‘She’d better be.’ The city was rocking with the clanging of bells. The gate creaked open, panicking men and women poured through it. They were through into a parade, the gate slammed behind them, the keys turned. An arch, lots of arches, very few people. Those who weren’t out now wouldn’t get out. But there was the smell of river, the moon reflecting off water. Not enough boats and still a long, dangerous way to go; men and women in the water clinging to gunwales as they moved off. Cull was in her boat. In the next one a massive figure was swearing at the oarsmen. ‘Bend your backs, you swag-bellied, donkey-dicked fish-suckers.’
Beside her, Kitterdy Two gave a great sigh. ‘Listen to Herself. Did you ever hear such music?’
Barbary considered before she passed out again. She hadn’t.
* * *
A burst of musical bubbles woke Barbary up, Through one eye – the other wouldn’t open – she glared at a caged canary trilling with what she considered unnecessary force. The unopened eye hurt, her head ached, her throat was sore, breathing was painful, there were rope burns on her wrists, her nose was cold, the rest of her was clean and warm in a clean, warm bed. There were lobster pots in the corner of the grey-lit room, a Spanish chest, the sound and smell of the sea, and a man with his back to her, a cloak thrown over his shoulders, looking out of the window. She was on Clare, and as near heaven as she ever wanted to be. She was washed by gratitude for him, Grace O’Malley, Cull, Kitterdy Two, Molly, above all Molly, masked men and women she didn’t know.
‘Are you hurt bad?’ she asked in English.
‘Not much.’ He turned round. Under his cloak his chest was bare except for a bandage. His face was older than the intervening absence since Spenser Castle should have made it and it wouldn’t ever be as amused as it once had been. At the moment it wasn’t amused at all. ‘You’re awake then.’
‘How many got out?’
‘Thirty-five.’
Sixty or more fate unknown. Not to be thought of. ‘You did well.’
‘Did well?’ He was mocking her in his temper. Apparently she was at fault. ‘Did well? I threw away years, years. Mine and O’Neill’s. Planning, quietening the clans till we were ready. I had the bloody English eating out of me hand. In London Elizabeth was flirting her goggle eyes at me.’ His mouth pursed into a rictus alarmingly reminiscent of the Queen of England, and his voice went high. ‘“Rise Baron of Waterford and be a good boy.” Thank you, your bitch Majesty. For nothing.’
‘Thirty-five people would have hanged else.’
He turned back to the window. ‘Christ forgive me, I’ve not even the excuse I did it for them.’
She thought: we’re never going to get it right. Men are a waste of time. She went back to sleep.
When he woke her up it was dark outside the closed shutters, a brazier had been lit in the room and he had a bowl of porridge and a spoon.
Wincing, she pulled herself up and obediently opened her mouth to the spoon. ‘Gawd help us, what is it?’
‘Stirabout. I made it meself.’
‘Don’t take it up for a living. Where’s Herself?’ Outside the shutters the sea was roaring and banging, but the respondent echo in the tower indicated emptiness.
He shoved more stirabout in her mouth and scraped off the surplus, still angry. ‘The bloody woman wouldn’t leave one servant, not one. Stayed long enough to see her precious granddaughter would survive, and went to the mainland to prepare her inland defences. There’s a crone called Katty in the cottages who leaves bread and milk and dresses people’s wounds. And the look-out on the other side of the island.’ His irritation was giving his English an unusually heavy Irish accent. He put down the porridge and went back to his damned window, opening the shutters again. ‘I should be with O’Neill, making new plans now that you’ve destroyed my position with the English.’
‘I destroyed it? I destroyed it? That beats the Dutch, that does. Nobody asked you to come interfering. I’d have got away, never you mind. They weren’t going to trine Barbary Clampett. And I don’t want to be here any more than you. I’ve got plans of my own, thank you.’
He turned round. ‘It’s plans now, is it? What plans?’
‘Don’t you mock me, you bastard. I’ve got a place in this war just as big as you.’ She paused and quietened; it was true, she had. ‘I’m going to get O’Neill his guns. And I’ll bring Bingham down if it’s the last thing I do.’
