‘I know him,’ puzzled Molly. He nudged Barbary. ‘Don’t you know him from somewheres?’
Sighing with irritation, Barbary looked, and stopped sighing. She knew him. Very well.
* * *
‘I resent that,’ Chief Justice Wallop was saying with energy to Bingham, ‘soft on the Irish, by God’s eyes. You’ll not confuse me with Perrot. I’ve hanged more of the buggers than you’ve had hot dinners, but I’ll not let you hang those innocent mites there. You’ll set the whole province by the ears.’ Wallop was fat and red and, at this point, extremely sweaty.
The newly created Baron of Waterford looked at the mites standing by themselves in the centre of the cobbles; innocent indeed. But among the prisoners just brought in there was a little girl no more than four years old, not to mention babies in arms, yet Wallop wasn’t protesting their doom. It was a matter of class. The Bourke children were nobly born, or as nobly born as Irish children could be, and well educated; they spoke English, qualifying for Chief Justice Wallop’s compassion. The children huddling with their mothers and fathers in the crowd of prisoners were mere Irish. Expendable.
The Bishop of Kilmore, the mayor and other dignitaries of Galway added their voices to Wallop’s, but more respectfully. Bingham stood in a silence that insulated him. His thin, handsome face was calm, his eyes fixed on a point others could not see. He would not argue; earlier he had said: ‘They are hostages and their lives are forfeit for their fathers’ treachery.’ There was no necessity for repetition. He knew he was right.
And, thought the new Lord Waterford, he is. That’s what rules are for, to be rules. Bingham rode his orders with the logic of a man who, assured the road ahead is straight, ignores the bends and goes over the cliff edge, taking everybody else with him. ‘Anglicise Connaught,’ his queen had told him, so Bingham applied the letter of English Common Law to a people who had operated a different system for a thousand years, showing none of the flexibility of which other governors, and even his own queen, were capable. This latest rebellion by the Bourkes had been caused by Bingham’s abolition of the MacWilliamship, the title to their chieftaincy. It was an Irish title, therefore it did not exist; the fact that it had in fact existed since 1342, and that time and persuasion were needed before the Bourkes would abandon it, was irrelevant because the rules made it so.
Had Bingham been a different sort of man, Lord Waterford could have felt compassion for him. He truly wanted the betterment of Connaught; it just didn’t behave as it was supposed to. When Bingham looked at the boys in the centre of the courtyard he didn’t see three pitiful children, only an aberration to his pattern. He was going to hang them to make his pattern tidy, and nothing would stop him.
The smallest boy broke away from the other two and came stumbling up to the dais. ‘Don’t hang me, my lords,’ he said. ‘I can read. I heard you don’t hang people who can read. I can read. A bit.’
His older cousin ran forward and dragged him back. ‘Don’t beg.’
Chief Justice Wallop’s eyes filled. ‘Bless the child, he’s pleading benefit of clergy.’ He turned to Lord Waterford. ‘You talk to the bastard,’ he muttered. ‘We can’t have this.’
I could run him through, thought Lord Waterford, I could rally the disloyal element in the town and effect a rescue. And I’d throw away the position I’ve worked so hard for these last years. He shrugged. ‘My lord,’ he said to Bingham, ‘you know for what services Her Gracious Majesty has seen fit to honour me. By my persuasion, tribe after tribe has been brought in to offer her its loyalty. Let me attempt the same on the Bourkes. With time and some rope we shall receive a happy outcome.’
‘No time,’ said Lord Lieutenant Bingham pleasantly, ‘but plenty of rope. My lords, gentlemen, it is late. Let us to dinner.’
Wallop was seduced. He’d come to Galway for the festivities and the hunting, not for argument, and he was hungry. He’d work on Bingham over the meal. He led the way to the southern gate of the courtyard, patting the smallest Bourke kindly on the head as he passed. Lord Waterford tried not to look at the boys, but something dragged his attention to the common prisoners crowded in their corner. The light from the flare was being reflected back from a head of hair so red that it was like a flare itself. It was of a once-in-a-lifetime redness. With wine in it. He stopped in his tracks.
‘After you, Waterford.’ Bingham was at the gate, waiting for him, alert and untrusting.
