‘Haven’t we been visiting your old friend, Mabel Bagenal, Barb?’
‘God bless you. That’s what we’ve been doing. I forgot.’ She was opening the taffrail gate as the longboat bumped alongside, welcoming its commander in her best court English. ‘This is a most happy chance, Sir John.’ Order rule: get in first. ‘I’d heard there was an English ship close by…’ Why not? If the O’Neill had been betrayed to them, they could have been betrayed to O’Neill. ‘…and I said to my lord of Tyrone: “If I can get aboard her, she can take me home,” I said. And so he very kindly lent me his own barge. Help me down, Dick. Pass my pack carefully now.’
‘Stay where you are.’ She blinked as a torch was held up by the man standing in the boat. ‘Identify yourself.’
‘Oh, Sir John,’ she said reproachfully, ‘and I recognised your voice at once. You know me. And most certainly you know my husband. Don’t you remember? We met in Munster, just before the Armada? I am Lady Betty.’
She saw the battered, kind, and now very worn face of Sir John Norris lift with recognition. ‘God bless us. Lady Betty. What do you do here?’
‘I’m wanting to get home.’ She fluttered her eyelashes at him. ‘I can’t tell you how sick of Ireland I am. But I could hardly desert poor Mabel, could I? The Countess of Tyrone and I are old friends.’ She prattled on, settling herself in the boat, passing her pack to sailors, beckoning Cuckold Dick to join her. ‘My servant… Now, I want to hear about Rob. I hope my letters to him have got through more regularly than his to me…’
She was rocking the man, she could see. Dick was in the boat now, and the barge’s taffrail gate closed behind him, its oarsmen sitting still as death.
‘Is there nobody else aboard that barge, Lady Betty?’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Only some very stupid rowers. They took me out to the lake, and of course lost the way. These Irish…’
She’d done it. He had to take the word of a woman who was wife of his expedition companion. He had to because he was a gentleman of the old school. It was what she’d banked on. He signalled to his own rowers to fend off and turn round.
She kept talking, hearing her words skip across the distance to the barge until it grew too great for them to reach it. Until then she hadn’t had time to realise the consequences of what she was doing. It had been necessary in order to save the lives of people who were vital to her, but for her own life it was disastrous. For a moment her voice faltered. She was doing what the O’Neill wanted. To the letter. She had cast herself off. She was going to be taken back to England, the queen – and Rob.
Chapter Twenty
The mere Irish did Sir John Perrot no favours when he was recalled to England. They lined his route to the harbour in their thousands, weeping and calling out that their only friend was deserting them. They stood on the dockside, still weeping, to wave him off.
Sir John shook his fist at them. ‘You bastards,’ he shouted. ‘You’ve wept me into the Tower.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘And you too, mistress,’ he said.
‘They’re not weeping for me.’
‘You’re their friend, so I’m told. That’s enough to loosen one’s head on one’s shoulders, eh, what say you?’
Barbary said nothing. She was returning to England as she’d set out: with Sir John Perrot and at the behest of Lord Burghley. The order to Norris had been sharp. The State required the answers to many questions concerning Lady Betty, who was to be closely attended and sent to London on the next available ship, which had turned out to be the same one taking Sir John Perrot, also to answer ‘certain charges’ against him.
Neither’s future held promise. Barbary assessed her chances of escaping severe punishment and didn’t fancy the odds. She had tricked the queen into believing she was a boy, she had married without the queen’s permission, she had absented herself, and – though, with luck, they wouldn’t know this – she had been in the company of notable rebels and committed piracy. People had gone to the block for less.
It couldn’t be said she didn’t care, more that there wasn’t a lot left to care with. The bit of her that mattered stretched beyond the low, green hills of Dublin across the central plain to a land of sea and rock where it sailed with pirates, swam with seals and loved a man in a tower. She had, she realised with irony, become typically Irish in loving Ireland not in its entirety, as a country, but a region of it. She was in exile. She had no lover. She had no child. All she could do with what was left over, if they let her, was to protect her kingdom by the sea. A confusing pain across her chest was either a breaking heart or a return of illness.
