It struck Barbary, and she realised it must have struck Rob, that he needn’t have married her at all. The ‘venture into Connaught’ was no longer necessary to bring him lands and the attention of the queen; his own courage had done it for him. ‘You should have waited, Robby.’ Still, he couldn’t un-marry her. She hoped for his sake he could get Elizabeth to overlook his wife’s ‘offences’ so that he could proceed to that greatness he wanted so much.
But blow me, she thought, I’m Lady Betty. At that moment the one person she wanted to share the news with was Cuckold Dick. He’d split himself laughing.
As for those instructions about the Hap Hazard estate, Rob had no idea what conditions were like here in Munster. The shortage of workers was crippling, even worse than the MacSheehys, and they were bad enough. Danger may have temporarily receded from England, but here it was ever-present. Captain Mackworth kept driving the MacSheehys away, but now and again their call would echo over the Awbeg Valley to tell the undertakers they hadn’t gone far. A cow would be killed, a horse hamstrung, an unwary Englishman killed tilling his fields.
Here in Ireland the system of beacons was kept in readiness for firing so that one beleaguered English household could call for help against the attack. Every time they restacked the Spenser beacon with dry kindling, Edmund would pause and thank God they hadn’t had cause to fire it. Barbary supposed she was grateful, but she was too numb with fatigue to feel it.
People said you couldn’t die of hard work, but in those first months at Kilcolman, Barbary thought she might. Mrs Ellis delivered Maccabee’s baby boy. Ellis and sons made the place defensible and reconstructed enough of the keep to be habitable. Then all four of them left to begin work on Ellis’s own land at Doneraile. Mary the servant also left, to join her husband on his settlement. The two soldiers whom Edmund had persuaded Mackworth to lend him to guard the place did only that, apart from eating. It was Barbary who was left with the cooking, washing, cleaning, who watered and fed the stock, who looked after Catherine and tended Maccabee and the baby.
Continually she swore at the labour and herself for doing it. ‘These fambles,’ she said, shaking her roughened fists at Edmund, ‘was never made for work.’ It was a form of protest against her position to throw off Penshurst manners and revert to Order cant, see Edmund’s eyes widen in shock when she swore, but he didn’t dare reproach her. ‘I am grateful,’ he kept saying. ‘I don’t know what we would do without you.’
Barbary didn’t either. She stayed because at the moment there seemed nowhere else to go and she worked because if she didn’t there would be chaos at Kilcolman and Maccabee would suffer. It had been a difficult birth and Maccabee was not pulling round. Her milk was just sufficient, but she was weak, not only physically but mentally. She seemed vague, cried a lot and took little interest in either the baby or what was happening around her. Edmund spent most of his time in those early days desperately scouring the surrounding villages for domestic and agricultural labour. Eventually he came up with Rosh.
Rosh did not promise well. True, the woman was big and moderately young, but she had one muscular arm protectively round the shoulders of a frail old man and the other on the head of a grubby boy.
‘Edmund,’ said Barbary between her teeth. ‘Three, I said. Able-bodied, I said. Not one and hangers-on. Throw her back.’
‘She was all I could get, Barbary,’ said Edmund. ‘They speak English. The boy’s strong for his age and the old man should be able to tell me the legends of his people.’
‘Oh good,’ snapped Barbary. ‘I was afraid the old fart might be useful round the house.’
‘Will you listen to the music-less mouth of the bitch,’ said the woman to her father in Irish. ‘Doesn’t she know no man ever wore a scarf as warm as his daughter’s arm round his neck?’
Barbary turned on her in the same language. ‘Well, suppose you take it off his neck and put it in this fokking washtub.’ Haggling with traders in the local markets had taken away her inhibitions about speaking Irish, and given her a command of the vernacular.
It had not been a propitious start, yet within the week Barbary would have shot anyone who tried to take Rosh away from her. The woman’s capacity for work was only outdone by her willingness to do it. An axe wielded by her reduced trees to logs and logs to kindling within minutes. Sheets, baby cloths, petticoats went into the stream dirty and blanched as if in fear of her fists. Her spade cut perfect bricks of peat out of the bog down the hill and turned the uneven tussocks at the back of the bailey into a neat square of tilth in which the herbs and vegetables she planted came up standing smartly to attention.
