The Pirate Queen

by The Pirate Queen (retail) (epub)

  The queen was tapping Barbary’s head with the spoon. ‘There, there. Is it still a loyal little Boggart? Well, we shall see. These matters shall wait till you come to court.’ She was gone, with her Elf hobbling along beside her.

  Barbary crawled to the wainscot and sat with her back against it, exhausted and ashamed by the emotion that had shaken her. How could she love that woman? After all the hangings, all the horror that had been committed in her name? But she did, had. Just as she’d wanted her grandmother’s love, in that moment she had wanted Elizabeth’s.

  And had apparently got it; she was to be received at court. She couldn’t have manoeuvred it better if she’d tried.

  After a while, Mr Secretary Cecil came back. He held out a small hand to help her to her feet. ‘It appears, Mistress Barbary,’ he said, ‘that the, ah, shit is not as thick as we thought.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘Yes, Lady Russell,’ shouted Barbary backwards from the street door into the house at Blackfriars. ‘No, Lady Russell. I will. Not far, Lady Russell.’

  Lady Elizabeth Russell, Cecil’s aunt, was old and busy and had instructions from her nephew to allow Lady Betty to come and go without question, but every time Barbary went out she was put through a catechism: Was she warmly wrapped? Was she sufficiently attended with just one footman to guard her? Would she be safe? Where was she going?

  Since the summer was warm, and since, so far, her forays had only been along the crowded quaysides of Blackfriars to Cuckold Dick’s Thameside warehouse at Puddle Dock, these precautions seemed to Barbary to be unnecessary, but Lady Russell lived in the conviction that London was populated by footpads and assassins of which the weather was a climatic accomplice, ready to kill by jumping out in a shower of rain or a cold breeze. Andrew, the footman, pushed aside a couple of the more aggressive creditors who were in permanent attendance on Lady Russell’s door and Barbary was at last walking along the lovely colonnade, the old monastery’s cloister, which led out of the close. It wasn’t that Lady Russell couldn’t pay, though she pleaded poverty, but that she disliked paying any bill she thought too high, and since most bills she regarded as iniquitous, her relationship with her tradesmen was stormy.

  At first Barbary had been surprised that the Elf, if he wanted her as a secret agent, should place her in the care of a woman who invariably attracted attention. But he said he needed her respectably established and Lady Russell, for all her raging eccentricity, was respectable and most certainly an enthusiastic upholder of the establishment. She attributed all the crosses she had to bear to the fact that her second husband, John, Lord Russell, had been careless enough to die while his father was still alive and before he could inherit the earldom of Bedford, thereby granting his wife her dearest wish, to be a countess. ‘Had I been a countess, my dear, this would not have happened,’ she would say to Barbary every time a tradesman presented an outrageous bill. Despite her advanced age, she was still determined to be one and had her eye on the Earl of Kent, ‘for though he lacks four of his five wits, my dear, I have enough for both’.

  Tiresome though she was, there was something endearing about Lady Russell; she was as eccentric and entertaining as the English public, eccentric themselves, expected their aristocracy to be, and by riveting attention on herself, Barbary’s own somewhat erratic comings and goings were overlooked. It was, Barbary realised, just what Cecil had wanted: that she be established yet disregarded. She went to church with Lady Russell, enduring the long ranting sermons of the popular Puritan divine, Stephen Egerton. She accompanied Lady Russell to the more decorous court occasions which nowadays mostly consisted of long, Latin eulogies addressed to the queen. Barbary was official yet unremarked – a most excellent situation for passing on information to Cecil as she did.

  There was another, more ominous, reason why the Elf wanted her to be an accepted part of the court scene. ‘Perhaps you should know, mistress,’ he’d told her one day, ‘that some months ago Sir Rob applied to the Archiepiscopal Court to prove your death.’

  She had been shocked to the core. ‘Why?’

  Cecil shrugged. ‘Doubtless he genuinely thought you were dead. Perhaps he wished to marry again. He is a young man.’

  And then she had realised that in Cecil’s tortuous mind was the suspicion that unless her existence was well known, Rob might attempt to get rid of her. ‘Rob’d never Amy Robsart me,’ she said, more stoutly than she felt. After all, it was odd that rising men who had made disadvantageous marriages in their youth were almost invariably free to make an advantageous one later on. Doubtless some of the first wives were paid off, or died naturally, but what happened to the others?

