The master’s language indicated he hadn’t. The boy tut-tutted. ‘Herself’ll have to take it out in goods then,’ he said sadly.
The master watched bales of cloth, silver plate, boxes of spices, furniture, hangings – all amounting to considerably more than £100 – passed down into the galley. There were shouts from two pirates who had opened a small chest. The master groaned: ‘Not the tobacco.’
‘Smokes, does he, Sir Bingham?’
‘Don’t know,’ said the master, ‘but I bloody do.’
The boy grinned and made pleading sounds in Irish. The woman indicated with her axe that beheading the entire crew was still an option as far as she was concerned, but under the boy’s persuasion some of the tobacco was tipped into a tin, much to the master’s relief, which increased as he saw the pirates preparing to leave, only pausing to empty the ship’s cannon balls from its shot locker over the side. His bones might not, after all, decorate this terrible woman’s neck. ‘Here,’ he demanded, realising he still had to find Galway, ‘what about that pilot?’
The boy spoke to the woman leader, who took the sea card from the master’s hand, turned it over and scratched a rough chart on it with her dagger. The master didn’t thank her. He’d paid for the service.
* * *
Cull and the crews were admiring of Barbary’s efforts. ‘She can charm the barnacles off their bottoms,’ said Cull, ‘and in the English too.’ Grace merely snorted and said the English had taught her grandchild to be plámás, as if plausibility was an underhand Saxon trait, unworthy of straightforward O’Malleys.
She resisted all Barbary’s attempts to get her to dress as a man. Barbary had reverted to boy’s dress because skirts were inconvenient up boarding ladders and because she saw no point in advertising who she was. ‘And why shouldn’t they know who I am?’ asked Grace.
‘What’s the point,’ said Barbary, wearily, ‘what’s the bloody point in letting these crews we’ve pirated,’ she caught her grandmother’s eye, ‘piloted, go and tell Lord Lieutenant Bingham as Grace O’Malley’s robbed them again? And that’s another thing. We should never have taken goods off the Rose. I begged you then and there. They were Bingham’s goods. Why make Bingham more frettish at you than he is already?’
She was wasting breath. To Grace this coastline was her kingdom by as great a right as England was Elizabeth’s, and the pilotage of foreign ships in her waters she regarded as much her due as Elizabeth did her taxes. ‘He pays his levy like the rest,’ she said, puffing on a pipe full of Sir Richard Bingham’s tobacco.
There were times when she drove Barbary distracted with her obduracy, and others when Barbary floundered at the old woman’s seafaring genius. Her instinct for weather was mystical. And the signalling system Grace had set up gave her time to calculate which ship of her fleet was appropriate to use against an intruder in the pertaining conditions. She was always right. Sometimes she used a couple of fore-and-aft fourteen-ton hookers, occasionally the Grace of God, her biggest galleon which she could sail so as to eat the wind out of the opposing ship’s canvas while retaining it in her own. Sometimes she used the fast and manoeuvrable galleys.
The reason the English hadn’t come against her so far was because they daren’t; their navy was over-stretched already in protecting England’s coastline against another possible invasion. Bingham had a small fleet at Galway but, for all the antiquity of Grace’s guns, the superior number of her ships could overwhelm it with ease. The only way they had been able to get her into their hands at all was by using her son as a hostage.
Her aloofness was something Barbary decided had been a vital ploy when she’d first begun commanding men, and had now become petrified into her nature. On land she used words as if they cost her money. At sea she encouraged her crews by cussing them with a profanity that opened new vistas of swearing to Barbary. She was especially foul-mouthed to her galleymen.
‘Row, you goat-begotten bastards,’ she’d roar at them. ‘Bend your backs, you turd-licking, crab-catching, double-cunted, donkey-dicked fish-suckers.’ And they rowed, contentedly closing their eyes like men encouraged by angels’ trumpets.
‘No, no, it’s a comfort to be cursed by her,’ said Cull, who had been promoted to fleet steersman but was still most at home in the galley, which had been Grace’s first command. ‘We’re her boyos, do you see. It was us joined her at the beginning. After Donal-of-the-Battles was killed, the O’Flaherties wouldn’t give her rights, God’s curse on them.’ An Irish chieftain’s widow was entitled to a third of her husband’s personal estate. The O’Flaherties had reneged on a traditional agreement. ‘It was why she had to take up the piloting.’