The marvel’s one failing lay in her cooking, of which the household had expected great things, only to be disappointed when it turned out to be as awful as Barbary’s.
Her name was Roisín, pronounced Rosheen. Her father’s name was Duibhdáleithe; it meant ‘black man of the two sides’ and its pronunciation defeated the English. Edmund Anglicised it into Dudley. The old man appeared not to mind. He was courteous and worked as hard as his frailty allowed, but he was absent; his opinions and emotions were elsewhere in some previous age where Irish greatness still existed. Rosh said he had been the reacaire to his clan’s ollámh dana, but she said it with hopeless pride, knowing they wouldn’t understand what a dignity that was and that to the English he was just a homeless old mere Irish. Only Edmund pricked up his ears. ‘A reciter of a chief poet, by the Lord,’ he said and from then on sat down with the old man almost every night and made him recount the myths that clung to the hills and valleys around them.
It irritated Barbary to see the men sitting when there was so much work to be done. ‘If the old bugger could weave as fast as he prattles we’d have something to show for it.’ But her own hands would fall in her lap as the old man began the stories in his sing-song voice, his remoteness cutting out the medium between listener and story so that there were nights when the household hunted with Finn Mac Cool over the Ballyhouras they could see from their window, and heard the blast of his Fianna’s horn sounding from the Galtees only a little further away. He always began in the same way:
Three sorrows of storytelling fill me with pity,
the telling of them grates on the ear;
the woe of the Children of Turenn –
sorrowful to hear.
And the Children of Lîr, bird-shaped;
a curse on the mouth that told their doom:
Conn, Fiacra, Finola and Aed –
the second gloom.
And the Children of Usnach, shield of men,
who fell by force and cunning craft –
Naisi, and Ainle and Ardan
There cracks the heart.
It cracked Barbary’s. Memories from her childhood came unbidden as she listened. She had sat on her mother’s knee and heard these stories from another reacaire, enfolded in not just her mother’s warmth but that of the people who encircled them, listening. There had been a companionship that put the Order’s in the shade, her body part of a greater body encompassing the blood and thought of its components. The old man’s voice took her further than the Galtees, it took her to the land of the cherubims.
Seeing her wipe away tears Rosh asked: ‘If you’re Irish, why are you serving these Gauls?’ She said it sharply, in the first aggression she’d shown.
‘They’re not foreigners to me and I’m not serving, you bog-trotter,’ said Barbary, ‘I’m helping. For that matter, why are you?’
Rosh shrugged: ‘Any man can lose his hat in a fairy wind.’ She was always saying things like that. She had the largest collection of meaningless proverbs Barbary had ever heard. ‘An oak is often split by a wedge from its branch,’ she’d say, or ‘When you get lime on your boots it’s hard to get off,’ or ‘A Clare man will sleep in your ear and build a nest in the other.’ Such profundities appeared to have comforted her through bad times, though she never mentioned her past. The only glimpse Barbary got of it indicated horror. It came through Cath
erine, who gained it from the boy, Lal. (His name was Laoighseach but to everyone’s relief Rosh called him Lal.) He was a silent child of about nine, going on thirty-five thought Barbary – with a face that had closed down all expression. The one person among the English he communicated with was Catherine, and only then when nobody else was about.
‘They won’t hang Sylvestris, will they?’ demanded Catherine anxiously of Barbary. Sylvestris was the new baby’s name, Edmund being enchanted just then by the woodland that surrounded them.
Barbary picked her up. ‘They certainly won’t. Why?’
‘Lal says they hanged all his brothers. He showed me on Peggy.’ From behind her back Catherine produced her wooden doll, dangling from her fingers by a thong round its neck.
Barbary disentangled the small fingers and ripped the thong off. ‘Nobody’s going to hang anybody.’ She looked over at Rosh, who was watching, and immediately looked away again. There were some things shouldn’t be seen in another woman’s eyes.
