The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  The next four hours were a nightmare of sliding, falling, running, lying still, listening, peering, wondering where the hell she was, and hating. Hating the Irish for their perversity in sticking to their religion: ‘What’s it bloody matter, anyway?’ Hating the English: ‘Why don’t they leave the poor fokkers alone?’ Hating Mackworth: ‘He loves it.’ Hating her surroundings: ‘Bally-bloody-houras.’

  One of the Order expressions for being in trouble was ‘in the briars’; for the first time that night she knew what it meant literally. Barbed arms dragged her down into them, toothed tendrils curled into her legs, her skirt. She cursed and tore her way through, less frightened now of Mackworth than of disappearing for ever into the maw of this forest.

  Her thousandth – or was it two thousandth? – fall tipped her into cleared space, her hands clawing water and mud. She’d found the bank of a river. Wiping her eyes she saw the dim shape of a bridge and beyond it a steep track edged by houses. Doneraile. She was at Doneraile, two miles from home. Even then she wasn’t safe. The road to Kilcolman, usually a dead place at night, was waking up to hoofbeats and the drum of marching feet. Every soldier in Munster must be out. She had to make her way back through fields and copses.

  The brambles over the tunnel under the wall were still as she’d left them. On the other side the cover had not been replaced. Rosh hadn’t come back.

  She had no capacity left to feel worried about anything except how to cover the distance to her tower and bed. Some people wanted salvation: she wanted her bed. Spenser Castle had no sign of life as she staggered through its grounds. She reached her bed, fell onto it, and slept.

  * * *

  With the peevishness of a soul summoned to hell, Barbary woke up to someone pounding the knocker of the gates. ‘No,’ she said, ‘Oh no.’ But the Devil summoned on.

  She opened one eye. Light was only attempting her east window. As she squinted, her bat came fluttering back from its night’s foray and hung itself resentfully in its corner. It was dawn, just. She’d had barely two hours’ sleep.

  She heard Nup, the Anglo-Irish ex-soldier who was now Spenser Castle’s porter, gardener, odd-job man and lodged in the new gatehouse opposite hers, grumble his way to the squint, draw it back to see who was there, and begin the de-barring of the gates.

  The voice which last night had ordered the charge on the Mass said: ‘My duty to Master Spenser and permission to search his premises. We’re after an escaped priest thought to be in this vicinity.’ Captain Mackworth wasn’t asking, he was demanding.

  She really woke then. So the priest had got away? She stung all over. She raised her hands and saw the backs were scored back and forth with dried blood. Her dress, which she’d slept in, was good as shredded. She got up and peered into her mirror; every lock of her hair was having a stand-up fight with the others. Luckily the only other scratch on her face was the yew tree’s, but if Mackworth saw her now he’d know she’d spent the night abroad. She tore off her clothes, finding new wounds.

  While she re-dressed she dodged from window to window. There were a lot of soldiers with Mackworth, but the search was being held up by a night-shirted Edmund affronted at this intrusion into the dignity of his new home. Mackworth was explaining and pointing to the Ballyhouras. ‘…savages held a Mass last night… some damned priest from Spain… got away… apprehended some… dangling from the gibbets in Mallow.’

  Rosh. Oh Jesus, had they got Rosh? Then, from the eastern window, she saw her. She was coming out of the hen house. Relieved, Barbary failed to notice for a moment that Rosh was acting oddly, even for someone who had been up all night attending an illegal gathering and escaping from English soldiers. Then she did. The woman was pale, understandably, but why, with the danger over, was she still so gripped with fear that she looked shiftily about? Why latch the hen house door so carefully? Why – it was out of all sense – why, now it was daylight, had she forgotten to let the hens out?

  Barbary dropped her hands onto the sill and groaned. Oh, Rosh. Rosh, you roaring pillock. You perfect, mutton-headed, pestle-pated pillock. You got the priest in there.

  She turned away and began pulling a comb through her hair. None of her concern. Rosh could stuff hen houses with a thousand patricos, it was nothing to her. He’d be found, sure as eggs, but it was his and Rosh’s neck would stretch, not hers. Old Nick and ninepence to her.

  She heard voices from the bawn and went back to the window. Mackworth had gone up to the house with Edmund, but one of his soldiers was searching through the cattle pens, and had hailed Rosh. And Rosh, niggle-witted heifer that she was, wasn’t answering. She was still standing with her back to the hen house door as if a sudden drop of temperature had frozen her there.

