Edmund drew Barbary aside. ‘Would you stay with her? You are so good, cousin, I should be much relieved… Should I leave more staff behind, do you think? The place will be undermanned.’
‘Edmund, the MacSheehys are on the run with a garrison of soldiers up their arse; they’re not likely to double back and call in here for supper.’
She sent Rosh to the gatehouse with a day’s supply of food and settled down to devote herself to Maccabee and Sylvestris in a house so unusually quiet that they could hear the sound of Abby, the only servant in it, flapping her pastry onto the board in the kitchen. After some rest and attention, Maccy recovered enough to insist on Barbary having another attempt at needlework. ‘You will never be a true lady without this skill, cousin. Now this is how to do a French knot.’ Barbary’s fingers, which could pick a lock and a pocket, massacred the stitch while her thoughts consigned the French and their knots to hell and wandered off to the gatehouse.
So that was the cause of his bad temper all this time. In his strange Irish mind it was more honourable to be rude to his hostess than to seduce her. Damn him. If he wanted to make love to her, why the hell didn’t he go ahead and do it? She was affronted, forgetting that her own peculiar loyalty had drawn her back from the brink. Him and his honour.
She was almost relieved that Maccabee didn’t want to be left for the night. Barbary clambered into Edmund’s side of the Spenser four-poster bed and listened to Maccabee chatter herself to sleep. There was a restlessness about. She was restless, Maccabee was restless, and outside the shuttered windows something disquieted the forest and filled Barbary’s dreams with the squeals of rabbits torn by foxes and the scream of foxes torn by rabbits.
There was knocking on the front door. ‘Stay there, Maccy. I’ll go.’ What damned time was it? She struggled into a cloak and slippers, cursing herself for leaving her snaphaunce over in the gatehouse. Downstairs she heard unfamiliar voices. What the hell was Nup doing opening the gates without her permission?
She pulled back the bolts and turned the great key. Against a sky that was showing reluctant light stood the tall figure of Sir Thomas Norris, the Lord Deputy of Munster, and, mopping with apology, the much smaller figure of Nup. ‘I’m sorry, mistress, sorry. I’d opened the gates afore—’
Sir Thomas cut him short by stepping into the hall and shutting the door on him. His cloak was muddy and he smelled of sweat. ‘The fact of the matter is, Lady Betty, that your noddle of a gatekeeper opened to some of my men who were demanding admittance. My officers are rounding them up now and we shall be away from here within the minute. You must forgive them; I fear they are drunk, but they have this night performed such a service to Her Majesty…’
Barbary rubbed her eyes. ‘Take it slower, my lord, will you?’ There was none of the link between her and this man that she’d felt for his brother. Sir John Norris and Rob had their fortunes tied up together in their mutual expedition against the Spaniards, and she and the Norrises met occasionally to swap any news of the expedition which came their way, but Sir Thomas, a conventional man, found her baffling.
Tonight, however, Sir Thomas, exhausted but uplifted, was more forthcoming. ‘We found the MacSheehys’ camp.’
‘Lovely.’ She remembered that she was hostess. ‘Do you want some wine or something? What are you doing here then?’
He wouldn’t stop, and his explanation was gabbled. He had to leave.
His men were running riot, small fault with them, but he must take them back to Mallow before they got out of hand. He’d gone before she’d grasped what it was all about. She caught his last words: ‘We’ll be back on the morrow. Stay indoors until then.’
She bolted the door behind him, went up to tell Maccabee that there was nothing to be frightened of, and looked out of the bedroom window. All was quiet at the back of the house, but there were shouts, howlings and general mayhem going on at the front. She could hear it.
‘What are they doing round my cattle pens?’ she demanded. ‘Stay put, Maccy. I’ll go and see to the buggers.’
What worried her most was what was happening at the gatehouse. At the door she paused to take stock. The lawn was full of soldiers uproariously drunk; a couple were chasing hens, others were flinging themselves on the ground as they tried to tackle some of the piglets who’d been loosed from the sty, and were being attacked in their turn by a furious sow. One was riding Colossus, the Kerry bull which Edmund had recently purchased at a high price to improve the quality of his herd, and Colossus, though slow-witted, was beginning to resent the indignity.