  ‘Perish the thought,’ said Cecil. But she knew he thought it and was protecting her, not from friendship, but because she was useful. It had caused her to put Cuckold Dick on to making certain enquiries. And today she would, among other matters, learn the result of those enquiries.

  When she was out of the close, she turned to the footman who walked behind her. ‘Take the day off, Andrew.’

  He was reluctant. ‘Lady Russell wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘I would. Cut off.’ She watched him slouch away, every line of his back suspecting an assignation with a lover. Better that than the truth. There must be no connection between Lady Betty and the place Barbary intended to visit today. Halfway up Fleet Street she turned into Red Lion Court and in a well-remembered gap between an apothecary’s shop and the inn, took off her silk cloak and hat, folded them into her basket and took other items from it.

  The servant who eventually emerged from a narrow alley into Fetter Lane was well but not showily dressed in a plain buff gown over a red kirtle. A white coif under a grey felt hat concealed her hair, and there was a white tippet round her shoulders. That she came from a house of rank was displayed by her gloved hands and the scarf that hid her lower face – high-class servants took precautions against bad air as seriously as their masters and mistresses.

  She walked through Long Acre to Covent Garden with its view across woods and fields to the windmills on High Gate Hill. Here she dawdled, frequently turning round. Confident that they could provide it, the traders called: ‘What do ye lack, mistress, what do ye lack?’ On offer was anything from fennel to a firescreen, from cabbage to cheeseparers. The servant appeared to lack a capon, for she bought one, then wandered on.

  ‘What do ye lack, mistress? What do ye lack?’ She paused, interested, at a stall selling strange implements. The stall-holder exhaled smoke and patter. ‘Artillery for the new fashion, mistress. The ladle for assisting cold snuff to the nostrils, the tongs, the priming iron. Here’s woodcock heads of the best, and tobacco boxes. See me, mistress, I have taken no other meat for twenty weeks but the fume of best Trinidado. It assists the expulsion of rheums, and sour humours, a specific against asthma, scabs, breast afflictions and flatulence. I can teach you the trick of it in two easy lessons at my smoking academy.’ She shook her head and walked away.

  A catchpole was lounging at the corner of Ship Lane, where the Ship Inn was still decked in black mourning ribbons for its late owner, Sir Christopher Hatton. He stopped her. ‘Don’t go down there, mistress. There’s no place for respectable young women in the Bermudas.’

  The respectable young woman pushed past him, the gently spoken words that emerged through the chin-clout sounding remarkably like: ‘Piss off.’ Bemused, the catchpole watched the prim figure disappear into the overhung shade at the end of the lane. Here she paused and pulled the chin-clout down for a moment to whistle three notes. A figure that had been waiting in a doorway to snatch her basket withdrew and allowed her to pass unmolested.

  In another familiar doorway she changed again, taking off a further layer somewhat crossly. If there’d been a barnacle, she’d thrown it off at Red Lion Court, but Mr Secretary Cecil insisted on every precaution. ‘Not all enemies are overseas, mistress.’

  Spy mad, she thought. They’ve all gone spy bloody mad. It had always been recognised that
ambassadors and men like Walsingham, and now Cecil, should have a network of agents, but in the England Barbary had come back to, even the most insignificant courtier employed spies. It was a growth industry. And not just to keep themselves informed on international affairs, but on each other. Jealous rivals tried to find or fabricate evidence to prove the other was a Papist or in some other way disloyal.

  The queen’s increasing senility brought an added complication for courtiers looking to their future. Whom should they support for the succession? King James of Scotland? The Infanta of Spain? Lady Arabella Stuart? The roads and ports of England were crowded with agents, some carrying secret, tentative messages of goodwill to a prospective heir to the throne, others trying to intercept them to find out who was backing whom.

  In this labyrinth of mistrust Barbary, with her Order training, was in her element. Her campaign to get Bingham recalled was doing very nicely. In front of the queen one day, Cecil had given her the opportunity to retell the story of the three young hostages hanged at Galway. The queen wept, then became angry: ‘God’s death, is this the way to win Irish hearts?’ She’d become even angrier at Barbary’s hints at corruption, though it wasn’t Bingham’s corruption that was the issue as far as Barbary was concerned – he was no more corrupt than any other of Elizabeth’s generals – it was his systematic brutality. And because Cecil regarded brutality as counterproductive, he was her ally. In return, she had become his creature.