‘Will you be hanging this rabble tonight, my lord?’
Bingham had clear, sharply defined eyes, like a raptor’s. ‘Perhaps.’ He did not have to explain himself to an Irishman, even one ennobled by the queen. They left the courtyard together.
Padraig, who acted as Lord Waterford’s personal valet on these trips, was waiting at Lynch Castle, and hurried up the stairs with him. ‘We’ve had word from a friend, my lord. Concerned about a relative.’
‘A granddaughter, perhaps,’ said Lord Waterford.
‘How did you know?’
In the room Lord Waterford kicked the door shut. ‘Where’s Herself?’
‘Out in the bay with three ships. The message is,’ Padraig paused because he didn’t believe it, ‘she’s ready to attack when we give the word.’
Attack Galway. Either Grace O’Malley’s concern for Barbary was outweighing her common sense, or she’d gone insane. Even at Christmas Galway’s walls were invulnerable to the outside. But at Christmas, maybe, they could be vulnerable to the inside. Maybe.
Lord Waterford spoke fast. ‘Gather our friends in the city while I’m at dinner. The nightwatchman reaches the landward gate walls every half-hour. Replace him. Kill him and replace him. Mind you get someone who sounds like him. Phelim O’Dowd – he can imitate anybody. I want men on those walls immediately. Any attempt to hang the prisoners is to be stopped. The soldiers have no guns. Just pikes. Get a message to Herself to have small boats near Spanish Arch Quay by midnight. Then I want arms, all you can get. And masks. About a hundred.’
‘Masks? There’s not a mask available in the city this night. Every bastard’s wearing one.’
The newly created Baron of Waterford took his cousin by the elbows and lifted him off the floor to look into his eyes. ‘Masks,’ he said.
‘Mother of God, Conn, I will if I can. Don’t hurt.’
Some sanity, though not much, returned to his chief’s face. ‘I’m getting her out of there, Padraig.’
‘I know you are, Conn. I know. Put me down and I’m away this minute.’ As he left the room, Padraig added, without hope: ‘And God save us all.’
Behind him, Conn O’Hagan kicked a side table into the fireplace, picked up a stool and threw it against the wall where it splintered noisily, adjusted his cloak and went down to dinner.
* * *
Barbary watched her lover go, leaving her imprisoned.
‘Is it Conn O’Hagan gone over to the Gauls?’ asked Molly.
She smiled at him as she hadn’t smiled for a week, for months. ‘It’s Conn O’Hagan come to get us out.’ If her brain had been working she’d have called out, ‘Don’t come back.’ She’d seen it in his face, watched it move as he saw her. He’d get her out. He’d got her out before. And if he couldn’t, her heels would drum the more lightly because she’d seen him again. ‘Don’t come back.’
Suddenly she knew how brave she’d been; all this long time, so brave to be without him. Even in her happiness at finding the land of the cherubims, she’d clenched emotional muscles against his loss, missing him so badly she hadn’t dare recognise it. Filthy and in pain, a rope round her neck, she leaned luxuriously back against Kitterdy’s shoulder and let herself remember a room in a gatehouse at Spenser Castle. They’d been doodles to let each other go. Her as stupid as him. More. What they’d had in that room had been greater than any religion, any cause. Causes and religion were here, in this stinking court. God, Finola’s God, had been there. If he did get her out, if she ever got him back, she’d never let him go again. She’d be a penance to him i
f she must be. O’Neill could whistle for his guns, Ireland could sell itself for dogmeat, but she’d never let him go again.
From the walkway of the wall above them, Galway’s nightwatchman stamped his round. He stood on the rampart of the North Gate, a deeper black figure against the black sky. ‘Eleven o’clock and all’s well.’
Bingham returned. He spoke briefly to the sergeant and went away again. As he left, the soldiers began binding the male prisoners’ wrists and legs. Panic broke out. Some of the women, their nerve gone, began screaming. A few of the men fought and the soldiers used their pikes on them. Children ran and were cuffed back to the group.
‘Is it now?’ She wasn’t brave at all. Molly’s hand had hers in a grip and she clung to it.
‘It’ll be quick,’ he said. It wouldn’t be quick. She’d seen it. One of the soldiers tore their hands apart to rope them, and clubbed Molly over the head when he struggled.
