The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  ‘Never met him. Why’d you bring me here?’

  He waved his knife at her. ‘It was a damned near thing. Herself’s on Clare just now, so we can get you away before she knows you’ve been.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ He sat back. ‘Good God, woman, she’ll kill you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she didn’t manage it in Dublin, that’s why. Because she thinks you’re an imposter. Because, God forgive me, she’s an uncivilised woman.’ He crossed himself. More wine for the two of them. Cuckold Dick was left to pour his own. Which he did.

  So he knew what had happened in Dublin Castle. But he didn’t know, bless his porky britches, what had since transpired between O’Neill and Grace O’Malley, and that Barbary was to be given a chance to prove her identity. He wasn’t that much in the confidence of either. Unless, of course, Grace O’Malley didn’t intend to give her a chance at all, but had tricked O’Neill into putting this hated imposter into her power. Who was lying?

  The swan went, a glazed boar’s head with an apple in its jaws came in. Barbary’s stomach was starting to revolt. With the absolute concentration he gave to food, Tibbot began carving. Barbary picked up her newly filled goblet, looking for a handy wolfhound, didn’t find one, and poured her wine into the rushes.

  He continued to recount atrocity stories about his mother. ‘Shall I tell you why they call her the Dark Lady of Doona? She had this lover,’ his full cheeks went tight again, ‘one of many. Anyway, he got killed out hunting by the MacMahons of Ballycroy. And she sailed to the MacMahon stronghold of Doona and she slaughtered them. All of them.’

  ‘And kept the castle.’

  Tibbot nodded. He was getting drunk. ‘She kept the castle.’

  Roast peacock next, its spread tail giving Barbary another screen behind which to pour away another goblet of wine. The atrocities went on. Grace and piracy. ‘Sent more good men to the bottom than I’ve had hot dinners. What sort of woman is that?’ Grace and gambling. ‘She cheats. I swear the bitch cheats.’

  Venison with antlers stuck into it. Atrocity. Wine. Veal and mutton pie with a live skylark pinioned to the crust. Atrocity. Wine. The rushes round Barbary’s feet were sopping. Her Uncle Tibbot stretched his arms across the table, looking at her with venom. ‘Do you know how old I was when she took me on my first pirate raid? Five. That’s how old. I was frightened by the guns. You would be, wouldn’t you? At five? And I clung to the back of her skirt. Do you know what she said? She said: “Are you trying to crawl back into the place you came from?” That’s what she said.’ His mouth was puckered, tears rolling down his cheeks. He heaved himself up. ‘I’m going to piss.’

  She watched him blunder out with something like compassion. Loves her, hates her, envies her, fears her. Poor old Beef-belly.

  Dick reached casually for the wine: ‘Clampett cocked, Barb?’

  She crumbled some bread: ‘Trained right on his nutmegs.’ It had been pointed ready through the muff on her lap the whole meal, waiting for one move from the spearmen. Her back was stiff with tension. She’d grown old in this damned room while that tortured tub of lard went through his performance to scare her off.

  She could hear him relieving himself out on the steps, then the sound of vomiting. Above the flickering sconces, a high window was letting in moonlight. The soldiers tensed as she left her place and clambered up on the chest beneath the window to look out.

  The hand of water was silvered by the moon, still beckoning her. The bay, he’d called it. This would be one of the hidden inlets of Clew Bay. Beyond the turn of the hill – there was a stag outlined against its smooth top – the water curved out into that huge, magical expanse which flowed into other secret inlets with other towers. She’d been born in one of them. Not here, she knew now, but one of them…

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Off guard, she said: ‘Waiting for the ship.’

  ‘What ship?’ Tibbot shoved her out of the way to look, then relaxed. ‘There’s nothing there.’ He’d sobered up a bit. He held out his hand like a courtier to help her back to her place. ‘So you see why we must return you to the Pale, quickly.’

  ‘What does she think I want?’ What do you think I want?

  ‘Whatever you can get. But, my dear Mistress Barbary,’ he jeered at the name, ‘there’s nothing you can get. Whatever they advised you in England, women here can inherit nothing.’

  She nodded. He was giving himself away nicely. ‘Except the treasure.’

  ‘What do you know about the treasure?’ His hand had gone to his sword hilt. The soldiers shifted.

