When Catherine had sobbed herself to sleep, Barbary bent and kissed her and went to the gatehouse. Rosh was coming down the stairs. ‘Thank God you’re here. He’s going tonight.’
‘Going?’ She felt cold. Being without volition, he had seemed a sort of present that she could pick up or not, go back to any moment she wanted. ‘He can’t go.’
‘He’s got to stop the MacSheehys. If they’ll listen to anybody, they’ll listen to him. They’re planning to attack Mallow Castle.’
She pushed past Rosh, who called after her: ‘I’ll see if the coast’s clear.’
He was sitting on the bed, pulling on his boots. Rosh must have stitched together the one they had slit to his ankle, as she had mended and cleaned his doublet, shirt, hose and trunks. He was no longer her patient, but a tall and presentable Tudor gentleman. ‘The MacSheehys are planning to get the rest of themselves killed,’ he said. ‘And now is not the time. If there’s to be another rising it must be all Ireland’s, and not before Ireland’s ready.’
He stood up, testing his ankle. ‘That’s what I was doing.’ He looked sharply at her. ‘When I was so rudely interrupted. That’s what I was doing, organising the clans.’
He’d already left her. They might never have shared a bed. He was paying her back for all those dependent weeks by showing her he was independent of her now, that she was only a very small part of his plans. Not consciously, perhaps, but he was. He could go, and confess his sin and gain absolution or whatever these dolly-worshippers gained, and be spotless white the next time he wanted to colt with a woman. Well, go, and the Devil and ninepence go with you.
He came nearer, studying her face. ‘I’m sorry the little woman is dead. Is there anything I can do?’
Not now, my lad, not ever. ‘No, thank you.’
‘You never need me, do you?’
‘I don’t need anybody.’ She stuck out her hand as she would in saying goodbye to a stranger. He shrugged and kissed it.
‘My eternal gratitude, mistress. Don’t bother to see me out.’
She didn’t. She stood in the doorway and watched him pass down the curve of the stairway. He was limping piteously. ‘Me ankle’s still giving me pain,’ he called up to her. If his whole leg had collapsed like a rotten pea-stick, she wouldn’t have lifted a finger.
She heard his footfalls pause. ‘About the guns,’ he called, ‘you’ll be contacted.’
‘I’ll hold my breath,’ she hissed and heard her words snake down the stairwell after him.
Suddenly he was chasing back up the stairs. He reached her, grabbed her and kissed her. ‘Hold it on that, woman.’
By the time she’d gathered the pieces of herself that had melted all over the stairway, he’d gone. She went back into the room and watched him hobble towards the bawn and out of sight. No sound came from the dark house where Maccy was laid out on her bed.
There was a wasteland around her again, and no cricket ticking away in it. But he’d done one thing, the Irish bastard, he’d made her so bloody angry that she could cope with it.
Chapter Fourteen
The smoke from Sir Walter Raleigh’s long, silver pipe puffed out into the early summer air towards the crescent lake. His tobacco case was made of gold. Edmund’s pipe, like the one Sir Walter had also given Barbary, was of whale ivory and had gone out long ago. It lay beside him on the window seat as he read:
Of warlike puissaunce in ages spent,
Be thou, fair Britomart, whose praise I write,
But of all wisdome be thou precedent,
O sovereign Queen, whose praise I would indite
But ah, my rhymes too rude and rugged are,
When in so high an object they do light…
He looked up from his manuscript. ‘Not too fulsome, do you think?’
Raleigh took his pipe from his mouth. ‘Can’t be,’ he said.
Sitting in her chair, wrestling with a seam on Catherine’s new skirt, Barbary raised her eyes to heaven. There was no virtue, no ideal of beauty, no compassion and grace that Edmund hadn’t heaped on that ill-tempered, vain, grand old woman, the Queen of England. One character had not been enough to encompass all the flattery – Barbary had stopped asking when the Faerie Queen was actually going to appear in ‘The Faerie Queen’; Britomart, Belphoebe, Mercilla were all manifestations of her perfections.
For days now Edmund’s voice had droned away until the hall reverberated with nine-line stanzas. The servants dusted away words, cooked words, words fell out of the cushions when they were shaken. And all the time, Raleigh listened and smoked and nodded. During an interval when Edmund had gone off for a pee, Barbary took the opportunity to ask: ‘Is it good then, this poem?’
