Moving her head slowly, as if it might still come off, she looked for her grandmother and saw her kneeling beside a body on the deck. It had a splinter as big as a rail post through its chest. It was still alive and Grace was talking to it in a voice her granddaughter hadn’t heard her use before: ‘…And there you’ll wait, Myles, and when it’s my time I’ll join you and we’ll sail the sea of heaven… Ach, sure there’s boats. Isn’t St Peter a fisherman? And didn’t Christ do a bit himself?’
There was blood coming out of Myles’s mouth, which was forming a word. Barbary thought it was ‘Deirdre’.
‘You know I will,’ said Grace. ‘You know I will. Like me own. Rest with God now.’ Myles rested. Grace’s dripping hands cupped his face for a moment, before she drew a cross on has forehead in his own blood with her thumb. Then she stood up, put her foot on his chest and yanked the splinter out.
Eoin, the Grace’s master, shouted from the carrack’s taffrail: ‘We have it all now. Her captain’s dead, but there’s a few quick left. Will we tow the prize in, Granuaile?’
Barbary saw her grandmother shake her head. ‘Squall coming. The living can come over, the dead can go to hell.’ Eoin relayed the message in pantomime to what was left of the carrack’s crew, indicating that they were free to try to get their wreck home, but that a storm was forecast. Bemused, the Dutchmen looked around at a sea no less and no more choppy than it had been all day, and pantomimed back that they would prefer to limp home, thank you very much. They could scarcely believe their luck.
‘You’ll be sorry,’ Barbary heard Eoin say, shrugging, ‘Herself knows the weather.’
Order was being restored, damaged rigging chopped away, a staysail and what was left of the others set. Grace regained the quarterdeck, and gave one, cold glance at her granddaughter. ‘Where were you?’
‘In there.’
Grace spat.
On the way back the sea began to slap the Grace’s buttocks in a familiar fashion, then more violently until they were bucketing ahead of the storm Grace had predicted. Huddled against the bulwark next to the wheel, Barbary shouted to Eoin: ‘How did she know?’
Eoin shrugged. ‘She knows. An arrangement with the saints, maybe, God rest them. If we’d been towing the Gaul we’d be going down to hell with her this moment.’ Barbary lifted herself to look back into the rain and wind. No sign of the Hollander, just grey, loutish sea in the place where she’d been. Well, she’d come pirating into foreign waters, knowing the risk. And she’d fired first. Nevertheless, the encounter had been a mess, a royal, pap-puking, piss-pizzler of a mess. She was offended by it.
Eoin glanced at her for a second. ‘No need to be shamed now.’
‘I’m not,’ said Barbary. ‘That Hollander wasn’t lobbing sponges.’
Eoin went on comforting at a shout over the noise of the squall. ‘Herself’s so brave she doesn’t realise. She was on the high seas when Tibbot was born. A Turkish corsair, the Devil run away with it, attacked her ship and things were going badly, and they called Granuaile up on deck from her birth-bed. She came swearing, bless her: “May you be seven times worse who cannot do without me for a single day.” So she said, and discharged a blunderbuss at the Saracens, and her men rallied and she won the day.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Barbary, flatly.
‘And to be sure, it’s not often like that,’ continued Eoin. ‘Usually they give in without a fight. No need to be shamed.’
‘I’m not,’ repeated Barbary. And she wasn’t. Irish piracy might depend on courage, but where she came from courage was way down the list of admirable qualities. The Order advocated guile, not courage, in its exploits. If you had to be brave, you’d done it wrong.
The Grace of God was left in Blacksod Bay for repairs, her pirated cargo transferred to two hookers which sailed Grace and her granddaughter back to Clare, separately. Grace was shunning her.
It liberated Barbary from her last restraint. In every situation of her life she had been forced to pretend she was something she wasn’t; now she was home on her own territory in her own right, ‘and I ain’t going to pretend no more’. After a long think, she clambered up to the castle’s top room and went in, uninvited. Grace was sitting at a table, smoking, drinking whiskey and giving orders to Manus for the funeral of her dead crewman. Don Howsyourfather bowed and smiled at her from a corner, as impervious as a cat to the way everybody ignored him.