  She recited: ‘“The ceremony of the Kishta is for the noble women of the Two Owels and the female fruit of their womb.”’ She was showing her hand because it was time to show it; she was sick of the table’s masculine meatiness, the disguising, this derivative meal, this derivative man. She kept her hand tight on the butt of the Clampett. ‘I’ve come home, Uncle Tibbot.’

  Absorbing that she was truly his niece took time because he had been so sure she wasn’t. She saw it touch astonishment, jealousy and finally, a deep atavism. He was Irish through his bones, and the Irish tanaist was a wolf that killed all rivals. ‘You stupid, interfering whore.’ He’d stood up and was leaning like a huge mattress over the table. ‘I’ll not have you here. She’s my mother. What’s hers is mine.’ It was terrible, a child’s ‘She loves me best’ coming from a man’s throat.

  She cowered back and took the Clampett out of the muff. He stared at it and she thought she’d have to shoot him. But he wasn’t a fool, whatever else he was.

  He sucked in breath. ‘My dear lady, no need for that.’ He collapsed back in his chair and collected himself well. She was proud of him. ‘What I am trying to say in my rough way,’ he said quietly, ‘is that there’s nothing but grief for you here. Herself is a savage living a savage’s life. Look at you now, a dainty English lady, used to English ways.’ Did he think all dainty English ladies carried a handgun? ‘Herself will never learn it, but you know and I know that our future lies in acknowledging England’s supremacy. Gaelic Ireland is dead.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t fight for it?’

  ‘I did.’ The answer surprised her. ‘When the other Bourke clans rebelled I went to war against the English. And lost.’

  ‘What if there was another rebellion? What if all Ireland rebelled?’

  He put his elbow on the table and rested his big jowls on his hand, smiling. ‘I believe in keeping my options open.’ It was the most honest thing he’d said all night. She found herself smiling back.

  He became brisk. ‘Bed for you, little lady. We’ll talk in the morning. Your servant can sleep with my men. Cathal, light Mistress Barbary to her rest.’

  ‘My servant, as you call him, sleeps across my door.’

  He shrugged, and bade her an avuncular goodnight. The man who’d waited at table took a flare from a sconce and led the way up the tower’s narrow, curving staircase to an upper storey. Halfway up, in the darkest section between the moonlit loopholes, he stumbled, dropped the torch which went out, stumbled again in the blackness so that his foot slipped backwards and caught Barbary on her shoulder; she fell back and sideways, slithering down two steps into Cuckold Dick who lost his footing but, filling more of the staircase’s width than Barbary, managed to wedge his spread arms into a fence that stopped the two of them from breaking their necks.

  It was over quickly. What took longer were anxious calls from Uncle Tibbot at the bottom of the stairs, slobbered apologies from the servant, before Barbary and Dick, rubbing their bruises, were able to limp into her room, bolt the door, and realise what a nasty incident it had been.

  Dick stayed at the door with his ear against it. ‘Way out there, Barb?’ He pointed to the window.

  She looked out and down, to a sheer drop. ‘No.’

  The room overlooked the inlet. She stayed at the window, breathing fast, trying to dispel her shakes. What was it with her and towers tha
t her worst moments, and her best, occurred in them? A long way down, on the ground, just out of her sight, a whip was swishing back and forth, and someone was moaning as it hit.

  ‘They’re lashing that bastard stumbler,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Because he nearly killed us? Or because he didn’t?’

  ‘We was Amy-ed all right,’ Dick said. Ever since Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester, had been unencumbered of his wife by her convenient accident, the act of pushing someone downstairs, or of being pushed, had become known in Order cant as an ‘Amy Robsart’.

  Barbary gave way to her shaking legs and slid down to the floor. ‘Why, though? If he wanted us worm-meat, whyn’t he just spear us clean and quick? Why that fokking awful meal?’

  ‘It was marvellous tasty, Barb,’ said Dick with the air of a man giving credit where it was due. ‘Making an impression. Your Uncle Tibbot can’t weigh you any more’n you can weigh him. He reckons the Rome-Mort sent you, and he don’t want to upset the English. Wants to stay palsy with Bingham.’

  ‘Why the Amy Robsart, then?’

  ‘He’s Irish, Barb. He don’t think straight. Shit-scared you was going to take something away from him. But I tell you this, Barb, he’s a likely lad. Give him a few more years and he’ll swadder with the best.’ Dick shook his jtiead, as one who sees a protégé’s brilliant potential. ‘What an Upright Man he’d make then.’