‘But why did you join her?’ That leap Grace had taken from wronged but respectable widowhood to pirate captain crossed a chasm still unfathomable to Barbary.
Cull looked at the sky, at his boots, stroked his chin and said: ‘Ah well, you see, she took us.’
And that, simply, was the explanation. Nobody else had wanted them. The many different clans they came from had disowned them. A few had committed crimes too dire even for the tolerant Irish social system. Others just hadn’t fitted in, some had been butts, scapegoats, malformed or merely unpleasant. All of them carried pejorative nicknames which gave a clue to their original isolation. Mooch, slow and ox-like. Gawk, clumsy. Keeroge, black beetle. Haverel, a boor. Kitterdy stuttered. Rap, meaning bad coin, was a name which indicated that its owner had been a cheat. Scalder, ‘unfledged bird’, had a hare lip. The port side’s stroke oarsman who wore jewels on his fingers and tossed his long, fair ringlets as he rowed was known as ‘Molly’. Cull himself, even the reliable Cull, whose name meant the weakling of a litter, had done something so terrible that Barbary never found out what it was.
These sweepings from the clans had carried their nicknames and their shame into exile, unemployed and unemployable until Grace O’Malley had gathered them up as a job lot. It was an indication of how low they had sunk that they had been prepared to sign on under a woman, and it was an indication of how extraordinary the woman was that, under her, they had been whipped into the finest sea-going fighting unit in Ireland.
Now they were all rich men by west coast standards. More than that, they carried their terrible nicknames with a swagger. They shouted them as they attacked. ‘Granuaile Aboo,’ they’d yell, ‘Grace to Victory,’ and then ‘Haverel Aboo,’ ‘Keeroge Aboo’, ‘Molly Aboo’. They had become honourable titles worthy to be passed on to successors. The original stutterer had been killed, but his place in the starboard rank was filled by his son, a non-stutterer who answered proudly to the name of Kitterdy Two.
It was Mooch who took Barbary shrimping. Keeroge taught her new card games, and Molly cut her hair. She was recovering her childhood, allowing its seaborne Irishness to infiltrate the sharpness of that other childhood in the London streets, and finding in the combination a way of holidaying from the memories of Spenser Castle.
Her outlook became that of an amphibian’s, the sea no more an obstacle between one place and another than a bridge. Surprisingly, they went to church almost every Sunday, walking to the tiny Cistercian abbey on Clare, or sailing to Murrisk on the edge of Clew Bay under Croagh Patrick to join the congregation in the Augustinian abbey in which Grace had been baptised and which smelled of incense and seaweed. In both abbeys was a stone carved with the O’Malley coat of arms and their motto: ‘Terra Mariq Potens’, ‘Powerful by land and sea’.
The sight of Grace O’Malley on the first occasion Barbary accompanied her grandmother to church was staggering. A crowd of admiring pirates had turned out to witness what was obviously an event. Instead of her usual outfit of calico and wool, Grace had raided the chests she’d pirated from foreign ships for more womanly attire. None of the items matched. She bore down on her waiting granddaughter like a galleon in full, multi-coloured sail. A massive, farthingaled scarlet skirt was hitched up by gold tassels to show a tartan petticoat. Her purple bodice had a pearl-encrusted stomach
er, bombasted bishop sleeves and a cartwheel ruff. Nothing had been left at home in the accessory line. Hanging from her chain girdle was a small book of hours, a pomander, a purse, a fan and a crystal looking-glass. A Spanish comb stuck her coarse, badgered hair into a six-inch contortion which she’d adorned with a billowing black lace mantilla. In a high wind she wouldn’t have stood a chance.
How much Grace believed in the tenets of the Catholic faith, Barbary was unsure – it wasn’t the sort of thing they discussed. It was more a matter of how much the Catholic faith believed in Grace O’Malley.
