‘We must be quiet now. Wait until we’re in the woods.’
They rode through gates, courtyards, more gates, a lane and along a green road through woods. For all Barbary was aware of their progress they could have been standing still. Misery hadn’t caught up with her yet, only disbelief. Yes, O’Neill. Three bags full, O’Neill. Off to Spain at once, O’Neill. He wouldn’t have done it like that. Abandon the most precious thing either of them had ever experienced without so much as a wave?
She shouted: ‘How do you know he’s gone to Spain?’
O’Neill slowed his horse and came alongside her. ‘I sent him his orders last week. This morning I got word his ship had sailed from Donegal.’
‘You’re lying.’
He caught hold of her horse’s bridle. ‘Do you know him then? A couple of encounters and you know the man? O’Hagan is my foster brother, and there’s no closer relationship in our culture. Did you know he intended for the priesthood? Why do you think he never married? Was he easy with you?’ He stopped in a patch of moonlight and examined her face. ‘I see he was not.’ Suddenly he leaned over and embraced her. ‘Let the man go to his work and his conscience. We’re facing annihilation.’ He let her go and they rode quietly on. ‘The time for love is over.’
The ground sloped to a small stone jetty where a barge waited for them, its riding light casting a yellow, wavering path on the water; there was no other light, except from the moon which outlined the barge’s elegant shape. The O’Neill handed her along the gangplank. Her numbed mind had to go back years to recognise the combination of bilge water, holystone, polished wood and the metallic smell given off by gold braid on the uniforms of sweating men. The O’Neill’s barge was an ornamented, gold-leafed copy of Queen Elizabeth’s royal barge on which she had first encountered Burghley and Walsingham, on which one chapter of her life had closed and another opened.
The poop deck was covered by an awning beneath which had been set a table. On one side of this sat four hooded figures. The awning shut out the moonlight so that their shapes were only degrees of blackness in the dark. The O’Neill gave the order to cast off. Phosphorescence, the colour of burning brandy, was ladled up by the oar blades. Barbary put out her hand to touch the unmistakable bulk next to her. ‘Thank you, Grandmother.’ She hadn’t been in any condition to express gratitude for her rescue from Galway since it had happened.
‘Captured by Gauls,’ Grace O’Malley hissed at her. ‘You’re not fit to mind mice at a crossroad.’
Barbary was in no mood for that game. ‘It is right O’Hagan’s gone to Spain?’
Grace shrugged. ‘We split up when we were being hunted. The last I saw he was for Donegal.’
‘Hunted?’
Her grandmother said, as the O’Neill had said, ‘Connaught’s gone. Most of me fleet’s gone. The people are in hiding and Bingham’s killing everything that lives.’
Barbary woke up. Since her illness she had been drifting in personal misery of which O’Hagan’s defection had been a terrible extension. But he was alive when thousands were recently dead, when an entire culture had disappeared, when this indomitable woman beside her had lost her home and her empire.
Barbary had become too mature and was now too hurt to pretend, as she would have once pretended, that, to hell with him, she didn’t care. But there were other things and people that mattered to her and those, as the O’Neill had pointed out, were facing annihilation and the time for love had passed. She shook herself and became aware of the strangeness of being on a boat at night with hooded figures round a table. ‘What are we doing here?’
‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to get me country back.’
Barbary looked around. They were heading out into the centre of the lough. She could just see dark slivers, either seals or curraghs, lying on the white strands behind them. The slight breeze carried the scent of blossom from the land and massaged the water into wavelets.
A servant brought a live coal from the fire bucket and lit lanterns hanging from the awning. ‘We won’t be seen now, lady and gentlemen,’ said the O’Neill, ‘if you would like to unveil. One at a time, perhaps.’ He loved theatricals. The first hood slipped back off a red head, and immediately a charge like an invisible St Elmo’s fire played around the table from the man’s inherent energy. It was O’Donnell. How he’d managed to sit still and quiet for so long was a miracle. He smiled and bowed to Barbary. He had an engagingly snub nose. ‘It’s to be hoped you’ve overlooked the unpleasantness after Dublin Castle,’ he said.
