‘Has he found the Jackman for me?’ Having promised Cecil she would find out the forger of the treacherous letter Sir John Perrot was purported to have written, it had been concerning to find the Jackman gone from his usual haunts.
Betty showed her gums. ‘Hylles found him. He was sleeping in the pure out Hampstead way. So drunk he couldn’t see a hole in a ladder. He was flapping away pink snakes when Hylles stumbled over him. He’s not got long, Barb. Pitiful he is. But he should be sober now.’ She raised her voice. ‘Hugh, bring out the Jackman.’
A pot boy opened the door of one of the Pudding’s many cupboards, fished about in it and dragged out a brown-habited skeleton which he propped up on a bench. The skeleton opened its eyes and called for wine.
‘Had to put him there, Barb,’ apologised Betty, ‘for he was lowering the tone something wonderful, and no lodgings’ll have him. But I’ll keep the old flick vitty as long as he lasts.’
Barbary went over to sit by the old man who’d taught her to read. He smelled of urine and vomit and he wouldn’t impose on the Pudding’s hospitality much longer; his skin, even his eyeballs, were as yellow as his hostess’s hair. Gently, Barbary tried to make him remember who she was, but he stared at her, mewed, and tried flapping her away as if she were cobwebs. ‘There’ll be no sense from him till he’s had his milk,’ called Betty. ‘Hugh.’
A blackjack of wine was set on the table, the Jackman grabbed it and managed to spill most of it into his mouth before his weakened hands let it fall onto the table. He sneered. ‘Pax vobiscum.’
‘Do you know who I am?’
His head swayed with drunken dignity. ‘Knowledge is power,’ he said in Latin.
‘Look at these.’ She put two pages in front of him. One was a genuine letter, mundane business that Sir John Perrot had penned to Mr Secretary Cecil. ‘This is from a friend of mine.’ She let him examine it and then held up the forgery. ‘And this is another supposed to be from him.’
The Jackman barely glanced at it. ‘It’s a forgery.’
‘I know it is. But who forged it?’ She steadied the Jackman’s shaking hands as he held it to his eyes.
He belched. ‘Char… Charles Trevor. Wouldn’t gull a jackass. Lives in Cheapside. Disgrace to a noble profession.’
She stroked his sticky hair and said goodbye, then Hugh picked the old man up and carried him upstairs. Galloping Betty had gone back to counting her money on the dais. Charles Trevor, eh? A freelance, not one of the Order. She hoped for his sake that he responded to Mr Secretary’s questioning promptly or he’d find himself giving his answers on the rack.
‘Glad to be back, Barb?’ Cuckold Dick flopped down beside her.
‘Yes.’ And she was. ‘How’s the whiskey business?’
Dick sighed. ‘He done me, Barb. Mr Secretary done me.’ It had surprised them both when Cecil, in return for his help in easing the liquor through customs, had appointed himself the enterprise’s senior, though secret, partner and put in his own man, a former purveyor by the name of Rattray, to oversee sales and distribution. It had surprised Barbary less when she realised that Cecil received only £800 a year for the maintenance of his intelligence service when, in fact, it cost nearer £3,000. Like his father, he lacked inherited wealth, and had to subsidise his salary, and his spies, by other means.
Dick still retained control over the shipping side, which was the important bit as far as Barbary was concerned, but the fact that he was not sole recipient of the profits had caused him to relapse into semi-inertia, which Barbary suspected he would have relapsed into anyway. Like most of the Order, Dick was better at dreaming success than achieving it.
‘I could a been a rich man,’ he said with the gloomy satisfaction of one who no longer has the responsibility of exertion, ‘but he done me.’
‘You wouldn’t have liked it,’ Barbary told him impatiently. ‘Think of all those fathers trying to foist their daughters on you. Did O’Neill send the ruddock?’ They couldn’t move on their own account until they had some gold. As it was, she was living and dressing on a small allowance from Cecil.
Cuckold Dick brightened and put a finger to the side of his nose. ‘The way we’re doing it, Barb,’ he said softly, ‘is there’s a small barrel among the rest on the ship marked for me personal. I got it agreed with Mr Secretary as I could supply the Pudding direct. It comes straight ashore and into Dirty Kate’s handcart, and she pushes it round here.’
