‘Lovely,’ said Barbary grimly. ‘You go on. I’ll see you at the picnic.’ There was to be a mass open-air banquet later for the Norris’s guests at Ballybeg Abbey, seven and a half miles away.
Catherine cantered off. Soon Barbary and Spenser were ambling along alone. Not quite alone. A man in livery popped out of some bushes and took Spenser’s bridle. ‘I’ll show you where there’s game, mistress.’ She looked down at the man’s cap and then his gauntlet. It was embroidered with the Red Hand of Ulster. They turned off left into hills.
The O’Neill sat in a clearing on a backed camp stool drinking wine and talking to a man, similarly seated, across a brazier which was cooking pigeon breasts. Further away a servant was flying his peregrine for him at partridge which were being flushed out of the undergrowth by a string of beaters, all in Ulster livery.
Spenser, who liked frequent stops and hadn’t had one for four miles, sank to his knees, making Barbary’s dismount an undignified scramble. The O’Neill helped her up. ‘A pony with devotional habits,’ he said. ‘Do you mean to wear the bird round your neck?’
Barbary untangled the merlin and handed it over with relief. ‘Bloody thing keeps pooping on my arm.’ She had been tense about seeing the O’Neill again; in retrospect he was alarming and there had been times when she was scared at having committed herself to the banner of so chancy a man. What she had forgotten was the familiarity with which they could communicate; there were whole seas to O’Neill which were unnavigable to her, but they had a channel to themselves. He was still dressing like a popinjay but he’d aged; not through wrinkling – there were no lines – but the very lack of lines, its deliberate blankness in repose, was mummifying all youth out of his face.
‘Allow me to introduce Murrough MacSheehy,’ he said.
She had never thought to see a MacSheehy, never wanted to. They roamed round the edge of her imagination dressed in pelts, wolf-shaped people. A stocky man looked back at her, round-faced, respectable, the sort of man you’d be happy to order your groceries from, unless you looked into his eyes and saw hatred so habitual that it had become passionless. She supposed he ate, drank, made love, but she saw that for him these would be extraordinary things to do; the natural function for this man was hating.
‘Murrough, this is the lady you are to escort when the time comes.’
The MacSheehy’s acknowledgement was minimal. ‘We know her,’ he said. God, had they been watching her?
To her relief, he went off to join the falconers down the hill.
‘Escort me where?’ She’d as soon be escorted by Death, reaping hook and all.
‘To Connaught.’ He led her to a stool and called for wine.
‘Connaught? I thought you wanted guns.’
The O’Neill sat himself down, crossed his legs and smiled at her. ‘Who changed your mind for you? O’Hagan?’
‘Have you seen him?’ she asked before she could stop herself and realised from his damned, patronising smile that he’d not only seen O’Hagan, he’d sent him in the first place.
‘You bastard,’ she said, ‘you gave him orders, didn’t you? He was to seduce me so that I’d get drawn in.’ Jesus wept, wasn’t there one man in the world who wasn’t trying to trick something out of somebody else?
‘And did he?’ He leaned forward, prurient and interested. He really didn’t know. It was a comfort.
‘What did he tell you?’
He sulked and sat back. ‘Nothing, except that you’d agreed to get my guns. I gather you nursed him. And if you knew O’Hagan better, you’d know he wasn’t the man to give that sort of order to.’
No. But you’d hoped, you slippery sod. However, the day had regained the sun. She grinned at him. ‘How’s Mabel?’ Few people had seen Mabel Bagenal since she’d eloped with the O’Neill, riding pillion on a wild gallop into the night to be married at a Protestant service by a bewildered Bishop of Meath, who later explained that he’d done it to protect the girl’s reputation.
O’Neill’s face went blank. The question was outside their channel. ‘The Countess of Tyrone is well,’ he said. He allowed the snub some air and then relented to add: ‘It’s her damned brother is the problem. He protests to the queen, to Burghley. He accuses me of bigamy, he raids my borders. You’d think I’d cuckolded the man.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t half take chances, O’Neill.’ She’d heard enough argument among the English to know that the number who doubted his loyalty was growing. ‘Jesus, any moment one of that falconing lot could have blundered in here and seen you chatting to a MacSheehy. I’m not getting no guns for them, I can tell you. I saw what they did to Mackworth.’