As the last grains of sand ran out in the giant four-hour glass that kept the time on the fleet’s biggest ships, the watch was changed to the mutter of a short prayer. Each watch was known by the first words of its own special prayer: the ‘God grant us’ watch, the ‘Lord hear us’ watch, the ‘Watch over us’ watch.
When, after a late raid, the galley returned in the dark to Clare, Cull’s voice would ring out over the black water with her particular password: ‘Before the world was God,’ and receive the countersign from the lights on the harbour: ‘After God came Christ His Son, born of Mary.’
It was a salty, superstitious Catholicism, bordering on the pagan, and it had its beauty. When a mist came down over the sea, through it could be heard the low, eerie moaning of seals calling to each other. ‘I remember me duty,’ said Kitterdy Two, and on a glorious October day he took Barbary to visit his aunt who had turned into a seal some years before. They rowed to a cave where light reflecting off the green water wobbled over the matt bodies of seals lying on its ledges. Kitterdy Two’s whisper echoed against the rock. ‘She was never great with my uncle, and one day she put on the cohuleen-dru and dived into the waves off Roonagh Point.’
‘Which one is she?’
‘With the damaged flipper. It’s how we know her, for that’s where my uncle threw the boiling water over her hand. Go m-beannuighe Dia dhuit, Aunty, and God save all here.’
Kitterdy Two’s aunt looked at them out of weeping almond eyes before flopping into the water and swimming past their curragh to the sea.
In late November the good weather finally surrendered to winter. Gales closed the seas and the piracy season was over for another year. If anything, Grace O’Malley became busier. She claimed as much by land as she did by sea and ran huge herds of beeves over her extensive grassland. There were disputes to settle, poachers and raiders to punish, chatelains to reprimand or reward, repairs, judgements, decisions to be made. As tanaist to Grainne’s chieftaincy, Barbary was observer to most of these matters. She learned the interests of lordship, much about its boredom, and even more admiration for her grandmother’s acumen.
But through all the business there was a recurring discomfort, like the early-warning twinges of disease. ‘What is on you?’ roared Grace O’Malley at her Burrishoole herdsman. ‘Four hundred beeves? You had a six hundred on foot, you miserable sheep-shagger.’
The herdsman wilted, but stood his ground. ‘The Gauls came against us and took them and it was prudent to let them, for there was more of them than us, and weren’t they armed to the teeth of them.’
‘What Gauls, blast your soul?’
The herdsman shrugged. ‘Gauls from Galway. They had the death of Rory Conroy and I escaped being killed by the black of my nail.’
They had the same story from the herdsman at Shrule in the east, though this time it was 800 beeves that the Gauls from Galway, English soldiers, had stolen.
On top of this, there was no tribute from the island of Arran among the taxes due to Grace. The island was actually O’Flaherty territory, but had found it prudent to pay for Grace O’Malley’s protection over the years. This year, however, neither O’Flaherty nor O’Malley was getting anything from it; the island had been occupied by a force of Gauls under the leadership of Sir Thomas le Strange.
Furiously, Grace did her accounting of an empire which was being eroded round its edges like a cheese nibbled by rats. Her income was down; it was still considerable, but it was definitely down. ‘I’ll make those Gauls smell hell for this,’ she said. ‘Come the spring I’ll raid the bastards back. I’ll feed their bollocks to the pigs. I’ll give them steal from Grace O’Malley, so I will.’
Barbary shook her. ‘Will you listen to me? It’s the English you’re talking about. The English. Not some bloody clan. It’s war. England versus Ireland.’ But Grace O’Malley didn’t understand. There was no Ireland. There was hardly a Connaught. Its people had existed too long as free-wheeling, intersecting tribes, each with its own great history, to have a conception of themselves as part of a whole. For them to think in terms of nationhood was too soon and, Barbary feared, too late.
* * *
Christmas was to be spent at Westport in a huge gathering of O’Malleys. But before that, Grace O’Malley was intent on taking Barbary to the secret treasure, the Kishta, an enterprise that meant a march inland to Lough Mask.
