‘There’s a lot of crows about today,’ said Catherine.
Barbary raised her head. There were. ‘Catherine. We’d better go home.’ She said it gently, trying to keep her breathing under control. She stood up straight and walked towards the girl. The child mustn’t look behind her. God, don’t let her look behind her. ‘We must go home now,’ she said again. She reached Catherine and put a hand on her neck and guided her gently to the edge of the glade. ‘You run on and unhitch the pony. Run fast. I’ll catch you.’
She watched the child out of sight and, unwillingly, turned back. She couldn’t have seen what she had seen. It might be a scarecrow against the tree.
Captain Mackworth’s round face grinned at her and winked a reassuring eye. They’d left the head intact so that he could be recognised. The rest of him had been flayed. The only skin on the body hung in flaps or formed white worms that clung against the raw, bulging flesh. Where his private parts had been was dried blood, turned blacker by massing flies. Given confidence by her stillness, two crows left the circling flock and landed on the scarecrow’s shoulders.
She turned and walked quietly away. Out of the glade she began to run. She snatched Catherine’s hand and, with Spenser bouncing his panniers behind them, ran until they had nothing above them but sky, away from leaves which dappled fire sun onto monstrosities.
* * *
‘Did you tell anybody?’ asked O’Hagan.
‘Of course I told somebody. Think I was going to leave it there for some other child to find? Or Maccabee? I told Edmund. And he’s ridden into Mallow to tell Norris and the garrison.’
She’d had to guide Edmund to the glade so that he could see for himself, but she hadn’t gone any further. She’d heard him scream and call on his God. She had recovered some of her wits by then. Yes, she thought, barbarians did this. But only days ago you stood in Mallow’s marketplace and watched another man being cut to pieces. Did you scream then?
And now O’Hagan, who had grieved for the death of the priest when she’d told him about it, was as unmoved by the soldier’s death as Edmund had been by the priest’s.
He was biting his lip. ‘There’ll be reprisals.’
‘Yes, there’ll be reprisals,’ she snarled at him. ‘That’s what you all want, isn’t it? It’s a game. You split that man open, I’ll skin this one.’
She was shaking. She tried to pour herself some wine, but slopped it. She’d prided herself on having a strong stomach, but this atrocious tit-for-tat was proving too much for it.
He snarled back, ‘If it’s a game, we didn’t want to play. And it’s our bloody ground. That’s MacSheehy land out there, not Spenser’s. For hundreds of years MacSheehy land. They hunted it, fished it, farmed it. Where Spensers and Norrises and St Legers will sit by their fires this winter, MacSheehys sat not long ago. By what right did you take it from them?’
She still wanted somebody to pay for the body on the tree, and there was only him. ‘Edmund says it’s your own bloody fault. If you Irish had banded into a nation instead of fighting each other… you needed to be civilised.’
‘And our laws to be changed, and our hair to be cut, and our language to be taken away and our religion to be banned. Showing us what a lovely faith Protestantism is by hanging and burning us for not believing in it. Sure, you Saxons have done us a favour.’
She said sullenly: ‘Savages.’
They fell silent. They had exhausted themselves blaming each other for what neither was responsible. She tried again for the wine and this time managed to pour straight. She gulped it down and sat huddling the beaker in her two hands.
He said more quietly: ‘Maybe the MacSheehys were never people you’d want to take home to mother. But they weren’t savages. The English have made them that.’
She wanted to go down to her bed, but she was reluctant to face the dark. She heard him say: ‘But I’m sorry you had to see it.’
She looked up at him suspiciously.
‘Edmund Spenser is right,’ he said. ‘We were ripe for conquering. Why we couldn’t be left to kill each other in peace I’ll never know, but for sure we were tribes, not a country. Even the poor Desmond fought only for Munster. But O’Neill now.’ He eyed her. ‘The O’Neill is something new. For all his faults, your man could make Ireland a nation.’
She had been right to be suspicious. He was merely being reasonable in order to peddle O’Neill to her.
She said: ‘Are you going to talk all night?’