Raleigh answered with sincerity: ‘It rises above anything yet produced under the name of poetry in England.’
She couldn’t see it. All this knight errantry was irrelevance as far as she was concerned; there hadn’t been much chivalry in the streets where she’d grown up; she didn’t see it manifested in Ireland. It didn’t get on with the story. Every time Edmund got to a good bit he stopped; palaces, landscapes, pageants, feasts were taken to pieces and every part likened to something else. Champions duelled until she didn’t give a dump who won.
‘Oh well,’ she said, resignedly, ‘I suppose you know.’ After all, Raleigh was reckoned as a nifty poet himself.
But she still couldn’t work out why he was putting in days on it. She had to; she was, if only temporarily, the hostess. But Raleigh the adventurer, man of action, lover of the queen? What was he doing, lounging around an Irish backwater, listening to an allegory, however great, that threatened to go on for ever?
He had brought her letters from Rob, who was still having a high time raiding Spanish shipping. Like his other letters they carried detailed instructions for their new home. The building of Hap Hazard was going well, with Raleigh’s help and advice. Rob wanted it to be modern, a mansion rather than a castle, brick rather than stone, herringbone style, crazy with black beams, white plaster and elaborate chimneys. ‘For I have faith that Ireland shall be at peace now, and battlements unnecessary,’ he wrote. Barbary shrugged her shoulders and passed his orders on to the masons. Certainly these last few months had been peaceful. There hadn’t been so much as a cattle raid by the MacSheehys. Spring planting had gone ahead with growing confidence that revolt had been frightened out of the rebels. ‘Root and branched ’em,’ crowed Ellis. ‘Dogs fall quiet iffen you kill the pups and bitches.’
‘The dogs fall quiet iffen they’re waiting their chance,’ thought Barbary, and for Rob’s sake ordered a high wall to be built round Hap Hazard; it spoiled its light-hearted charm but would give some protection when the storm broke.
She commanded the work of the rammers, wallers, brickers and paviours without enthusiasm. She had no intention of ever living at Hap Hazard, but seeing to its completion was the last thing she could do for Rob before she left him. For her the marriage had dissolved at the moment she had seen the baby and mother in the woods. There had been the great divide. It was when Ireland had become vulnerable and she had switched allegiance from Rob, who sided with everything English. She would never see him again. Anyway, he’d never loved her and she, she realised now, had never really loved him. Love was what she had discovered with O’Hagan. And she wouldn’t see him again either. She tried to put him out of her mind, insisting to herself that he had been an interlude that was over. Him and his religion.
Where she was going to go and what she would do when she went was not apparent. ‘About the guns,’ O’Hagan had said, ‘you will be contacted.’ She was waiting for the contact, and until then inertia and the pull of affection for the place and for Catherine and Sylvestris kept her at Spenser Castle. Edmund had begged her to stay on for the children’s sake ‘until I can make other arrangements’. It had caused gossip among the undertakers, and Lady Norris, Sir Thomas’s wife, who disapproved of Barbary, had actually told Edmund that his children should be in the care of someone
more conversant with the ‘gentilities’. But Edmund, with one of those stubborn quirks which saved him from total conformity, refused. They were happy with his ‘cousin’; he liked his children to be happy.
When he had company, as now, Barbary moved out of the gatehouse and into the castle to act as hostess. Raleigh’s stay had caused a lot of work for everybody; they had invited half Munster to various festivities for his entertainment. What surprised her was that the servants hadn’t minded; they had enjoyed the unaccustomed excitement, and were charmed by Raleigh himself, who had handed out clay pipes and tobacco to every one of them, saying that the smoke would cure them, like hams, against the ageing process. He acquainted himself with their names and personal history, and flirted shamelessly with the women, young and old. He had done more than flirt with Lucy, the cook’s daughter. Searching the orchard for a hen that had gone broody, Barbary had heard puffing and squeaking coming from behind a tree. Investigation had shown Lucy, with her skirts and legs up, and Sir Walter, with trunks down, standing against the tree in the act of what the Order called ‘doing a perpendicular’. Since it was obviously not rape, Barbary had walked away. Later she got Raleigh on his own and scolded him. ‘You stop sarding my girls, you mutton-monger,’ she said. ‘They’re good girls, and Edmund don’t want a nursery full of little Raleighs.’