The second unveiling was Cuckold Dick. Barbary sighed with comfort, and then went wild. ‘Dick, did you…?’ She could see he was full of himself.
‘I did, Barb.’
And he had. The third man was Will Clampett.
She flung herself across the table to clutch his neck and kiss him. ‘Oh Will, I missed you awful.’ His answering pat on her back was a reminder that she’d lived among emotional Celts for too long, this wasn’t the way the foster daughters of cannon masters behaved.
‘All right, girl,’ he said. Barbary wriggled back, rebuffed and happier.
Grace O’Malley lit a pipe, bottles and tankards were put on the table. O’Neill said: ‘I would not choose to greet honoured guests in this manner but, between you, you make up a combination that would hang us all. The English, as usual, might get the wrong impression. For this is not a council of war, it is a council of… well, a council of eventuality. Master Clampett, one question. Are you prepared to make guns for me?’
‘I come for two reasons,’ said Will, the familiar voice sounding weighty against the rapid speech of the O’Neill. ‘One, for that I wanted to see that maid there again. Two, for that I wronged your country once and wish to right it. Then again, I’m out of a job. That’s three.’
‘What’s your man droning?’ asked Grace O’Malley, whose shaky grasp of English was having trouble with the Devonian accent.
Barbary ignored her. ‘Why’d Sir Henry Sidney let you go, Will?’
‘He’s dead, girl. There’s a new lord at Penshurst didn’t want me.’
‘Dead?’
Will nodded. ‘Lady Sidney, too. Seemingly they didn’t want to live after they got the word about Sir Philip. I’d thought you’d heard. He was killed fighting the Spanish in the Low Countries.’
There was a tree in front of her eyes with a young man leaning against it reciting poetry. The sun came through its branches. She heard O’Donnell say: ‘That’s one less damned Gaul to kill.’
There was a silence. ‘O’Donnell,’ said the O’Neill, ‘still your filthy tongue before I cut it from your head.’
The young chieftain was blustering, Grace O’Malley was pouring wine and talking – she’d met Philip. Only O’Neill and Barbary were silent. He had known, of course, but perhaps he hadn’t wanted to pile on too much sadness, strange man that he was. They sat quietly, joined in watching a golden English gentleman dance out of their sight, taking light with him.
‘Don’t even have to steal ’em,’ Will was saying to O’Donnell, ‘more a matter of crossing the right palms with silver. The Weald turned out two thousand ordnance last year. Near two hundred pieces never got fired by English gunners. Went missing.’
The O’Neill shook himself. ‘Can you set up a foundry here?’
‘If you’ve got the iron, I got the skill,’ said Will. ‘Take time, mind.’
‘Do you hear that, O’Donnell?’ asked the O’Neill. ‘Time.’ He banged the table suddenly with both fists. ‘Now then. The English have demanded that the Maguire come in to pay his rents and make his submission to Her Gracious Majesty’s deputy in Dublin. They want me to bring him in. I want to bring him in. But last week the Maguire left my table, spitting brimstone, to declare war on Bingham who is harassing his southern border. The English will demand that I join their expedition to suppress him, and join it I shall, or be attainted. And when we’ve wiped out Maguire we shall continue westward to wipe out the O’Donnell.’
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‘You’ll not wipe me out, O’Neill.’ O’Donnell was on his feet, his head into the awning and his hand on his sword hilt.
‘No, my dear, I won’t. Because you are coming to Dublin with me to make your submission.’
‘I’ll not.’
‘You will!’ The O’Neill screamed, he threw bottles into the river, tears spurting out of his eyes. It was an appalling exhibition. The only one who wasn’t immobilised by it was Grace O’Malley. She put a massive hand on his shoulder and forced him back into his seat, then patted him.
‘Your nerves are in flitters, me boy.’
The O’Neill went quiet. That was rehearsed, thought Barbary, but it’s real for all that. The O’Neill’s nerves were in flitters all right, but from anger; anger at a war he dreaded being forced on him, and, most of all, at his own people’s connivance at conflict in refusing to bend to the English wind.