Whatever else they’d discovered at the MacSheehy camp, the men had got at its liquor store and now were after food; the army in Ireland was permanently short of provisions. Well, they’d come to the wrong manor. A part of Barbary was in every grass-blade of Spenser Castle and she wasn’t about to have it sacked by a load of booze-crazed foot-sloggers.
Officers were trying to restore order with the flat of their swords, urged on by commands from the bellowing Sir Thomas. Barbary set off across the lawn to fetch her snaphaunce, only pausing to put out a foot and trip up a soldier running after a hen. He fell and was collared by a captain.
It was quieter down by the gatehouse, and all sound blotted out when she saw that its door was open, a hole surrounded by splinters where its lock had been. The lock was still attached to the frame, having proved stronger than its surrounding wood. Whoever had broken in was still climbing the steps. Looking up she saw the wobble of fight from a lantern on the walls, heard metal clatter against stone. She went up faster than she’d ever done, desperate to get to the top before whoever-it-was. She didn’t make it in time. Somebody rattled the top door and then banged on it. She heard: ‘Lady Betty, Lady Betty, give us a kiss.’ It was a Cockney, it was Mud-crusher, the soldier she’d tricked away from the hen house. He was drunk and he saw her. He swayed above her on the top step, the lantern casting upwards to make his face ugly and desperate. ‘You give us a kiss,’ he shouted at her. There were tears on his cheeks. ‘I’m a hero now and all. Done proud. They done it to us, we done it to them. You give us a kiss.’
‘You’ll kiss the gunner’s daughter afore you’re done,’ she told him. ‘Come on down.’ But he’d passed beyond her influence; it came to her for the first time that he, that all of them, had taken part in something so terrible that being flogged at a gunwheel, the penalty for insubordination, was a diminished threat.
Suddenly he realised the door he’d been trying to open was bolted on the inside. ‘Who you got in there, lady? You sarding someone? Got a pike for your pin-cushion, have you?’
‘Come down,’ begged Barbary. Jesus, don’t let O’Hagan interfere.
The soldier put the lantern down, leaving his hands free to reach for her. ‘Standing on your pantables, and all the time putting horns on poor old Sir Rob, eh?’
The door behind him swung open. ‘No,’ said O’Hagan, ‘she isn’t.’ The range of the lantern showed the soldier’s feet leaving the step. She heard a crack, saw the feet regain the step to be followed by the rest of his body.
She was terrified. ‘You’ve never killed him.’
‘I refrained,’ said O’Hagan, ‘from the pleasure. I’ll push, you pull.’
‘I could have managed,’ Barbary shouted at him.
‘Now you don’t have to,’ he shouted back. ‘Will you get the bastard downstairs?’
Somehow, with O’Hagan using one foot and one arm, Mud-crusher was bumped down to the main door. ‘Suppose he tells when he comes to?’ she asked.
‘When he does he’ll not remember.’
‘I’ll cope now. Just get back upstairs.’
The officers had restored something like order; apart from a few strays, most of the men had been rounded up. She called a captain she vaguely recognised and Mud-crusher was carried off in an untidy but fast-sobering column that was being marched out of the gates.
When at last they’d all gone it was light, or as light as it would get in weather that h
ad turned overcast, and Barbary, Abby, a chastened Nup, and Maccabee, who refused to stay indoors, could see the damage. The herb garden was ruined, the newly planted yew hedges were trampled, hens and pigs were all over the place. Worst of all, Colossus was missing. Offended at his misuse he had wandered out of the gates in the furore and there was no sign of him. Barbary gave instructions. ‘Nup, go and get some cottagers to help. Maccy and Abby, you round up the pigs. I’ll go after Colossus.’
But indignation had restored strength to Maccabee. ‘That is Edmund’s very expensive bull,’ she said. ‘I’ll get him.’
There wasn’t time to argue; it might take two of them anyway. ‘We’ll both go.’
The back fields had been ploughed and they had to walk along a balk, wetting their slippers and ankles in the grass.
They wandered into the three-dimensional grey of woods that had shed their personality along with their leaves. Trunks and branches were greasy, the fallen leaves beneath their feet wetly treacherous. ‘Coom, coom, Colossus,’ they called and heard their voices peter out into moist silence.
