And she did. The shapes in the Deer Park receded as this new luxury became first a novelty and then a drug.
She went to Lady Russell and hired her services as adviser. Armed with Rob’s purse and Lady Russell’s taste, she called in furniture makers, bed suppliers, statuary and porcelain importers, needlewomen and ironworkers. She took on servants and entertained. She went to dressmakers and hired a dancing master. She was astounded by her own enthusiasm and told herself it was a hiatus. ‘Just to swim with the tide for once.’
It was conying really, using the swank, all the old Order pretences to be accepted as a lady. When she’d attended court functions during Rob’s absence, she had, at Mr Secretary’s suggestion, kept in the background. Now that Rob was back she was, of course, no longer invited to court, but beneath the royal circle existed another consisting of women, wives and mistresses who were not acceptable to Elizabeth but who nevertheless formed a high society of their own. And it was into this scene that she now stepped, and enjoyed it.
So she stayed. She told herself it was for Henry’s sake, and partly it was.
Ebullient little boy though he was, he was disturbed by being taken away from his mother and woke up at nights crying for her. Rob, probably because he’d never cared for the woman who had been the only mother he’d known, couldn’t understand it. ‘Jesu, boy, can’t you see this is for your profit?’
‘Rip me, Rob, he’s only six years old.’ A year younger than when she’d lost her own mother. She put her arms around the child. ‘There, pigsney. When the season’s over you shall go back to Kerswell and holiday with your mother. Look, I’m writing her a letter to tell her you’ve met Mr Secretary Cecil, and how well you look in your russet doublet.’
Elizabeth, according to Rob, took with resignation the news that this favourite of hers was a father. So was Essex. So was Raleigh. She could not imagine why the men in her life should wish to breed, but it seemed they must. She asked how old was ‘the little fellow’, wondered without much interest why she had not heard of him before, and did not ask for him to be presented.
In the sub-culture that existed outside court, however, Henry was taken to every household of note and introduced with a flourish by his surrogate mother. ‘Lord, but he was so sickly. We felt it better to leave him in Devon to be raised by his wet nurse until now.’ If it was marked that Henry was the least sickly child and, despite warnings, occasionally referred to the wet nurse in Devon as ‘Mother’, nobody commented on it; in that society there were too many skeletons in the cupboards to point out anyone else’s.
Barbary was corresponding regularly with Helen who, to her relief, seemed to have taken the loss of her son with the glazed equanimity with which she accepted all situations. Barbary knew Rob had other women, and that during his frequent trips to Bristol to oversee the outfitting of his merchant ships he also journeyed to Kerswell and Helen, and was always surprised at his reluctance to admit it. She didn’t mind. Well, next time he could take Henry as well. The boy was getting over his grief, but he was still homesick.
To alleviate it, she began to attach the child to herself. She couldn’t out-mother Helen, nor did she want to, but she had skills that Helen didn’t have.
‘How do you do that?’ asked Henry, running down the walkway to retrieve the dagger which still quivered through the heart of a rose.
Barbary was modest. ‘I’m rusty. I was aiming for the bud.’
‘But how do you do it? I want to do it. I want to do it. Show me.’
She had plenty more tricks up her sleeve, not all of them pleasing to Rob: ‘Margaret, I will not have Henry taught to cheat at dice.’
‘It is not cheating, Rob. I was merely demonstrating how to put them in with the four-side down and flick the shaker, like this, so terces come out every time. It’s something to stand him in good stead in later life.’
‘His later life will be in honest society, not the Order.’
‘Have you diced in honest society lately?’ asked Barbary, who had.
With servants and a tutor to take away its drudgery, she found parenthood immensely worthwhile. Henry had all the character and strength of will necessary to carry him into successful adulthood and she did not fret, as Rob did, over trying to mould it. What the child felt for her was not the love he had for Helen but friendship, and the greater friends they became the harder it was to make the effort to abandon him.
