The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  ‘I ain’t coming, Edmund,’ said Barbary evenly. It was an old argument.

  The poet put on his responsible look. ‘I request it, cousin,’ he said. ‘We live among the most barbarous people in the world. We must show them an example.’

  ‘I’m one of them barbarians, Edmund.’ And so’s that boy standing there, she thought, listening to every word.

  It flustered him to be reminded she was Irish. ‘I regard you as one of us,’ he said. ‘And you’re no Papist.’

  ‘No, I’m not. And I’m not coming to church neither. I’m taking Sylvestris for some air.’

  ‘How can these people find the True Path unless they see us, their betters, following it?’

  Barbary shrugged. It wasn’t her problem. ‘Are you going to call in on Tadg O’Lyne on the way back?’ Tadg was a distinguished, blind, old Irish poet who lived in part of the ruins of Ballybeg Abbey.

  Edmund became defensive. ‘I might.’ Then enthusiasm took over. ‘You know, cousin, these Irish poets have much to teach us in cadence and good invention.’

  ‘You stayed overnight with him the last time…’

  ‘We had much to talk about.’

  ‘…and a spear was put through his cow the next day.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ said Edmund.

  ‘The same coincidence as burned down his barn when you stayed the night the time before that?’

  ‘I’m not responsible for the MacSheehys and their terror.’

  It was Rosh who had begged Barbary to dissuade Edmund from visiting the old poet. Finding the English farms well defended, and the reprisals carried out by Captain Mackworth too painful, the MacSheehys were now dissuading their fellow Irish from fraternising with the enemy by killing the stock of anyone who entertained an Englishman in his house. Barbary doubted if they were winning the hearts and minds of their people any better than the undertakers were.

  She wagged her finger at Edmund. ‘It won’t fadge, Edmund. You’re taking advantage. Rosh says poor old Tadg can’t refuse you lodging because it’s against his honour. She says it’s tradition and he’d rather die than not be hospitable. But he don’t like it, and I don’t blame him.’

  Edmund’s lips tightened and he mounted his horse. ‘You can tell Rosh that it is not up to an Irish slut to teach manners to an English gentleman.’

  Barbary watched him ride off, a thin, stiff-necked but curiously nebulous figure. There were so many bits to Edmund they seemed patched on, as if he’d borrowed them from people he admired. What lay underneath and whether it was worth discovering, she had no idea, except that it was stubborn. He’d go to Tadg’s sure as eggs were eggs to learn the poetic art of a people he called barbarian, and sure as eggs were eggs one of Tadg’s few remaining animals would be killed next day because of him. ‘You’re a dandiprat, Edmund,’ she said under her breath. ‘What’s worse, you’re a hammer-headed dandiprat.’

  She spent a pleasant day playing with Catherine and Sylvestris in the sun. At first Catherine, who had a lot of her father in her, said: ‘You shouldn’t take his swaddling clothes off. His limbs won’t grow straight.’

  ‘Who’s a little drabbit, then,’ crooned Barbary, releasing Sylvestris from the last of his binders. ‘The Irish don’t swaddle their young ’uns, and their limbs go straight enough.’

  Catherine cocked her head on one side. ‘That’s true. Can I take my stays off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And paddle in the lough?’

  ‘Yes.’ The open-air attitude of the Irish produced healthier children, for all their poverty, than did English confinement. In fact, Barbary thought, the Irish were healthier altogether for all that their diet included a lot of green stuff – young nettles, comfrey, sorrel, fat-hen and all wild herbs. The meat-eating English scoffed at them and called them ‘grass-eaters’, but Barbary compared the stunted growth of Maccabee, Edmund and Catherine, and even herself, to the thin but tall and strong-limbed Irish servants, and decided that grass-eating had its benefits.

  It was such an unusually lazy day that by the time everybody else had retired to bed, which they did just before sunset, Barbary, for once, was startlingly awake. She leaned against the jamb of her westerly window, her foot tapping for something interesting to do while her mind grumbled at the lack of purpose and excitement in her life. The sunset turned every tree into a beckoning shadow and warmed the scent of evening adventure so that it drifted up from the grass, up the stones of Spenser walls to tantalise the nostrils of the red-headed, still very young, woman who stood there.

