‘We fight rabble with rabble,’ Rob wrote. ‘God help us if O’Neill should break out again.’
* * *
On the day of Lord Burghley’s funeral, Betty House was draped in mourning Cyprus crepe like all the noble residences in the Strand; even Charing Cross had been tied with black ribbon out of respect for a nation’s grief.
The tiltyard stand had been bedecked in black and carried to the open gateway so that Barbary, Catherine and Sylvestris could watch the procession on its way to Westminster Abbey. The great bell was tolling.
‘My legs ache,’ Catherine said. The August had turned hot and humid, and under an overcast sky they all sweated in the funeral clothes which enveloped every area of skin except the face. They had been standing there for an hour as the muffled drums beat on and on, timing the slow march of city archers, infantry, shot and gunners, the livery companies, ward beadles and watches, foresters, infantry, and heralds.
‘Bear it,’ said Barbary. ‘The hearse hasn’t gone by yet.’ But here it was, coming down the hill by the Cross, pulled by black horses caparisoned to their fetlocks, with pennants over their manes and tails. By its side walked gentlemen pensioners with pikes reversed. Behind it a herald led Burghley’s horse, riderless.
‘Kneel.’
They knelt, but at this height they could look down under their eyelids and see the statue lying on the coffin.
‘Was he a good man?’ asked Sylvestris.
‘He was a great one.’ She thought back to the barge going down to Greenwich that night very long ago. What she remembered most was his fatigue. Even then he’d had little more colour than that marble down there, but it was not so much physical tiredness as erosion of a personality that had worked too hard, known too many secrets. The brain had manipulated her, blackmailed and schemed as it had gone on blackmailing and scheming all these years since to keep his queen’s peace. Goodness or not, she didn’t know, but it was greatness.
His last appearance in the Council Chamber had coincided with another outburst from Essex denouncing peace with Spain and the Irish. Barely able to speak, Burghley had taken his prayer book from his pocket and pointed silently to the twenty-third verse of Psalm 55: ‘Bloodthirsty and deceitful men shall not live out half their days.’
And now the old crossbiter was dead, and the streets were massed with silent people who felt less safe without him. Elizabeth, they said, had gone to pieces.
‘He must have been good,’ Catherine was saying, ‘to warrant all this.’
The two sons walked alone behind the hearse. Thomas, the new Lord Burghley, was the one who looked the statesman, whereas in fact he did everything the hobbling, stunted figure at his side told him to do. Mr Secretary Cecil’s expression was so habitual that, even now, he couldn’t rid himself of it and stared ahead in a cheery rictus that caused the crowds to murmur in disapproval. Behind them came the dukes, the earls, the viscounts, a walking black forest of England’s notables, foreign princes and ambassadors.
‘There’s Henry.’
Barbary clamped Sylvestris’s arm. ‘Don’t wave.’
Henry was too young to be at the Abbey, but Garter King of Arms had agreed that he could represent Rob in the procession as far as Betty House. He was behaving beautifully, matching his short stride to the Lord Admiral’s. Now he bowed to the hearse and cut away from the lines, the crowd opening to let him through.
He squeezed between the gatepost and the stand and looked up at Barbary, wriggling. ‘I’m desperate.’
Oh dear. ‘Go behind the rose bed, then come up here.’ He’d been waiting for hours at Paul’s while the procession assembled. She could hear the splash of a tiny stream above the slow shuffle of the 500 poor and needy going by, all dressed in their new black gowns and hoods.
She hoped Elizabeth in her grief had agreed the Treasury should pay for all this. What it must be costing. She could think of nothing but costs nowadays. Ominously, the cochineal boat still hadn’t put in; she was only holding off creditors by persuading them that Sir Rob had great expectations. She’d had to pawn her diamond dragonfly brooch to pay for their mourning dress and these all-encompassing, stifling Mary Stuart hoods she and Catherine had to wear.
‘My lady.’
She looked down. ‘Yes, Philip?’
‘A visitor, my lady. Lady Penelope Rich. Come by boat.’
Stupidly she asked: ‘Are you sure?’ Everybody who was anybody, and Penelope Rich was somebody, was either taking part or watching the funeral.
‘In the library, my lady.’
The servants were all clustered on the stages of the oriel window, enjoying the procession. It was quiet in the library. Penelope was in a baroness’s weeds, a coronet over her mourning hood. Later, Barbary was to remember her kindness, the hug, how she made her sit down and sent Philip for a restorative.