Rob said: ‘You have behaved excellently, Margaret. I thank you,’ and presented her with a diamond brooch in the shape of a dragonfly. Because she was prepared to say it was, Henry’s legitimacy was beyond question, a line of Bettys could be established. She had fulfilled the dibs. And still she stayed.
Then she found that she had acquired not one child, but three.
Roland, the steward, entered what Rob had somewhat optimistically called the ‘sewing chamber’, and which Barbary, being unable to sew, used as her private sitting room. She was doing accounts.
‘A visitor, my lady. I have put him in the gallery.’
‘Who is it, Roland?’
Roland’s swagger left him. ‘I have forgot the name, my lady.’
Servants. ‘One of these days, Roland, I’m going to take that staff of yours and stuff it up… the chimney.’ She’d had to promote him from footman because there wasn’t a steward to be had in the whole of London and Whitehall.
‘I’m sorry, my lady.’
‘I’ll be out in a minute, tell him. Sweetmeats and malmsey, Roland.’
‘Yes, my lady.’
She went to her looking-glass and dallied. One did not rush to greet unexpected visitors, apparently. ‘One’s steward makes him comfortable in some spacious apartment,’ Lady Russell had said, ‘that he may examine its riches. One’s butler brings him sweetmeats and malmsey, while you, the hostess, make yourself point-device in your boudoir. Then you go to him, taking him into some other grand apartment…’
Was that grey in her hair, or a trick of light? Was it time to call in the dyers? No. The light, thank God. Should she put on a patch? The hell with it, patches might be the rage, but she still couldn’t put one on without getting mastick all over her fingers.
The plunket samite had turned out well with billiment lace. The face in the glass smiled as she thought how far she’d come in dressing since the O’Neill had sent her one of his mistress’s outfits all those years ago when she’d been staying with the Spensers. The Spensers, Maccy, the children, Dublin, Munster, Rosh, the hanging woman, O’Hagan… Think of something else.
Tomorrow she must call in the ruff-maker and get another rapato; she’d worn this one at too many events for it to be seen again, and Rob insisted that she keep up appearances. Which suited her down to the ground; she had succumbed to a weakness for wearing beautiful things, as she had succumbed to having servants, entertaining, living in a house where every turn brought beauty to the eye. She had never been privy to riches on this scale, not even at Penshurst, and there was no doubt of its seduction. She might linger lovingly over thoughts of the good old days in the Bermudas and Connaught, but they’d been bloody uncomfortable. Every time she climbed the steps to her four-poster bed with its needlepoint hangings and goose-feather mattress, while a maid hung away the clothes she’d taken off, the prospect of exchanging it for a ship’s cot or a palliasse became that tinge less inviting. After all, Rob was keeping to his promise and letting her sleep in it alone, and a bargain was a bargain. Henry really couldn’t afford to lose her yet. Dammit, Ireland had cost her enough, for Jesu’s sake. A wiser head than hers had told her not to go back.
A pair of startled eyes stared back at her. Why should she? What was there for her now? O’Neill? He’d tricked her. O’Hagan? He’d left her. Her grandmother? Will? Well, yes, but there was no rush…
Lord, the visitor. Etiquette or no etiquette, one didn’t leave somebody waiting this long. She went out into the gallery.
Like the rest of Betty House, the gallery imposed dignity on its occupants, and Bar
bary’s progress along it was a stately rustle of silk. Its 120-foot length on the south side was nearly all windows, 1,500 separate panes of glass, looking out on the Thames. It might be draughty when there was a southerly blow but the effect was superb. Every recess in the opposite wall had a table covered with Turkish carpet, or contained statuary and other vertu, while the spaces between were lined with tapestry. They’d economised here; the tapestry was actually by Hicks of Warwickshire, not Gobelins of Paris, but it took an expert to tell the difference.
A figure at the end of the gallery stood up at her approach. Barbary’s acquired fashion sense assessed it. Fairly well dressed, though the copotain hat was a mistake and, oh dear, the marquisetto beard was no longer the ton. And whoever it was was impressed by his surroundings, it showed in the way he stood, and nobody in the right circles ever showed he was impressed…
‘Edmund.’ She stumbled over her high heels as she ran towards him. It was as if thinking about Munster had summoned him up.