He lost his temper again. ‘Are you going to get us those guns?’
‘After today?’ She couldn’t believe him. ‘I wouldn’t trust any of you buggers, Irish or English, with so much as a sodding hatpin.’
* * *
The manner of Captain Mackworth’s death as much as the death itself caused terror among the undertakers. They were inured to living with apprehension, to watching out for themselves and their stock when they heard the screeches from the forest, to going armed, sensing when the MacSheehys had retired to their fastnesses in the hills and when they were on the prowl. It was the background against which they lived and the price they were prepared to pay for colonising the Golden Vale of Munster. But the scraps of flesh and bone tied to a tree was a reminder that the price could go higher.
Not for the first time they wrote to their queen in England expressing their fear and demanding better military protection. As always, nothing came of it.
Watching an enraged garrison march out from Mallow Castle on the punitive expedition to put paid to the MacSheehys once and for all, they didn’t know whether to cheer it on or demand that it stayed put to protect them from further outrages.
Edmund Spenser was particularly exposed. Had the MacSheehys killed the captain because he’d been zealous in hunting down them and their priest? Or had they put him to death in remembrance of the 600 men he’d slaughtered at Smerwick? If it had been a reprisal for Smerwick, then Sir Walter Raleigh was another man in danger, and so was Edmund who, while he had not taken part in the actual massacre, had stood by while it was done and publicly defended the Lord Deputy who’d ordered it.
Pale and worried, he justified it again over the dinner table in conversation with Ellis who, like many of the outlying undertakers, had decided to evacuate his land for the period of the emergency and move into his neighbour’s more defensible manor. ‘Back home they called Lord Grey a bloody man for ordering it, and said he regarded the lives of Her Majesty’s Irish subjects no more than dogs’.’
Ellis belched. ‘’S what they are.’
Edmund Spenser’s eyes were fixed. ‘In the famine the Irish came creeping out of the woods and glens on their hands because their legs wouldn’t support them. Anatomies of death, crying like ghosts from the grave, falling on carrion if they could find it. If they found a plot of watercress or shamrock they flocked to it as on a feast until they couldn’t eat it any more. In a short time there were almost none of them left and the country was empty of man or beast.’
‘’S only way,’ said Ellis, his thick hands ripping the leg off another capon. ‘Teach ’em. Cruel to be kind. Make a short end of it. ’S only way.’
Edmund’s eyes refocused. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it’s the only way.’ The ghosts the poet had raised were still in the room; Barbary watched wraiths against the new linenfold panelling stare at the loaded table; she saw Edmund re-seeing them and crying for them and being prepared in another part of his complicated soul to see them starve again.
‘Only good Irishman a dead Irishman,’ said Ellis.
‘The only way,’ said Edmund Spenser.
Having Ellis in the house was the worst part of the emergency as far as Barbary was concerned. The man’s presence was ubiquitous, loud, hectoring, inquisitive. She had to walk him round the estate so that he could see how and where the crops and cattle were being disposed. As they neared her gatehouse, he expected to be invited in. ‘What’s up there then?’
‘My apartments,’ said Barbary. ‘My private apa
rtments.’
He passed on reluctantly. ‘Done well for yourself.’
The man was unlikeable and unliked, but he could boast of friendship with families like the Norrises and St Legers and it looked increasingly probable that he would soon be Mayor of Mallow. It wasn’t so much that he had bridged the class divide of Munster society as assaulted it, and it gave way to him not only because he was becoming increasingly rich, but also because he voiced his uninhibited hatred and contempt for the Irish as patriotism and he wrong-footed anybody who might have had a more liberal view into the camp of those who were ‘soft’ on England’s true enemy. ‘Give the buggers an inch and they’ll rebel again,’ he kept saying. ‘We must keep our foot on their necks.’ And the killing of Captain Mackworth had silenced the soft and raised Ellis to the status of prophet.
‘That’s the potato field,’ said Barbary.
