‘That’s great, that’s great. We heard she’d had the smallpox…’
They were ten years out of date. ‘Should I be sending her some of me buttermilk potion for her skin, do you think?’
Cuckold Dick being at a loss, Barbary assured her that the queen would be grateful.
Cormac O’Kelly shouted from his end of the table: ‘And what about a nice wolfhound for her hunting, would she like one of them as well?’
Yes, said Barbary, Her Majesty would like a nice wolfhound. They made no mention of Deputy Bingham, whose over-enthusiastic use of the gallows in those parts of Connaught he could reach they obviously regarded as bad manners, but they held no ill will for Queen Elizabeth.
Barbary saw the MacSheehy looking at these, his fellow Irish, with the hatred of a soul from hell regarding the blessed. But he remained as silent as ever. The chasm between his experience of Elizabeth’s rule and theirs – they talked of the English as if they were just a newly emerged clan – was too great to be bridged. They’d learn.
God preserve them from it, thought Barbary suddenly, looking at the interesting, interested faces around her, imagining their joy in their land, their life style, in each other, blanked out; the myths they enjoyed weeping over at this moment – the harper was singing the ‘Children of Lîr’ – replaced by repetitions of death to inspire generations into hatred and revenge. Keep them innocent and free.
She slept in Cormac and Brigh’s long house that night, between sheets and white blankets on a pile of rushes. ‘Nobody ever caught cold sleeping on sweet new rushes,’ Brigh said.
Obviously they knew she had some connection with Grace O’Malley, and were dying to know more, but at no point had they asked her. Curiosity into a guest’s business was bad form.
The next day they wanted to take her hunting, and it was only reluctantly, at her insistence, that they let her go. Even then she was escorted through the mountains to the edge of their tribal land where she and the others were handed over to the next clan, the O’Dalys. It was actually done under a flag of truce. ‘We’re at war with the O’Dalys, sorrow fly away with them. The bastards have been at our herds. But you’ll be safe enough, thieves of the world though they are. They respect the O’Neill.’
All the Connaught clans, it seemed, respected the O’Neill, though whether they respected him enough to sink their differences and band together when the time came, thought Barbary, was another matter.
From then on travel was slow, partly because the terrain became wilder but mainly because Connaught clans could not receive a newcomer into their land without entertainment. There was a feast of welcome in every new territory. Sometimes it was held outdoors, sometimes in castles built on crags, or on an island in a lough. It was always noisy – the free Irish were incapable of eating without the accompaniment of harpers and singers – friendly, and crowded.
Cuckold Dick regained some of his natural bloating, and groaned with hangover as they set off the following morning. ‘I’ll never touch bloody whiskey again, Barb.’
‘Until the next time.’ She couldn’t stand usquebaugh herself and in order to save her hosts’ feelings surreptitiously emptied it under the table, soaking various wolfhounds in the process.
As they went further north and west they found they were no longer under the aegis of O’Neill, but a deity known as ‘Herself’. Joyces handed them over to MacJordans and MacJordans to Clanrickards with the instruction: ‘Travellers to be escorted to Herself.’ O’Neill’s writ had run out and that of Grace O’Malley had taken over. It was something, thought Barbary, for a woman to command such a title among clans as powerful as these. For they were very powerful clans indeed, no longer pure Irish but descendants of Norman knights, De Burgo, Dexter, Prendergast, who conquered Ireland in the twelfth century and then absorbed themselves into its culture, becoming Bourke, MacJordan, MacMorris, gone native while still retaining a sense of superiority and a wider contact with the rest of the world. Their castles were big, gloomy and medieval; they feasted Barbary lying on couches in halls as big as Westminster’s. They dressed Irish, had adopted Irish names, spoke Irish, but (‘Jesus, Barb, look at them fart-catchers’) splendidly dressed footmen stood behind the couches.
On the morning following the feast at the grandest castle of all, belonging to MacOliverus, as Barbary was being accompanied by MacOliverus women down turret steps to the great hall, ready to ride off with her escort to the next destination – and wondering when this interesting but interminable journey would be over – she passed Cuckold Dick and heard the whisper: ‘’Ware hawk.’