  What alternative did she have?

  There were two main parties vying for power at court. There was the one which was in favour of everything the Earl of Essex stood for, and there was the one which wasn’t. The Earl of Essex himself led the pro-Essex party; the anti-Essex party was more diffused, but rummaging down into it, tossing aside the front men, what you came to was the unassuming, crooked little shape of Mr Secretary Cecil.

  Essex. For a moment in that dingy doorway in the Bermudas, Barbary’s fingers paused in their tussle with hooks and strings. Like everybody else, she’d caught her breath on seeing him first. It was at the Grocers’ Hall. The Mayor of London was making a boring loyal address to the queen, and Essex had rushed in late, apologising, and bearing a basket of sweet grapes he’d had brought post-haste from France so the queen should taste them with the bloom on. Immediately Grocers’ Hall became a forest glade, the queen a maiden beset by goblins, and Essex the rescuing medieval knight, turning the whole thing into a celebratory picnic. He had that power. Even the mayor was charmed.

  Before she set eyes on him, and from the way everyone talked – and it seemed to Barbary they talked of little else – she imagined a handsome but sub-standard Philip Sidney. But Essex was both more and less than Philip. Beautiful, God, he was beautiful, blazing, tall, leonine head, cheekbones, jawline, lovely hands – and unaware of it. That was the thing, he didn’t care. He paid no attention to his dress, he frequently had mud on his boots and cloak. And this glorious, elemental thing stroked and petted Elizabeth’s mummified old body as if it was a young Cleopatra’s and he an Antony.

  He dragged admiration after him, men’s even more than women’s, like a comet. And if he’d been content to be what he was, an event, Barbary would have felt the same spell that had put the queen under her midsummer enchantment. But he wanted power, over Elizabeth, over England. His foreign policy was as lacking in frills as his dress. The Irish, bog-trotting savages, must be subdued by the sword once and for all. The Spanish, Papist heretics, must be subdued by the sword once and for all. She had looked from the irrational splendour of the Earl of Essex to the paltry body of Cecil and decided she was in the right camp. She knew Mr Secretary Cecil no better now than the day she’d met him, despite frequent encounters since. She didn’t know if he liked her, didn’t like her, whether he preferred dogs to cats. But it didn’t matter. He was for peace with Ireland. And in a comparison of brain size, Essex’s was a pea and Cecil’s a prize vegetable marrow.

  However, at Elizabeth’s court, brains didn’t always win out against beauty. Cecil could fail; he was failing in the matter of Sir John Perrot, who was being sent for trial, despite all that his friends could do.

  So here she was, Cecil’s last resort, now dressed in a red kirtle with the tippet tied like a skimpy shawl over an equally skimpy bodice, a feather stuck in her hair. A pawn on the Cecils’ bloody chessboard, that’s all you are, Barbary Clampett O’Flaherty.

  She bundled the servant’s outfit into her basket and stepped out from her doorway. She gave another whistle and set off for the Pudding-in-a-Cloth. ‘Rip me, what’s happened to the Bermudas?’ How had it gone so far downhill? It was darker, filthier, smaller than she remembered. Rot nibbled at its shutters and doors, sewage ran sluggishly along the gutters in which ragged children floated boats made from twigs. Women with black eyes and sores at their mouths sat listlessly in their doorways, suckling thin babies from thin breasts.

  Jesus, it had always been like this. She had expected to be washed by sentiment when she came back here, but it was only the child she had been who’d invested it with energy and romance. From the vantage point which had given her so different a view, she looked down to the red-headed, ignorant little ghost galloping through these terrible lanes, and felt compassion.

  A new sign swung on a bracket above wide, decaying, once-beautiful doors declaring that the old inn was now the ‘House of Pity’, but otherwise the Pudding-in-a-Cloth hadn’t changed.

  The glamour of the Pudding belonged to the night-time; daylight exposed the bones of its business. A pot boy was polishing the carefully placed mirrors which would later reflect the gulls’ cards. A pedlar – it was Wilkin – was checking his dice. Damber the Filch was polishing a nice-looking ring on his sleeve and examining it with the air of one who hadn’t had it long. The bawds, of course, would still be in bed preserving their strength for the night to come. The place smelled of candle grease, cheap scent, old ale, basting chickens and new sawdust. And on the dais at the far end an enormous figure was stacking coins into piles and clicking the beads of an abacus.