A servant put out more bottles. O’Neill raised himself and poured wine for them all. ‘You will come with me to Dublin,’ he said softly to O’Donnell, ‘and you will bend your back to the Lord Deputy, confess your misdemeanours, especially your insolence in escaping from gaol, promise that you will be a loving subject of Her Majesty from here on, pay her taxes, and tuck her soldiers up at nights. If they produce the Bible, you will swear on it. You will do this because I have had to do it for twenty years. You will do it because it will give us time.’ The bottles on the table bounced nervously again.
O’Donnell’s large and handsome head turned from one table companion to another. His eyes were screwed up. ‘A sort of game, you mean?’
O’Neill expelled his breath. ‘Yes, my dear, a game.’
‘To give us time to form an army.’
‘Yes.’
‘Trick them.’
‘Yes.’
O’Donnell beamed. ‘I can do that,’ he said. They drank to him.
O’Neill turned to Grace O’Malley. ‘How many ships have you got left, Granuaile? If it comes to it, can you transport guns and gallowglass?’ Gallowglasses were Scottish mercenaries whose inclusion in Irish wars went back centuries.
‘If I get me price.’ Grace put her pipe down. ‘Now do you know what I’m going to tell you. You buggers have Bingham yapping on your borders, but it’s Connaught the bastard’s ravaging. Time, you say. But my people have no time left. I’m making me peace separate and I’m making it now.’ It was the longest speech Barbary had heard her grandmother make. O’Donnell hissed: ‘You’re making peace with Bingham?’
Grace shook her head. ‘With Elizabeth of the Gauls.’
‘With the queen?’
‘I’ve written to her,’ said Grace, picking up her pipe again. ‘Cut out the middleman. One woman to another. Didn’t the O’Malleys and O’Flaherties submit to her? And didn’t she promise her protection in return? Well, now she can deliver it and prise that bastard off me back.’
All at that table had reason to consider themselves audacious in their various ways; only Will Clampett was unamazed by this old woman who gave new meaning to the word, and that was because she’d spoken in Irish. They stared, Cuckold Dick with his what-an-Upright-Man-she’d-have-made gaze, Barbary, a Jill the Baptist beholding the half that had not been told her, O’Donnell as at the Medusa, and O’Neill like an alchemist at the pupil who’s come up with the formula for gold. ‘You’ve written to Elizabeth for protection from Bingham? Asked Attila for protection from the Hun? What of pirating her ships these forty years?’
Grace puffed out a long stream of smoke. ‘Pilotage, would you mean? Forced into it, so I was. It’s a fine, sweet letter. Manus has the English and wrote what I told him. I’ll not be surprised if she asks me round to England to split a bottle with her.’
The O’Neill passed his hand over his eyes. ‘By God,’ he said, quietly, ‘I think she might.’ They were so used to the thump of oars in the rowlocks and the grunt of rowers that the sounds of the night, a dog’s sudden bark a long way off, the splash of a disturbed swan, fell on apparent silence.
‘Lady Betty.’
Barbary stirred uneasily. It was her turn. ‘What?’
‘Last and most important.’ His dark eyes were tender as he took her hand. ‘We’ve known each other a long time.’ It’s going to be nasty, she thought, but he digressed. ‘How was it Philip Sidney died, Master Clampett?’
‘Gangrene,’ said Will. ‘Place called Arnhem. A hard death, but borne like a Christian, so they say.’
‘Yes,’ said O’Neill gently, looking back at Barbary, ‘it would be.’ He was deliberately resurrecting Philip Sidney as a link that only they shared.
‘What do you want, O’Neill?’
‘You, my dear. Back in England. Getting my guns. Putting in the right word at the right time. Destroying Bingham. You did swear to destroy Bingham, I believe? Back in the good graces of Our Gracious Majesty.’
The request was so outrageous and so impossible she was relieved. ‘The queen? O’Neill, she wouldn’t look at me. Sir John Perrot said she wanted my head off. She’ll never forgive me.’
‘Whether she does or she doesn’t, my dear, you have a direct link to her court which could be of the utmost use.’
She’d gone white. She knew what he was asking, knew he knew his own enormity in asking. He wanted her back with Rob.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’
‘There’s nobody else can do it.’
‘No.’