Dirty Kate was a pie-seller whose dropsy, facial carbuncles and personal habits affected her trade to the point of never selling a single pie. The Order used her to carry goods it preferred officialdom not to see.
‘How much?’
Dick splayed two hands, with three fingers turned under. ‘All gold coin of the realm, Barb.’ Dick’s whisper was awestruck. ‘I was frit the dockers unloading would notice the weight.’
Seven hundred pounds. She’d expected the O’Neill to be generous, but the hugeness of the amount, and O’Neill’s willingness to pay it, jerked her into a horrified realisation of what she was doing and, more importantly, what she was asking Cuckold Dick to do. She saw herself and Dick, travellers in a long and tortuous full circle which had brought them back to the inn they’d started out from; two conspirators. Only this time they plotted not a crossbite, but high treason.
The journey had changed her so much there was hardly a point of contact between the Barbary who’d left the Bermudas and the Barbary who’d returned. But Dick was untouched, exactly as he had been, vulnerable and innocent.
‘I want you out of it, Dick,’ she said briskly. ‘Your bit’s done. Some of that ruddock’s yours. Take it and cut off.’
He was hurt. ‘Why, Barb?’
‘Dick, I’m a traitor.’ Was that what she was? Could pity and indignation for all the inequality, all the babies hanging from their hanging mothers, be reduced to that simple, terrible word? She had been vouchsafed the imbalance of things and put in the way of fumblingly, perhaps hopelessly, trying to right it. But Dick had gone through no such process. ‘And you ain’t,’ she said. ‘They don’t whip you at the cart’s tail for smuggling guns to the Irish. They cut your tripes out.’
Dick stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. She got up and retrieved what was left of the malmsey. Tenderly, she poured him some. What would she do without him?
He sipped, thoughtfully. ‘You see, Barb,’ he said, as if he’d already made a statement, ‘I’m in it. Separate from you, like. O’Neill, he said to me: Dick, he said, I’m like a gravedigger, up to my arse in business and don’t know which way to turn. You’re the expert, Dick, he said, and it’s an expert I need. Barb’s the contact, he said, but you’re the beater. I need them guns bad, he said, and you’re my Upright Man. You in or out, Dick? he said. And I said “In” and he said “Oatmeal” and we shook fambles on it. I don’t call it treason, I call it business.’
Barbary was silenced. Even if it had not been conducted in those terms, the O’Neill and Cuckold Dick had come to their own understanding. Useless to tell Dick that the O’Neill was an astute and manipulative bastard; for the first time in his life somebody had ascribed to Dick the quality of upright manliness he so admired in others, and, tripes cut out or not, the injection of dignity it had given him was irreversible. And perhaps the O’Neill was not so wrong after all. She’d been the one patronising Dick when all along such strength as she had came from him. She had to do some reassessing.
‘Suit yourself,’ she said. There was an awkward pause while they both absorbed Dick’s new independence. ‘Where’d you stow the ruddock?’
He smiled with relief. ‘Under Galloping Bet’s bed.’
There was nowhere safer. ‘Any news from the walking morts?’
‘Nan Nevet come in yesterday to report. That gunmaker’s a rogue right enough.’ It was a word Order members never used about themselves and described a dishonest man in ordinary society. ‘Friends round Panningridge has it that for every three ox-loads of cannon leaving the gun
works is one the Master of Ordnance never gets to be h’aware of.’
‘Who’s he selling to?’
Dick shrugged his dandruffed shoulders. ‘Sea Beggars, maybe. The morts don’t know yet. Word has it the oxcarts leave the foundry afore first light, but one cuts off from the train. There’ll be some inlet along the coast where they load the guns aboard some rock-creeper. Could be he’s trading with Low Countries Spanish. It don’t matter much.’
Barbary agreed. If the cannon master at Will’s old iron works was a rogue, it was going to take at least some of the sweat out of her mission. He could be blackmailed if necessary but he was more likely to respond to a straightforward bribe which, thanks to the O’Neill’s provision, they could make unrefuseable. ‘Tell Nan to set up a meet,’ she said.
Cuckold Dick put a hand on her arm. ‘Not you, Barb.’