‘You don’t eat them foreign things,’ said Ellis, more as a statement than a question. ‘Only fit for the Irish, them.’ Sir Walter’s strange tuber from the New World had grown successfully on his Youghal estate and was gradually spreading through Munster, though mainly among the mere Irish. Its value to them was the ease of growing it. With no livestock and few tools of their own, they could dig two parallel ditches, throwing the excavated earth into the middle with manure and have a self-draining bed that needed little more attention. Half an acre, even of poor soil – and usually poor soil was what they had – could support an entire family for a year. The potato didn’t need threshing or grinding. To cook it only needed a pot and a peat fire.
‘Lazy-bed farming,’ scoffed Ellis, ‘that’s what I call it. Suits lazy Irish. They’re all growing it in their plots, lazy bastards.’
‘Don’t give them time to grow much else, do you?’ retorted Barbary. It was well known that Ellis’s terms of employment for his Irish serfs bordered on slavery.
‘That I don’t,’ grinned Ellis. ‘Lash the buggers into being busy. Keeps their minds off rebellion. Potatoes is good enough for them. They don’t need civilised food. Ellis knows.’
By the time they’d finished the tour, Barbary was having a pleasant fantasy in which she procured a cannon from Will, and blew Ellis up with it. The crudity with which he and the other undertakers expressed their hatred and fear for the Irish sent her up to her gatehouse at nights prepared to sympathise with the man who was imprisoned in it. But within minutes sympathy went. His rudeness exasperated her into defending the indefensible. She couldn’t think what was the matter with the man, but his bad temper was infectious and they had fallen into a rut of mutual recrimination.
Tonight she found him reading Edmund’s ‘Shepheardes Calendar’. He flung it to the end of the bed as she came in. ‘I’m in no mood for English pastorals. Get me some Greek. Get me the Iliad, for God’s sake.’
‘I’ll get you the back of my hand,’ she told him. She put down the food she’d brought and picked up the book, smoothing out its pages. ‘He’s a great poet, Edmund. Everybody says so. Who are you to chuck him about?’
‘An English poet is a contradiction in terms,’ he said. ‘Is that his wife who goes to pick herbs every morning?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘She reminds me of a little hedgehog I had once,’ he said, and looked sideways at her, ‘though it lacked the moustache.’
He was trying to bait her, but she’d taken in a greater enormity. ‘Jesus, have you been looking out of the window?’
‘What else is there to do?’
‘What else… You careless bastard, do you know what could happen to me if you’re seen here?’ In her panic she clutched her hair.
She heard him say: ‘I’d not let anything happen to you,’ and for the first time the voice was the voice she’d heard in the Wicklow hut, but when she pushed back her hair to look at him he was gnawing on a piece of chicken and complaining, ‘Not enough salt.’
She took a deep breath; if he wasn’t going to break out of this quarrelling mode they’d got locked into, she’d have to. ‘Look, O’Hagan,’ she said reasonably, ‘you want to be out of here and, believe me, I want you out of here. But Rosh risked her life and I risked my life and my reputation getting you up here. It’ll be as big a risk getting you down, but with one of your stamps… feet… not working, the risk gets extra. We need the dice loaded in our favour when we go, and I’m not making a move until they are. Is that fair?’
There was an alteration in his face, almost a defeat, as if he’d given way to an inevitability. She’d breached a wall, but there was something in the look of him now which made her uneasily aware that in doing it she’d freed him of irritation and released something more forceful.
‘And when will my stamp be better?’ He seemed amused.
‘Another week or so, Rosh says.’
He said: ‘It’s not been easy. I’ve begun talking to the bat.’
She smiled. ‘I’ve talked to it a bit myself.’
‘Ah, but the damned thing’s begun to talk back.’
‘And what does it say?’
‘Not to look out of the window.’
She’d won. ‘Good. Then let’s get that wound dressed.’ She knew the contours of the wound like a general knows his battleground, she had watched it diminish like a beaten enemy but tonight, for the first time, she was uncomfortable with it, self-conscious when she put her arms round him to pass the bandage across his back, aware of his skin and the line of his breastbone where it made a dip beneath his throat, wishing he was complaining like he usually did instead of watching her.