  ‘Hey, nocky,’ the soldier was saying to her, ‘what you got in that eaves.’ He was a Londoner. Only Cockneys called a hen house an eaves.

  Barbary groaned again. She was going to regret this. She leaned out of the window and twanged her old accent into shape. ‘Hey, you. Mud-crusher. What you want?’

  The soldier looked up at the perky red-head in the window and grinned. ‘Last time I was called mud-crusher, I was home.’

  ‘I’ll mud-crush you, you go unsettling my cacklers. Stay there, I’m coming down.’

  She whipped up her torn dress in case they searched her tower while she was gone, bundled it over her hands like dirty washing and ran down the stairs. The infantryman was leaning on his pike with pleased expectancy. Rosh hadn’t moved a muscle. ‘What they call you, then, carrot-nob?’

  ‘They call me Lady Betty,’ said Barbary. ‘Wife to Sir Robert Betty. Heard of him, have you?’

  The names of the Armada heroes had been toasted by drinking Englishmen in taverns from the Low Countries to Connaught. ‘Great man,’ said the soldier. He winked. ‘And lucky.’

  Barbary winked back. ‘Whitecross?’

  ‘Next door. Golden Lane. And wondering why I left it.’

  Barbary nodded. ‘Know it well. Now then, what’s with my cacklers?’ As she spoke she wandered to a point where she could see the ground between the hen house and the wall. A pile of cattle litter covered the tunnel.

  ‘Orders,’ said the soldier. ‘There’s a Papist loose. Got to search every out-house and all Irish shacks, and Madam Midnight there’s acting suspicious.’

  ‘Thick as pig shit,’ said Barbary, ‘like all Paddies. Still and all, you’re not tramping around my eaves in those clumping great excruciators. Them birds get the pip as soon as look at you.’ She held out the worst of her hands to the soldier. ‘And that cock in there’s a tiger. Look what he done to my hand.’ The soldier quailed. ‘You go and look under that hay in the byre,’ she continued. ‘I’ll search here.’ She gave him no time to object, but snapped at Rosh: ‘Open that door.’ Rosh came to and opened it. The soldier moved off to the byre.

  Barbary stepped in and drew the door half closed behind her. As hen houses went, this one was big; the late Earl of Desmond, or whoever ran the castle for him, had obviously gone in for poultry on a large scale. The Spensers’ thirty hens were lost in the wide-slatted perches which ran its twenty-foot length. She moved in semi-darkness through the farinaceous, green-yellow smell of hen turds, relieved here and there by a chink in the planking of the walls letting in the dawn. ‘Chook-chook,’ she said pleasantly, loud enough for the soldier to hear her. ‘Chook-chook.’ She was nervous. Priests were queer cattle and the thought of one lying in here somewhere, waiting, was unattractive. The hens were nervous as well, displeasedly settling feathers as if they’d been ruffled by recent disturbance. They increased their clucking, telling her it was time they were in daylight. ‘Chook-chook.’ She stepped backward, suppressing a whimper, as the cock flapped up from her feet to a rafter and rasped into his morning call. She’d told the truth about him. The bird was a black-hearted bugger, likely to fly at you with his talons up for your eyes. She shuffled past him. ‘One move, Double-guts, and tomorrow’s Christmas.’

  There was something
dripping, a slow, irregular drip. ‘Chook-chook.’ A pool with a black sheen was by her foot and as she looked, it rippled from another drip. Reluctantly, wishing she was elsewhere, she raised her head. Fingers nearly touched her nose. A human arm was acting as a drainpipe for the blood seeping down it to gather in the half-closed hand and well over onto the ground.

  Priest’s blood. Papist blood. She swallowed. If he was losing it at this rate he wouldn’t be a priest much longer, he’d be dead. She stepped onto the lower perch and raised herself up to get a glimpse of the face turned towards her. It was white and unconscious. And it wasn’t the priest’s.

  Barbary looked at it for some time. ‘Chook-’ she said to it slowly, ‘chook.’

  She turned and went briskly to the door, opened it wide and began ushering the hens out. Rosh gave her a glance, but Barbary ignored it. Double-guts erupted into the sunlight, handsome and wicked, with the hens stepping bandily after him. She left the door open.

  Over the byre the soldier glanced nervously up at Double-guts, who’d landed on its roof to crow. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. You?’