Grace’s face didn’t change. ‘There was never an O’Malley yet that was a coward,’ she said. Manus winced.
‘Well, there is now,’ said Barbary. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘Hiding in a locker.’ Grace was making a meal of it.
‘Yes, well, cannon balls aren’t what I’m good at. And I didn’t come for to be brave. I came to meet you. But I don’t like the way the English are killing babies, so I also came to get O’Neill’s cannon for him.’ She dragged a stool up to the table and sat opposite her grandmother. ‘And while we’re about it we’re going to pick up a few for you and all. Where’d you get them pop guns the Grace was shooting yesterday? The local blacksmith?’
The lese-majesty of her tone was agitating Manus nearly out of his wits. Don Howsyourfather said: ‘You don’ talk to Hhherself so rude.’ But Grace’s eyes had a cautious interest.
‘And what’s wrong with them? Didn’t we take the ship?’
Barbary said: ‘You took her because you can sail and because you fired a lucky shot. But one of these days an English warship’ll come prancing into these waters, and with the guns you got you can line your lads up to spit and you’ll get better firepower.’ In her anger, she was wagging her finger at her grandmother. She transferred it to the dust of the table – there was plenty of it – and began drawing, showing Grace the design of Will Clampett’s latest demi-culverin and sakers, his improved fuse mechanism and his marine gun carriage which gave space for recoil and still allowed easy loading.
Don Howsyourfather was offended. ‘Na, na. Not nice gun. You want nice gun.’ His long, elegant finger drew a long, elegant and indeterminate piece of artillery mounted on a trailed field carriage. ‘Media culebrina,’ he said, fondly. ‘Nice.’
‘Lovely,’ agreed Barbary. ‘That’s what lost the Armada.’
Grace studied Barbary’s tracings. ‘Can we make guns like this?’
Barbary relaxed with relief, and began admiring her grandmother again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I know a man who can.’
By the early hours the table dust was patterned all over. Manus had long since taken himself off, assured in his own mind that it was safe to leave the two women together, and Don Howsyourfather, having decorated his gun with curlicues, had fallen asleep.
Grace sat back. ‘What now then?’
Barbary thought. She could talk grandly about delivering guns, but in fact she couldn’t deliver anything without Will Clampett, and whether Will would be prepared to help her provide artillery for his country’s enemies she didn’t know. After his Irish war experiences, he hated the English Crown, but that was a very different matter from espousing the cause of Ireland. If she went to him she was fairly certain she could persuade him, but there were two or three objections to that. In the first place, she would very much rather, if he did take the huge decision to switch sides, that he did it for the same reason she had, to correct an appalling imbalance, rather than for love of her. For another, she was reluctant to leave her ancestral lands now that she’d found them, and even more reluctant to return to England. Grace’s piracy might not be everybody’s idea of the honest life, but compared with the piracy committed in Elizabeth’s name it was positively saintly. England was oppression, it was Burghley and Spenser and Rob. Already this islanded coast was dearer to her than England had ever been. And, she had to admit it, while she was in Ireland she was in the same country as O’Hagan…
She knew one thing: Will wouldn’t steal from his employer. He might go over to Sir Henry Sidney’s enemies, but he wouldn’t steal Sir Henry’s guns while he
was in Sir Henry’s employment. He might prefer, if he did switch sides, to come to Ireland and make guns here. It would take longer… ‘Any ironworks around here, Grandmother?’
Grace nodded through the pipe smoke. ‘Iron Dick was called Iron Dick because there’s iron worked on his land.’
‘Now your land?’
‘Now my land.’
Barbary made up her mind. ‘I’ll send Cuckold Dick. He can go on one of your cargoes to Bristol.’ Ignoring all embargoes, Grace O’Malley and Bristol carried on a mutually advantageous trade. Dick would put the situation to Will in that uninvolved way he had, and Will could decide without his affection for her buggering up his judgement. Would Dick be safe? Where’s safe?
‘I’ll not be putting that scrofulous piece of ill luck on any ship of mine,’ said her grandmother.
Barbary was tired. ‘It’s too dangerous by land. Either he goes by ship or I go for good.’ She’d known the test would come sooner or later. She was developing affection for this dreadful old woman, her grandmother, but if the price of their relationship was the surrender of her right to think for herself, she wasn’t prepared to pay it. She waited to see how much her grandmother valued it.