If she’d been accompanying anybody but Sir John, she’d have curled up in the cabin for the voyage and slept, but Sir John was ill and because of his kindness to Ireland and herself she felt a weary duty towards him, and kept him company during the terrible attacks that he put down to ‘stones’, and during the equally terrible drinking bouts with which he anaesthetised them. Drunk or in pain he raved against the ‘yapping weasels’ in Dublin who had hampered his every attempt at reform and gained his removal by telling England that he was a traitor, encouraged rebellion, corresponded with Philip of Spain, and spoke contemptuously against the queen.
And of those charges the only one with truth to it – and the most serious, thought Barbary – was that of speaking against the queen. He was furious with his sister’s mismanagement of Ireland, and when Sir John Perrot was furious he was loud. Looking exactly as an enraged Henry VIII must have looked, he stamped about the ship’s cabin, foulmouthing Elizabeth as a ‘filthy hypocrite, more at the mercy of those frisking courtiers than her wise men’.
‘For God’s sake, Sir John,’ Barbary told him, alarmed, ‘with your tongue you don’t need enemies. Take it quieter.’
‘Quieter? While Bingham hangs for the pleasure of it? While those Dublin weasels line their own pockets? While Loftus corrupts the word of God? I tell you, mistress, the meanest hedge priest is a better archbishop than that son of a whore. I’ll not be quiet. God’s wounds, what’s in here,’ he pointed to his enormous codpiece, ‘is a better sword of state than the paltry thing my sister wields.’
‘That’ll go well at your trial.’
‘There’ll be no trial. Even that base, bastard, pissing, kitchen woman will pause from arraigning her own brother.’
Barbary wished she could be so sure. Of all treacheries, the greatest in the view of the queen was disrespect.
Sir John clutched his back and moaned. Barbary helped him to his cot and ran for his attendant and some medicine. He waved both away. ‘Where’s that potatofaced varlet? His is the only physic to aid me.’ Cuckold Dick had employed their short wait in Dublin in acquiring ten barrels of whiskey which he was shipping to England to begin his new career as liquor importer, though Sir John’s newly acquired taste for it had already reduced the ten barrels to nine and a half.
‘And he’s welcome, Barb,’ Dick said earnestly when she demanded more, ‘but if he tears the queen’s body to the revenue men when we gets to England like he’s doing on this ship, they’ll impound us, whiskey and all.’
Barbary was worrying along the same lines. ‘When we get to England you slip ashore without us, whiskey or not. If I’m for the Tower, I don’t want you there with me. And somebody’s got to get those guns.’
Elizabeth’s new Master of Ordnance, the man responsible for the country’s cannon manufacture, was the Earl of Essex. The young favourite had clamoured for the post for months and finally got it, to O’Neill’s relief. ‘I feared she would give it to Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son,’ he’d told Barbary, ‘for he is an efficient man. Essex is more to my liking, capable of great industry, but never for long. We’ll whisk more guns from under his nose than Cecil’s.’ And Will had told Dick that the cannon master who had replaced him at Penshurst’s foundry was bribable. ‘If we can’t grease him, Barb, we can do a crossbite,’ Dick said.
But would they get the chance? The very ship they were aboard indicated what bad od
our she and Sir John were in with the powers-that-be. It was a studied insult to Sir John; old, leaky and much too small to accommodate the large retinue which was his due. Now he was laid low in its none-too-clean cabin, his huge, swollen legs sticking out from the end of its cot, breathing oaths and whiskey fumes. ‘God’s wounds, no other prince in Christendom would deal with me so. But she’ll not curb Old Harry’s son, silly woman.’
Barbary bathed the great flat, red face. ‘Go to sleep.’
He couldn’t. Even dozing, anger spurted out in expletives. ‘Pissing woman. Bastard Bingham. Sniveller Loftus.’ His light, protuberant Tudor eyes glared at Barbary. ‘If I go down, they’ll come with me.’
Barbary adjusted his pillow. She was remembering three small bundles hanging on the gallows at Galway. This at least she could do. ‘My Lord,’ she said, ‘if you were to bring Bingham down, how would you do it?’
* * *
Used to the clean, bare outlines of the Connaught coast, Barbary found England’s late and pretty spring almost oppressive. As if making up for the aloofness of winter, the landscape on the banks nestled close in a glut of foliage, constricting the sunlight into a million dapples, blooming with such energy that even the wattle fences round the sheep folds and small fields were in bud. There was too much of it. The distortion, she knew, came from her state of mind, but she felt suffocated. The Thames was busy all the way up, and near London it was crowded with traffic. She was amazed at the growth that had taken place in her absence; areas along the river which had once been dotted here and there with villages were now an almost continuous waterfront down to Stepney.