  He made her lie down on the bed while he took first guard duty. For a moment or two Barbary’s eyes stayed on the moonlit window; for all the evening’s vicissitudes, for all that the best they could expect of the next day – if they survived it at all – was to be escorted back on the long journey they had already made, she could not rid herself of the certainty that the view outside was going to produce something wonderful. Its particular combination of land and water was so acutely personal to her it couldn’t, surely, witness her destruction without coming to her aid.

  ‘Barb.’ Dick’s whisper cut into her last sleep. She’d been waiting for it. Good or bad, she’d known it would come. ‘Barb. Come and see.’

  The moon was still up, contrasted into a wan disc by the sun beginning to rise out of sight behind the tower. Light touched the top of hills and the furthest edge of sleek water. The view was full of everything early, tide, fresh leaf, new grass, the first calls of oystercatcher and curlew bobbing in the shallows, terns skimming the unbroken surface.

  And into the inlet was coming its missing piece. The ship. It should always have been there. The breathless morning obviated a sail, so the slanting yardarm was empty, leaving the hull’s symmetry uncluttered except for the oars on each side rising and falling in a beat of matchstick wings. At this distance they flapped so delicately there was no sense of propulsion, the ship just grew in size.

  Barbary sobbed.

  The tower look-out was late seeing it, but now there was a shout: ‘Herself’s coming!’ Boots sounded up and down the staircase outside their door, somebody hammered on it: ‘Come out.’ Dick shook his head. Spears started thudding into the wood, but they had piled most of the room’s furniture against the door during the night, and after a few tries there was silence.

  The ship’s unearthliness was dispelled as it approached; Barbary could see the sweating backs of rowers bending to and fro, the sea-stained, wooden figurehead of a woman’s torso at its bow, but with detail came the music, a drum beating the rowers into time, a chant. The oarsmen were singing. They always had.

  With its shallow draught the galley was able to approach right up to the rock plinth on which the tower stood. A man in the bow shouted: ‘We’ve come for the Protestant woman, Tibbot.’

  From above her head – he was standing on the roof of the tower – Tibbot shouted back: ‘What woman?’

  The man in the prow grinned and pointed at Barbary’s window. ‘The wee one there, waving like a windmill. Herself expected her at Murrisk. You’ll smell hell for this.’

  She didn’t care he’d called her ‘Protestant’, which in his sense meant anything of inferior quality. She didn’t care, she didn’t care. She was leaping up and down. ‘Don’t go without me.’

  From above, a chastened Tibbot called: ‘Don’t tell Herself, Cull.’

  Cull jumped ashore, followed by some of the rowers. ‘Ah now, Tibbot, just let the wee girl go.’ Dick was pulling away the furniture from the door.

  Cull met her on the steps, a weatherbeaten, capable-looking man whose eyes widened at the sight of her hair.

  ‘There’s two of us,’ she told him, joyfully. ‘Oh, and our mounts.’

  He was not friendly. ‘Herself’s expecting the one of you,’ he said, ‘not a damned entourage. Get into the galley.’

  It had been a bad night and a dawnful of emotion. ‘You think I’m leaving my friend and my horse with that bastard Tibbot,’ she raged, ‘you bloody think again. He’d cook ’em. I come here willing.’ Shaking, she pulled the Clampett out of the muff. ‘Want me unwilling?’

  He didn’t look at the gun, being too busy staring at her with a peculiar look on his face. At last he turned away and gave an order: ‘Prepare horse stays.’

  Tibbot emerged from the tower, full of aplomb. ‘Are you off, then, cousin?’ He turned to Cull. ‘Where are you going with her?’

  ‘She’s for the Test,’ Cull said shortly, moving off.

  Tibbot of the Ships took his niece’s hands in his. ‘My poor girl. My poor, poor girl. I warned you.’ Cull was shouting with impatience from the galley. Tibbot put his head down to give her an avuncular kiss on the cheek. ‘Shun Adam, hug Eve,’ he whispered.

  Barbary drew a deep, grateful breath. ‘Thank you, uncle.’