Don Howsyourfather snored prettily. The shadows of bars from the canary’s cage striped the walls. Grace O’Malley took her pipe from her mouth. ‘That’s a powerful stubborn streak you got from the Gauls.’
Barbary was magnanimous in victory. ‘It wasn’t from the Gauls I got it.’
Cuckold Dick surprised her by being reluctant to go. With his gift for being at home wherever he found himself, he had managed to absorb himself into the pirate fraternity, even though – or perhaps because – he was banned from accompanying it to sea. He had settled himself into the cottage on Clare’s quay where the pirate wives, with typical Irish hospitality, looked after him like one of their own. Every time she entered it, Barbary was reminded of her time on the Lambeth Marshes with Will Clampett. Like Will’s cottage, Dick had made this one into a temple to scientific enquiry, and had barely room for his bed among the retorts, tubes, and metalwear which littered it in rackety profusion. Will had been in pursuit of the perfect cannon; Dick was searching for the finest usquebaugh, and doing it with the enthusiasm of an alchemist on the track of kitchen-produced gold. He used mysterious terms like ‘doublings’, ‘singlings’, ‘backing the wash’, ‘still head’, ‘worms and worts’.
‘Be a shame to leave now, Barb,’ he protested.
‘Will could help you make an even better still.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not a go, Barb. You got to have Irish malt and turf and peat water to give it the flavour.’ He brightened up. ‘I could smuggle it into England.’
‘You wouldn’t have to. There’s no whiskey tax in England. They don’t know what it is. You could be “Cuckold Dick. Whiskey Importer. By Royal Appointment”.’
The idea of trading legally was novel and unsettling. Dick considered it, then shook his head. ‘They’ll tax it,’ he said. ‘Sure as the Devil hates holy water, they’ll tax it.’
‘You don’t have to stay, you rinse-pitcher. I need you back here.’ She was irritable, because she didn’t want to lose him any more than he wanted to go. ‘Just put Will in the game and see if he wants to play.’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘It’ll be good to see Will again, see if all’s beneship with him.’
‘All right, Barb.’ He was persuaded, but still uneasy at leaving her with Grace O’Malley whom he considered to take the English threat too lightly. ‘She’s powerful clever, Barb, but she’s got green in her eyes. Round here they talk about the Gauls like they talk about the fairies. They don’t hardly believe in them. But they’ll come after her, Barb. She’s tweaking their arse too much for them not to. I don’t want you there when they does.’
Barbary knew he was right, and found it all the more reason to get him out of the way. ‘You be easy. If I get nabbed, I’ll send word to Sir John Perrot. And the O’Neill. Between them, they can stop Bingham stretching our necks.’
‘If he ain’t done it before then,’ said Dick, gloomily. ‘That bachelor’s baby’d trine as soon as look at you.’
‘You take care, Dick. Give my love to Will.’
‘You take care, Barb. For Gawd’s sake keep out of sea battles.’
* * *
There were none. Eoin was right, the exchange with the Hollander had been unusual. Fighting was inherent in the piracy trade, and when necessary Grace O’Malley ordered it done, but it wasted time, men and shot as far as she was concerned and most of the ships she plundered were overcome by the threat of battle, rather than by battle itself. Which was where Barbary came in. Disappointed as she may have been that Barbary’s arrival hadn’t provided her with another battling heroine, Grace had at least come to recognise her as an element she could use to overcome crews without violence once she’d boarded. Barbary’s training enabled her to single out what the Order called the ‘barker’, the one in a group of potential victims likely to cause trouble, the leader, the one with initiative. Sometimes it was the ship’s master, sometimes it wasn’t, but once spotted he could be conied out of his impulse to be brave by fear, suggestion or sheer fast talking. Barbary’s English was another advantage since the majority of the ships they boarded were English-owned. Irish ships, knowing Grace’s reputation, handed over her ‘pilotage’ without so much as a peep.
Gradually grandmother and granddaughter became a piratical double act; Grace a natural as the ‘frightener’, prepared to stick at nothing, Barbary playing the ‘pleaser’. There were no more deaths.