She was almost blind with fear. It took minutes to register that only three of the gallows were being got ready. Three kick-stools placed under three nooses. Dear God, it was to be the boys. Not her and the others, not yet. The Bourke children.
The mere Irish became quiet. Sounds of revelry came from over the south wall. The littlest one’s voice rose sharply: ‘But I can read.’ He was clinging to the soldier taking him to the platform.
Please God, please, prayed Barbary. Whoever you are, wherever you are, please no. They heard the eldest say: ‘Be brave.’ They were pressed further back into their corner with ten soldiers forming an angle across them, pikes levelled. There was nothing to be done. Except one thing. One of the women fell to her knees and raised her voice in a chant: ‘Christ be with me, Christ be before me.’
It was the Faeth Fiadha, the Deer’s Cry, St Patrick’s own invocation of his God at a time of great peril.
‘Christ be behind me, Christ be with me.’
Beside Barbary, Molly’s deep voice and then Kitterdy’s took up the chant: ‘Christ be beneath me, Christ be above me. Christ be at my right, Christ be at my left…’
The singing swelled as all the prisoners knelt for the boys.
‘Christ be in the heart of everyone who thinks of me. Christ be in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me.’
The soldiers worked quickly for a kindness. The youngest boy’s voice shouted once more, ‘But I can read,’ before it choked away.
‘Christ be in every eye that sees me; Christ be in every ear that hears me.’
It was over. At least they hadn’t been alone.
The soldiers stepped back and put up their pikes. The sergeant and his team came down from the platform. For some reason the sergeant looked apologetically at Kitterdy Two. ‘Orders to leave them up there,’ he said. ‘And you,’ he addressed the gatekeeper, ‘get out there and find us some whiskey. There’s no more hanging tonight.’
Though nobody looked at them, the quiet of the three bundles on the gallows permeated the courtyard. The living children fell asleep on their parents’ lap, the other prisoners huddled together and tried to doze, though it was becoming very cold. Where the boys had stood, the soldiers made a bonfire and sat round it, occasionally grumbling, mostly silent. The gatekeeper came back rolling a barrel. ‘Compliments of a grand gentleman.’ He stayed to sample it.
Stars came out and frost fell; Barbary could almost see it falling. First the cobbles acquired a sheen and then a gentle sparkle. ‘I tell you this much,’ she said to the stars, ‘if I get out of here I’m going to hunt Bingham down to hell.’
Molly was awake. ‘And I’ll be with you.’
The cloaked figure of the nightwatchman thumped its way along the top of the wall. ‘Twelve o’clock and all’s well.’
Kitterdy Two stirred. ‘Strange,’ he said. Nobody asked him what was, and he settled down again. Steady tapping of the barrel was going on round the fire, rallying the soldiers into better humour.
A new crowd of revellers was approaching the street outside the courtyard’s city gate, shouting and laughing, rattling sticks along railings, clanging cymbals, and singing at the top of its voice the song about Galway’s founding, and apparently well-endowed, giant who lived on a rock in the bay. ‘It was long as the river, and as thick as the town.’
Molly started, and began shaking awake the prisoners attached to his neck rope. Barbary wanted peace. ‘Leave me alone.’ Molly jerked his head upwards. On the ramparts there were shapes like statues that hadn’t been there before. Other prisoners were stirring, gently wriggling themselves free of sleeping children. Barbary had difficulty with her breath; frantically she tried to flex hands numbed by the restricting rope.
‘And the poor maiden quivered as it went up and down.’
Kitterdy Two was speaking to the others. ‘There’s an alarm bell in the gatekeeper’s lodge. We get between him and it.’
A soldier by the fire fell forward into it and stayed there. Two more slumped sideways. If it hadn’t been that the one in the flames was burning, they might all have been pretending. The sound of whatever had hit them was lost in the noise from the street. Barbary looked up and saw an archaic figure swinging a piece of leather round his head. The sling opened. A fourth soldier fell forward. Another had sprouted a dart in his eye. But the rest were on their feet. Shapes were coming down the walls on ropes. A soldier ran one of them through the back with his pike before it reached the ground.
