And in Ulster O’Neill himself bent and resisted, doubled and dodged, in his attempt to be all things to all men and still keep Ulster free. On the east he had an angry and reluctant brother-in-law, Henry Bagenal, trying to bring him forcibly to court on the grounds that he had married Mabel Bagenal bigamously. He had commands, exhortations, enquiries and bans arriving every day by snow-covered English messengers from Dublin. From the south-west, also every day, he received pleas for help from clans writhing under Bingham’s oppression. He was trying to keep his westerly neighbour, Maguire, from all-out war with England and to control the even more westerly, even more hot-headed Hugh O’Donnell, his kinsman. Struggling against calumny, prophecy and snow, the O’Neill went to Dublin and cried as he answered the charges against him. He cried so hard his accusers were embarrassed. ‘I acknowledge myself most bound to Her Majesty for her great goodness and bounty extended towards me,’ he sobbed. ‘Let me go to London that I may kiss her feet and tell her how I am hounded on all sides.’
He didn’t go, he had no intention of going, but he was playing a strong card, because the Dublin administrators didn’t want him to go either. For all they knew, O’Neill might be in the right; the only evidence against him was based on the word of unreliable spies. If they could have requested one gift from God that winter, it would have been the ability to see into O’Neill’s mind. But though God might be holding the lantern that cast light into such a dark labyrinth, He wasn’t giving it to anybody else.
It was not to be expected that a man like Bingham would suffer prisoners to be removed from under his nose without reprisal, and he didn’t. While Barbary was fighting for breath at Clare Castle, her grandmother arrived to say that an English fleet was on its way from Galway and that Clare itself must be evacuated.
‘Bingham’s enough ships with him to choke Clew Bay,’ she told O’Hagan. ‘Maybe we’ll beat him off, maybe we won’t. Either way the girl must be got out.’
O’Hagan panicked. ‘She’ll die. She’s dying now. I’ll not move her.’
Grace O’Malley was unmoved. ‘Will we ask Bingham to let her get better before he hangs her?’
‘Where to, then? Where do we send her?’
‘To the O’Neill. Ulster has the only safety now. The sea’s calm and I’ve a good little merchantman waiting to take her. Katty and Kitterdy Two will go along with her. I’ll be needing you here.’
The two escapers from Dublin Castle looked hard at each other. Grace was right, O’Hagan knew she was right. He wrapped Barbary in a large, warm cloak and carried her to the landing stage. She felt the cold on her face, tasted the sea air, and put what energy she had into clinging onto his neck. ‘Don’t send me away.’ She was only safe when she was with him. Losing him now would be losing him for ever.
‘I’ll get you back. Avourneen, listen to me. If hell comes between us, I’ll get you back.’ But he wouldn’t have put money on the chance of either of them surviving the next few days. Carefully he handed her over to Kitterdy Two.
‘She’ll come through,’ Grace told him. ‘She’s got the O’Malley blood with her.’
* * *
The O’Neill castle on its hill at Dungannon commanded the north’s River Blackwater. It was of so many architectural periods that from a distance its towers and steep-pitched mansards resembled a collection of stalagmites. It would have grieved Lord Burghley to see that not one of them was roofed with the lead he had so kindly permitted the O’Neill to import from England, that same lead having long ago been moulded into bullets.
However, O’Neill had paid his patron the compliment of building on a new section that was a pastiche of Burghley’s home of Theobalds, a jumble of cinquecento and Tudor styles. It had a gallery a hundred feet long, a magnificent staircase rising out of an enormous hall, parapets and porticos carved into grotesque shapes, black and white stone floors, side walks in the gardens, and statuary everywhere. But whereas the risk of siege was a thing of the past in Hertfordshire and Theobalds could face the world unprotected, Dungannon was curtained by walls.
The room where Barbary was nursed back to health, though not without difficulty, was high up in one of the modern turrets and looked over the battlements to woodland and Lough Neagh. It wasn’t a restful room. Every inch of wall was tapestried with hunting scenes. Its ceiling was vaulted into a roundel depicting a scantily clad Artemis aiming a bow at an equally naked Actaeon, somewhat needlessly, thought Barbary, since he was being torn apart by hounds anyway. She spent listless days staring at it from her pillow. It was a sign she was getting better when the scene began to get on her nerves. And the day she was heard to hiss at Artemis: ‘Oh, go ahead and shoot him,’ was the day that Katty informed the O’Neill her patient had turned the corner and could be visited.
