.’
‘Doneraile, your worship.’
‘I tell you it’s Mallow. You savages don’t know your own damn location.’
‘Your worship’s sure to be right then. And all these years us thinking it was Doneraile.’ The next minute the Irishman sprawled in the mud from a whack by Captain Mackworth’s fist.
‘Insolence,’ puffed Mackworth. ‘Ah ha, there’s light ahead. I knew I was right.’
The light was torches held by a search party of horsemen and soldiers. ‘God’s breath, Mackworth,’ said a tall man from a tall horse. ‘What are you doing in Doneraile?’
The insolent Irishman and his family were evicted while Mackworth, Raleigh, Spenser and Rob went into conference in his cottage with the tall man. Barbary, furious with fatigue and the new delay, helped Maccabee and Catherine down from the wagon and followed the others inside to dry. The cottage smelled of peat, goats, cooking oats and wet cloaks steaming from the fire which cast even bigger shadows than the big men who were dwarfing its one room and its only indigenous occupant, a baby in a wicker cradle.
They didn’t intimidate Barbary. ‘These ladies need hot drink and vittles,’ she announced, shepherding them towards the fire. The tall man stood up politely and Barbary plonked Maccabee onto his vacant stool. ‘And they needs ’em now.’
‘For Lord’s sake, woman,’ hissed Rob, ‘this is the Lord President of Munster.’
‘Then he can organise hot drink and vittles,’ snapped Barbary. She had come to the end of her tether; what concerned her more was that Maccabee, who looked very white, had come to the end of hers.
The tall man bowed. ‘John Norris at your service, mistress.’ He went to the door and called for one of his lieutenants to bring brandy, and himself ladled out some porridge from the cauldron into a bowl for Maccabee and Catherine. He was huge, dark-complexioned, grizzled and ugly. His nose was flattened (an injury sustained while quelling an army riot), his right hand crippled (a musketball during the battle of Nordhorn in Flanders), and he limped (a thigh smashed by shrapnel at Malines). But the battering, while it had physically malformed Sir John Norris, had hammered into his soul a rare concern for others. He was also susceptible to beauty. As Barbary unwound her sopping travelling veil from her head and shook her head near the fire to dry it, Sir John’s chin went up in surprise.
Barbary took to him. Feeling she’d been over-harsh, she said in her best Penshurst voice: ‘Kind of you, my lord, to come looking for us.’ Now she thought about it, it was extraordinary that a man who commanded a quarter of Ireland had done so.
‘If I’d known such ladies were in distress,’ Sir John told her earnestly, ‘I would have been out the sooner. It was at the behest of the queen that I came at all.’
Raleigh, always unsettled when an attractive woman’s attention was commanded by anybody but him, stepped in. ‘My Lord President is sent to take us away from you, mistress.’ Maccabee and Barbary stared at him, then at Sir John.
Rob said: ‘It’s the Armada. There’s news that it’s ready to sail. Raleigh and I are ordered back at once. Sir Walter’s promised me command of his Speedswift.’ He spoke with the reverberative hush of an Arthurian knight glimpsing the Holy Grail. Barbary, his undertaking, his plans for a kingdom in Connaught, were unremembered. He was refastening his cloak as he spoke, desperate to be off. The Armada might endanger England, but at that moment he could have kissed Philip of Spain’s foot for giving him the chance to tilt for glory.
The two wives in the room threw themselves on their husbands. ‘Me too,’ begged Barbary. ‘Rob, I can fight the Armada too.’ The idea of escape overwhelmed her.
‘Not you,’ begged Maccabee of Edmund. ‘Dear husband, don’t leave me.’
Both men were embarrassed; Rob because Barbary was being unseemly in front of great men, Edmund because nobody had even suggested he should go.
The President of Munster saved the situation with tact. ‘England needs her women and her poets,’ he said. ‘Let us who can do nothing else go kill the Don. If the Armada invades Ireland we shall have you in reserve.’
