The place was called Clontibret.
Most of the English stood still, but a Palesman called Seagrave spurred forward into the attack with forty troopers. As if by magic Tyrone cavalry appeared behind the O’Neill, shooting. They missed Seagrave, who reached O’Neill, knocked him off his horse and fell on top of him. O’Neill was saved by one of his subsidiary chiefs, O’Cahan, who cut off Seagrave’s arm. O’Neill managed to reach his dagger and finished him off.
From then on the column was under continuous attack. The Irish horse was worked forward by troops, each troop protected from English fire and cavalry by a formation of shot. It was a manoeuvre that brought them right up to the English ranks. Weighed down by its wounded, but showing courage, the column stopped, fought, staggered on, fought, staggered on. Irish horse and foot came screaming out of the scrub time and again, the kerns whirling along at the cavalry’s stirrups like acrobats, firing, stabbing, and then being whirled back out of danger by the horsemen. Any soldiers foolhardy enough to pursue them were never seen again. There was no clear front. Ammunition was low. Bagenal gave the only order he could, to press on with the march, suffering loss, men dropping around him. It went on for eight hours.
By dusk the English had covered fourteen miles to a moorland height where they fell down in battle formation. Bagenal’s pewter dishes were melted down for bullets and one of Bagenal’s servants – an Irishman, Felim O’Hanlon – was sent off to make his way to Newry and bring help.
The next morning the relief column came marching over the moor to find weary and wounded Englishmen encamped in an empty countryside. The Irish had gone. The O’Neill, too, had run out of ammunition.
Back at Newry Marshal Bagenal, humiliated and ashamed, recorded his losses as merely thirty-one killed and 109 wounded. In fact, the English casualties had been something like 700.
Numbers, however, were not the point. The point was that it had happened. The O’Neill had used Irishmen who had been trained by Elizabeth’s own officers in the time when she’d trusted him, and, moreover, used them in a new kind of warfare. Contrary to what everybody had been led to believe, the enemy was not rabble. One of the Brittany captains privately wrote to Cecil saying that the O’Neill had proved himself a skilful commander of troops as disciplined and accurate as any he’d faced before, brilliantly using familiar terrain, and that it would take a better-trained, better-equipped army than had so far been put in the field to defeat them.
Marshal Henry Bagenal had one cause for triumph, however. The shifting shape that was sometimes the Earl of Tyrone, Her Majesty’s loyal subject, and sometimes the O’Neill, Gaelic chieftain and backer of rebels, had stopped flickering and resolved itself into a figure on a horse directing troops against the English. He had shown himself as the arch-rebel his brother-in-law had always said he was.
Neither the English nor the Irish bothered themselves with why he had chosen that moment to cross his Rubicon. For the Ulster clans which had grown sick of his shifting, it was a joy to be celebrated in savagery. As if somebody had trailed gunpowder along the invisible Hadrian’s Wall and lit it, flames exploded in colonial fort, castle and homestead along a line from east to far west, killing and burning military and civilian alike. Humiliation and cruelty were revenged in humiliation and cruelty. Sir Richard Bingham’s brother George was murdered in the library of his Connaught castle.
The rising in response to Clontibret was so immediate that it was happening while letters bearing the news of the defeat were still on their four-day journey to England.
* * *
‘We shan’t be too long, Rob. Sylvestris is at his Greek with the new tutor. Catherine is spending the day at the Cumberlands.’
‘I don’t like Henry going to the Tower.’
‘He won’t be coming into Thomas’s. He can go off with Winchard and visit the menagerie.’
Rob looked up from his desk. ‘It does my consequence no good, Margaret, for my son to be accompanied by an ape whose knuckles brush his shins. When Winchard opened the gate to Sir James Harington the other day Sir James refused to enter until he heard him speak.’
‘That’s Winchard’s job, to frighten people off. Nobody’s going to attack me, or the children, with Winchard about.’ Sometimes she herself wondered why she’d hired Winchard, but he was one of her naughtinesses, the deliberate lapses to remind Rob, when he became over pompous, that his past too lay in the Order and even if he was ashamed of it, she wasn’t, and that she still had a will of her own. Winchard was her new Clampett.
‘They wouldn’t attack you anyway,’ said Rob. He was still sulking from the incident at Paul’s churchyard two days before when his purse had been cut. The loss of the purse hadn’t upset him as much as having it returned a few minutes later by a figure who muttered: ‘Didn’t realise you was Barb’s husband,’ before disappearing into the crowd.
