Cull was reassuring. ‘Not at all. Not at all. But Herself took the castle from the Joyces, and you never know if the bastards will try and get it back.’
Considering that it was an O’Malley residence, Hag’s Castle was surprisingly comfortable. Its centre was a hollow core which ended at the bottom in a well. Around it were galleries balustraded on one side, serving the rooms leading off it. Grace had furnished it with some of her finest pirated pieces, so each storey had surprises: a Persian carpet hiding an archway to a privy, a gaudy carving of women with too many arms, a square of mosaic with a representation of a peacock, Spanish chairs, beds, chests.
Barbary would have welcomed bed, it had been a long journey, but there was a meal with the crew and lakeland men and women to be eaten first by candlelight at a huge round table set over the well head on the ground floor. She was sloping off to bed at last when Grace caught her: ‘Come with me.’
‘Doesn’t anybody ever sleep round here?’
‘Do you want to see the treasure or not?’
She did. She had seen it before a long time ago. It was one of the clearest pictures she’d received once memory of her childhood had returned because it had been in many ways the strangest; she’d been surrounded by women, not in itself an unusual event, but their gravity had made it so. Her aunt Margaret, Grace’s only daughter, had been there. Odd she should remember her so vividly, for Margaret had little personality, as if her mother’s abundance had used up the supply. Her own mother had been there, aloof and beautiful as always, and her uncle’s wife and every other woman of importance in the O’Malley clan, all in their best linen and gold. She had been aware of ceremony, oaths of secrecy, singing, silences.
What had imprinted it on her mind had been the sense of illegality. These women then had been defying something. It was no ordinary, condoned feminine ritual, like the Maytime dances, or husband-foretelling on St John’s Eve. Whatever it was, they were being audacious and rebellious in doing it. She remembered the scars on Grace’s hands as, reverent for once, they had lifted the treasure out of its carved box…
The same box was in front of her now, in Grace’s room, the candlelight and the glow from the brazier shifting its tortuous Celtic pattern, the same rough hands lifting its lid with the same reverence.
Barbary grinned. Queen Elizabeth should be here this moment, and Lord Burghley. And Walsingham. And Raleigh. And Rob. And Tibbot. All the people whose innards had griped at the word ‘treasure’. The smell of what Grace was holding now had reached the nose on the throne of England and sent it sniffing the streets of London for the boy who would be the means of attaining it. That priceless object had worked through agents great and small to discover a poor urchin and, having found her, changed her character and outlook to restore her to her people.
And it was only a book. Not even an impressive book, but a ragged piece of vellum stitched between plain leather covers. The writing was ancient, not just the original Latin-scripted manuscript, but the two translations, one in Irish and one, surprisingly, in a crude mixture of English and Norman French. Perhaps because they hadn’t been written in the crabbed style of a professional scribe, the first two were comprehensible to Barbary.
Her grandmother fetched a candle and put it close to Barbary’s stool, then sat on the bed to wait. Despite the room’s brazier, Barbary found her hands shaking. The air coming through the shutters smelled of icy vegetation, but there was another scent coming from the book, very old, very strange. Perhaps it was sanctity.
‘Know all who live now and who will be,’ the manuscript began, ‘that I am Finola of the clan of Partraige, once Sister Boniface of Fontevrault, once Abbess of Kildare…’ It told her story.
It was a book by women about women. To the women of her clan it became treasure, the most precious thing in the world because it was unique in the world. Among the millions of volumes that had been written to record the doings of men for the glory of men, there was just one, here, in these pitiful pages, that recorded the doings of women for the glory of women, as if in a universal monastery of chanting monks a single woman’s voice had been raised in an unheard female hymn.