They were landed at Wapping; immediately the gangplank was in place a contingent of breast-plated men-at-arms marched aboard, politely but firmly funnelling the passengers onto the quayside. There was no opportunity for Cuckold Dick to slip away; with everybody else he found himself ushered towards a closed, gilded coach waiting with some baggage carts. The door opened and Sir John and Barbary were helped into it, Dick still standing outside.
For a moment Barbary, adjusting from the glare of sunlight, thought the coach was empty; the one man in it was dressed in black, like its hangings, and sat in its most shadowed corner blending quietly with his surroundings. It wasn’t until the coach had stopped rocking from Sir John’s collapse onto the bench that a light voice revealed the chameleon. ‘My lord,’ it said, ‘and Lady Betty, this is an ignominious welcome home, but it was thought in the circumstances that discretion…’
Sir John Perrot peered blearily into the corner, then sighed. ‘Ah lad,’ he said, ‘is even your father afraid to greet this old pariah?’
‘The Lord Treasurer is ill, my lord,’ said the pleasant, insubstantial voice, ‘or he would have been here, expressing his friendship and support.’
So the man Sir John addressed as ‘lad’ was the queen’s new Secretary, for Walsingham was dead. He was Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son, and now holder of England’s third great seal. O’Neill, when he was bringing her up to date on court matters, had described him as ‘the coming power in the land’. Coming or going, he didn’t look a power. He looked a puppet, not necessarily one to be manipulated, but unreal, a doll. First glance showed a bright, interested, wide-eyed little face, second glance showed the same expression, its perkiness carved as permanently as gravity was chiselled into a stone crusader. Elizabeth had nicknamed him her ‘Elf’, which was clever as far as it went, but gave no reflection of the stillness behind the spritely exterior. The head moved, the mouth talked, the eyes blinked but the jaunty mask was fixed on something very deep indeed. It turned on Barbary. ‘Dear madam, our Sovereign Lady sent your husband on an embassy to the Low Countries some weeks ago, and he is as yet unaware that you have… reappeared. He will be overjoyed to know you are alive, as are we all.’
Had they thought she was dead then? She supposed they had. The relief of knowing that she didn’t have to encounter Rob right away lessened some of the dread that had been making her feel ill. She could face punishment, but she couldn’t face having marital relations forced on her again. Belatedly it occurred to her that perhaps Rob couldn’t face them either.
‘Her Majesty has been graciously pleased to grant him the honorary position of Keeper of the Tilsend Light,’ continued the Elf, ‘which carries with it the manor of Tilsend in Kent. No doubt that is where you will wish to make your main residence. His house in the Strand is as yet unfinished. So while you are here, perhaps you would do my aunt, Lady Russell, the honour of lodging at her house.’
Nice touch that, as if she had the option. She inclined her head graciously, wondering if this mannikin realised the smartest place she’d ever lodged in the London area was Will Clampett’s hut on Lambeth Marshes. And Rob had certainly gone up in the world. He now had a manor in Devon, another in Kent – that might be useful – and another in the Strand. Highly salubrious.
‘And you, my lord,’ said Mr Secretary Cecil to Sir John Perrot, ‘would you do the Lord Treasurer the honour of lodging at Burghley House?’
Sir John swatted the invitation with an unsteady hand. ‘I’m for my Welsh estates, lad. Keep out of the bitch’s way.’
There was another blithe blink. ‘Later perhaps, my lord. Until then, my father would be most happy…’
Dick was making faces through the coach window. ‘My lord,’ said Barbary, quickly, ‘my man there has imported some barrels of a new, Irish drink he is hoping will find favour in England. Can he have permission? It’s distilled from malt.’
‘Usquebaugh?’ said Cecil, perfectly. ‘One has heard of it. One might be interested…’ The crook of a small finger brought an official, a word sent him off, unloaded the barrels, and set all of them under way with Dick perched on top of his whiskey on the luggage carts behind them. And that, thought Barbary, impressed, is power. O’Neill was right.