‘Who was it?’ Barbary asked, interested. ‘Damber the Filch or Harry Poyning? Harry works Paul’s.’
‘I have no idea who it was,’ said Rob, ‘and I could wish you didn’t.’
‘Anyway,’ said Barbary, pursuing the Winchard argument, ‘Henry likes him. And if you think you can find a better you are most welcome to try.’
Both statements were clinchers. Henry was the apple of Rob’s eye, and good servants were so hard to come by that acquiring them was a specialist business.
‘Very well. Very well.’ He generally gave in nowadays.
With Winchard and Henry she went down the garden, where the under-gatekeeper unlocked the gate onto the wharf and Winchard called up an eastward boat. Strictly speaking, they should have kept a barge of their own – Essex kept two – but, as Rob pointed out, the Earl of Essex was in debt to the tune of £20,000; he even owed the queen £3,000, and she’d asked for it back.
As the boat sculled under the raised portcullis into the basin of the Tower of London’s Watergate, a guard she hadn’t seen before asked for her authority, but his sergeant came bustling out of the postern to hand her up the steps. ‘Good afternoon, Lady Betty. Can’t stay away from us then? Hot for May, in’t it, Lady Betty. Brought the little lad today? Arternoon, young gentleman. Mind your step, now, Lady Betty. No need to show you the way. Good day to you, Lady Betty.’
He looked after her, appreciatively watching her progress into the ward of St Thomas’s. Her kirtle and bodice were of emerald satin embroidered on stomacher and bodice in a bold coral pattern; round her neck was a gold carcanet; her hair was uncovered except for an audacious, nodding ostrich feather. She left behind in the river-smelling basin a whiff of best Italian scent. Even though she was attended by a servant who looked like a gorilla, she was the glass of fashion. ‘That’s Lady Betty,’ he said.
‘I gathered,’ said the guard.
‘I do not wish to hear, Henry,’ Lady Betty was saying, ‘that you have been poking sticks at the lion through the bars. Nor you, Winchard. It will be a hot lion today and it might get angry again. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Henry.
‘Yes, Barb,’ said Winchard.
‘Winchard.’
‘Yes, Lady Betty.’
‘And then you may go to the Ordnance Tower and look at the guns. Tell Sir Roger you have my lord of Essex’s permission. I shall come there.’
‘H’ray,’ said Henry.
Winchard winked. ‘Guns, eh, Barb?’
‘Winchard.’ She watched the two disparate figures walk away, one lumbering, one skipping. Winchard’s nods and winks to her past were rare and so impenetrable as to be comprehensible only to those in the know, but she tried to cure him of them, mainly to prevent Rob from dismissing him.
She stood where she was for a while, gloating, looking towards the centre of the grey complexity of buildings where she had once been incarcerated. Her visits to the Tower were occasioned by tragedy, but there were moments when the contrast between her consequence then and now made her want to shout: ‘Look at me. Look at me, you key-clankers. Recognise me?’ They di
dn’t, of course. Two visits previously she had passed Keeper Morgan and, although he’d been one of the kinder warders during her imprisonment, she’d been unable to resist a petty revenge for it: ‘Do you not salute a lady when you pass her, my fat fellow? I shall inform your superiors of this discourtesy.’ Kept her happy all day, that had.
Oh well. Barbary turned into St Thomas’s tower gateway. She nodded to the guards, who saluted, not even bothering to examine the basket she carried, and made her way through the hall that Edward I had built, to the turret staircase leading to the gallery that in turn led to the chamber above the Watergate. It was a beautiful room with a tiled floor, vaulted ceiling, and windows fitted with coloured glass that looked out onto the river and today were open, letting in the sunlight and the calls of watermen, a room unusually sumptuous and escape-worthy for a prisoner, even if he was a king’s son. But the prisoner, who lay in a great bed facing the windows, wasn’t going anywhere.
‘How are you today?’ asked Barbary, leaning forward on tiptoe to kiss him. His breath smelled of urine. She opened her basket. ‘I’ve brought you apple jelly mixed with port wine and a receipt of my cook; he makes it from elicampane roots, whatever they are, and—’
‘Whiskey.’
‘Sir John, you’ll get me hanged. The doctors—’
‘Abortionist bastards. Whiskey, woman. What say you?’ He’d grown thin and was as yellow as the late Jackman had been, but he was still in command.