The pony Spenser had spent the piracy season in the care of Grace’s horseboys, running the grassland with the O’Malley herds of Connemaras, and was fitter than at any time in his life. To be on his back again brought memories of Spenser Castle, good and bad. Her apprenticeship to the pirate trade had rendered her so much a sailor that to be out of sight of the sea was at first claustrophobic. The swooping Partry mountains hemmed them around, blocking every view into the distance with smooth uprushes of thinly grassed rock. There was water a-plenty, falling down clefts so that from far off it looked as though white ribbons were dangling down the mountain faces, feeding the rivers that twirled through the valleys, forming loughs like mirrors of every size, some of them dotted with tiny, tree-sprouting islands. It was a terrain of such difficulty and isolation that she almost caught some of Grace’s conviction that no enemy could find them in it. Almost.
It was dazzlingly cold, no snow yet but a metallic iciness which refused to give way to a bright, clear sun and froze the last remaining bolls to the bog cotton and turned the peasants’ stacks of cut peat bricks into brittle walls. The owners of the peat were not in evidence; an occasional dead-straight line of smoke issuing from the landscape – the turf roofs were so thick that they looked more like natural protuberances than dwellings – indicated that the hut beneath was occupied, but the only living creatures they saw were sheep. Twice they heard melodious howling from the mountain tops. Cull said it was wolves. ‘Greeting Herself with a challenge. Herself loves a good wolf hunt.’
She would, thought Barbary. She looked ahead to where Grace bumped along on what appeared to be a cart horse; her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf and poked up through the splayed fringe of her voluminous cloak so that from the back she looked like a hunched and enormous vulture. Probably tears their heads off. One of the mysteries she still hadn’t solved about Grace O’Malley was the secret of the woman’s physical strength. ‘Doesn’t she ever get tired?’ she asked Cull.
‘Ah well, you see,’ Cull said, ‘her bones aren’t bones, they’re ships’ spars.’
But did no arthritis twinge the spar joints? Didn’t they ever long to be laid up? If there was one constant to pirate life it was its spray-splashed, rain-lashed, hard-benched, rope-burned discomfort. Yet Grace, old as she was, didn’t just endure it, she thrived on it. And now, on holiday, she was trotting through bog, over bridges slippy with ice and heigh-ho for a wolf hunt at the end of it.
They were travelling with an escort made up of most of the galley crew, not for protection but for Grace’s consequence; no chieftain worth his salt was attended by less than twenty followers. Away from their oars, their muscular upper bodies and undeveloped legs made them look crab-like, but they were enjoying the excursion. Keeroge and Kitterdy Two carried hawks on their wrists, and wolfhounds followed Molly and Cull.
They emerged out of the Partry mountains and onto the western shore of Lough Mask in a sunset that put a spell on even that magical lake, turning its frosted islands apricot, flushing the reeds which stippled its surface and polis
hing the water itself with a sheen that reflected everything above it, trees, swans, hills, their own selves, in a pellucid gold.
Men and women in curraghs were waiting on a small, wooden pier to take them to their destination. The horses were led off to a corral, the dogs to a houndmaster to await the hunt. Unless you were a bird, an overall view of Lough Mask was impossible; what Barbary thought was the lake turned out to be one of its thousands of inlets, separated from the others by trees, piles of slabbed rock and islands. Even out on the water its bends prevented Barbary from seeing more than a fraction of the lake’s ten-mile length. What she did see as they approached the eastern bank was a giant boot, at least it looked like a boot from her view, a mid-calf boot of stone with the outward curve of its uppers in the water, as if some Colossus had got one of his feet stuck into the mud of the lake, slipped his leg out of his boot and left it there. Nearer, it turned into a fat, looming castle built onto an island just out from the shore. Cull nodded towards it. ‘Hag’s Castle.’
‘Who’s the hag? Herself?’
Cull nudged Barbary’s ribs for her naughtiness. ‘Not at all. It belonged to warrior women. Way back. The time of Noah. It was always a woman’s place, a secret place. It suits Herself.’
Like Grace, the castle was old and grey and strong. They were landed onto tiny, lethal steps which led to a rocky surround, and made an even more difficult ascent up a rope ladder to the only door, set halfway up its wall. The ladder was drawn up after them. Barbary was half-relieved, half-alarmed at this precaution. ‘Do we expect trouble?’
The Pirate Queen Page 42