  ‘Nah. Roast-a-stone, this is. He’s in some paddy hut somewhere. But the captain’ll get the shifter, rest on that. The captain hates priests worse’n MacSheehys.’

  She stretched. ‘Better see to his breakfast then. Wouldn’t say no to some inner lining yourself, would you?’

  ‘Lady,’ said the soldier warmly, ‘you’re a prize. My belly thinks me throat’s cut.’

  Barbary nodded and shoved Rosh forward. ‘The kitchen, masterpiece,’ she told her, ‘and see if you can get a proper English breakfast for a proper English gentleman.’

  As Rosh stumbled past the soldier he dragged at her arm. ‘Say “thump”.’

  ‘They can’t,’ said Barbary involuntarily. ‘The sound’s not in their language.’

  ‘I like hearing ’em try. Come on, masterpiece. “Thhhump.”’

  ‘Tump,’ said Rosh.

  Barbary’s hands, wrapped in her dress, inflicted more damage on it. She winked at the soldier as Rosh made her getaway. ‘Hopeless,’ she said. ‘But her black pudding’s near as good as Mother Bunch’s.’

  ‘Mother Bunch’s,’ said the soldier with longing. They walked up to the house together, swapping memories of London. Barbary heard him report to Mackworth that the bawn had been checked and was clear. She caught up with Rosh in the smoke house, where the Irishwoman was trying to lift a flitch of bacon off a hook with hands weak from trembling. Barbary helped her. Her own hands shook, but she was invigorated by her conying. Beautiful it had been. Like the face in the hen house.

  Rosh dropped the flitch to the floor and collapsed onto it. ‘For what did you do it?’

  ‘They’d have trined you else.’ She jerked an invisible rope round her neck. ‘And him. Come on, we must hurry.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  Barbary stopped to stare at her. ‘Don’t you know?’ Rosh shook her head. ‘He was a stranger. He came with the priest. When we ran, he held back and fought two of them to keep them off. But he’s terrible wounded. He was asking for you, and the English were everywhere so we brought him here. And anyway, didn’t the feller save my life?’

  Barbary nodded slowly. ‘He saved mine once. His name’s O’Hagan.’ She shook herself. ‘And he’s dying. The moment the coast’s clear, get down to that bawn and stem the bleeding. Got any stuff for it?’

  ‘Bog moss,’ said Rosh, ‘We use bog moss to stop putrefying.’

  ‘Gawd help us. Well, it’ll have to do. After dark we’ll move him. Get him away from here.’

  ‘He’s broken his ankle. He was too big for the tunnel and he had to climb the wall. He fainted and fell off.’

  ‘Jesus.’ This was sheer Irish carelessness. ‘We’ll get him to my tower then. That’s nearest. And burn this.’ She passed over her poor dress. ‘Now, for Chrissake, move.’

  * * *

  ‘Well, I hope you get him, Humfrey,’ Edmund was saying. ‘Nevertheless, these Popish priests are willing to come out of Spain by dangerous travel here where they know peril of death awaits them and no reward or riches are to be found, and this only to draw the people to the Church of Rome.’ He was on his hobby-horse, emboldened by sitting at the head of his long oak board offering hospitality. ‘Whereas our idle ministers like Prebendary Chadwick have the living of the country open to them, no pain, no peril, but do nothing for God’s harvest. Prebendary Chadwick nestles by his mistress’s side…’

  Captain Mackworth stuck his knife into a fat piece of bacon. ‘Prebendary Chadwick is nevertheless a Christian, Edmund.’

  Shut your pipes, screamed Barbary’s nerves at the two of them. And you, you belly-swagging bastard foot-wobbler, will you get out of here?

  Aloud she said: ‘More ham, Captain? It is our own sweet-cured.’ With Maccabee merely a depressed presence at the table, she had to be hostess.

  Mackworth took more ham, more ale, more everything. ‘When do you start rebuilding the Hap Hazard estate, ma’am?’ The question was aggressive. Mackworth rejoiced in not being a lady’s man, which meant that most of the time he ignored women, and verged on the insulting when he didn’t.

  Edmund said: ‘We are fortunate that Lady Betty is delaying her project and looking after us during my wife’s indisposition.’

  ‘Fortunate indeed,’ sneered Mackworth.