She excused herself to the ladies, pretending she had forgotten something back upstairs, and joined Dick in a window recess. ‘What?’
‘We’re too far north, Barb.’
‘Eh?’
He looked worried. ‘Do you know where we are?’
‘No.’ She’d stopped asking the names of locations. She looked out of the narrow loophole, glimpsing a colossal view of mountains and a bright blue lough nestling in the middle of them.
‘Nor me. But, Barb. We’re too far north. O’Malley territory’s over there somewhere.’ He waggled his hand through the arrow slit in a south-westerly direction. ‘I found out. This MacOliverus is a chief of Clan MacWilliam, right?’
She nodded.
‘Now there’s two parts to Clan MacWilliam. The Lower MacWilliam and the Upper MacWilliam. I know because O’Neill told me afore I set off. “When you gets to the Upper MacWilliam,” he says, “you’ll be a day’s ride to Grace O’Malley’s land.”’
‘So?’
‘This MacOliverus is the Lower MacWilliam. Last night somebody addressed him as MacWilliam Iochtarach, and that means Lower, don’t it?’
‘All right, but if this is Lower MacWilliam ken, the next stop north’ll be Upper MacWilliam and we’ll be oatmeal.’
Dick shook a doleful head. ‘This is Ireland, Barb. Upper and Lower’s got bugger all to do with geography, nor logic neither. Lower MacWilliam’s more north of the Upper. The cove as I sat next to last night was trying to explain it. We’ve passed the Upper MacWilliam. We been taken too far.’
Barbary drew in her breath. ‘Where’s that shite MacSheehy?’
‘Gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘And never called me mother. We’re in the brown stuff, Barb.’
She handed him her muff. ‘Load the Clampett, then come on down. Me and MacOliverus is having a talk. I’ll upper his lowers for him.’
But the handsome MacOliverus was unfazed by her questioning.
‘Beautiful lady, it’s Herself’s very own castle you’ll be at this very own night. At Carrickahowley. Well, it’s sort of her castle. Temporarily, if you see what I mean. And her very own son waiting there to greet you.’
‘O’Flaherty?’ For one confused second she thought he must mean her father.
‘No, no. Bourke. Tibbot. Tibbot of the Ships. And agog to see you.’
Tibbot? Bourke? She remembered no Tibbot Bourke. As she mounted Spenser, Dick was waiting at her side to pass up her muff before getting on his own horse.
Whatever was up – and something was, her nose was sniffing fish – there was damn all she could do about it. The escort was too big, and it was guiding her through a landscape so bewildered by bog, precipice and river that she and Dick couldn’t hope to find their own way in it. Was Grace O’Malley still so suspicious of her? Did some quirk of Connaught clan politics, already more confusing to her even than the landscape, want her hostage? Or dead?
She rode all day with one hand on Spenser’s reins and the other hidden round the butt of the Clampett.
But as evening came on, her nose began to smell a different scent than fish. Compounded with weed and brine and space, it sidled up on her like an acquaintance once seen years ago, afraid she wouldn’t remember. A subliminal picture blinked into her brain. A shore and on it a rectangular tower and beyond the tower the flat, limitless surface of the sea. Her head whipped to her left, p
ointing like a dog’s. Hills, just hills. The track they were on meandered dully between grass and heather, trying to pretend that it was a typical Connaught road, that the little beaten paths heading westward off it led to yet more sheep-cropped hills. The track was lying. It was throwing strangers off the scent, but Barbary’s nose knew the scent from way back.
Somewhere just beyond those hills to the left, where the paths went, was the sea.
Why were they keeping her away from the sea? Her sea. The iodine content of her body awoke to that mysterious substance present in the water over the hill; just as every drop in the ocean answers to the force that creates the tide, Barbary’s blood responded to a gravitational pull.
‘Is it this turn to Carrickahowley?’ her escorts were asking each other, ‘or is it further on?’ They hadn’t been keeping her from the sea; they were lost, as the track intended they should be. The shoreline over those hills was a secret.
Barbary watched a skein of greylag geese pass overhead going west on long, unhurried wingbeats. Hardly aware she was doing it, she headed Spenser down one of the paths to follow them.