  A moment later she followed Cuckold Dick and Spenser along a gangplank into the cherubims.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the map of Ireland the O’Neill had given to Barbary, the west coast looked like a tattered flag streaming out into the Atlantic with bits shredding off the ragged end from the blow of an easterly wind. The reality was the other way round. The bits were islands, scores of inhospitable pieces of rock which had refused to go under the Atlantic as it surged on its westerly way to lacerate the land.

  On this day they floated greeny-brown out of a sapphire sea. The men at the oars of the galley were singing the ‘Oro and Welcome Home’, just in case Barbary was who she claimed to be; if she wasn’t she wouldn’t understand it and would soon be dead anyway, so no harm to sing her to her funeral. The ‘chunk’ of the oars went in time to the song.

  Rowing was so much their second nature that they made it look easy to speed a galley against the wind, though it wasn’t. Cuckold Dick and Barbary faced them in the stern. They weren’t a pretty view. Every one of them had the neck, shoulders and arms of an ogre. In contrast, their legs looked weedy when they stood up, though they were as muscled as most men’s. An overabundance of scars and broken noses made Cuckold Dick uneasy. ‘I bet their mothers were polite to ’em,’ he murmured to Barbary. ‘If they had mothers.’

  Barbary wasn’t seeing what he saw; more than a decade of years had washed out of her eyes, allowing everything she looked at to be touched with the glittering unexpectedness it had held for her as a child. These men, or men very like them, had not seemed brutal then and didn’t now. Their faces were landscapes of home, just as the shapes of Croagh Patrick and the Twelve Pins behind her were home, just as the salt of this wind and this sea was part of the saline in her own veins. She struggled, like Odysseus against his ropes, not to call out to these villainous-looking sirens, to the seagulls, to the mermaids and dolphins of her kingdom: ‘It is me. I’m back. Oh God, I’m back.’ They wouldn’t believe her. She had to prove it.

  She had been allowed to rest at Murrisk, where a grumpy, seasick Spenser had been put ashore and, with Dick’s horse, installed in a hilly meadow more to his liking. Then the galley had rowed out into Clew Bay where every one of the little islands, locked into it like a petrified school of whales, possessed that far-off familiarity to the c
hild within her who had shrimped the pools of their beaches. Now, out here on the open sea, the bigger islands sent their names and personalities pulsing across the waves to her, like pleas to come and land. Out to starboard, Clare, not Clare Island, just Clare, crouched lion-fashion at the bay’s entrance. A castle, a mountain, a chant in a church. Hold Clare, young Barbary, and no ship enters or passes unless you allow it passage. Clare is power.

  Coming to port was Caher, small, wedge-shaped, containing an appalling holiness. ‘Dip oars to Caher,’ whispered Barbary, a second before Cull shouted: ‘Dip oars to Caher.’ Eighteen pairs of oars rose, streaming water, and dipped in reverence. Inishturk, the Island of the Boar, walled with cliffs. Ahead Inishbofin, the island of the ghostly white cow, hiding with its bulk the Sound between it and its calf, Inishark – and the place of her ordeal.

  Cuckold Dick was gaining confidence from the brightness. ‘Well, Barb, not a bad day for it. Bit of a chop, but nothing we can’t handle.’

  She patted his knee. He had no idea. Bit of a chop, bless him. The smoothness of the rowing and the skill of Cull at the galley’s two tillers were making light of a very considerable swell. Here in the stern they were sheltered by the banks of oarsmen, but the galley’s pennant was streaming in a straight line. Better get his safety established before he saw what test Grace O’Malley had set her. ‘I’m making the landing alone, Dick. One of her conditions.’ It wasn’t, but no reason for them both to come to a watery end.

  Dick looked suspicious. ‘You scrimming me?’

  ‘No.’ Her invigoration was masking her fear.

  The men had stopped singing, and a spare rower was beating the great drum at his feet, gradually quickening the stroke. Don’t hurry for me.

  There were other ships in the Sound, three small galleons, some hookers, and a couple more galleys, part of Grace O’Malley’s vast fleet hiding in the inlets like hermit crabs, waiting to reach out and grab passing merchant-ships. A couple of yawls were fishing. The Sound was virtually invulnerable to pursuit; its rocks and reefs could tear the bottom out of those who didn’t know them. The families who lived on Bofin were all involved in Grace’s pirate trade and most of them were lining the vantage points to get a glimpse of Barbary’s ordeal; what concerned Herself concerned them.