  Swipe me, Barbary realised, he thinks Edmund and me are doing the naughty. You dog-bolt, you Nebuchadnezzar. If there was a thousand priests hidden round this house I wouldn’t hand them to you. It struck her that Mackworth’s suspicion was fortunate. The man’s dog nose had sniffed out something wrong in the house. He wasn’t dragging out the breakfast through greed but because his animal instinct told him that Barbary had something to hide. He’d been looking at her squint-eyed ever since she’d sat down. She calmed herself. Better for him to think she was niggling that dandiprat Edmund than guess the truth.

  At long last she stood at the gateway and mouthed goodbyes and good lucks in their hunt to him and his soldiers, and turned away as they cantered out of sight – to endure the longest day of her life. Nothing could be done for the body in the hen house in daylight, except to ensure that nobody found it. Every minute was another drop of blood out of his body. Occasion after occasion she and Rosh tried to snatch a word together, and every blessed time somebody or something intervened to prevent it. She saw Rosh put the hens away towards evening, but even then it wasn’t until after household prayers that the Irishwoman, passing close to Barbary on her way to bed, hissed: ‘Stopped the bleeding,’ and Barbary hissed back: ‘When all’s quiet.’

  Edmund and Maccabee slept at the back of the house, overlooking the crescent-shaped lake. Bedrooms for guests – of whom, thank God, there were none – were at the front, overlooking the gatehouses and the bawn, but so did the children’s rooms, and the servants’ attics. As Barbary slunk down the steps from her tower and into the gardens, it was like entering a stage lit by the moon’s chandelier. The yew tree walk that Edmund had planted in the hope that it would one day rival Penshurst’s was a pathetic waist-high frill which emphasised, rather than concealed, to the watching windows that overlooked it, her progress along it.

  It was a relief to get through the gate to the bawn and be hidden by its walls. Rosh was waiting for her. They didn’t speak. The hens put up a squawking when they went in, but settled down when they smelled who was disturbing them. The body hadn’t moved. ‘Is he dead?’ But if it was dead, it still retained warmth.

  They pushed and pulled at it, until it flopped onto Rosh’s shoulders, and then flopped to the floor as the Irishwoman gave way under its weight. With no room to go two abreast, they took one end each and staggered with it between the shelves until they were outside, but even that short distance brought home the knowledge that they could not carry it all the way to the gatehouse.

  ‘What’ll we do?’

  ‘We’ll have to drag him. One arm each.’

 
‘But his poor leg.’

  ‘It’s his poor leg or his poor neck. And our poor necks for that matter. Get that bloody arm and drag.’

  She had to blot out what pain and damage they were inflicting on the man, blot out that he was a man at all. Think of him as an object, bumping along behind them. It wasn’t easy when she noticed that the object was leaving a trail of blood behind it. Nor when it started to moan in full sight and hearing of the manor’s windows.

  Getting the body up the outside steps to the gatehouse took a quarter of an hour, and twice as long up the narrow, twisting staircase to Barbary’s top room. By the time they’d stretched it, twisted it, and got it onto Barbary’s bed, they were half dead themselves. They slumped down onto the floor and closed their eyes.

  ‘He’ll not survive this.’

  ‘Sod him.’

  * * *

  For four days the body on Barbary’s bed had the depersonalised demands of a baby’s. She and Rosh washed it and kept it warm; when it could swallow they stuffed milk into it at one end and cleaned up the results from the other. The wound had been caused by a sword thrust through the right ribs; it seemed to have pierced none of the vital organs and, incredibly, Rosh’s dreadful bog moss was keeping it clean. The ankle was blue and swollen, and would take a good six weeks to mend if the body could make up enough of its lost blood to live at all.

  ‘Will it?’ asked Barbary. ‘He’s horrible white.’

  Rosh shrugged. ‘The apple will fall on the head that’s under it.’ Her proverbs had returned with the recovery of her nerve.

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘Ach, there’s always hope. All’s not lost that’s in the floodmark.’

  They cut his hair and shaved off his beard because Rosh said they sapped strength, leaving the pallid, suffering face more vulnerable than ever.

  Barbary had never had a human being physically dependent on her before. Come to that, she’d not been acquainted with male nudity before; Rob equated undress with degradation and anyway preferred copulation in the dark. The body of the man in her bed was an anatomy lesson in long muscles, bones and interesting bits, a relief map of masculinity. Rosh unashamedly thought it beautiful. ‘He’s a grand-looking fellow, so he is,’ she said.