‘We’ll say goodbye then.’ Behind her, uncertain voices bade her farewell as if relieved that she’d taken the initiative. She was going where they didn’t want to go. She didn’t hear them.
‘Wait, Barb. Where you going? We’ll be stranded.’
They were, literally, stranded. The track threaded between two hills and opened out into a stream-riven, flat expanse of grass and rock on which rabbits were enjoying the pleasantness of the evening. Rowan and hawthorn trees cast long shadows over close-nibbled turf that had been lent a viscous emerald green by the sunset. There were hills on both sides of the view, but down its middle, curved like a hand with fingers extended towards her, was sparkling clear water. And interrupting the low, golden light, sturdy as a giant with his legs slightly apart as he looked out to sea, was the black outline of a tower.
She had been born here. Or if not here, somewhere just like it. A tower, hills, water, were the constituents from which she was assembled.
‘…’Ware hawk, ’ware hawk. For Chrissake, Barb. ’Ware hawk.’ Cuckold Dick was pulling at her arm. She dragged her eyes away to concentrate on the here and now, which was lanced with the shadows of armed men, about ten of them, closing in from behind and from the low buildings which stood across the stream adjacent to the tower.
‘What do you want?’ she asked crossly, as they encircled her. She hadn’t got time for fear or dealing with it; she was too busy with the other emotions this place held.
They were odd Irishmen, now she came to look at them, if Irish was what they were. They were smartly defined in English iron helmets, short cloaks and had a blazon on the front of their tunics. Squinting into the dying sun, she could just make out the quarterings. One contained a lion and another a black cat.
‘Well?’ she shouted at them. Whatever they’d been expecting, it wasn’t irritation. Their leader, a man with an English sword on his belt, glanced towards the tower at a loss. The door in its dark side opened and somebody huge came down the steps, making the sign of the cross. ‘God and His saints be praised we got you here,’ he said. If he’d just rescued her from drowning, he couldn’t have taken more credit for her safety.
His relief sounded spontaneous, but Dick whispered: ‘He’s been watching from the tower these five minutes.’
With her in the sun and him in the shade of the tower, she couldn’t make the figure out, except that it spoke English with the fruity, exaggerated care of one trying to disown a natural Irish accent. ‘I am Theobold Bourke,’ it said. ‘Welcome to Rockfleet Castle, cousin. Come in, come in.’
Even when she’d been ushered into the hall of the tower and servants had scurried to put a flame to the resined torches in the sconces, she couldn’t make him out. She never really did.
He was enormous, over six foot and wide with it. At the moment his height made his bulk impressive, but any more lateral growth was going to land him in the category of the obese.
‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone called Tibbot somewhere called Carrickahowley,’ said Barbary peevishly. She was resentful at leaving the images on the shore, and being dwarfed never improved her temper.
‘So you have, my dear girl. Carrickahowley is the Irish for this castle, but I prefer the English version, Rockfleet. I am Theobald Bourke, known to the Irish as Tibbot of the Ships.’ He used the word ‘Irish’ as if patting an unkempt head, but, for all his care, he pronounced Theobald ‘T’eobald’.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Ah hah,’ he boomed, as at a triumph. ‘We’re displaying a gap in our knowledge, aren’t we? If we are Mistress O’Flaherty we should know of me.’ He lowered his big head and put up a finger in mock interrogation. ‘Grace O’Malley? Your grandmother? Married Richard Bourke? Gave birth to Tibbot Bourke? Eh? I’d be your uncle, wouldn’t I? Your Uncle Tibbot.’
He was a gap in her knowledge. She knew no Uncle Tibbot. She stared up into his face and saw with a shock that, for all his girth, for all the loud superiority, Uncle Tibbot was very young, younger than she was. Aided by his size and his deep voice, he’d opted to by-pass youth for the style and grandeur of an English middle-aged gentleman, but his eyes let him down. They darted about and blinked too often in adolescent suspicion of being found out.
She smiled back at him. ‘That would be after my childish departure from the Irish scene, would it, uncle?’
Inside the grown-up armour, a little boy sulked, then changed tack. ‘You’ll be hungry.’ He clicked his fingers, commanding a servant to take their cloaks. He nodded distantly at Cuckold Dick to indicate that he wasn’t the class of person he usually entertained and drew out a chair at the table for Barbary to sit, pointing to Dick’s place and shouting for the first dishes.