‘And I gather you saw the reprisal for it.’
She looked away, and in doing so noticed a look-out posted in one of the trees and that servants who were apparently taking their ease were facing outwards, like sentries. They’d done this before. Wherever O’Neill went, ostensibly socialising with English Irish, he was secretly meeting with their enemy. This camp was just one knot in a net he was preparing all over Ireland.
‘Barbary,’ he said, and his voice throbbed, ‘I have no idea of war. As I trust in Almighty God, I have no idea of it. I want to be Gaelic chieftain of my people as my ancestors were. I want to serve Queen Elizabeth as her loyal subject. But there is no trust in any of us. She won’t trust me when I’m Gaelic. My Gaels won’t trust me when I’m English. I am a rope tugged by young O’Donnell who wants me to save Donegal and Connaught from the terrible man the English have put there to rule it, and I am tugged by Elizabeth to ride against O’Donnell. I can’t trust her not to invade Ulster one day and take it away from me, as she took the Awbeg Valley away from MacSheehy. But I tell you this, I’ll not be turned into my own woods to live like an outlaw as MacSheehy has been.’
He put out his hand and covered one of hers. ‘I’ll not go to war, Barbary, but I must be prepared for it.’
She looked into his wet eyes. He cried easily, like Edmund. But she believed him. She believed him because he believed it. Balance was all they could aim for; imbalance was not allowing babies to be born.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do?’
He brushed away his tears. ‘First you must be accepted by your grandmother. I need Granuaile O’Malley. For such a small island we are lamentably short on seafarers. There’s the O’Sullivans in the south-west, and the O’Flaherties and the O’Malleys in Connaught. And the greatest of these, thanks to your grandmother, are the O’Malleys. It’s her ships will bring the guns to Ulster.’ Burghley, Rob, Raleigh and now the O’Neill, nearly all the men in her life wanted her in Connaught for their differing reasons. Well, she couldn’t fight them all.
‘Will she accept me?’
‘I’ve talked to her. She says you must a pass a test.’
‘What test?’
The O’Neill looked uneasy. ‘I don’t know. That is a doorful of a woman. She said to me: “She shall be given the tide, a curragh and a landfall. If she comes safe ashore she is an O’Malley. If she does not…”’ He peered at Barbary: ‘Are you her granddaughter?’
She went back to the cell at Dublin Castle and saw the ship scratched on the wall come to life. ‘Yes.’
‘You’d better be.’
‘Why? What if I’m not?’
The O’Neill coughed apologetically. ‘She said: “If she does not, the sea will drown her and her lie.”’
The young summer was held for a moment in a cuckoo’s call further down the hill. The beaters moved towards the sound, shouting. As the cuckoo flew out of its tree, O’Neill’s falconer unleashed his peregrine. It gained height above the low-flying grey bird, stooped and landed on its back, taking it to earth.
The O’Neill was put out. ‘Now why did they do that? It’s bad luck to kill a cuckoo.’
‘Is it?’ said Barbary flatly. ‘How about red-headed women?’
‘Ach, it’s bad luck to kill them too.’ He turned to her. ‘Do you go?’
&
nbsp; She considered. She wasn’t a wife any more, she wasn’t a lover, or a mother. She wasn’t English, she didn’t feel Irish. She had grown out of the Order. She belonged nowhere. The land of the cherubims was the only possible home she had left, and gun-running for O’Neill the only occupation. Both were likely to prove deadly.
‘Why not?’ she said.
The O’Neill kissed her hand. ‘God go with you. The MacSheehy will guide you through to Connaught, and I’ve made arrangement with the clans to let you through. You’ll be safe under my writ. But would you like a friend to go with you?’ He shouted down the hill. ‘Send that man up here.’
‘What friend?’ It’s O’Hagan, she thought. He’s ordered O’Hagan to go with me. I’m getting O’Hagan back.
Then she saw who it was. She sat down on the camp stool and leaned back in contentment. Coming up the hill, shambling and portly, was Cuckold Dick.