  It was then that she saw a flicker at the very edge of her right-hand view. Low rays of the sun were in her eyes, but definitely something human-sized had moved. Quickly she crossed over to her east window. From here she could look over the bawn where the cattle had been enclosed for the night. She counted them. All present and correct. None with a spear through its neck.

  To the right of the cattle pens was the raised wooden hen house. She listened; she knew enough of hen behaviour now to interpret the low clucking coming from it as the sound of undisturbed birds settling down for a good sleep. Nothing wrong there. She went to the north arrow slit to scan the ground that fell away below her towards the Ballyhouras. It had been cleared so as to give no cover to an enemy creeping across it but the hummocks in it cast shadows. One of the shadows detached itself and hurried over to the next, where it paused. It was Rosh. What’s more, it was Rosh carrying the egg basket which Barbary herself had given to Lal this morning to collect the day’s layings, and in which, when he’d finished, had been an unusually small clutch. ‘Not laying so well today,’ he’d told her. In her surprise that he’d spoken at all – for him this was garrulity – she’d not questioned the statement. ‘But it wasn’t bible, was it?’ she realised now. ‘You and your ma filched the rest of them eggs and now she’s off on her ten toes with ’em. But where to?’

  Barbary didn’t give a dump for the eggs. Rosh could have them. Had got them. What she minded was not knowing what was going on. Ever since settling at Kilcolman she’d been aware that the English were excluded from the native life of the countryside. In mysterious ways the Irish communicated with it and each other. For instance, how had Rosh, who until today had not been known to leave the estate, been aware that the MacSheehys were persecuting Tadg O’Lyne, the poet, four miles away?

  But it was more than that. On certain nights, which were no feasts recognised by the English, faraway pipes and flutes and laughter taunted the ears of the undertakers. The estate owners would make angrily towards the sound, for to hear music and secret laughter was as unsettling as to hear the hated, hating, screech of the MacSheehys. They never found anything. Some trampled grass perhaps. On their return they would investigate the servants’ quarters, and discover each man, woman and child beatifically keeping the right bed and snoring. Somewhere, somehow, life in which the English had no part was being lived. They began to believe in the fairy world of Irish myth. The Pooka invaded their nightmares. It bothered them.

  Most of all it bothered Barbary. She who had been part of the secrecy of London’s underworld resented being cut off from this one. It was dangerous not to know what was going on and, anyway, it itched her curiosity until she screamed to scratch it with an answer. Rosh knew the answer. And Rosh was going to lead her to it.

  She moved like lightning. But she was Barbary of the Order again, and she didn’t rush out of her tower into a darkening, hostile countryside without precautions. She threw the string of the muff in which she kept the Clampett snaphaunce over her neck – a muff might look incongruous in this weather, but the Irish were too eccentric themselves to notice eccentricity – and she flipped her shawl over and over until it was a fat roll which she tied round her head, giving its outline the approximate shape of an Irishwoman’s headgear. She could now prattle Irish as good as Rosh’s and if she met a MacSheehy she’d give him the rough side of it. And if that didn’t do for him, she’d shoot him.

  An instant later she was out
of the tower. The great gates had been barred for the night. The walls were high, but Barbary had seen them built. At the back of the bawn was a stretch of the original retaining wall, from the days when Kilcolman had belonged to the Earl of Desmond. It retained fissures that nimble toes might use for purchase. She ran for the bawn, through the cattle pens and behind the hen house. Then she saw that nimble toes would not be needed for climbing. Rosh hadn’t gone over the wall, she’d gone underneath it. There was a hole in the ground at the foot of the wall. Set to the side of it was an old well cover and a pile of manured litter from the cattle pens which usually concealed it. The entrance was only a little wider than that to a badger sett, just big enough to allow a slim human body to slide into the tunnel which, she found as she pushed herself through it, sloped steeply down and then steeply up, leading under the wall to the world outside.