Barbary looked at Cutress, Sir John’s valet, who shrugged. She brought out a bottle from a locker, picked up a feeding glass from beside the bed, crossed to the window, tipped out the medicine and filled it with whiskey. She had to hold the glass while he sucked greedily at its tube. The queen, conscience-stricken by what she had done to her half-brother, was sending her own doctors every day, but it was too late. Sir John Perrot was dying.
All Barbary’s and Mr Secretary Cecil’s efforts to prove the evidence against him false had gone for nothing. Despite pleas from Burghley, his son and even Essex, whose sister was Sir John’s daughter-in-law, the queen had been determined to have him arraigned for treachery. Her Justices sitting at Westminster refused to allow Cecil’s and Barbary’s findings to be taken into account, the forged letter was accepted as prima facie evidence, and Sir John was condemned to death.
His arch enemies, Loftus and Wallop, had come over for the trial. Barbary, watching them from the ladies’ gallery, could see that even to them the verdict was a surprise. By then it wasn’t a surprise to her. Sir John’s supposed treating with Spain was not the issue; the thrust of the charges were Sir John’s insults to the queen. In effect he was on trial for hurting Elizabeth’s vanity. The jury buzzed with horror at hearing Her Majesty referred to as a ‘filthy hypocrite’, ‘a base, bastard, pissing, kitchen woman’, and, with Sir John shouting even juicier epithets from the dock, they returned a guilty verdict after only three-quarters of an hour.
It was then that the whole point of the travesty became apparent; the queen declined to sign the death warrant and refused to sanction the usual custom whereby a traitor’s property was confiscated. Sir John’s heirs would be able to inherit. Mr Secretary Cecil had been as near anger as Barbary had ever seen him. ‘Just to teach him a lesson,’ he said, slamming his small hands on his desk. ‘That’s all it was, to teach him a lesson.’
‘Well, she’s done it,’ hissed Barbary. ‘Now she can let him out of the Tower.’
‘She will,’ the Elf had said, soothingly. ‘She will.’
But by the time she did, Sir John was too ill to be moved.
‘Fill it up again, mistress,’ he told Barbary when he’d finished his bottle. ‘I’ll keep it under the bedclothes. Quickly, the doctors are coming.’
But it wasn’t the doctors, it was the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Owen Hopton, in a sweat. ‘Forgive the intrusion, Sir John. I hope you are better today. But I have need of your Irish knowledge… ah, and Lady Betty. Excellent.’ Sir Owen always became distrait when he saw Barbary, as if he was trying to remember where he’d seen her before.
‘What is it?’ snapped Sir John.
‘And hold your voice down, sir,’ said Barbary sharply. ‘You are in a sickroom.’ Keeping Sir Owen off balance was another of her revenges.
‘Do you think it’s a prelude to invasion?’ whispered Sir Owen, taking a chair by Sir John’s bed, ‘because if it is, the work involved in putting the Tower back into war readiness should be taken in hand at once.’
‘What say you, blast you?’
‘Haven’t you heard? No, of course not, I’ve only just heard myself. Clontibret, a place called Clontibret in Ireland. Half of Bagenal’s force wiped out in the Earl of Tyrone’s ambush. The queen is publishing a—’
‘Are you sure it was the O’Neill?’
‘How do they know it was the O’Neill?’ Sir John’s and Barbary’s questions were simultaneous.
‘Most certainly it was him. Stood across a river and jeered that he’d be King of Ireland within the month. His kerns cut off our soldiers’ heads. The cur, the treacherous cur, after Her Majesty raised him from the dust.’
‘Tell us what happened, man,’ said Sir John, quietly. Barbary went to the window as Sir Owen told what he knew. One of the guild barges was rowing by, its pennant so long that it trailed in the water. Watermen, waiting for a fare, were gaming with dice on the steps of the wharf. Had he used cannon? ‘He kills people.’ She killed people. If you supplied a man with guns, he’d use them. She’d known that. Ordinary people, like those men down there, men who joined the English army to get away from poverty at home, men no more responsible for Ireland’s past than she was. Metal came flaming out of gun barrels and cut bits of them off. It had seemed so indefinite, the O’Neill had temporised so long that it had seemed as if nothing would make a difference, certainly not a few guns.