‘There is no easy way to tell you, my dear. Sir Rob is killed.’
Barbary put out a reproachful hand to pat her. She smiled. ‘Lady Rich,’ she said, ‘I had a letter from him this morning.’
‘Please, Boggart, don’t. I’m from Whitehall. The queen gave me permission to come and will come herself by and by. We have it firsthand from Captain Wingfield who has ridden day and night from the boat. He was there. A place called Yellow Ford. Somewhere near Armagh. An ambush by O’Neill and O’Donnell. Terrible, so terrible. Three thousand men dead and injured, the rest defeated. I thought the queen would go lunatic.’
It was still a mistake. She had read out Rob’s solid sentences to the children just this morning; she could still hear them. Penelope’s sporadic phrases were irritating; if the woman would only go away, everything would be back as it was.
‘Marshal Bagenal too. Ulster is lost, perhaps Ireland.’
Crossly, Barbary turned her head to find Penelope down on her knees beside her, clasping her hands. ‘But I tell you this, Boggart. He’ll be revenged. They’ll listen to Essex now.’
* * *
That night Lady Russell relieved Lady Rich. They spoke in low voices outside the door of Barbary’s sewing chamber. ‘She’s very calm, except to keep asking whether it was cannon that killed him. As if it mattered. Perhaps it matters to that class, how can one know?’
‘How did he die?’
‘They think he was blown to pieces. It was all such chaos apparently. Two barrels of powder in his section were hit and exploded. Charles Percy, Northumberland’s brother, did well to retrieve the body. They knew it was his from the quality of the uniform pieces. I’ve told her he died like Bagenal, a musket ball in the forehead as he lifted his visor. It seemed to quiet her. Great God, who would believe this could happen.’
‘Well,’ said Lady Russell stoutly, ‘I have made my arrangements. I have written to my nephew, demanding he give me a detachment of halberdiers to defend my house. I shall kill as many Irish as I can before they cut me down. And Spanish. They say the Spanish have already landed on the Isle of Wight.’
‘They always say that. I give it no credit. Who’d land on the Isle of Wight if they could help it?’
* * *
Guilt took up occupation like some monstrous tumour. As she made arrangements, took decisions, received condoling visitors, she dragged it around with her. She was her own battleground; nothing that had happened at Yellow Ford altered her feelings one jot for the three men she knew who had been involved in it. She recoiled from understanding why the O’Neill and the O’Donnell had attacked the English column, but understand she did and there was an end of it. She knew with what high ideals Rob had gone to Ireland and approved them, but they had not given him the right to be there in somebody else’s land. If there was any right in the business, it was the historical, male, right of conquest. And if conquest was a right and Ireland had originally been won for England by conquest, then the O’Neill was exercising the same right to get it back.
But Rob was dead and she had helped to kill him. Friends, she’d told him, versing him like some cony she was planning to catch. ‘W
e’ve become what we always should have been, friends.’ They hadn’t been friends. They had come to an amicable arrangement to preclude the truth.
He’d never asked why she’d run guns to Ireland, and she hadn’t told him. As he’d grown in stature and revealed the maturity that had come to him in these last years, she had wanted to explain the complexity of Ireland, the O’Neill, Grace O’Malley, the hanging woman, Will Clampett and the reason for his defection. He hadn’t even known Will had defected.
Once or twice she had broached the subject but he had become unsettled and angry, and she was so comfortable with things the way they were she hadn’t persisted. He’d gone away unarmed by knowledge he should have had. If he’d understood the O’Neill and the O’Donnell, the Ireland she had discovered, it might have made a difference. It might have helped him. It might have saved his life.
And here she was, tenant of this beautiful ostentation that wasn’t paid for, widow of a marriage that had been no marriage at all, mother of children who weren’t hers. She had achieved standards the Upright Man could only dream about. She was a credit to him.
Fraud was everywhere. The official placebo being handed out by Elizabeth’s government to try and stop panic was a fraud. Two surviving commanders of regiments at Yellow Ford, Sir Thomas Wingfield and Sir Charles Percy, came to see her to express their sympathy and, however good their motives, they were fraudulent too. They told her Rob had ridden gloriously into the melee at the head of his loyal men, and their accounts were so stilted and, under questioning, so conflicting, she’d known they were lying. It was probable that in the confusion nobody still alive had seen Rob die.