He didn’t throw a fit. Or bottles. The conference was over. But after a while in the general movement she found herself standing in the barge’s stern with the O’Neill beside her, though how the manoeuvre had come about she wasn’t sure. There was an almost imperceptible lightening of the sky as they headed back to the loughside, though the shore was still some way off, a confused mounding of dark shadows. They had come a long way out in the O’Neill’s search for complete secrecy. You couldn’t blame him, she thought; on this barge there’s an arch-renegade in O’Donnell, an arch-pirate in Grace O’Malley and an English cannon master. Just being seen in such company would condemn him to the block.
The O’Neill leaned companionably on the gilded scrollwork. ‘And how will you occupy your time now?’ he asked. He knew her too well, always had.
‘You can save your breath, O’Neill. I’ll fight. I’ll spy. I’ll do anything you want. But I can’t go back to Rob.’
His hands spread out in amazement that she could think he’d force her to. ‘I understand. You love another. Don’t I know about love? Haven’t I been in it often enough? It’s just, well, a matter of function. For many a woman a man is her function, and good luck to her. But for Barbary O’Flaherty? I thought you’d want to do work only you can do. No matter. We’ll find something else.’
‘You’re a bastard, O’Neill.’
‘So they tell me, so they tell me.’
They stared down, hypnotised, at the bubbles of their wake. ‘I always had hope while Philip Sidney lived,’ said the O’Neill.
She knew what he meant; not hope for anything specific, just a possibility that the world held marvels. And it had gone. She put out her hand to ringed fingers which clutched at hers.
Ahead water rose up in a white, untidy column. The barge reared, then rocked. Barbary’s body knew they were under fire and threw itself down before her brain caught up. The O’Neill landed on top of her. There was another explosion, this time forward. They were bracketed. Her fingernails tore at the planking, trying to burrow through it. The next shot would be a direct hit.
It didn’t come. A voice used to hailing over distance shouted: ‘Ship oars and surrender in the name of our sovereign Queen Elizabeth.’
Barbary dragged herself up and peered over the gunwale. It was difficult to see the ship, even though she knew it was there; it had hidden itself, waiting, in the shadows of the lakeside until the barge, as conspicuous as a beetle on a white carpet, was in the middle of open, moonlit water. The O’Neill hadn’t cared who saw the barge as long as they didn’t see
her passengers. Like Grace O’Malley before him, he had considered himself inviolable in his own country. Like Grace O’Malley, he’d been wrong. And he’d been betrayed; this was no chance entrapment.
‘I have information the traitor O’Donnell is aboard. I’m coming alongside in a boat. One false move and you’ll be blown out of the water.’
The O’Neill’s face was green. His trickster’s eyes shifted in the search for a way out. Her own brain was racing. Make a run for it? Get blown up clean and fast? Bluff? Say they were bringing in Grace and O’Donnell for their submission?
Beside her the O’Neill said: ‘And me so full of promise.’ He’d tested every bar and found no way out. The only thing left to him was to show courage.
Barbary said: ‘Get out of sight, O’Neill.’
His mind was on other things, so she kicked his shin to wake him up. ‘Take the others, get into the bilges or whatever, and keep out of sight.’
‘Doomsday must be met with dignity, my dear.’
‘It ain’t Doomsday yet. We might still catch this cony. Send Cuckold Dick down with a pack. Clothes, anything that looks like luggage.’
He kissed her hand. After he’d gone, she moved to the taffrail gate and waited, wishing she was dressed as an Englishwoman and not in Irish fashion. For what it was worth she took the Gaelic roll off her head. This was going to have to be a good catch, the best. Will’s life depended on it. They’d hang him for sure, consorting with the Irish. And Grace. And O’Donnell.
A longboat was coming out of the shadows into the moonlight. The voice she had recognised said again: ‘One false move and I’ll sink you. Yield the traitor O’Donnell.’
Cuckold Dick was standing beside her. ‘Have you got a pack?’
He whispered back: ‘Yes, Barb. What we been doing in O’Neill territory?’
What had they been doing? She hadn’t thought it through. Jesus, her mind was a blank. She could hear the clunk of rowlocks in the oncoming boat and she hadn’t an idea, not an idea…
The Pirate Queen Page 48