Oh God, Will. He was in the midst of it, and making more guns for the O’Neill. She’d get him back. She’d send a message through Cuckold Dick’s whiskey boats to Grace O’Malley and tell her to get Will out of it. Grace could do it, she could do anything. But then her grandmother must return to Connaught and stay there, where she’d be safe.
Still with her back to the room she said: ‘Why did he move now?’
‘Because he’s a cur, a treacherous cur.’
Sir John said: ‘Because they demanded his son.’ She turned round. The old man in the bed was crackling a letter between his weak fingers. ‘James, my son, wrote to me. Dublin demanded O’Neill send in his eldest son as a hostage. It showed him, d’you see. He’d never be an Englishman to the English. They treated him like a chieftain in a wolf-cloak, not an earl in doublet and hose.’
‘And quite right too.’
Barbary turned on the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower. ‘Out.’ Sir John was crying, she wouldn’t have a fool like Sir Owen see him cry.
‘But there’s the matter of my lord Bingham. Will the queen release him now, do you think?’
And that was the best of Barbary’s revenges. Though Sir John was in the Tower, so was one of his greatest enemies. Sometimes she would stand beneath the window of the small, uncomfortable cell in which Elizabeth had ordered Sir Richard Bingham to be confined, and imagine for her pleasure what fear and humiliation he was suffering. She wanted him hanged so that she could watch him on the gallows, hear him beg as a little boy who could read had begged.
But she couldn’t be bothered with all that now. ‘Out with you.’
Sir Owen went, and she crossed to the bed and wiped the yellow, waxy face with her handkerchief. ‘Don’t now, don’t. God knows you did your best, my lord. It would never have happened if they’d listened to you.’ Why didn’t he swear and rage? How could he be this ill and still care so much? ‘You were the best Englishman Ireland ever had.’
Cutress was in distress on the other side of the bed. ‘Do I go for the doctors, my lord, my lady?’
The wrinkled eyelids opened and the pop-eyes of a Tudor glared at h
im. ‘Whiskey.’ They gave him whiskey and he rallied. ‘Well, well, it’s begun. The end has begun.’
Barbary began repacking her basket. ‘Maybe it’s not the end.’
‘What say you?’ His hand took hers in a suddenly strong grip. ‘You think he’ll beat her, do you?’ He was still shrewd.
‘Well…’ Something might happen. Elizabeth might sicken of her rebellious Irish, might withdraw, pigs might fly. Anything was possible.
‘I tell you, mistress, it’s the end of the Irish. He’s offended her, d’ye see. She’ll never forgive him. I know. Don’t I know? She’ll go all out. Watch the old cheeseparer spend the cash on arms now.’ He fell back on his pillows. ‘When she might have spent it on peace.’
She wiped his face. The flesh was falling away from the flat plane of its bones. As she kissed him his hand tightened once more on hers. ‘Barbary.’ It was the first time he’d called her that.
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t go back. D’ye hear me? Don’t go back.’
* * *
Henry, most definitely his father’s son, wanted to return home by river, as they’d come. ‘I don’t want to go in a chair, it’s eff, an eff word.’
‘Effeminate, you mean – I hope. Maybe, but my shoes hurt and I must call in at Paul’s.’
He studied her. ‘You do look tired.’
Two of the chairmen on Tower Hill, waiting to take sightseers home, jumped for her custom. Henry balked again. ‘I can walk.’
‘Very well, I’ll have Winchard ride with me, and he can tell me about the lion.’ Grinning, Henry clambered into the chair. He was aggressive and occasionally a bully, but, young as he was, his humour gave him a flexibility his father had never possessed.
The middle aisle of St Paul’s had a different sound to it today; usually it rang with young bloods shouting their conversations to each other over the noisy trade of the stalls to attract attention. But today there was the low, concentrated buzz of discussion. Winchard cleared a way for her through the crowd round one of the pillars so that she could read the news sheet. It was long and full of invective against O’Neill – among other things it called him the ‘Great Satan’ – but it contained no more facts than Sir Owen Hopton had given. Below was another sheet declaring ‘Her Majesty’s grief at the loss and death of so many good soldiers’. The mood around the pillar was bellicose with a touch of panic. ‘It’s a cockatrice den. Always was. Wipe out the lot of them, I say.’ ‘Gad, the queen should make me Lord Deputy, I’d show them.’ ‘She should send Essex. He’d show them.’ ‘What if the bastard joins up with the Spanish?’
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