He came into the room tiptoeing absurdly, one hand holding a pomander to his nose and the other proffering a posy. ‘Are you better?’
Katty took the posy and put it in water. ‘Sure, I could blow her off me hand, but she’s better, thanks be to God.’
‘Grand. I hate sick women.’ Everything about him was exaggerated, his beard – he was dyeing it – his over-colourful clothes, his gestures. Even the fact that he knew he was verging on caricature was exaggerated; his long black eyes looked sideways to measure his effect. The room became doubly unrestful.
‘Any news?’ Barbary asked.
‘None.’
She sank back. There had been a perfunctory sea battle between Grace O’Malley and the English fleet outside Clew Bay, but the overwhelming superiority of Bingham’s numbers and firepower had been such that Grace had used her own superiority in seamanship and knowledge of the waters to make her escape with few losses. Since then, there’d been no word of either her or O’Hagan. It was only O’Hagan Barbary worried for; Grace O’Malley had established herself in her granddaughter’s mind as immortal. They wouldn’t get Grace O’Malley. But for the vulnerable O’Hagan she prayed barbaric prayers. ‘Just keep him safe. I’ll never see him again if that’s what You want, so long as You keep him safe.’
The rest of the news was not reassuring. The settlement of Connaught, which had never been as successful as Munster’s, was being renewed. Bingham’s army was evicting the Irish, there was fighting and starvation.
The O’Neill perched himself on the window seat and opened the casement to the falling snow outside. Katty promptly shut it. He went on staring out through the glass. ‘They’re plucking geese in Connaught,’ he said, ‘that’s what we used to say when it snowed. Plucking geese in Connaught. It’s Bingham plucking them now.’ He slid his eyes towards the bed. ‘It’s gone, Connaught’s gone,’ as if western Ireland had slid into the sea. ‘I’m the man in the gap.’
‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’
‘Not at all. We’d have heard. They’ll turn up one day, dead or alive or a-horseback.’ He came over to sit on the bed. ‘Do you want other news?’
She shook her head.
‘Then I’ll begin. Did you know Sir Walter Raleigh is in the Tower for having made a secret marriage to one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour?’
‘Never.’ He’d caught her attention. ‘What’d he do that for?’
‘I imagine,’ drawled the O’Neill, ‘that he got bored. Pouring out passion for the queen and staying celibate can only be done by a Christopher Hatton, and he’s dead now, poor bastard. The intelligent find it wearing. Perhaps our Walter wanted legitimate issue. He’s forty-one years old, after all.’
She pondered on it, and the O’Neill, watching her, thought she’d fallen asleep until she said: ‘Poor old Edmund. What price his poem now?’
‘Spenser’s back in Ireland.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘Are you interested in your husband at all?’
She’d known this would come. ‘I suppose so.’ It wasn’t as her husband she remembered him; her mind had rejected the interlude of marriage and reinstated Rob as the real Rob, the lover of ships and books, Rob of her childhood, the only Rob for whom she could fe
el any affection, and even that as someone far removed.
But O’Neill kept insisting on the relationship. ‘He’s rising, your husband. He came well out of the recent campaign, the only one that did.’
The expedition to pursue the Spanish fleet to its home ports had proved disastrous. Its leaders, Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris, had refused to risk their ships on a difficult crossing to the Biscayan ports and disobeyed Elizabeth’s orders by sailing on to the Azores to look for prizes among the New World fleets, knowing the queen’s displeasure could be assuaged with gold. They hadn’t found it. Eleven thousand men lost their lives and the condition of the returning ships was lamentable.
‘But your husband had the good luck. He took a prize stuffed with spices, much of it pepper. Do you know what pepper fetches in England? Elizabeth sneezed her pleasure at him. She likes a well-built young man with good luck. He’s at court now, an object of jealousy to the boy Essex, so I’m told. Drake’s in disgrace and poor Norris is back in Ireland.’