Finola, the one-time abbess, had begun it because otherwise she would have been wiped out of history. She had been Abbess of Kildare in the twelfth century, which had made her the most powerful woman in Ireland at that time, and one of the very few who could write. She had come up against the equally powerful, and certainly more ruthless, King of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough, who, to get rid of her, had her raped by his men. It was a successful move. Even more than the Roman, the Irish Church of those days prized virginity. Because, however unwillingly, the Abbess of Kildare had lost hers, a carelessness that besmirched her, she could not be mentioned. History was in the hands of the tonsured monks who sat at their writing boards in cells all over Ireland, and they allowed the wronged, defiled abbess, like so many other women, to drop through it into the dark. She was unrecorded, invisible. She had never existed.
But she had existed. She had made her way here, to Lough Mask, and with the help of the warrior women who lived in Hag’s Castle, she had exacted revenge on Dermot of Leinster. Then she had written her story.
Somehow the document had been preserved. Because of Hag’s Castle’s feminist tradition, other women had read it and been inspired to write their own history. Finola’s quill and ink had become more than a means of making marks on vellum; they had become a torch which cast a tiny light down generations of women who would otherwise have lived and died unknown and unsung.
Barbary looked up at her grandmother. ‘Is this why you wanted to get into the Annals of Clare?’
‘How will the future know of me otherwise?’
True. Grace could not write. If men didn’t record her existence, she hadn’t existed.
Every so often there was a gap in the continuity where female literacy had flickered out for a while, as it had now; here and there a cross marked one of the pages as if some woman who could not write had nevertheless shown that she knew the book’s value. Hag’s Castle had changed hands many times during 300 years of clan feuds but, miraculously, one woman had always managed to hand the book on to another safely. Word of what Finola called ‘The Word of Woman’ had got out to become a legend that the women of the western clans possessed great treasure known only to themselves, but even so it had been kept from theft and destruction. It had suffered – some of the pages were scorched on one edge as if it had been snatched from fire – but it had survived.
Not all the stories were as interesting as Finola’s. One entry in an appalling script merely said: ‘Brigit O’Connor did bake the best bread of all.’ Others recorded acts of heroism by women; some had fought in battle, some had commanded their clans, one had found a herbal cure for sore throats, another had given birth to twenty children, another had been childless, some had written their own prayers.
All of them had been inspired by Finola, whose story included a great heresy. ‘God is not male,’ she had written, ‘God is at once male and female and more than both.’
Barbary looked up, appalled, to meet the eyes of her grandmother. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. Grace O’Malley nodded.
‘…in that Jesus came to us not in strength but in the weakness of a poor human baby,’ wrote Finola, ‘not to experience the power of the world but its pain, he was partaking of the common lot of women… In that he loved and forgave prostitutes and adulteresses and rejoiced at marriages as at Cana, and frequented the company of women, he reflected the womanly nature of God as much as the manly. Nor can I find any condemnation of women in his teaching such are heaped on our heads by the bishops… Therefore the saints who have regarded Eve and her daughters as evil have done violence to God who is both their father and their mother.’
Barbary looked up again. ‘What happened to her?’
‘They killed her.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
It was a bell-jangler, this. It had never occurred to her before
to question God’s maleness. He was ultimate authority, which was male. And yet, why not? Just because the Burghleys ruled this wicked world, it didn’t mean they ruled heaven. Had the Church, after all, got it wrong this long, long time? Had men walked along the road of history with their heads stolidly in one direction, taking in only what was happening on their side of the way? Wouldn’t they then believe that only their side of the view held importance, and the other none?
No wonder they’d killed Finola, with this clarion call of equality before God. And no wonder the women of Lough Mask had kept the book hidden. In the eyes of the Church this was not just heresy, it was blasphemy and sacrilege as well.
Yet it had produced its effect. This then, these scribbles of ink on a tattered piece of vellum, were the secret ingredient that had transmuted an Irish widow into a pirate chieftain. It was a charter giving her the right to break the rules men laid down for her because they weren’t the rules of this new-seen, vaster God. Piracy might not have been what Finola had in mind for her sex when she wrote her heresy, but Grace had interpreted it as a woman’s entitlement to survival, and with a female God urging her on she had gone out and survived.
And yet Grace’s story was not in the book.
‘Who did you get to read you this?’ she asked Grace. No man, for sure. A man reading this heresy would combust and the manuscript with him.