‘What do you mean, not me?’ Dick’s sudden uprightness was giving him ideas above his station. It had always been unders
Chapter Twenty-Two
The unarmed ship sailing up the Thames on the tide was small, not more than a hundred tons, and of a type unknown to those waters, a cross between a balinger and a Galway hooker. Grace O’Malley had designed her to double as transport and merchantman. She was expendable; if this was a one-way voyage, Grace wasn’t going to deprive her fleet of a fighting ship. Nor, as a supplicant, could she prance into English territory in anything as magnificent as the Grace of God. The name alone would have hanged her.
The battering from the Atlantic breakers past Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, along the Channel and through the Straits of Dover, had left the ship salt-stained and unpolished. The slight breeze fluttered a somewhat tattered pennant showing the tusked boar and sail of the O’Malley arms.
She dropped anchor in the Pool of London where word that the Irish woman rebel-pirate had come to visit the queen attracted an immediate crowd. The first person ashore was Sir Murrough na dTuadh O’Flaherty, whom Grace had brought along to make initial contact with the queen because he was one of the few pro-English relatives she had, and because he looked impressive. He was impressive, tall with snow-white beard and hair. But his rich, unexceptional, English clothing disappointed the crowd which expected native Irish to wear loincloths and bones in the nose. Murrough’s soubriquet ‘na dTuath’, ‘of the Battle of Axes’, had been earned before he settled for the quiet life. The crowd hung on in the hope of something more savage.
Pushing through the press, Barbary heard adverse comments: ‘My old mother’s washtub’s a likelier pirate. Papist traitors. Squalid, them Irish.’ A contingent of small boys marched up and down the quay holding their noses to illustrate the universal truth that all Irish smelled. But a man from one of the boatyards was admiring the hull’s apple-cheeked forequarters which ran from its deceptively sharp, clean entrance to the raked transom. ‘They can build, all right. Hardly a flat plank in her.’
Mr Secretary Cecil had sent a small detachment of his personal guard to keep the over-curious off the ship, and its captain, recognising Barbary, allowed her through. The gangplank’s length was a time-bridge. She had never worked out why the lanolin which permeated Irish ships’ ropes and sails smelled different from English lanolin, why the resin in Irish spars was distinct from that in English wood, but if she’d been blind she’d have known she was aboard a Connaught vessel, and the effect of that familiarity here in the midst of this other familiarity was disorientating. So was seeing the crew.
That man on the poop deck coiling ropes with a preoccupation that quarantined him from the English catcalls was Cull, the three sailors holystoning the deck on which the crowd was spitting were Rap, Keeroge and Scalder, shapes known in another world and now set against the London skyline. Seeing her in her court clothes was just as strange to them; they were almost remote in their greeting until Cull, lovely Cull, looked into her face, as he had once done on a strand in Connaught, and gathered her up. ‘No need to be homesick now. Sure and we’re here.’
‘Oh, Cull.’ She clung to each of them, showered by whistles and more catcalls from the quayside, then pulled herself together. ‘Where’s Herself?’
‘Below. Making pretty.’
She stepped down into the captain’s cabin. Ireland again. Lobster pots. Grace’s pipe, the smell of tobacco and seaweed and stirabout, a crucifix. And Grace O’Malley herself, as sturdy as Croagh Patrick, but a Croagh Patrick rigged out in bunting. She was in her Sunday best, all her Sunday bests. With extras. Farthingaled, tasselled, mantilla-ed, accessoried almost into a stoop, whaleboned, buckrammed, slashed, embroidered, be-laced, be-furred, be-jewelled and bedecked. She looked like an ironmongery stand. Catching sight of Barbary in the doorway, she picked up an ostrich feather fan and added it defiantly to her already weighty chatelaine. ‘I’m appearing me finest to the Saxon queen,’ she said grimly.
‘What are you trying to do, outrank her?’ It took time and high words, but at last Barbary had battled Grace down to her shift and started again. ‘Irish, that’s what you’ve got to be, for Chrissake. Dignified and Irish.’
In an excellent linen robe of saffron surmounted by her cloak and with a fine Irish roll on her head, Grace’s height showed off the sweeping lines of a culture as sure of itself as Elizabeth’s. ‘No jewels,’ said Barbary firmly, ‘you’re not going before the queen in stuff you’ve piloted from under her nose.’