  She pulled aside the branches of a low bramble bush which concealed the outside entrance to the tunnel, heaved herself out and was immediately running low across the ground to the ‘Deer Park’ and the trees into which Rosh had already disappeared. As she entered the edge she listened and followed the sound of feet brushing leaves along a track that led into the interior. A fat harvest moon was taking its place in a sky still glowing pale from the remnants of the sunset, but it was dark under the canopy that grew thicker as she moved forward and her ears kept being cheated by the rustlings of what she hoped were merely the woodland’s animals going about their nightly business. Rosh was going at the unhesitating pace of someone who knew the way like the back of her hand. Luckily, it was a slowish pace – she wasn’t risking the eggs. And she had no suspicion she was being barnacled, and barnacled, what’s more, by a mistress of the craft. Barbary grinned. Penshurst, marriage, maturity had fallen away. The old intoxication was back, the cony-catcher was on the loose again. This track was an alley, the branches her rooftops. It just smelled better than the Bermudas.

  She made up the distance and spotted the tall, skirted shape and instantly adjusted her pace so that her shoes touched the ground exactly in time with Rosh’s.

  And what’s for extra, she told herself, for once I’m on the side of law. It’s Rosh who’s the prigger and me the priggee. Whatever Rosh was going to do next was probably illegal as well. Everything the Irish did, unless the English permitted it, was illegal: speaking their own language, practising their own religion, wearing their hair this way, putting on their clothes that way.

  The wonder that it hadn’t come to her before was almost as great as the realisation itself. For a fraction of a moment she missed the movement of Rosh’s step and had to freeze as the woman glanced over her shoulder before going on. The mere Irish were the Order. They were surviving against crushing authority, just as the Order survived. Rosh was her as she had been. She had been Rosh as she was now, hunted, stealthy, knavish. She was shadowing herself.

  I won’t peach on you, whatever it is, she promised mentally. But I’ve got to know whatever it is.

  They were climbing now, the scent of bracken becoming forceful. The steep rise allowed the moon entry under the trees, but Rosh was too intent on keeping her basket level to look behind. The track was heading for the summit of Edmund’s ‘Old Mole’. Barbary was getting tired when at last Rosh paused. She heard the Irishwoman mutter a thanksgiving before she moved down a steep slope out of Barbary’s sight. Barbary gained a vantage point and looked after her. Below, the trees ran out into a grassy dip between the hills, and in the clearing there was fluttering light and the movement of people. Barbary sniffed. The light was coming from candles, but not ordinary tallow candles; she was smelling beeswax.

  Barbary grimaced. Was that what Rosh was up to? If she was, it wasn’t only illegal, it was so dangerous that the thought of being caught just watching it made the palms of her hands sweat. She had to find out, but she wanted cover, nice thick cover, preferably armour-plated. She cautiously circled the rim of the dip before she spotted the nearest thing to an armour-plated hide the forest had to offer. It was a yew tree. She took the shawl from round her head and tied it about her waist. Barbary knew about yew trees. They were the only trees she did know about. Every cemetery in London had one. She knew they scratched you to hell but that, if they were old, like this one, they had gaps in their interior which allowed a small person who had a high threshold of pain to hide within them. She’d avoided more than one pursuit by availing herself of a yew tree’s hospitality.

  Making use of this one’s hospitality meant crawling a yard downwards across open ground, but it was under shade and the people in the clearing were too busy to notice her. Gritting her teeth, she squirmed under the low branches, found a gap and undulated upwards into it, removing barbs from her hair and ear. Gingerly she parted the stems in front of her and looked through a tunnel of yew at the scene below.

  She’d been right. This was a ceremony which could only be lit by beeswax candles because bees were reckoned to be virginal creatures, untainted by the sexual act, like their patron saint, the Virgin Mary. A white cloth covered a bumpy, natural altar on which the candles were standing round a battered tin plate. Two boys were robing a tall man, putting a white cope over his head. A hundred or more Irish men and women were in the dell. Where had they all come from?