‘We’ve tried to keep a woman olave at Lough Mask who could read and hand on the skill. Me mother brought me when I was old enough, like yours brought you. But the last one died before she could remember me.’
So that’s why Grace had been so insistent that the Cistercian annalist should ‘remember’ her. Women were half the world, Finola said. And intended to be so. Intended. Not squeezed in at the last moment, curse-endowed, flawed, useful little ovens into which men inserted the next generation.
‘So now you’ll do me remembrancing,’ said Grace.
‘You believe what it says here?’
Grace’s eyes were steady. ‘Why not?’
Why not? Because it changed the world, that’s why, sent the planet off course, spinning into a new orbit… But why not?
In that moment she was bonded to Grace O’Malley as she had never been by blood. With her, and with generations of women who had gone before her, she shared a much greater matter, an idea.
‘Why not,’ she said.
Grace nodded. ‘Go to bed.’
Barbary went. Even in her sleep she was aware of a shift that changed all perspective. She heard trumpets that blew for the untold heroism of untold women. They went on blowing until they woke her up.
On the shore of the lake, real trumpets were blowing. Outside her door men were running and shouting. ‘Is it the Joyces?’ She could hear her grandmother’s voice swearing and giving commands.
‘Light the beacon. I’ll shorten Ruairi Joyce’s career for him, so I will.’
Barbary leaped out of her bed to the window. In the frosty mist of the morning she could see figures on the eastern bank of the lake, lots of figures, clustered round long dark shapes. Boats. Some were already launched and moving over the water towards the castle. Somebody came into her room and she turned to see Molly, the stroke oarsman, peering over her shoulder. ‘Isn’t that typical of the Joyces to attack at Advent?’ he said. ‘They’d tear Christ’s body for a piece of silver.’
Barbary realised she was naked, and ran to the aumbrey for her clothes. ‘It’s not the bloody Joyces,’ she shouted. She’d seen the banner with the Tudor rose. ‘It’s the English.’
Molly smoothed back his long fair hair in relief. ‘And I thought it was the Joyces.’ He went to the door of the bedroom and shouted: ‘It’s only the English.’ He turned back to Barbary, aggrieved. ‘And how did the English find themselves here?’
It was no time for discussion. And no time to put on women’s clothes. She struggled into the trousers and shirt she wore for pirating, rammed on her cap, snatched up the Irish woollen cloak her grandmother had given her, and the snaphaunce. ‘Let’s go.’ But another glance out of the window showed it was too late. Under its thin, low-lying mist the lake was speared with boats, like slow-moving arrows, all centring on Hag’s Castle.
From the castle’s inner balcony overlooking the drop to the well, she could hear men telling each other: ‘It’s only the English,’ and felt their initial alarm degenerate into disorientation. This was their playland. Even its dangers were familiar. And now they had been disturbed in it by an enemy so alien that they could no more comprehend it than if elephants had appeared on the hills and tigers sprouted in the rushes of the lake.
Barbary was very frightened, not only for herself, these men, for Grace, but for the Kishta. It mustn’t be wiped out; it would be intolerable for that new colour she had discovered last night to be withdrawn from the rainbow. Finola had to go on living; it would be very nice if they could all go on living.
Her grandmother was coming ponderously along the passage. At the sight of her everybody, including Barbary, calmed down. Her nod might have been wishing them good morning. ‘We’ve lit the beacon.’ Above her head, from up on the roof, came the deep roar of a fire. The message of its smoke would be repeated by the beacon on the Hill of Doon, flashed to the Killaries, then from beacon to beacon along the hilltops to Murrisk and across the sea to Clare.
‘How soon will they come?’
Grace considered, and Barbary remembered that all O’Malley and allied forces had dispersed for the holiday. Trust the bloody English to attack at Christmas. ‘Soon,’ was all she said.
‘They’ve got art-ill-ary,’ called a look-out. Barbary rushed to the window and looked out. Two strings of figures were man-hauling a gun to its position on the shoreside.