* * *
Gradually life at Kilcolman improved. Masons from Raleigh’s estate at Lismore arrived and rebuilt the keep and the gatehouse to their full four storeys, then began work on the large stone manor that would crown the hill. Labourers, two loyal Irishmen from Youghal, the rest mere Irish, were hired and given plots of land on the estate, the mere Irish having smaller plots than the loyal. A steward and more house servants were acquired. Clutches of farm cottages sprang up along the banks of the Bregoge which ran through the estate, where they could be seen from the gatehouse, yet not offend anyone looking out from the windows of the manor. A dairy was begun, stables, kennels. Spenser pigs grunted in the woodland, Spenser sheep roamed the Ballyhouras, Spenser cattle grazed the water meadows. Hedges were planted.
Edmund, Barbary realised, was trying to create an Irish Penshurst. The wages he had to pay out to the mere Irish were paltry, while his income from the Irish tenancies he owned in other parts of Munster was making him richer than he’d ever been before. He modelled himself on Sir Henry Sidney and strode his fields talking knowledgeably of virgates, ploughlands, ox gangs and yield. The knowledge actually came from Ellis, who was making a success of his farm at Doneraile, although his treatment of his labourers was such that every so often a couple would escape its tyranny by running away to join the MacSheehys.
Barbary’s dislike of Ellis grew the more she knew him but the man was indispensable. Kilcolman estate would not have got the start it did without Ellis’s instructions on what to plant, where and when. Edmund was a figurehead, it was Ellis who gave the commands and Barbary who saw they were carried out. But gradually, and to her relief, the responsibilities which had rested on her shoulders were shifted onto O’Mahony, Edmund’s new farm steward, who had worked for Raleigh. The only function she retained was looking after the hens and ducks, and that was because she liked it.
Eventually there came a Sunday in late September when she woke up and realised that, apart from feeding the hens, she had nothing to do. She’d got out of bed ready to start the day before it came to her that it stretched in front of her, whole and uncommitted. Abby, the cook, was in charge in the kitchen, her daughter Lucy had the linen cupboard under control. Rosh had only yesterday beeswaxed the new floors in the house, as well as polishing everything else that stood still. Maccabee was well enough to dress Sylvestris, and, anyway, Catherine could help her. There were still no men to spare to start building Hap Hazard so she didn’t have to oversee that.
She went to the northern arrow slit and leaned against its slope to look out. The moment the gatehouse of Spenser Castle had been finished, Barbary had claimed its top floor as her living quarters. Another one to accommodate a porter was being built on the opposite side of the steep drive. The entrance to Spenser Castle was going to have grandeur.
‘But my dear cousin,’ Edmund protested, ‘you must have your own room here, in the house with us.’
She was working like a dog: she was entitled to her own kennel. ‘I want that one.’ He could hardly refuse her and he didn’t. The ground floor of the tower contained a large well, while supplies in case of possible siege were stacked on the first floor into which the gatehouse’s only door opened to the bailey. The upper storeys were empty and in the top one Barbary made her home. Edmund gave her hangings to take the chill off the walls, a bed, table, stools, a brazier and a clothes press. She cut rushes to put on the floor. It was inconvenient, was investigated by the occasional bat, and would verge on the icy when winter came, and she loved it.
Maccabee couldn’t understand the move. ‘Why are you leaving me?’
‘I’m only a spit away, Maccy.’ She paused in her packing. ‘But you know, when the masons are finished here they’re going to start on building Rob’s manor.’ She thought of the land called ‘Hap Hazard’ five miles away, which they were to undertake, as Rob’s only. It was Kilcolman, into which she had put so much work, that she felt was hers quite as much as the Spensers’. ‘And when that’s finished I’ll have to move over there.’ Maccabee burst into tears. ‘You mustn’t leave me. I don’t like it here. I’m so frightened.’
Barbary felt her trembling against her arm. ‘It’s just the namelesses, Maccy. You’re not frit of them old MacSheehys?’
‘It’s the forest. The forest frightens me.’