Raleigh was undiscomfited. ‘Don’t ’ee fret, my beauty.’ With Barbary he relaxed into deep Devonshire, partly to point up her own refusal to use better-class English with him, and partly as a familiarity. ‘She’ll come to no harm for a bit of loving, and if so she do have a babby, I’ll care for ’un. ’Tis lonely here for a lusty lad.’ His black eyebrows had twitched an invitation which she’d ignored.
Then why does he stay? She couldn’t work it out. There was an Earl of Essex, a new Earl of Essex, arrived at court to bewitch the queen. Raleigh was amusing about how jealous the young man was of his own position in the royal bosom, but he dwelled on the matter too long and too often to conceal his own raging jealousy of this rival.
So why are you here and not safeguarding your back at court? Barbary raised her head as Edmund’s voice ran out. Raleigh took his pipe from his mouth. ‘Good Shepherd Edmund,’ he said – it was their little joke that they were Theocritan shepherds in a pastoral ruled by Goddess Elizabeth – ‘here’s too mighty a poem to be hid in this Irish forest. Come back with me to place this jewel you have wrought into the crown of England. Display it to the world, as it do deserve to be.’
‘Come to England, you mean?’ asked Edmund.
‘I do.’
‘To court? But Sir Walter, good Shepherd Walter I mean, they don’t like me at court. Burghley hates me.’
Raleigh spat out of the window. ‘Burghley’s an old man. The queen’s our prize. A royal poem for a royal mistress, my lover. Boldness.’
Edmund wriggled. Boldness wasn’t his forte, but he was afire with the idea, Barbary could see. She also saw at last what Raleigh was about. He wasn’t going to go back empty-handed to fight young Essex for the queen’s affection. He was taking presents which would tempt Elizabeth from his rival. He would hand her the wonders from a New World, tobacco, the potato. And he would hand her ‘The Faerie Queen’, a poem which could sate even that old harpy’s thirst for flattery. ‘You saucebox,’ she thought, with grudging admiration. ‘Straight as a ram’s horn you are.’ Well, for Edmund’s sake she hoped it was as great a poem as Raleigh thought it was and that the queen would enjoy it more than she had.
Later that morning Edmund joined her in the kitchen and took her out to the gardens. ‘Shall I do it, cousin?’
‘Be a proper fool not to, Edmund.’
‘I have been thinking for some time that Catherine and Sylvestris should be exposed to English ways. I could join my sister. I have hesitated to bring her here with… you know.’ His hand indicated the Ballyhouras and the sleeping presence of the MacSheehys. ‘You must come with us, cousin. Neither I nor the children can do without you.’
Can I let them go? Will they be unhappy? Will the sister realise how gentle they are, how easily hurt? But there are other children here who are being hurt already, unborn children who are destined to be hurt, babies… ‘No, Edmund. I stay here.’
He took the refusal happily enough. ‘Of course, there is Hap Hazard to be completed.’
When he left her, she was joined by Raleigh. ‘A sweet, pretty morning, Mistress Barbary.’
Leaves had newly unfurled from the bud, catkins hung in suspended showers, lambs were gambolling on the hills and the forest was a contrast of greens filled with birdsong. ‘What of it?’ she asked suspiciously. It was always necessary to keep Raleigh at a remove, to remind herself that he was a killer; the man vibrated with energy, sexual, intellectual, elemental. She could understand Lucy being overwhelmed by it. Physically, he and Rob and O’Hagan were alike, Rob actually modelling his manner and ambition on him. The difference between Raleigh and O’Hagan, she thought, was that the Irishman was civilised and Raleigh, for all his learning and wit, was not. O’Hagan was held by ancient custom and culture; Raleigh was rootless. He had no limits. He was a product of his age; unweighted by any tradition of the past, he could soar to the highest peak, and commit any crime to get there. But he could also fall. She wouldn’t want to bet on which it would be.
‘What are you going to do?’ he was asking her.
‘What about?’