Barbary dropped back. She was going to be imprisoned in rain and domesticity and danger.
They were to leave right away, Sir John Norris to oversee the English land fortifications, Rob and Sir Walter to put the finishing touches to fitting out the Speedswift and the Ark Raleigh. Courteously Sir John offered his home, Mallow Castle, where his brother, Thomas, who was to take over the running of Munster in his absence, also lived. ‘He and my sister-in-law would be delighted. Kilcolman is no place for you at the moment. We heard there had been MacSheehy activity there, but I fear we have been too busy to investigate.’
But at this suggestion Maccabee went into hysterics. Despite all the devastation she had seen she still retained a grand and fully furnished image of her home-to-be. Her son – she was sure it would be a boy – must be born a Spenser in Spenser Castle. How could they suggest anything else? The birth was days away, plenty of time to make any little repair to the place.
Barbary dragged herself out of her depression. Maccabee needed her; probably the only person in the world who did. She didn’t know much about pregnancy, but Maccy’s shape suggested the baby was imminent. Mary, the servant, was an experienced midwife, the Ellises would be living with them until Spenser Castle had been fortified, and Mrs Ellis had had two children of her own. And wasn’t Baby Jesus born in some sort of country hut? Perhaps they could manage. She caught Edmund’s eye and nodded encouragement.
Edmund said: ‘I think, my lord, that there is no sense in delaying our settlement.’
The Lord President nodded. ‘I’ll send some of these men with you.’ Rob, not sure how the gentry took leave of their wives, told Barbary to be dutiful, hesitated, then kissed her hand. Raleigh kissed her on the cheek, hard.
She stood in the small doorway to wave them off. Rob looked superb, like all men going off to war, and in that moment she loved him over again, for all that he had tricked her and was deserting her, just for his beauty. War for him meant lack of complication. He would be brave, a man among men, boasting perhaps of the little wife who waited for him back home with no mention of the fact that their marriage was an emotional disaster. You lucky bastard, she thought. Why didn’t women have the wit to invent war? He blew her a kiss at the last, the moment giving a pang to his feeling for her, as it gave a pang to hers for him. But he was relieved to be going, and although it left her to cope with darkness, rain, Maccabee, Ireland and the Irish, his departure meant equal relief for her. At least the real Barbary could deal with them in her own way.
* * *
Even with directions and fresh horses, Kilcolman eluded them for hours. ‘Straight down the Doneraile road,’ Sir John Norris had said. But the Doneraile road wasn’t straight. ‘Bloody Irish,’ grumbled Barbary, forgetting she was one of them, ‘wouldn’t know a straight road if it bit ’em in the arse.’ A thunderstorm, unable to make them wetter, aided them in lightning flashes which gave momentary glimpses of their location.
‘Look for turrets,’ Maccabee kept saying. ‘There’ll be turrets.’ There were hills, the Ballyhouras, on their right, there were trees, there was mud, but turrets were lacking.
At last a dismal dawn revealed two jagged stumps they had passed time and again in the night to be the ruins of gateposts. An overgrown track inclined gently, muddily, upwards. They followed it and stopped. Edmund said nothing. Ellis said: ‘That’s the only one-storey castle I ever seen.’ Maccabee began to cry. Barbary, light-headed with fatigue, began to laugh so much she nearly fell off Spenser.
Tumbledown walls fringed a large, natural mound. On this side of it stood the stump of a tower that had once formed a gatehouse. Across the rise was another stump, this time two-storeyed. That it had once been a tall keep was evident from the blocks of stone lying scattered around it. But in the middle of the mound was what had once been a sizeable house, perhaps even a castle – it was impossible to tell because somebody, a lot of somebodies, had taken it apart stone by stone so that now it was just an enormous heap of granite rubble.
The whole place looked ridiculous. The gate-tower was a ruin, but enough remained of the keep to make it look as if it was trying to stand on tiptoe to see over the bailey walls.