At the bottom of the drive to the house was the track to Doneraile and on the other side of it deeply forested land dipped down before rising again to become the foothills of the equally wooded Ballyhouras. Edmund grandly called it the ‘Deer Park’ and had hired gangs to thin out its enormous beech, oak and ash and clear the spaces between of clogging undergrowth. They were making slow progress and had so far penetrated less than a hundred yards, so that most of the interior was still primaeval. What or who made the eccentric tracks that weaved through it nobody knew. Since that first day when they’d heard the calling that had pursued them through the Glen of Aherlow, it had echoed to only non-human sound, the bark of deer and foxes and a mixture of birdsong as dense as its canopy. Deep in it might be sinister, but the cleared edges were lightly dappled and a storehouse of good things. Rosh and Barbary were watching the ripening of its hazelnuts and blackberries with predatory eyes.
There was no doubt, though, that Maccabee, who had stood the rigours of the trek into Munster so well, had not been herself since she arrived at Kilcolman. All her irritating chatter, her busy-ness had faded and left her nervous and dependent. Barbary blamed the birth, but Maccabee attributed her unreasonable terror – what Barbary called the ‘namelesses’ – to the countryside that enfolded her.
Barbary liked it. It wasn’t the land of her cherubims, but as she stood looking out on it from the windows of her tower that Sunday morning she felt an affinity with it. To the north, and very close, were the dark Ballyhouras. To the south, further away, were the Nagle mountains. The smudges visible eastward on clear days were the hills of Waterford and, westward, the mountains of Kerry. The mound her gatehouse guarded was one of several pretty hills. Defensible walls now surrounded its base, like a circlet round a high-domed head. On the top of the head was growing the castellated shell of what would soon be a fine house dominating the surrounding countryside.
One day there would be an ornamental garden leading down from it to the Bregoge, a tributary of the Awbeg, but at the moment the slope was of rough, goose-cropped grass. Further off, where the land rose again, was an odd lake, crescent-shaped, as if a new moon had come hurtling down from the sky and crashed into the earth. This side of the lake was marshy and full of frogs whose croaking dominated the night sounds and drove Edmund mad when he was trying to compose his poetry. Interruption to his muse was one of the few things that provoked him to outward anger. Barbary had heard him shout out of his window last night: ‘I’ll see to your choking, you devils. I’ll have you drained.’
Always trying to change things, Edmund, thought Barbary as she dressed. Trying to create England out of an Irish landscape. Altering names, insisting on call
ing the Awbeg the ‘Mulla’, and belittling the high peak of the Ballyhouras into the ‘Old Mole’. It was all something to do with the fantastical epic poem he was working on which would, he hoped, finally bring him the queen’s recognition since she was the allegorical heroine of it. Barbary had no time for allegory, mainly because she didn’t understand the allusions.
And poor Abby in the kitchen, who was really called Gobinet, and Lucy who was Luighseach, had to be given Anglicised names in case a Dublin official came enquiring into why Irish labour was being employed. Why couldn’t the English admit they were in a foreign country? Because doing so would remind them that it didn’t really belong to them?
Personally, she liked it as it was. And today the sun shone on it. The Armada had been beaten off and the expedition to the Azores would keep Rob with his demands away for another year at least. She was free and there was no work to do. She turned back into her room, shook her fist at the bat which had come back in the night and hung upside down from a corner beam looking at her from its aggressive little eyes, hauled her mattress and bedding to the window to air, went down the tower’s stairway to the first floor, out of the door and down the steps.
She climbed the incline to the house. Lal was holding Edmund’s horse so that his master could mount. ‘Ah, Lady Betty, my dear,’ said Edmund, always formal in the presence of servants. ‘Just in time to accompany me to church.’
On one of the parcels of land held by Edmund was the all-Irish hamlet of Effin with its tiny church. Since the outlawing of Roman Catholicism in Ireland, only a handful of loyal Irish attended it, and they did so reluctantly, since owing allegiance to Elizabeth did not mean in their eyes that they had to practise her religion. The churchman responsible for its service was an Englishman, Prebendary Chadwick, but, like so many of the Protestant ministers in Ireland, Prebendary Chadwick was too busy grabbing land of his own to try and secure the hearts and minds of the Irish. He collected tithes from the parishioners, of course, but until Edmund had arrived and dutifully attempted to fill the gap, no service had been held at Effin for three years.
The Pirate Queen Page 29