‘This way,’ said Barbary, following a trail. ‘Something’s kicked up the mould here.’ Maccabee didn’t move. She was staring round her like a sightseer, except that her hands were over her ears as if to block out intolerable sound. Barbary watched her, not wanting to look, aware that at the edge of her vision the shape of the glade was wrong; all round, to the back, front, sides, its branches bore fruit, enormous ragged pears that hung from bent stalks. The last clear thought before she surrendered to her eyes was: Should have known. They’d hang them here. Where Mackworth hung. Oh God, so many.
There were no men, except old ones. The garrison had found the MacSheehy camp but not the MacSheehy enemy, not the MacSheehys who had flayed Mackworth. They had found the home camp, the wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, small sons, grandmothers and grandfathers. And the garrison had brought them here and hanged them all. Hard work, work in shifts, three or four men to each rope. So much rope. So much straining as they pulled. So much screaming, so many struggles for so long.
This had happened to her mother.
There were scores of hanging bodies, perhaps hundreds; they overflowed into other glades where they made dark nuclei in the midst. Little bodies, big bodies, all with their heads on one side as if they were shy at being found in this condition. Her mother had looked like this. Barbary stood in an architecture of death, pendicles arranged at different heights, clusters where a branch was big enough, single bodies placed almost artistically at random. A child’s bare feet, gracefully pointed, were near her shoulder. She swung away and faced a pair of muddy moccasins. This head was grey, but it bent at the same angle as the gold one behind her; one lined, one chubby, they shared the same look, slack, indifferent. All the faces were the same, it was the feet that had the individuality. An old woman’s with bunions, an old man’s with rheumatism and knotted veins, a stout but small pair of boots beneath a petticoat, toddler’s feet, little toes, a town’s worth of people who had walked and run on the good earth, now quietly suspended above it.
Someone was moaning, either her or Maccabee. Maccabee was kneeling by the worst thing in the world. Barbary saw it, rejected seeing it. She whimpered as she went down on her knees to it, touched it, just in case.
The men who had done this had lost their hold on the most basic imperative of their lives. The baby hung from its mother. They had hanged the woman in the act of giving birth. They had known because she was stripped; they’d hanged her between the contraction which pushed the baby into the world and the contraction which would have expelled the afterbirth; the child hung from the mother by the cord at its navel.
Oh God, obliterate this crime against genesis. Obliterate the men who committed it. Obliterate me for having seen it. But there was no God.
Maccabee said clearly: ‘They’ll tell.’
Hunched so as not to brush against the bodies, they tiptoed out of the woods as if afraid of waking what they left behind them. ‘They’ll tell,’ said Maccabee again. Tell who? A non-existent St Peter as they crowded through his non-existent gates?
Barbary put Maccabee to bed, called Abby to watch over her, and went downstairs to stand in some space, the hall, the kitchen, she didn’t know, wasn’t aware that she was standing at all. It was as if she had been hanged as well; she was suspended, bloodless. Somewhere down on the ground soldiers and officers were justifying what they’d done. Do it to them before they do it to us. Not people, smell different, don’t feel as we feel, sub-human, not us-es. But it was too late for her. She and the baby and the mother were connected by that umbilical cord, part of a huge, corporate womb and the violence done to it had violated the whole world. She had been violated.
Knowing that it was impossible for her to know it, she knew nevertheless that in the forest she had been made barren.
Later that day she walked over to the gatehouse and up its steps. She opened the door and looked at the man on the bed. ‘You can tell the O’Neill I’ll get his guns for him,’ she said.
He had been reading. He scrambled up and she went to him.
She told him a little, not much, not anything about the mother and the baby. She had fits of shuddering she couldn’t control. He held her for a long time, just held her, soothing her as a mother with an injured child. ‘There, there, Cushlamochree. Quiet now, my brave girl. There, there, pulse of my heart.’
She had no more fellow feeling for the Irish than before, no more sense of her own Irishness; even pity for Ireland had not overwhelmed her. But from this moment on, she knew, she would support the side of its people because the imbalance of the scale against them was too monstrously weighted to be borne. She would support them from an impulse resembling the involuntary reaching of hands to straighten a lopsided picture. She would do it, if she could, because it had to be done.