In early October the Rose Tremayne out of Bristol bound for Galway was carrying a cargo such as could console Queen Elizabeth’s lieutenant in Connaught for his lordship of a province which he loathed and which loathed him back. Sir Richard Bingham was looking forward to receiving it. The problem was that the master of the Rose Tremayne had missed Galway; not so much missed it as beginning to think the bloody place didn’t exist. A storm, and not so much a storm as God’s vengeance on man’s wickedness directed entirely on this one ship, had ripped her off course and left her adrift off an unfamiliar coastline with her master, still shaking, grateful to heaven for his deliverance and wondering why he hadn’t taken up tannery like his mother’d wanted him to.
With his first mate, he consulted the sea card, a sheepskin on which was drawn a scale of latitudes and what little was definitely known of Ireland’s west coast.
‘Well, it’s not Galway,’ said the first mate, who had a gift for the obvious. ‘The card don’t show no funny-looking mountain like that.’
They could just see the funny-looking mountain, a bare cone, through the driving rain of the storm’s aftermath. What they didn’t see was the oar-driven galley creeping out from one of the nearby islands towards them, and for that they couldn’t be blamed. The galley had no mast to stick up above the sea line and its neutral colour blended into the blurring caused by rain bouncing on the water’s surface. It edged towards them like a venomous log.
By the time they’d spotted it, the Rose’s tired crew were too late to prime their handguns, and while their ship carried two demi-culverin, they didn’t have the manoeuvrability to shoot down at low-lying craft. But the galley, like a small dog attacking somebody’s kneecaps, could send shot virtually into the Rose’s waterline.
The first mate and some of his men drew their knives and rushed to cut away the grappling hooks which were already dropping over the taffrail. It wasn’t a wise move. A discharge from four arquebuses – as ancient, ridiculous, and as effective, as the galley’s cannon – drove them back, allowing unattractive-looking persons carrying axes in their belts and knives in their teeth to swarm over the side. Most unsettling was the large, grey woman who seemed to be in charge. The master had heard of women pirates; he’d heard of mermaids, sea monsters and the Archangel Gabriel, but he hadn’t expected to meet them.
The woman gained the poop deck, shouting in a foreign language, gesturing for
her prisoners to kneel on the deck below.
‘It’s healthier doing what she says,’ said a voice in English at the master’s arm. Looking down, the master saw he was being addressed by a skinny youth with freckles and an ear-flapped cap. ‘The last lot as didn’t,’ continued the boy conversationally, ‘was cut up for fish bait.’
Studying the woman, the master decided the boy didn’t exaggerate. Apart from her men, who were terrifying enough, she carried a sense of weight disproportionate even to her big frame, as though she were granite, a monolith with arms and legs. ‘See them gew-gaws round her neck?’ asked the boy. The master looked at Grace’s coral necklace, actually a gift from a Corsair captain. ‘Bones,’ intoned the awful boy, ‘bones picked from the living flesh of men as opposed her.’ The master believed him. That this pirate was female and elderly increased the horror. It was like seeing midwives, stall-holders, grandmothers, all the old women one took for granted, pick up an axe and become murderous. She was a domestic nightmare. The master instructed his crew to do as they were told.
‘Now then,’ said the boy, seating himself cross-legged on the ship’s drum. ‘Herself wants to know who you are, where you’re bound, what you’re carrying and who for.’
The master’s orders didn’t preclude answering questions, especially as the small, efficient-looking handgun the boy carried was aimed at the master’s stomach. It seemed unnecessary to list the cargo since some of the pirates were already down in the hold opening boxes, but he listed it anyway.
‘Sir Richard Bingham, Lord Lieutenant of Connaught,’ nodded the boy, and spoke in rapid Irish to the large grey woman, who spoke stolidly back. ‘He’s a lucky man, is Sir Bingham. You’d lost yourselves anywhere else, anything could have happened. Wrecked, boarded by pirates, anything.’ He seemed to expect the master to express gratitude, which, without enthusiasm, the master did. The boy nodded again. ‘Which instead Herself gives a pilot service in these waters. Usually she’s pricey, but seeing as it’s Sir Bingham, let’s say one hundred pounds and I’m a fool to meself. Got a hundred, have you?’
The Pirate Queen Page 41