Barbary felt a tug on her neck as Molly began to crawl to the lodge. She crawled after him with the others, in parallel, awkwardly, so as not to throttle themselves. The gatekeeper, picked for size rather than quickness on the uptake, recovered his wits and rushed for his lodge and the bellrope, to find himself impeded by a twelve-legged, clumsy monster insect whose attack, like a bee, threatened its own life but which, like a bee, was prepared to risk it. He drew a dagger and charged. Barbary was dragged down in a mass of shouting, biting, kicking bodies. She couldn’t see which was whose. Agony came from somebody’s elbow in her broken ribs, the rope was tightening on her neck. She clawed at it, open-mouthed, rolling in the tangle. Her last, strangled, irritable thought was that she was saving Bingham the trouble…
Of all things, somebody was putting a hat on her head. She flapped at it feebly and somebody slapped her. ‘Leave it on. Get up.’ Her hands were apart, they must be free. She could breathe but wished she couldn’t. Her lover’s voice was unloving. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Just passing through.’ She was in a lot of pain.
The gates to the town were open and her fellow prisoners were being ushered through them, each having a mask slapped on his or her face by men who were themselves masked. ‘Remember to revel now,’ they were being told. ‘Come on, you can revel.’
‘Whyn’t we go that way?’ She nodded her way towards the gate leading to open country.
‘Barracks.’
The courtyard was littered with bodies, more bodies than there had been soldiers. O’Hagan had had his losses. There was another body at her feet. ‘Molly. Oh, not Molly.’
Kitterdy Two put Barbary’s right arm round his neck. ‘He’s dead, bless him. And took the gatekeeper with him.’ O’Hagan took her other arm and they half dragged her to the gate. A cheery rescuer tied mask strings under her hat. ‘Don’t forget to revel now.’
They joined the gang which had been making such a noise outside the gate; it continued making it as it wound its way back down the street. ‘It was long as the river. It was thick as the town.’ Some of the men and women were fantastically dressed, carrying torches, waving bladders. A couple had drums, one a whistle. They jigged along before, behind and on the edges of what was now a huge snake of people, most of them as festal as death. Barbary saw the eyes of a fisherman’s wife who’d been captured at Lough Corrib staring in terror from the holes in her mask as she tried to jiggle her baby like a Christmas puppet.
Barbary wasn’t sure whether some streets were brightly lit and others dark or whether she kept losing consciousness. In the
bright bits she prayed for dark. They didn’t look like revellers; except for O’Hagan and the other rescuers, they were too ragged and radiated too much fear. Besides, the streets were quieter now. Galway had drunk itself into stupor. What gaiety there was had locked itself into the houses, leaving the streets to the dead drunk and night prowlers who, in turn, were attracting patrols of the portreeves. And they were losing people. Every time she looked behind to the rest of the snake, it was smaller; some weren’t keeping up with the pace O’Hagan was setting.
‘Wait,’ she shouted at him.
‘No.’
Her hand which was clutching the back of his cloak was wet. He was bleeding. He let go of her for a moment to clout a MacJordan shepherd. ‘Revel, you bastard.’ The man attempted a caper, shook a bladder he’d been given, and resumed the lope of a hunted dog.
They were approaching a square by a church; across its entrance were a string of men with a ship, Galway’s arms, blazoned on their tabards. They were shouting something. Barbary dropped to her knees as O’Hagan let go of her again and drew his sword. Kitterdy Two and some of the other rescuers joined him in a rush forward. There was a rasp of steel. She struggled to her feet and ran forward over bodies. Some of the portreeves had got away. Kitterdy Two and O’Hagan were alive. They grabbed her hands, running now as the great bell of St Nicholas Church began to toll the alarm. The crowd behind them was smaller than ever, and at its far end there was shouting and some kerfuffle.
She woke up because they’d stopped again. They were at a wall, gates. A stout man in front of her, holding a huge ring of keys which jingled as he hopped up and down, was the best dressed she’d seen this night. She recognised the type, aldermanic. ‘Will you ruin me, O’Hagan?’
‘Get the bloody gate open.’
There were more bodies around, presumably the gate guard. As the alderman-type fumbled with the locks, she heard O’Hagan say, ‘She’s O’Neill’s agent. She’s important.’
The Pirate Queen Page 45