‘I’ll be selling them while I’m here anyways,’ Grace told her. ‘That black-hearted bastard Bingham’s cessed his troops on the Two Owels and they’re eating me people’s food like maggots.’ She looked at Barbary. ‘There’s famine.’
Oh God, not Clare, nor Murrisk, not all those confident people bewildered and dying. ‘Tell her.’
‘I intend to. And I’m wearing this.’ Grace picked up something from her cabin table and put it round her neck. The beautiful and barbaric torque that had been Barbary’s mother’s, that Lord Burghley had once held, the cause of everything that had changed Barbary’s life, glowed its Gaelic triumph round the sinews of Grace O’Malley’s throat. Barbary wiped her eyes and nodded.
It would have been quicker and, Barbary thought, more appropriate if Grace had been carried to Whitehall by boat, but the Elf had sent a coach. The crowd on the quay jeered as they went ashore but Grace stalked through the path cleared for her by the guard, paying no more attention than if the sound was the wind on her quarterdeck. In the coach she sat upright, refusing to turn her head to look out of the windows, though her eyes slid sideways from time to time.
She’s amazing, thought Barbary, she’s never seen a city like this before. Has she seen a city at all? Aloud she asked: ‘What do you think of it?’
Her grandmother put her in her place. ‘Seville’s prettier.’
As they left the city, Barbary began to panic. ‘You’ve got to sweeten her. Play the poor old woman. None of this you’re an uppity Saxon barbarian and I’m a descendant of Noah. I’ve put Bingham in her bad books, but you’re the one can finish him off if you play your cards right. Remember Connaught.’
‘I’ll not be likely to forget. Katty died of starvation.’
‘Katty? But I left her with the O’Neill.’
Grace’s voice was inexorable. ‘She went home, never being happy away from it. I was off at Rockfleet, and the Saxon soldiers made a surprise raid on Clare. They took away all the harvest and the animals and then destroyed the boats so the people could not fish. Katty gave her food to her grandchildren, much good did it do them for they were dead with her when I got back.’
That comfortable, comforting woman who’d nursed her at Dungannon, dead. The community that had been Clare, dead too? Like a vulture, the reality of what had been an amorphous word flapped onto Barbary’s shoulder. Famine.
‘And it was your woman killed her.’ An inclination of Grace’s head cited London and its queen. ‘So hold your breath for I know what I’ve to do.’
‘What?’ But questions, advice and pleading glanced off granite.
&n
bsp; She’s no idea what she’s dealing with, thought Barbary. There was no parallel in Ireland to English court life, which was dominated by the shifting mood of one person. Had Elizabeth been continually tyrannical everybody would at least have known where they were, but she could lull her people into relaxing and then switch. One of her women had been cast into outer darkness for playing the queen’s favourite tune when, in mid-phrase, the queen had sickened of jollity. The court danced, as it were, to a measure that had no rhythm. The problem was the queen’s age and the queen’s love. Miserable as they were when they were apart, Elizabeth and Essex had begun to get on each other’s nerves when they were together, and their tantrums and reconciliations were eruptions that caught others in the lava-flow. Essex had looked with flirtatious eye on Lady Mary Howard; Her Majesty had said nothing but had Lady Mary’s best dress secretly taken from her wardrobe and stalked into court wearing it herself. The effect was awful; Elizabeth was several inches taller than Mary Howard. ‘If it’s too short for me, it’s too fine for you, so it fits neither of us well,’ she’d shouted at the cowering maid of honour.
Undoubtedly the queen was going mad, but Essex was madder. He wanted to invade Spain, the Indies, put down the rebels in Ireland. Why was the queen not filling the vacant command of Ireland? It was on this matter that he had ruined himself, or so it seemed at the time. The Councillors who witnessed the incident came out of the Council shaking. Essex had drawn his sword on the queen, or at least would have done if the Earl of Nottingham hadn’t pushed him back and held him. He’d been insolent, she’d boxed his ears and he’d clapped his hand to his sword: ‘This is an outrage. I would not have borne it from your father’s hands.’
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