‘Bingham? You? Bingham? Don’t bank on me rescuing you next time.’
‘You…’ Epithets failed her. ‘If you remember, the last time we was in a tower it was me rescued you.’
‘I do remember.’ She looked up because his tone had changed. ‘There’s the hell of it. I’ve remembered every second of it every day since. I’d go to confession to be rid of it, and remember it over again. And I’d think: there was nothing to that red-headed, skinny woman, nothing at all.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘A married woman who’d have forgotten me long ago. And I’d persuade myself I was only grateful for the saving of me life. And then, there you were among the prisoners. Skinnier than ever and dressed like a scarecrow.’ He came back towards the bed, and as he passed the firelight it gave a sheen to the skin over the muscles of his chest. ‘Why in hell get mixed up in this? Why didn’t you go back to your husband where you belong?’
She was snuffling. ‘You mind your own business.’
He picked up the stirabout. She could see he was in pain; how much of it was physical and how much mental she couldn’t tell. ‘And here we are again.’
Tears were running down her cheeks, and she got porridge over her face as she wiped them away. ‘I’m sorry, O’Hagan.’
‘Ah, now.’ He ran his finger over her mouth and put it in his own. ‘Maybe God’ll not notice. With all the ugly old evil going on out there, maybe He’ll wink at the bit of time we can snatch together.’ He smacked his lips. ‘This is grand stirabout and you’re an ungrateful Saxon, so you are. Did you remember me at all?’
‘No.’
He leaned forward and licked her face and then he was kissing her, his arms so tight round her that involuntarily she gasped in pain. He sat back, wincing on his own account. There was blood coming through his bandage. ‘God damn. How are we going to manage this now?’
‘Carefully.’ She rubbed her cheek against his. ‘But somehow.’
In the morning the room was freezing and snow had piled up on the windowsill and made a small drift on the floor beneath it. It was still coming through in thick flakes. Such a winter was rare in western Ireland and she could have sung at the weather’s complicity in their isolation. He was still asleep and she winched herself painfully onto her side to study his face. No wonder it had gained lines since Spenser Castle; the man had balanced his life on a blade edge and only nifty footwork had kept him from a nasty death at the hands of the English. In between making love, he had talked of the mission he’d carried out. Tricking the English into trusting him as their pacifier of the clans had been marginally less difficult than persuading the clans to cohere. ‘Some wanted to rise quicker than yesterday. Others saw no reason to rise at all. Others wouldn’t join O’Neill’s army, just kill their landlords.’ He lifted himself up to look at her. ‘You’ll not go back to Munster, promise me. Nobody will hold the MacSheehys from slaughter when it comes.’
‘When will it come?’
He shrugged. ‘Whenever it is, there’ll be no winning of it. Even if we beat them, Gaelic Ireland is lost.’
She didn’t ask him whether, in that case, there was any point to a war because she had seen enough to know that people pushed to the brink, as the Irish were being pushed, had to fight, if only to find a more survivable way of losing.
He amazed her. Organising the escape from Galway alone had required such nerve as made her gasp, and he’d done it for her. Being loved by him was astounding not just for itself but because for the first time in her life she could throw away physical and mental reserve. Last night she hadn
’t felt a fool in using her body, within the limits imposed by its battering, to show him how much she loved him, and telling him so over and again. She wished she could command erotic Irish such as he used so she could tell him better. Or erotic English for that matter. She wished she remembered the love poetry Philip Sidney had taught her. Order love language was strictly limited, its most romantic phrase for the sexual act being ‘mattress jig’. There weren’t words for him. ‘You’re a dimber cove, O’Hagan,’ she said at last.
He kept his eyes closed. ‘I’ll bet you say that to all the boys.’
She kissed him. ‘Let’s get that wound seen to.’
‘I’ve other priorities.’ He reached for her. She grimaced with pain, and he said: ‘Ouch. God help us, how do hedgehogs work these things?’
‘I told you… ow… carefully.’ But, again, manage they did, and afterwards she soaked the dressing away. He was still a baby in physical affliction.