Chapter Fifteen
When she saw Edmund and the children off on their journey to England, Barbary had to wrench Catherine’s hands away from her neck to get her into the wagon. It was like wrenching her own flesh. ‘You be a good girl, pigsney,’ she said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Do as your aunty tells you. You’ll like London.’
‘Will you come and see me there?’
‘That I will.’ If I live.
She hugged Sylvestris. How would they get on without her? Would their aunt understand them as she did? Would Edmund, so often abstracted, remember that Catherine was frightened of the dark and Sylvestris was sick if given eggs?
She watched the wagon sway off down the road, returning the wave of Catherine’s handkerchief, listening to Sylvestris’s crying becoming fainter, wondering why women were so eager to have children if this agony was an inherent part of it.
The house was empty without them, though all the servants and estate workers were being retained to keep the place going for when Edmund returned. He was a comparatively wealthy man now, and could afford two establishments.
She and Cuckold Dick were to begin their own journey the next day. She bade no goodbyes. Only Rosh knew where they were going and she, if asked, was to answer: ‘Lady Betty has gone away and didn’t say where.’
She gave much thought to what she should write in explanation to Rob. I’m leaving you because this is a loveless marriage we’re in, and I was tricked into it anyway? I’ve given my body and soul to another man? I’ve gone over to the Irish?
Eventually she decided not to write at all. Although she owed him nothing, she didn’t want to hurt him and, she thought, he’d suffer less social damage from a wife who’d just disappeared than a wife who had committed adultery with and defected to his enemy.
Perhaps he’d think she had done what Raleigh had suggested, and gone to Connaught to spy the land for him. Perhaps he’d think she’d gone back to the Order. He could take his choice.
She was careful in packing her saddlebags to include nothing that Rob had bought and realised as she did so that he had bought her very little, except the ring and bale of silk he had pillaged from a Spanish galleon for a wedding present. She parcelled them up and left them with a note for Edmund telling him to hand them on. Poor old Rob, we didn’t give each other a lot. Well, she’d done her best in overseeing the rebuilding of Hap Hazard; she’d done that much for him.
At dawn the next morning Cuckold Dick, on a horse given him by the O’Neill, and Barbary on Spenser, rode down the drive and into the Deer Park. Barbary hadn’t been among its trees since the day she and Maccabee had stood among the hanged bodies, the day of the mother and baby.
This morning it was refreshed with buds and catkins, with delicate, pale daffodils growing among the new grass, but Barbary kept her eyes straight ahead. It wouldn’t ever be spring in these woods for her, nor for the man who waited for them and who, without greeting, turned his horse and led them towards the Ballyhouras.
They were handed on like parcels along a route which had no road recognisable as such. Sometimes it was a green lane between high banks, sometimes no more than a badger track through the centre of forests from whose edges came the distant sound of crashing trees and the chop of the undertaker’s axe. They slept in huts belonging to a dispossessed people, hidden in woods and without a fire, given food and a courteous but unsmiling welcome.
Only the MacSheehy accompanied them, but they were directed by unseen guardians. Twice, once in the Slievefelims, and once near the Shannon, which they crossed at night on a battered and illegal ferry, a whistle came out of the air, and they had to take cover while patrols from Limerick went by.
Barbary wasn’t sure which suffered most from the relentless going, pony Spenser or Cuckold Dick. Of the two, Dick complained the less, but his unease at being exposed to so much air and space was obvious. The fact that he was looking leaner and brown didn’t ameliorate her guilt; fitness was unnatural to a personality only truly at home in the unhealth of a crowded city.
‘Why’d you come?’ she asked him sharply. ‘You could have gone back to the Bermudas long since.’
‘Didn’t mind Dublin, Barb,’ Dick said. ‘I done a lovely crossbite on a cove for the O’Neill. Worked it with Janey, the landlady at the Anchor.’
Barbary was interested. ‘Why’d the O’Neill want him bit?’
‘Dubbams. Information. The cove was a nunquam, messenger, for the Rome-Mort.’