‘You’re supposed to be the expert,’ said her grandmother’s voice behind her.
Barbary rubbed her eyes and looked again. ‘A saker, I think.’ It wasn’t as big as some, but it didn’t have to be. ‘Five-pounder. It can hole us, given time.’
‘How much time?’
‘Depends on the accuracy. For certain before help comes.’
‘We’ve been betrayed,’ said Grace, flatly.
‘Yes.’ They hadn’t dragged that thing through this terrain in twelve hours. It had been nearby, waiting for them. Who? A rival clan? Or some poor captured sod saving his life and his family’s?
‘God damn the bastards,’ said Grace, suddenly violent. ‘Do they think I’m made of lead?’
Barbary looked round in alarm. Was her rock wobbling? But Grace was striding out of the room, shouting orders. ‘Strip the roof. Light all braziers. Get the boats ready.’
The parapet round the roof of the tower was only waist-high, and the diameter of the roof itself so wide that to be in its centre meant exposure to the shore’s high ground and the musketry of the soldiers swarming over it like ants. Grace’s men had to crawl on their bellies to strip off the lead. They had two factors on their side: the lead had been softened by the heat of the beacon, now gone out, and the English musketry was terrible. Haverel was its one victim, and he was just grazed by a ball. He came round from momentary unconsciousness to be told by Rap: ‘It’s not where it matters. Only your head.’ The worst injuries were hands lacerated by torn metal.
Outside, the uppers of Hag’s Castle boot were jammed with besieging soldiers and officers. Attempt after attempt was being made to reach the door in the castle’s side with ladders and grappling hooks. So far they were being foiled from above by showers of rocks which had been laid up along the various storeys of the tower for just such an emergency. To shoot down at them with a gun meant leaning out of the windows, thus becoming a target. Keeroge, who tried it, took a small steel arrow in his throat from a matchlock. He tore it out.
‘Ain’t you got cannon?’ shrieked Barbary at Grace.
‘No.’
‘Jesus.’ Waiting for the bombardment was what terrified her most. She took a roll of lead out of the bleeding hands stretching it down through th
e roof hatch and skittered with it into Grace’s room where a cantilevered cauldron was being set up over the brazier. The tower began to reek with peat smoke as braziers were lit wherever there was a window or arrow slit.
She ran back to stand beneath the roof hatch and receive more lead. She didn’t hear the noise around her. They’d got the saker in position. They’d begin the procedure. The only sound in her head was Will’s voice chanting the fourteen commands for firing cannon.
‘One. Put back your piece. Two. Order your piece to load.’
Down to the next floor with more lead, this time into Haverel’s cauldron. He told her to go down to the undercroft and bring him more rocks ‘to discourage the bastards down there’. He had to tell her twice.
Up from the undercroft, this time hauling a net of rocks from the basement store. Dropping it on the first landing. Kitterdy Two, sweating, dragging it towards his arrow slit.
‘Three. Search your piece. Four. Sponge your piece. Five. Fill your ladle.’
More hands, more blood, more rolls of lead. Down the merciless steps, wedge-shaped, steep and naked.
‘Six. Put in your powder. Seven. Empty your ladle. Eight. Put up your powder.’ They were obeying the commands out there on that lovely shore. God damn them. God damn.
Shoving lead at Mooch standing over his cauldron. Down. More rocks into a net. Up the fokking stairs, meeting MacCaudle, the one Scotsman in the crew, coming down and singing. Singing?
‘Nine. Thrust home your wad. Ten. Regard your shot.’ What would they use? Stone? Iron? ‘Eleven. Put home your shot gently.’ Gently, gently.
Dropping the net on the second storey. Molly, still managing to mince, bless him, dragging it to his window. Gawk puffing at the peat in his brazier to get a flame. Cull on the inner balcony, overseeing the hauling of curraghs up from the undercroft. If they cleared away the soldiers outside – some hope – they’d throw out the boats and scramble after them and row away, row away, to Myles on his golden sea.
Soon now. Any minute. Up to the roof hatch. More lead.
The Pirate Queen Page 43