‘Your inheritance, maid.’ He pointed his pipe westward. ‘There’s princedoms for the winning out there, and even so that you’re not a lad, you’re like the queen, you have the heart and stomach of a prince. Rob and I were planning to win yours for ye. But seeing as how we’re so occupied, perhaps you should go see for yourself how the land do lie. Present yourself to your granny, like. No harm in it.’
’Ware hawk, thought Barbary. Aloud she said: ‘What’s up?’
There was a flash of white teeth in his ferocious black facial hair. ‘Bingham’s up,’ he said, ‘our Governor of Connaught. He’s a many-sided gentleman, seemingly. Gamekeeper, poacher and butcher. Unless and we’re watchful, he’ll have it all. Don’t you have nothing to do with him until so be as Rob and I get there. The land’s mazed; Os and Macs fighting each other and Bingham, separate and together. Rob’ll need to know who’s friend, who’s foe. ’Tisn’t a job for most maids, but you can do it, I reckon.’
‘Spy it out?’
He drew a beautiful handkerchief from his sleeve, dabbed his eyes with it and adopted a falsetto: ‘Oh dear Granny, take me in, for I am your little grand-babby as was lost.’
‘She thinks I’m a trickster.’
‘Then trick ’un.’
The green eyes and the black eyes were lit with mutual understanding. ‘What a pair of cony-catchers we’d have made,’ she thought. In essence, he was using her for his purposes as much as he’d used Lucy, but the idea was still attractive. If it hadn’t been for the mother and baby, she’d have gone along with it, and turned it to her own advantage, not his. She might yet.
‘I’ll see,’ she told him. The rest of the stroll was taken up with his persuasion and instructions. If she went, she was to contact his men at Youghal, who would go with her as protection…
‘Do you come falconing tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘Every soul with a bird will be there. It’s Sir Thomas Norris’s welcome for my Lord of Tyrone.’
The O’Neill was at Mallow? Then falconing she would go. It looked as if her contact had arrived.
* * *
Raleigh was right. Practically the entire population of the Blackwater and Awbeg valleys had turned out to join Sir Thomas’s falconing party. As an exercise in falconry it looked like being a disaster. The crowd, the shouts, the horn-blowing, the barking of dogs, the neighing of horses was enough to frighten the surrounding countryside birdless. The provincial nobility and those aspiring to the nobility were dressed to kill, a beautiful, clashing cavalcade of colour, with each rider apparently growing a carved log from his/her wrist which, every so
often, sprouted wings and flapped its annoyance at the disorder.
The hawks’ hoods and jesses were as rich as their owners’ clothing. Raleigh’s white Norwegian peregrine, which he carried with nonchalant ease, was in gold and silver. Ellis’s arm was showing signs of falconer’s droop under the weight of a vulgarly flashy gerfalcon, usually a king’s bird.
The Irish, however downtrodden, could never resist a sporting occasion and had turned out to let the side down with their patched clothes, their pet kestrels, their mongrel dogs and their subversive Celtic comments.
Barbary had been introduced to various forms of the chase, stag, boar, hare and falconry, at Penshurst. She hadn’t taken to it then and she wasn’t taking to it now. She looked at the bird on her wrist, a merlin that Sir Thomas Norris had insisted on lending her: ‘One more gripe, you moth-eaten mouse-catcher, and you’re baked with bay leaves.’ Such occasions, in her opinion, brought out the worst in everybody. Those on good horseflesh despised those who weren’t; her own poor old Spenser was beneath contempt. Those who were on foot despised those on horses. Those who were familiar with hunting parlance used it to exclude those like her and Ellis who weren’t and talked loudly about ‘bowesses’, ‘disclosing’, ‘eyer’ and ‘timbering’, being in turn despised by the mews servants who regarded everybody else as a bunch of bloody amateurs.
In the crush of the meet at Mallow Castle she’d caught a glimpse of the O’Neill, but if he’d seen her he did not show it. Now she trailed resentfully after the cavalcade as it wound along the Blackwater bank. Catherine, who was falconing socially for the first time, came cantering back, a sparrowhawk on her small wrist. ‘Hurry up, cousin, you’ll miss the branching. Oh, isn’t this wonderful?’
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