She tore her eyes off him to look around. The flame from the sconces threw light on excellent furniture and tapestries, all in the English style. The only typically Irish adornment was a gruesomely lifelike crucifixion in wood. Whatever else he had abandoned, Tibbot of the Ships kept to the faith of his birth.
She was unsettled by four of his soldiers ranging themselves round the walls with spears in their hands, like statues. Ornamental perhaps, but they made her spine tickle.
Like the hall, the table was the most elegant she’d seen since Penshurst, laid with an enormous gold salt – Cuckold Dick had been placed below it – gold candlesticks, gold plates, gold goblets, wreaths of cowslips, linen napkins. A servant placed a charger in front of Tibbot containing a long, unappetising-looking grey fish, decorated with prawns. ‘Now I think this will surprise you,’ he said, cutting into it with the dedication of a chirurgeon. ‘It’s lamprey. An acquisition I brought to Sir Richard Bingham’s table, for which he has always been grateful.’
‘You’ve dined with Bingham?’
Again the jubilant ‘Ah hah. As a lad I was fostered in his household. Didn’t they tell you that in Dublin?’
So he was another of the young chieftains the English had attempted to anglicise by rearing them in noble English households. And to better effect in his case than O’Neill’s. Where the O’Neill aped English manners as a form of profanity, Tibbot found them congenial.
‘Now don’t be put off by its look,’ he said, sliding a slice of lamprey onto her plate, ‘nor that poor old Henry the First died of a surfeit.’ He spread out his fat fingers to lick them. ‘It’s ambrosia.’
If he could surfeit Henry the First, whoever he was, perhaps he was going to surfeit her, whatever that meant, and it sounded nasty. She didn’t like the way there were only the three of them at table. She didn’t like the soldiers round the walls. ‘And I don’t trust you, Beef-belly, further’n I could throw you.’ Hungry as she was, she didn’t touch the lamprey until her host had taken his first bite. She heard Dick whisper sadly to himself: ‘It’s eel. And it ain’t jellied.’
A servant poured them wine. ‘A nice little sack I picked up in Spain,’ said Tibbot of
the Ships.
If they sat discussing pan and peck all night, she’d never find out what was going on. ‘The MacSheehy was supposed to be taking me to Grace O’Malley,’ she said.
‘Yes. I sent him a small… pourboire, asking him to bring you here instead.’
So the MacSheehy had accepted a bribe to disobey the O’Neill and let her fall into the hands of this possibly dangerous uncle. She’d never liked the MacSheehy and, obviously, he hadn’t liked her much either.
‘This is Bourke territory, my girl. And you can thank your stars for that.’ His face tightened. ‘Of course, Herself would say it was hers. She married Father to get all the land on this side of the bay. Married him and sent him off on a trading trip to Spain, and when he sailed back, wouldn’t let him land. Said she’d only married him for one year certain.’ He pointed a colossal, agitated arm upwards: ‘Stood up there, leaned over the parapet and shouted: “I divorce you.”’ He was spurting bits of lamprey into his beard. ‘She kept the castle, of course.’
This ‘one year certain’, after which wife or husband could simply withdraw from a marriage, more than anything else separated Irish society from mainland Europe. It scandalised the English. Grace’s use of it scandalised her son. He wanted Barbary to register shock, but she was used to similar arrangements in the Order, and was thinking how well it would suit her and Rob.
She needed to place this new, giant uncle and his motive for bringing her here, apparently to save her from some terrible fate at the hands of his mother. Barbary got a mental picture of Grace rampaging Connaught, looking for her granddaughter, cutlass upraised – and didn’t believe it. Why this uneasy, extraordinary meal? The lamprey had been replaced by cooked swan, its feathered head and neck wired to rise lifelike out of the meat. Keep him talking. How much does he know? Learn. The soldiers round the walls indicated her life depended on it.
He was back on food, a favourite subject, pouring wine for them both.
‘I stole a cook from Genoa on my last voyage. The climate didn’t suit him and he died, but not before he’d passed on some of his skill. Admire Italian cuisine, do you?’
The Pirate Queen Page 37