‘Mother of God, woman, will you skin me?’ The wound wasn’t near as bad as the one that had nearly killed him in Munster; not a thrust through this time, but a slice that had colloped a portion of flesh away from the back of his waist.
‘It ain’t good,’ Barbary said. ‘Why can’t you stay out of trouble?’
‘Red-headed women keep getting me into it.’
They were driven out of the room eventually by hunger. O’Hagan had got it into his head that she should be recompensed for missing Christmas – ‘Bingham’s version of it being unfestal’ – by a feast of their own. But he wouldn’t allow Barbary to send for Katty to cook it. ‘No outsiders. You cook it.’ He didn’t believe her protestations that she couldn’t. ‘All women can cook.’
They hobbled downstairs – she was still discovering her injuries, and one of them was a sprained knee. They picked out a goose from Grace’s cold house and found her cupboards contained everything from basic flour, oats and beans, to exotic durables. ‘Sugar, my God,’ said O’Hagan. ‘Where did she get the sugar?’
‘Piloted it,’ said Barbary.
Her ineptitude at making forcemeat and shoving the unappetising result up the bird’s wrong end convinced him there was at least one woman who couldn’t cook, and he took over himself, becoming edgy and preoccupied with pan sizes and weights, in a self-imposed, brow-furrowed responsibility which couldn’t have worried him more if he’d been formulating a political constitution rather than a dinner for two. Redundant, Barbary wandered the tower, investigating her grandmother’s chests and boxes. Manus, the steward, had taken the more important valuables to be available to Herself on the mainland, but she was able to adorn the table with exquisite Dutch tankards of colourless glass mounted in silver-gilt, pewter bowls, and gold, Spanish, dolphin-shaped ear-picks which she set out because she thought they were spoons.
The shock was in discovering the hand mirror, in itself a lovely thing of polished steel set in embossed leather, but reflecting a face that had seen too much wear. Its skin was tightly stretched. She had a cut across the bridge of her nose, a dark-blue, moon-shaped bruise under one eye and a scar through her top lip. Had he been making love to that? She’d seen prettier pack saddles. And her hair…
She tried lugging an iron laundry boiler to the top room, and had to give up. She wrapped herself up in a cloak and hurried down the slope to the quay to beg Katty for a bath. While the water heated, she returned to the tower and ransacked it, putting her loot into a handcart.
Back in Katty’s kitchen, which smelled of baked bread and lye soap, she poured the unguent contents of strangely shaped glass bottles into the steaming wooden cask that was Katty’s bath and washtub. With a vague remembrance that Philip Sidney had known somebody who bathed in asses’ milk, she added a couple of quarts from the milk churn. She stripped, clambered in and, using a loofah from the unguent box, sat up to her neck in hot water and nearly scrubbed her freckles off. She washed her hair, dried it by sticking her head in the still-warm bread oven and burnished it with a pair of Grace’s silk drawers.
Eventually, smelling like a bawdy dairy, she paraded in front of Katty in jewelled, satin, high-heeled shoes somewhat too large and a child’s bodice and skirt slightly too small of sea-green plush stitched with pearls. She had Colombian emeralds in her ears and round her neck, hiding the rope burn; in her hand was a peacock-feather fan.
‘As beautiful as Herself on Sundays,’ Katty said, ‘though smaller.’
Going back up the hill to the tower, Barbary said goodbye for ever to boy’s attire. She might don male dress for convenience’s sake, but never again as a disguise; the mirror said she couldn’t get away with it much longer. Her body was still unsatisfactorily boyish in its thinness, but her face had lost its youth; not lined, not sadder, but set in awareness. It had always been knowing; now it had gained the ageing element of wisdom. She didn’t like it, but how old was she now? Twenty? Thereabouts. A mature woman; time to dress like one.
She posed in the doorway of the tower’s undercroft, the fan coquettishly over her lower face, waiting to be noticed. O’Hagan glanced up from his oven and came abstractedly towards her. ‘What’ll I do with all the goose grease?’ he asked.
She snapped the fan shut, and told him.