Within its walls, too, London was changing. The Tower was its old looming self, but nearly everywhere else gaps that had been fields were being filled by tenements and warehouses. Despite runners clearing its way, their coach was obstructed time and again by crowds, drays and flocks.
Barbary’s nose went further and further out of the coach window, twitching at the ancient, remembered smells, while, despite herself, the city ground her senses down to the narrow sharpness that had kept her alive in its streets. Rip me, twice as many chairmen as there used to be. Twice as many sweeps – probably twice as many chimneys – and still mistreating their boys from the look of the poor little sods. That was never Pinky Annie still selling garters at Paul’s? It was. ‘Strong scarlet garters, tuppence a pair.’ Older than God she must be. And Harry Oaksey at the Lud with his ‘Chickweed for your singing birds’.
London was like nowhere else in the world. It buzzed with joy in itself. The old statute that citizens’ wives should wear flat, white, knitted caps unless their husbands could prove themselves gentlemen was still being flouted. Ungentle wives strode the streets in hats of all shapes and material with an air suggesting that if the law tried to stop them the law would regret it. Why did Elizabeth deny to her Irish this splendid English freedom?
Another generation of maidservants gossiped with the water-carriers at each conduit. Same old washerwomen, round-shouldered and lopsided, staggered along with their tubs. Same old prickle-basketmakers squatted by the Fleet, weaving their prickles for the wine merchants’ bottles. Smells from the tallow-maker and cat-gut cleaner in Fenner Lane, sewage, cow-heel broth, horse manure, hot pudding. Old Santander staggering along under his basket: ‘Old chairs to mend…’ Wait for it. Sure enough, every urchin in Fleet Street shouting back: ‘We don’t want to mend any old chairs.’
She peered back to the cart with Dick on top if it. He looked right as he never had in Ireland, seedily in tune with his surroundings. They were nearing Temple Bar. There were the grotesquely carved brackets of the King’s Head on the corner of Chancery Lane, and off to the north, behind the shopfronts and houses, lay the putrefying alleys of the Bermudas. She cou
ld smell it. Cuckold Dick waved to her, and directed his carter to turn into the Lane. Then he was gone, back to the Pudding-in-a-Cloth and home. And she’d have gone with him if she could.
Her best was in Ireland, her meanest was here, and since they’d dragged her back to it the meanest was what they’d get: Barbary Clampett, purse-cutter, verser, crossbiter extraordinary, a lady whose bib they were not going to wet. Let them do their worst, she’d wriggle out of it somehow.
She sat back in her seat, chin forward, to meet the brightly interested gaze of the chameleon. And what the chameleon saw was not the wan Irish lady from the boat, but a London streetfighter.
They passed out of the city into the Strand and more change. All lords worthy of their title were desperate for an address here. The Savoy was still in picturesque decline, and between the Savoy and Durham House there was a gap, but everywhere else great houses, many with scaffolding still in place, obscured the waterfront.
‘Where’s Rob’s house?’
‘Much further down. The old Rounceval site.’
They were held up by congestion outside Leicester House where, most unusually, the great gates were open to welcome the world and his wife, who had accepted the invitation. Inside, a band played to petitioners awaiting audience in a queue that went round the courtyard. Under an oak in the centre, beggars were feeding at a long table bent from the weight of dishes upon it. Sightseers wandered everywhere, picking keepsake-leaves off the bushes, gawping up at the windows in the hope of seeing the provider of this largesse. ‘What’s going on at Leicester House?’
‘It’s Essex House now,’ said the Elf.
Of course. Leicester was dead and his mantle had fallen to his stepson, the Earl of Essex, the new royal favourite, the man of whom O’Neill had spoken slightingly. Well, O’Neill might not think much of him, but he was winning London’s heart, that was for sure.
Leicester dead. Sir Christopher Hatton dead. Philip Sidney dead. Walsingham dead. Raleigh disgraced. Burghley ill. A new generation had moved onto the chessboard where the queen was the only unvarying piece. For the first time it struck Barbary that even this constant was mortal. Despite everything she’d come to hate in Elizabeth’s reign, she felt disorientated by the thought, and frightened; Elizabeth had been there for her lifetime and almost everybody else’s. How would the world spin without her?
The Pirate Queen Page 49