He was still looking at her for a reaction, but it was like listening to fairy tales, something happening in another world. ‘Well,’ she said, and went back to sleep.
She spent much of her convalescence on the window seat, and much of that time straining her eyes towards Lough Neagh, looking for a ship flying the O’Malley pennant, which never came. When the waiting became unbearable she would distract herself by looking down into the formal garden sixty feet below her turret where men and women were reduced to the size of chess pieces. It was a bird’s eye view on the dangerous game the O’Neill was playing, so dangerous that if some of the pieces encountered others, his life was forfeit.
There was the bearded, cloak-swirling Maguire, a figure out of myth and head of the English-hating clan that bordered O’Neill territory, brandishing his fists at the O’Neill and bawling his wrongs in Irish. There were the Catholic priests remonstrating in Latin, come from Rome to urge on O’Neill the Holy War which would restore the True Faith to Ireland.
Once, and it made the palms of her hands sweat, a servant came running to clear them out in the nick of time before a deputation of English officials from Dublin came stalking into the garden to give orders to the O’Neill in high, commanding voices that came up to her like the cawing of rooks. The hats of the English passed along one side of a hedge, while the tonsured heads of the priests, a bobbing row of spring onions, skulked along the other.
She watched the small figure in the centre of it all caper, talk, reason, argue, switch from command to petition, from Irish to English to Latin and back again, stand straight, bow, give and receive homage, and wondered when it would go mad. There were times when he came to her room and she wondered if he wasn’t mad already, so violently did he rail, as much against his own people as the English. But it was the madness of a visionary who sees what others are too short-sighted to glimpse.
‘All they can grasp is that Elizabeth offers them abasement. They’ll go out and fight in individual, heroic despair, grand idiots that they are, knowing that they’ll fall. And all the time there’s an alternative, my alternative. A confederation of Gaelic clans which, given time, could be so mighty that Elizabeth would be powerless against it. But they’ve never united before, so they don’t see it. God damn them. God damn them.’
Even on unharassed days the O’Neill was never still, and walked the garden dictating to his English secretaries interminable letters to Burghley and the queen and in the next breath to Philip of Spain.
‘Why use English scribes?’ she asked him once. ‘Didn’t one of them betray you once?’ Katty got a lot of information from the servants.
The O’Neill flicked his fingers. ‘I only trust the devious, Lady Betty, being a devious man myself. It’s the straightforward give me trouble. I never know what bulls like Maguire and the O’Donnell are going to do.’
On another day she saw two beautiful girls quarrelling as they pulled him in two different directions. ‘Sure and he’s got to have mistresses,’ Katty told her. ‘Would he keep the respect of his people if he didn’t have women?’
‘But where’s Mabel?’
‘Who?’ asked Katty.
And there was the ghost. Barbary knew it was a ghost because, although she could see it from her eyrie, nobody else did. Sometimes it was alone, drifting through the early spring garden, sometimes it made its appearance when the garden was crowded, moving through conversing groups that obliviously went on talking. It was elderly, thin and female. Nobody addressed it or looked at it. Barbary was relieved it cast a shadow.
On the night after his physician had pronounced her well, the O’Neill came up to escort Barbary down to the hall for dinner. She was reluctant. Her window had become a waiting place, suited to the limbo she existed in.
‘It’s only family,’ O’Neill said. ‘Nobody controversial tonight. A small feast in your honour.’ His idea of a small feast was 200 people; the entire clan felt free to pop in to sample O’Neill hospitality any time it was passing, often staying for months, sometimes taking up permanent residence. To Barbary, used to the quiet of her room, it looked, and sounded, as if half Ulster and its dogs had come for dinner.
‘I’ll not toast you,’ said the O’Neill, ‘for there’s no need to let the secretaries know everyone who stays here.’ The chair on his other side was empty. ‘They’ll think you’re a new mistress and that I’m a lucky man.’ He was smiling as he said it but his eyes were on the far end of the hall where a figure had come in to drift along the tables. It was the ghost. It leaned over a guest, who appeared not to notice, and picked up a leg of chicken which it gnawed as it continued its invisible progress.