The ridiculous things he was saying so gently began to get through to her. ‘Quiet now, pulse of my heart.’ She could feel the pulse of his heart. In the wasteland she was lost in, this cricket ticked out its insistence on living. Concepts like honour and loyalty were irrelevancies. Not to be dead was what counted, not to be cold or alone. The only warmth and companionship she knew had been in this room all these weeks. Her own body ticked into life.
‘About damned time,’ he said, and he wasn’t holding her like a mother now.
It wasn’t at all like sex with Rob. He looked at her, spoke to her, mostly in Irish. Everything sophisticated and moody had gone, leaving his face defenceless. Her body and soul had held a gap and he filled them both, like the fitting of mortice into tenon by some beautiful carpenter. A tight fit, so that the rest of her wrinkled up in a huge and joyful orgasm. ‘Gawd help us,’ she said, when she could speak. ‘What was that?’
‘Me,’ he said, panting modestly.
‘Well, do it again.’
‘You know nothing of the male constitution, woman.’ He collapsed back onto the bed and put his arm round her, so that they lay staring up at the darkening ceiling together. The bat stared back. ‘Oh God, that I have to do penance for this.’
‘You have to do what?’ She sat up and could only just see his face.
He said: ‘I would hear you coming up the steps and wait to see you in the doorway. Is mo chern in maiten bán. Come into my dark oratory, be welcome the bright morn, is mo chen, a muingel mass, white-necked and gold-bedecked. You were dawn to me, Saxon. But it’s still a sin.’
She was appalled. ‘I’m not a sin. I’m not a sin.’ She was hammering on his shoulders. Sin hung out there in the forest. How could sin be juicy and warm and fitting?
He caught her hands. ‘You are the bravest woman with the reddest hair I have ever known,’ he said, ‘but you are married.’
A damned devil-dodger. All the light had withdrawn from the room now and he had gone with it into shadows where she couldn’t follow, leaving just his bones in the bed. There were too many facets to him for her to be sure of who he was; the kindness,
the mockery, the courage, the bad temper, the hypochondria, the lover and now the Catholic. She would accept them, any of them, but he had to apologise to God for loving her at all.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said wearily. ‘You’re foreign.’
‘Irish,’ he said. ‘I’m Irish.’
There was noise outside, Edmund’s voice shouting for Nup to open the gates. Tiredly, she slipped away from his detaining arm, out of the bed to dress and go back into the cold.
* * *
Edmund and the others had heard about the hangings from Sir Thomas Norris and when they’d passed along the road by the woods they’d seen the bodies being taken away on carts.
Edmund was cross with her. ‘Sir Thomas told you to stay indoors,’ he chided her. ‘Not a sight for ladies and their susceptibilities. Tragic, but inevitable. They must be taught a lesson. I fear it may have sent my poor wife mad.’
It had killed her. Maccabee began to die immediately, turning yellower and yellower. Barbary didn’t go back to the gatehouse because Maccy grew restive when she was out of sight. She stayed in the Spensers’ room, taking it in turns with Edmund to sit with her, trying to persuade her to take the doctor’s nostrums, to calm her. But she was in terror. ‘They’ll tell,’ she kept saying, clutching at Barbary.
‘Tell who, Maccy? Who will they tell? Tell what?’ But if that remoteness which the dead in the wood had possessed contained a secret, Maccy died with it, in too much pain to pass it on.
Rosh and Barbary washed her, put her in her best clothes, shut the once-busy little mouth, tied the linen band that would keep it from falling open and settled the small hands on her breast. ‘Oh, Maccy. Goodbye.’
Edmund cried easily over the body of his wife, Catherine with a desperation that produced almost as great a desperation in Barbary. The pitying maternalism she had contracted in the forest wouldn’t leave her. She picked the girl up and felt the child’s bony little frame relax totally into grief against her. ‘There, there, pigsney, don’t cry.’ How idiotic. Why shouldn’t you cry? What is there to stop crying for? Cling on. Human warmth’s the only thing worth having in this world of dead bodies. I’ll go back to the gatehouse soon where human warmth is waiting for me, and I’ll cony O’Hagan away from his God if it’s the last thing I do.
The Pirate Queen Page 34