  At Barbary’s entrance, Wilkin, the dice, the ring and Damber disappeared like magic. The figure on the dais raised its head and told a pot boy: ‘Throw that bawdy basket out. She’s not one of ourn.’

  Barbary side-stepped. ‘Oh yes I am. Hello, Bet.’

  ‘Gawd’s buttocks, it’s Barb.’ Galloping Betty heaved herself to her feet and stepped massively down from the dais, obviously such a rare event that the pot boys stood staring. Barbary found herself enwrapped in Galloping Betty’s flesh, a substance that had not diminished over the years, though her laboured breathing heaved it about more alarmingly. ‘I should’ve known that poison pate anywheres. It’s Barb, lads. Barbary as was a dell all those years when we thought she was a kinchin co.’ She raised Barbary up and shook her, ‘You naughty pigsney, whyn’t you tell old Betty?’

  ‘Never fancied the Upright Man,’ Barbary said through rattling teeth.

  ‘None of us do, dear. And he’s still at it, the old dog-bolt, though there’s not the powder in his pistol that there was, thank Gawd.’

  Barbary was put back on her feet to be hugged and slapped on the back by Wilkin and Damber, who’d reappeared from the woodwork. ‘Don’t she speak holiday?’ ‘High in the instep now, in’t she?’ With exquisite regard for Order etiquette nobody asked her what she’d been doing in the intervening years; Cuckold Dick would have informed them as much as he considered necessary.

  Barbary gave the capon she’d bought in Covent Garden to Galloping Betty, who said: ‘No need, pigsney,’ but took it anyway, and to mark the occasion ordered up her best malmsey. The four of them sat round a table to drink it, Barbary being pointed out to the pot boys as an example to them all: ‘Best crossbiter’s aid in England, she was.’ Damber held up her hand. ‘See that? That little white famble could nimble the reds out of a miser’s purse.’

  That she was still alive and healthy was a success in itself. So many colleagues were not. ‘Foll? She’s a doner
, dearie.’ Galloping Betty wiped a tear from her eye. ‘Of the pox. Not all suitors of my Venuses will wear a Mother Phillips.’ Mother Phillips lived, appropriately, in Cock Lane and supplied the Pudding with condoms made of sheep gut. And Doll was a doner. Rafe the Rifler also, having had the misfortune to murder a nightwatchman and be nabbed for it. And Limping Billy had fallen off a roof while farcing a ken. They called the rolle of the dead with a gloomy satisfaction and drank to each honoured name. There had been losses, but others had filled the gaps. The Armada had come and gone, houses risen and fallen, but London of the Order was still Rome-ville and very much the same.

  Eventually, Galloping Betty poured more wine for herself and Barbary only, indicating that Wilkin and Damber could take themselves off.

  ‘Seen my boy, Barb?’ she asked idly.

  Barbary hadn’t been looking forward to this. ‘You know we was married, Bet?’

  Betty nodded so that some of her white-rooted gold curls tossed into her tankard. ‘Irish Harry brought the news.’ Her international network was better than any courtier’s. ‘That was a night, Barb. When we heard. We whipped the cat that night, all right. Wilkin got so drunk he opened his shirt collar to piss.’

  ‘In the middle of the ceremony, Bet, he said: “If only my dear mother was here to celebrate with us.” That’s what he said.’

  Galloping Betty nodded, appreciating the lie. On the wall behind her was a tattered flysheet mentioning Rob as one of the heroes of the Armada.

  ‘Only a-course,’ continued Barbary, ‘being so warm with the queen, he’s been busy ever since.’

  Galloping Betty wept at Rob’s neglect of her, but not too much. She had reached the age where pleasure and loss, kindness and unkindness had a similar tenor. She grabbed Barbary’s hand and her eyes, sunk deep in puffy flesh, scoured Barbary’s. ‘You want anything, Barb. Strike, stalls, skew, anything, you come to old Bet. I never forgot that day my boy was seek-we’d. You was a hero. Stood there in your little jallyslops and said: “I’ll save him for you, Bet.” And save him you did. Old Bet ain’t forgotten. You come to old Bet.’ It was a powerful offer from a powerful woman. ‘Now then, Dick’ll be down the dancers in a minute. Keeps his bed these days, said he did enough dew-treading in Ireland.’