Edmund got down from his horse and stood with his back to it, facing the wagons. He was pale but in that moment he had a dignity and courage Barbary hadn’t suspected. ‘My dear,’ he said to Maccabee, ‘welcome to what will be Spenser Castle.’
Barbary stopped laughing. Maccabee stopped crying and announced she was in labour. From the Ballyhoura hills came a moan rising to the ululating howl that told them they had been located by the enemy.
Chapter Twelve
The Armada bore down on England in crescent formation, like a scythe. With no other nation to help, the English fleet went out to meet it and joined battle on 31 July. For ten days the fight veered back and forth, the huge, soldier-packed Spanish ships trying to grapple, the English with better ships and better guns dodging out of boarding reach, pumping out cannon balls at a faster rate than the enemy, using the tide races and currents they knew so well.
After ten days the English gained an ally. As if He had been waiting to see which side looked like winning, God in the form of a wind puffed out His cheeks and blew against the Armada. The Spanish could not beat the English and God. They were forced up the North Sea to face the 750-league journey home round the stormy, unknown waters of Scotland and Ireland in battered ships running out of provisions.
The worst losses were in Ireland. Connaught’s governor, Sir Richard Bingham, worried about holding his unruly coast against these possible invaders, gave orders that all Spaniards coming ashore were to be killed on sight, as was any Irishman who aided them. The sea and rocks of Donegal, Mayo, Clare and Kerry did most of his job for him. As many as seventeen ships may have gone down, most of them with the loss of all hands. At loyal Galway the entire crew of the Falcón Blanco Mediano was executed on Bingham’s gallows. Here and there in the remote parts a few survivors were clubbed to death, like seals, for what they wore, being regarded by wild shore-dwellers as just another offering from the sea. Several hundred Spaniards, however, were helped by the Irish at the risk of their own lives and delivered safely to Scotland.
Nevertheless the superb seamanship and administration of the Spanish Admiral, Medina Sidonia, brought two-thirds of the Armada back to Spain.
The English fleet was jubilant, as it had a right to be, the Spanish downcast. But neither side yet regarded the battle as decisive. Metic
ulously, Philip of Spain enquired, read every report, and started making plans for a new Armada that would avoid the mistakes of the last. The English commanders pleaded with Elizabeth not to disband a navy that might yet be required to fight off another invasion. The war was by no means over.
Rob Betty distinguished himself during the battle of the Armada. The Speedswift went in to attack Sidonia’s own ship, the San Martin, like an angry and agile wasp. On 5 August, during a lull in the fight, Rob was called aboard the flagship and knighted by Admiral Howard with other brave men, including Hawkins and Frobisher.
So it was an exultant Sir Robert Betty who wrote to Barbary after it was all over. He could not yet return to Ireland; he was joining Drake and Sir John Norris in an expedition which would follow up the victory while the Spanish were still recovering. They were to go to Lisbon, destroying any Armada stragglers they found there or on the way, take Lisbon and, finally, the Azores, from which they could intercept Spanish treasure ships from the New World.
‘Be assured, my dear wife,’ he wrote, ‘this venture will be as successful as the last, for God is pleased to smile on our Great Queen. Already Her Sacred Majesty hath in her turn smiled on me with the gift of the manor of Kerswell in Devon which is rich in pasture. In her goodness she hath confirmed me in the estate of Hap Hazard in Ireland in which regard I urge you, my dear wife, to see to the appointment thereof against my return or, if you be not able, to be guided by Master Spenser in the choice of some excellent Englishman to whose capacity as steward for some reasonable wage the building of the manor thereof may be entrusted. Sir Walter Raleigh is to recommend to Her Majesty our venture in Connaught whereof I have great hope on my return. He has further in his goodness undertaken to press Her Majesty that she overlook your offences against her that one day you may bask in the favour of her prosperity as does your loving husband. For this encompassing, be virtuous, dutiful and zealous that all may go forward to our greatness.’
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