‘Excuse me, my dear.’ O’Neill left his seat and walked towards the ghost, courteously taking its hand to conduct it to the empty chair beside his, but it moved away from him and went out.
Now Barbary knew who it was. She ran outside after it and caught it up among the geometric flower beds of the garden where she had so often watched it walk. ‘Mabel. It’s me. Barbary. You came to see me once. At the Spensers’ house in Dublin. I was going to be married and you were…’ She gave it up.
‘Did I?’ Mabel didn’t remember. She was fairly interested, but no more than in the chicken leg, which wasn’t much. How could somebody young look this old? No, not old. Age was something positive, and everything positive had gone out of Mabel O’Neill. She was dressed in Irish clothes, but wasn’t wearing them; somebody else had stuck them on her and the shoulder seam sagged at the front of her chest, the head-roll had been jammed ridiculously far down on her forehead. Youth, health, emotion had gone but there wasn’t enough in her to say she was ill. Her face, which had been so round and pink-cheeked, merely lacked definition. Some remnant of manners remained. ‘So pleased you could come.’
‘The O’Neill was kind enough to shelter me.’
Mabel patted her on the shoulder. ‘You must make sure he doesn’t kill you,’ she said. She might have been advising against the prawns.
‘Does he kill people?’
‘I think so. I think he killed my brother.’ She dropped the bone, regarded her hands as things not belonging to her and wiped them on her skirt.
‘Mabel.’ Barbary put her hands under the woman’s chin, so that she would look at her. ‘Mabel, Henry Bagenal’s alive. O’Neill hasn’t killed him.’
Mabel nodded, ‘I expect so,’ and began to move away.
Barbary held on to her. ‘Would you like to see your brother? Mabel, we can go now. I’ll take you now, this minute.’ And she would have done; anything to reverse this lethal wilting. Sod O’Neill. Him and his bloody table napkins, what had he done to the girl? ‘What’s he done to you, Mabel?’
The Countess of Tyrone glanced up at the moon like someone estimating the time and disengaged Barbary’s clutching hand. ‘He kills people.’
Barbary watched the ghost of Mabel Bagenal waver away. She found the O’Neill beside her and turned on him. ‘What in hell have you done to her?’
/> He shrugged. ‘She didn’t transplant well.’
‘Didn’t transplant well?’ She could have hit him. As if Mabel Bagenal were a cutting refusing to flourish. ‘How did you ever think she could?’ The loneliness of the girl. Dropped into what she must have seen as Dark Age society where the barbarians regarded her manners, her language, her people and her religion with contempt.
‘You did,’ said the O’Neill.
That was different. She’d been prepared by the Order’s own form of barbarism. Besides, for her it had been a coming home and her eyes had been opened to its beauty and comradeship.
‘My dear,’ said the O’Neill, ‘I should like you to come with me on a little boating trip. There are some people out on Lough Neagh I want you to meet, and it would be as well if nobody else saw their faces. Horses are being got ready for the ride to the loughside, if you feel well enough.’
She forgot Mabel and clutched at him. ‘Is it O’Hagan?’
‘I fear not, though I have received word of him.’
‘Is he safe? Where is he?’
It was chilly in the garden. Absentmindedly the O’Neill took her hand and held it high so that they walked in the attitude of dance as they once had in the garden of Penshurst a long time before. ‘He is well,’ he said, ‘and on his way to Spain.’
She couldn’t understand him at first. ‘Spain? Spain? Why’s he going to Spain?’
‘Because I ordered him there.’ He turned and, still prancing, led her back the way they’d come. ‘My dear Lady Betty, our mutual friend O’Hagan is possibly the most able lieutenant I have. His action in rescuing you from Galway must be applauded, but it finished his usefulness here. In my position I cannot afford to waste talent and, since King Philip knows and likes him, he is to be my unofficial ambassador in certain negotiations I am conducting.’ He glanced up at the moon. ‘It’s time we were going.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ She was stumbling to keep up with him as he led her through an archway towards the stable block. Somebody wrapped her in a riding cloak and helped her up onto a horse. ‘I don’t believe you.’
The Pirate Queen Page 47