The O’Neill, it seemed, had found Cuckold Dick a useful addition to his espionage service. Dick could recount the entire political situation in Dublin; who was in, who out, who was backing Sir John Perrot’s attempt to be fair to the Irish – hardly anybody – the O’Neill’s precarious position with the queen. But he retailed it all without emphasis, taking no side with his employer O’Neill, nor with his queen, as if he were giving details of the weather. He was the most un-judgemental man Barbary knew; as patriotic as he was sexual, which was not at all, a watching victim of the life around him. If he could have spoken the language, Barbary thought, he would have been equally at home in the criminal quarter of Cathay as in London’s Bermudas. He was a citizen of the underworld. What combination of his battered emotions had involved him with herself, she couldn’t guess; she was just grateful that it had dragged him into this alien environment to be with her.
‘The O’Neill said you’d need me, Barb.’
‘And don’t I just.’ This journey with the unspeaking MacSheehy into an unknown and possibly dangerous past would have been insupportable without him.
Just as when they had crossed the Pale on the way to Munster, they were aware of the change when they crossed the border into non-Anglicised Connaught. For one thing the country shook itself out of its gentility, raising the hills to mountains, streams tilting into waterfalls. For another, the frontier was marked by hangings. Not that they passed through frontier posts, there were no frontier posts as such, but when they looked down from their vantage point at a crossroads it was to see it studded with occupied gibbets. And further on, where they crossed a stream at a concealed ford, they found that the Lord Deputy’s soldiers had been before them and that the trees overhanging the stream bent with the weight of corpses. Like a gamekeeper decorating his fences with dead crows, stoats and magpies to frighten away other predators, Bingham was showing the Irish what he did to rebels.
But within a day’s ride it became obvious that though he intended his fringe of corpses as a warning, Bingham had in fact marked the point at which English rule ran out. This was Irish Ireland, no sense of oppression, no deadness. A string of horsemen came galloping down a mountain towards them as free as running foxes, stirrupless, saffron shirts billowing, illegal glibs streaming backwards with the speed of the going, illegal wolfhounds loping at their horses’ sides.
‘From the O’Neill,’ shouted the MacSheehy quickly. ‘We have the O’Neill’s permission.’
‘And who’s O’Neill of Ulster to permit travellers through Connaught?’ But they were friendly, prepared to assist O’Neill as an ally as long as it was clear t
hat this was their territory. They surrounded them, questioning, laughing, their voices raised to carry on the breeze for all to hear, and Barbary realised that Connaught had not yet been conquered or, if it had, it didn’t know it. These were O’Kellys. For the sake of peace and quiet, their chiefs had gone through a ritual submission to Elizabeth’s representative, Sir Henry Sidney, years before at Galway, as had most of the Connaught clans, but it no more affected their lives than a new moon. For the first time she was encountering free Irishmen.
They insisted that the travellers be entertained at their ‘booley’, for a feast outside the long, low, wooden pavilions they built every summer up in the mountains so that their cattle could graze on the high grass, and they could hunt.
Barbary, trained to the English view of the Irish as nomadic herdsmen, was unprepared for the sophistication of the meal she and the others sat down to that evening. True, they were in the open air, seated on tussocks at a long plank table, and the smoke from the fires where beef, mutton and venison turned on spits watered her eyes, and, true, the feasters tended to lean down and wipe the grease from their hands on ferns, or their wolfhounds, but the food and the hospitality were as fine as at any Penshurst dinner.
Brigh O’Kelly, the hostess, talked philosophy from behind a plate of oatcakes so high that it nearly obscured her and at the same time piled mountains of food on her guests’ plates, while her sons and daughters, on bended knee proffering ale or usquebaugh, were equally intent on drowning the gold-chased chalices they drank from. A tall, comely woman, dressed in a beautiful leine, the traditional linen smock, with a gold torque and earrings, Brigh O’Kelly had the same all-noticing calm of Lady Sidney. ‘Try a few of me honeyed onions with your beef now. And how is Elizabeth, daughter of Henry? Is she well with her?’
Cuckold Dick, to whom the question was addressed, bemusedly assured her that the queen of England was in good health.
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