He said: ‘About your reputation. If they catch me I’m prepared to go to the gallows swearing you are not my type.’
‘Thank you very much. And what is your type, may I ask?’
‘Oh, soft, dark-haired, compliant, fragile women, grateful to me for noticing them. Not women with hair like a toasted carrot.’
‘Good then.’ The bandage had to be passed round his back twice. She felt giddy.
‘I like tall, rounded women with poetry in their souls. Graceful women. Not bossy women who swear like a docker.’ The words were getting softer and moving the muscles of his throat. ‘Not women who are short and skinny with crafty eyes. Not Saxon tricksters with hearts like lions and freckles on their noses who save a man’s life at the risk of their own.’
She fumbled the tying of the bandage. His eyes were on hers; he had dark lashes and stubble was growing on the pale skin of his jaw and if he went on like this she would be past help. She managed the knot and sat back. ‘That’s good then,’ she said again. She got up, wondering if her legs would carry her to the door. They did. Just.
His voice reached her as she lifted the latch. ‘And if the pleasure of caring for me has worn thin from time to time, it’s because being in the company of a woman like that is very trying to a man in bed.’
She went out, shut the door behind her and leaned against it, trying to clear her head of murmured negatives that wafted through it like the far-off chant of sirens. They wove her to the door so that she had to pull herself away from it to descend the steps. ‘God damn the man.’ They wooed her off the hard bed of the settle to sit at the window where they joined the night sounds in the moonlight. ‘God damn him to hell.’
He wanted her as she was, Barbary Clampett, not as Rob had wanted some totally different woman. Him and his damned words that made you throb to get close to him.
The words wreathed themselves round the fidelity in her soul to undermine it, like ivy creeping into mortar. But fidelity was strong, not to Rob, her husband, though it encompassed him as part of the upbringing where loyalty was the only moral principle that mattered, and betrayal the only crime. That it would be adultery was unimportant, but by committing it she would be abandoning the part of England that mattered to her. The body of that man upstairs was its enemy, Rob’s enemy; it was dangerous, it was Ireland. It was the only sin that mattered, defection.
In the morning she dragged Rosh out of the kitchen to the orchard. �
�You give him his feed tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m done with him and his insults.’
Rosh was not deceived. ‘Will you stop knauvshaling the poor man and get into his bed where you belong. And him struggling for his honour not to want you there.’
Barbary stiffened: ‘Who’s this Honour?’
‘Ach, it’s a code the nobility has. You’re his hostess, and married, and he thinks you love your husband and is as blind as the bat on the roofbeam.’
She said automatically, ‘I do love my husband. Dearly.’
Rosh shrugged. ‘Sure, we all love our husbands, but that’s no reason for denying a launchy man like that, nor it is.’
‘You’re disgusting.’
‘And you’re forgetful. Isn’t it today we’re going to the fair?’
She had forgotten. She’d been looking forward to the Mallow Autumn Fair. The Spensers, including Catherine and herself, were going to spend the night at an inn in the town so that Edmund and Ellis could have a clear day to look over the horses and cattle they wanted to buy. Edmund, being an indulgent employer, had given permission for most of the house servants and some of the outdoor staff to accompany them.
In her memory, fairs were an amalgam of wonders and danger. Fake mermaids, dancing bears, jugglers, fire-eaters, sweatmeat stalls, conies by the hundred asking to be conied. Faces as familiar to her as her own which must be passed without a flicker of recognition on either side; Jackman in his persona as Dr Cabal, the quacksalver, shouting his cure-alls in Latin to attract the serious punters, the bawds in all their splendour with Cuckold Dick lurking in the background, the Upright Man bleeding from every disgusting pore. The thread of rogues to which she belonged running through the careless crowds and the sharp eyes of the constables. Great days.
But when she went into the hall she found that Maccabee was ill. ‘Of course I can go to the fair, Edmund,’ she was saying, but her face was yellow and after a minute’s protestation she sank into her chair.
The Pirate Queen Page 33