‘Lady Betty. How well you look.’
Suspiciously she squinted at him under her lashes. Did he mean how well she looked compared to the mess she’d been when first put in his charge in Dublin? Better than she’d looked in a muddy potato field in Munster? Was he going into an I-remember-you-when? No, he wasn’t, bless him. Edmund Spenser was thrilled by acquaintance with the great. Barbary’s dress, jewels, her husband, her house declared she had achieved greatness. Therefore she was one more with whom he could be thrilled to be acquainted. He wouldn’t belittle her because he didn’t want her belittled.
‘Forgive me, Lady Betty, for the intrusion. But with Sir Rob away…’
‘My dear Edmund, we’re old friends,’ she said with grandeur. ‘Sir Rob is in Bristol for the moment.’ She sat him down and handed him sweetmeats. ‘How are things at court?’ It was kindness to assume he knew, though now she came to think about it she’d only heard vague references to him, as if he’d been running around on the edges, tugging at people’s attention.
But it was a sore point. ‘Ah, Lady Betty, what times of envy and detraction we do live in.’
‘Do we?’
They most certainly did. ‘Our peerless Majesty herself was so graciously pleased with “The Faerie Queen” as to grant me a pension of fifty pounds a year, but there are those who put difficulties in my way of getting it.’
She gathered he meant Burghley, or, more likely nowadays, Mr Secretary Cecil, who couldn’t stand Spenser any more than his father did. She saw his sudden recollection of her connection with both gentlemen. ‘Though doubtless it is obstruction by the petty functionaries of great men too busily involved in affairs of state…’ His retrieval of the mistake took time.
Poor old Edmund. He’d hitched his star so firmly to Raleigh’s wagon that it had been extinguished when Sir Walter went into disgrace – and the Tower – for his marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, and though Raleigh was slowly working his way back to acceptance it looked as if his protégé wasn’t enjoying the same rehabilitation. And the protégé couldn’t think why. Sadly, he was saying: ‘I had hoped my poor rhymes would have found favour with those having the virtue to hear them.’
God knows he’d tried; she couldn’t enter a noble house without seeing a prominently displayed dedication by Edmund to its owner. Being new to the grovelling of the patronised for the patron, most of them churned her stomach. He hadn’t missed anybody out. Just to make sure, he’d even addressed one ‘To All the Gracious and Beautiful Ladies in the Court’. But it hadn’t worked. The nobility was pleased to receive the poetry but not the poet.
She watched him as he talked, trying to reason why. His work left her numb with boredom, but, then, she wasn’t educated; those who were said it was the greatest thing since Chaucer. (And a little of him went a long way, and all.) The thing was, you could know that Edmund had genius, but when you were with him you couldn’t see where he kept it. It was as if it was something completely separate from the anxious, stubborn, obsequious, unremarkable little man himself.
His soul wasn’t big enough, she decided. Now Philip Sidney – there was a poet if you liked – had been able to see all points of view, even the Irish. You couldn’t imagine Philip standing by and watching while his side slaughtered unarmed men or hanged pregnant women. Spenser had. A blinkered little bugger, she thought. And boring. All she really wanted to hear about were his children.
‘How are Catherine and Sylvestris?’
He was delighted. ‘How kind of you to remember, Lady Betty. And you recall me to the point of my visit.’ He paused. ‘I’m getting married again.’
‘My felicitations.’
He was blushing. ‘An Irish country lass with the freshness of the dew about her.’
‘Irish?’
‘Anglo-Irish, of course. A Paleswoman from Youghal. Elizabeth Boyle. We are wedding at Cork. I shall leave wanton extravagance and false standards of worth and return to that savage land where yet there is simplicity.’
‘Very nice. And the children?’