If she had to say once that the goose was the most perfectly cooked bird that ever graced a board, she had to say it twenty times. If it had been raw with feathers on she’d have said the same. The meal, the warmth, the candles, the furniture of the room, its lobster pots and cobwebs, the bloody canary, the sea and snow acting as sentinels outside, were all subsumed in enchantment. He was wearing one of Don Howsyourfather’s fine linen shirts, ruffled at the wrists and open at the neck, and when he’d stopped preening himself at the goose’s perfections, he became aware of her. Even then he didn’t seem to notice the dress or the emeralds. He put down his tankard of Grace’s best Bordeaux and leaned his elbows on the table, staring. ‘Hair like that should have special dispensation from the Pope.’ He was slightly drunk, but so was she, and neither of them on the wine.
‘Admit it, O’Hagan, you wouldn’t love me if I was bald.’
‘I would not.’
‘Stop looking at me like that.’
‘I can’t help it. God help me, I can’t help it.’
The bawds had never said that there could be this sort of passion between men and women, so desperate it was a form of despair.
After a week or two of this intimate living, she supposed the passion she felt would become domesticated into something more comfortable and everyday.
It didn’t. She knew every inch of him but he could still come back into the room from fetching peat or water, and his long-bodied shape in the doorway unsettled her breathing as badly as it had back in Spenser Castle gatehouse.
Her breathing was unsettled anyway. She wasn’t getting better as fast as he was. He’d healed nicely and she’d lost her bruises, but the pain in her chest kept coming back. At first the illness lurked, like an eavesdropper at the door, so that she was only uneasily aware of it. She waited for it to go away, but gradually the lurker came in as real and unwelcome as a third person. She had more and more difficulty waking up from sleeps that resembled delirium. She didn’t tell him because she couldn’t believe that her happiness wouldn’t cure it. With the poignancy and joy of this spring-in-winter, she must get better. She was in a spice-scented Hy Brazil floating on azure waters, sprinkled with flowers that to the less enchanted were frost crystals on dead stalks of grass. When they went for a walk, their frozen breath made lambs’-tail clouds.
‘The Order would say this was my bunting times,’ she said, panting, to O’Hagan, dislodging the aftermath of a snowball from her neck.
‘Bunting times?’
‘When the grass is high enough to hide the loving of swain and maid.’
But on the next walk she fell down and couldn’t get up. He carried her back to the Tower. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m all right.’
She was aware that he nursed her
, as she had nursed him. Through terrible dreams, his voice was the only causeway leading her back to solid ground. Sometimes it bullied her back, then it pleaded. ‘Will you die on me?’
Chapter Nineteen
It was the coldest winter anyone in Ireland could remember. Starvation forced the mere Irish, who had hoped to stay clear of both, to join either the rebels or the English army. In neither camp did they find more in the way of food and warm clothing than if they’d stayed where they were, though things were marginally better among the rebels who were not subject to a royal parsimony that forced the queen’s Irish administrators into corruption which began at the top and filtered down to the bottom where soldiers had to sell their weapons in order to eat. It was a time of inactivity and complaint and therefore a time to look for a scapegoat. Among the constant despatches from Ireland landing on Lord Burghley’s desk requesting supplies, uniforms, arms and money, he began to notice increasing mention of O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Spies were bringing information, for which they were paid, that O’Neill was treating with Spain, with Scotland, with rebels. He was still protecting shipwrecked Spaniards. He would not move against neighbouring Irish clans who refused to pay their taxes. It was he who had been behind the escapes from Dublin Castle, he was in cahoots with the pirate Grace O’Malley, he was in cahoots with the O’Donnell who was once more ensconced in the fastnesses of Donegal, defying Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
For the Irish huddled round their peat fires, equally inactive and with even more complaint, it was time to look for a deliverer. And there, too, men and women mentioned with increasing frequency the name of the O’Neill. They passed around among them the ancient prophecy of the Two Hughs who, when they came together, as Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh O’Neill were now contemporaneous, would bring about the reinstatement of the High King of Ireland, and banish from thence all foreign nations and conquerors.
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