  Dolly worshippers. Papishes. Catholics. Romans.

  She was about to see a Mass.

  She felt the prurient curiosity she’d experienced when she and Rob, both very young, peeked through a crack in the floor of the Pudding-in-a-Cloth to try and discover what it actually was that Foll did for her clients.

  Protestant propaganda hinted at eroticism, human sacrifice, the Devil rampant and naked presiding over idolatry. She couldn’t see the Devil. She couldn’t see much. Just the priest, now robed, a careworn man in the candlelight. There was still some light in the sky, but the figures gathering before him wore the fur collars of their Irish cloaks high round the lower part of their faces. She recognised Rosh and the two O’Dwyer boys who worked for Ellis. Wasn’t that Patrick, one of Edmund’s estate workers? And his wife? Here and there were figures that resembled men and women she’d met at Mallow market, but she couldn’t envisage feeling a compulsion to put herself in the danger these people were risking. Captain Mackworth hunted down priests with more zest than he hunted the MacSheehys, which was saying something. If he was caught, that white-coped man there would be cut apart still living. The rest would hang, if they weren’t burned. And all for a ritual. What possessed them?

  They were afraid. They bloody should be. They kept glancing at the encircling trees, just as Order men on their way to a robbery scanned the streets for constables of the watch. Rosh waved to an oak on the far side of the dell and an arm high up in it waved back. At least they’d posted a look-out. Lucky he hadn’t spotted her wriggling into the yew tree.

  The basket of eggs was lying on the ground with other goodies, a ham, a bundle of onions, more baskets. Offerings. Supplies for a priest on the run.

  They were kneeling now. The priest was chanting in Irish, not Latin, and he wasn’t keeping his voice down either. Typical devil-dodger. They all talked like God was deaf.

  ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts.’

  Her lips mouthed the words before her brain caught up with what she was doing. Jesus God, she knew what to say. As easily as those people in the dell, she could make the responses. She was a Papist. Had been a Papist. Of course. She was Irish. She hadn’t connected. Somewhere in the land of the cherubims she’d been taught to kneel like these, pray like these. She clenched her teeth against the rhythm of the words, and jerked her eyes away from the dell as the priest went into the Prayer of Humble Approach.

  Under the tree where the look-out was posted something moved. She strained her eyes to see what it was. Something moved behind her yew. Infinitely slowly, tearing her cheek against the thorns, she twisted her head round and saw the moonlit glint of a breastplate.

  Mackworth was here. Mackworth and soldiers. Jesus. Mary. Mother of
God, don’t let them see me. Don’t let them see me. Don’t let them see me. With terror for herself came terror for the people in the dell. Protect them. Warn them. Mary, Mother of God, keep them from these soldiers’ swords. Connected now to the faith of her childhood she used its phrases in her extremity of fear.

  There was a movement on her right. They were surrounding the dell. Any moment Mackworth would give the signal and he’d be down on those kneeling souls like a wolf on sheep.

  There was a loud clapping of wings as a pheasant trailing droppings and feathers came flying out of the bushes to her right where it had been disturbed. The worshippers in the dell looked up, got up, began to run. She heard Mackworth’s voice – she knew it well – ‘Charge!’ Soldiers began spilling out of the trees. She heard the one behind her break into a heavy run, saw his back as he pelted down the slope.

  Her wits came back. Escape. The pheasant had spoiled Mackworth’s manouevre. The soldiers hadn’t completed their pincer movement; half the dell, the half that lay to the west, was clear of them. The Irish were running in that direction. She saw a woman fall and prayed it wasn’t Rosh. A child was going back to help his mother up. Leave her. She’s as good as dead.

  Go? Stay? Go. When they’d finished chasing, the soldiers would come back to the scene of the crime, spread out and search for stragglers. They’d have lanterns. Go then. And go in the direction they’d come from.

  There was screaming from the dell, but Barbary was wriggling out of her tree, her snaphaunce was in her hand, and she was stealing from tree to tree as she’d once slipped through the shadows of London’s streets.