His hands clasped. ‘Lady Betty, would you, would Sir Rob take them into your household? With you they can receive affection and introduction into the highest society I could wish for them. Your tenderness towards them and their poor mother emboldens me to ask it…’ He was going on at length, something about the sacred Muses being the nurses of Nobility, or vice versa, her and Rob being immortalised by the poem he would dedicate to them. She stared at him, remembering the agony it had been when he’d taken the children to London and she’d had to tear their hands from her neck.
She shook herself. Would Rob agree? He might, he’d probably be flattered to contribute to the tradition where the children of a good family were sent to learn their manners in great households. And he admired Spenser’s work; he might like to be immortalised. And he was beginning to rely on her judgement.
She gathered that dew-fresh Elizabeth Boyle was nervous at starting family life with two stepchildren, that Spenser wanted peace and quiet in which to compose a new poem, a wedding ode ‘Epithalamion’ which would far surpass…
‘I shall speak to Sir Rob,’ she cut in, ‘but I think you can take it that he will agree.’
She accepted his gratitude graciously. She could have kissed him. He found her worthy to entrust her with the most precious things he had because it would lead to their betterment. She was no longer Barbary of the Order playing at being Lady Betty. She was Lady Betty.
* * *
Nineteen English companies of foot and six troops of horse, 1,750 men in all, set out from Dundalk under the command of Marshal Henry Bagenal on a routine march to take supplies to the fort at Monaghan. The size of the force was merely to show the Tudor flag along the Ulster border and to discourage any clan that was feeling disaffected.
Monaghan was the most central of a line of English garrisons along what the Dublin administration liked to think of as a Hadrian’s Wall dividing the north of Ireland from civilised territory; except that there was no wall, just isolated forts, and very few of those. Nevertheless the Irish, and especially the O’Neill, whose territory they encroached on, found their presence an insult; the Armagh garrison, for instance, occupied one of the country’s oldest and most sacred cathedrals, a hill site presented to St Patrick himself by Queen Macha. And in the last ten years the English had been edging the invisible wall northwards. Another fort had been built above Armagh on the River Blackwater, and others were planned to fill the gaps, when and if Elizabeth sanctioned the cost of building them.
Lately the clans had been giving more trouble than usual.
The marshal was marching in the usual three divisions of vanguard, battle and rearward, with himself and other officers in the rear. The vanguard, the point of least danger, if there was danger, consisted largely of raw recruits fresh out from England, but to counteract their inexperience the column contained some of the 2,000 veterans whom Elizabeth had recently recalled from Brittany to stiffen her Irish army.
On the
second day’s march the howling began. Even the Brittany veterans, used to battle, were unsettled by an apparently empty countryside wailing as if the hills and trees had voice; the recruits were badly shaken. From nowhere a band of Irish shot appeared ahead of the van, firing with rapidity and accuracy. The English recruits crumbled at once and a company of veterans, musket and pike, had to rush forward to steady them. As fast as they’d come, the Irish disappeared.
The column reached Monaghan without further incident. The fort was built with the stones of an abbey the English had pulled down for the purpose. Supplies were carried into the quartermaster’s storehouse, wounded seen to, the dead buried, weapons cleaned. They’d already burned a good deal of their powder.
The next day, at ten in the morning, the English left a fresh company in the garrison and began their return march. This time there was a better distribution of officers and men. Bagenal moved up to the vanguard, and two of the Brittany officers took command in the battle and rear with the recruits.
Without heavily laden wagons to slow it down the column stepped out briskly into a sunny morning and a nightmare. Three miles out from Monaghan the howling began again. There was nothing to be seen except echoing hills and the trembling reeds of bog, but from either side of the column the bog began to spit fire. Suddenly up ahead were what appeared to be 300 English soldiers, red-coated, firing English calivers. To be attacked by doppelgangers broke the already stressed recruits, who ran and had to be replaced by the battle division. Then the red-coats had gone, as if a mirror had shattered. Silence fell over the pretty countryside, birdsong came back. Bagenal ordered the march to continue.
Ahead was a stream and on its far bank, in full view, was a horseman. They said later he shouted: ‘Let it be seen today whether the queen or I own Ulster.’ The O’Neill had finally declared himself.
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