Nevertheless, she called Henry into the room and watched his face as they gently fed him the same story, seeing it help him. He had the right to be proud of his father, but one day he ought to know more than the fact that a bad man called O’Neill had lain in ambush and slaughtered good Englishmen for no better reason than that he was wicked.
Busy as she was, she called in Cuckold Dick. She hadn’t seen him for months. As a result, ten days later she put on a plain cloak and took a boat with Winchard down to Nell Bull’s waterside tavern at Deptford. Cuckold Dick was waiting for them. ‘There ain’t many, Barb. Most of them’s being offloaded in Wales and finding their own way back, and a lot more’s deserted and in hiding. But there’s him. Name of Brent. Brittany captain. Been here two days.’
And hadn’t stopped drinking from the look of him. Captain Brent was holding up Nell’s doorpost and obstructing anyone trying to go in and out. He was also shouting. ‘The Great Satan, eh? Hang O’Neill high, shall we? Eh? Eh? Let’s blame good old Irish Satan. Eh?’ Cuckold Dick spoke to him, and the captain focused on Barbary with difficulty. ‘Lost your husband, lady? There’s a pity. What a pity.’ He dragged off his cap and threw it on the ground. ‘Stamp on that. That’s O’Neill’s head. Stamp on that.’ He snatched Dick’s hat off and threw it next to his own. ‘An’ I’ll stamp on this. Know what this is? It’s Bagenal’s head. This is me stamping on it. See? Eh? See me stamping on the marshal’s head? Poor old good old bloody old marshal.’
It took time to calm him down and get him to sit in Nell’s private room where nobody else could hear this sedition. ‘Bloody Bagenal,’ he kept saying. ‘Bloody Bagenal. I’ll tell you about bloody Bagenal. Him and his bloody sister. Glad he’s dead. Glad she’s dead.’
‘Is Mabel dead?’
‘That her name? Never knew her name. Dead as a rat. An’ took my lads with her. Bloody Bagenal.’
They managed to gather that when Marshal Bagenal had heard of his sister’s death he’d pestered Dublin to send him the 2,000 newly arrived, newly levied recruits for an attack on O’Neill, who was blockading the Blackwater Fort. Dublin said no; it was still negotiating terms. Bagenal persisted. Worn down, suspecting Bagenal to be too unbalanced, Dublin asked Ormond to command the attack if attack there must be. ‘But Black Tom’s got too much sense. Wanted to protect his own property in Leinster. Got a lot of property in Leinster. He said no.’
Bagenal went on persisting. As usual the recruits were receiving no pay and, also as usual, turning into looters and deserters who terrorised the city, so at last the administration agreed and sent 1,000 of them to Bagenal.
‘Sweepings,’ Captain Brent hiccuped, ‘that’s what they were. Didn’t know their pikes from their pricks, pardon the expression.’
So Bagenal marched 4,000 men out into the little hills of Armagh that, even in August, were islands in wet meadowland. ‘A bloody mile of us, strung out in bloody bog, lifting boots stuck with half of Ireland, pulling the bloody horses, pushing the bloody saker. You ever seen a saker, lady? Bloody thing. Never fired a bloody shot as far as I know. And guess what bloody Bagenal did. Eh? Go on, guess.’
She shook her head.
‘Left one hundred and fifty paces between each regiment.’ Captain Brent spread out his arms and knocked over his tankard. ‘Bloody great gaps. But correct. Routine. Very sound on procedure, our marshal. I went back to him. “Look, marshal,” I said, “I don’t want no bloody great gap at my bloody rear when I’m marching through enemy territory,” I said to him. Did he listen? “Get back to your position, captain,” he said. And I got back. And it came.’
She ordered more ale. ‘What came?’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to know, lady. You may think you do, but you don’t. They howl, you see. Did you know they howled?’
Yes, she said, she knew they howled.
‘But these weren’t savages. Savages don’t sustain attack for hour after hour after hour after hour. Savages don’t shoot like that. Know how my men died? Shot. It pissed bloody shot. More shot than air. They got in between the gaps and poured shot up our arses. Bloody recruits. Threw down their arms and ran like bloody rabbits. Never fired a bloody shot back. And my men,’ he smeared his tears over his face, ‘been with me all through the Lowland wars. Good men. Too good for bloody Ireland. Snapped down like wasps.’ He peered up at her. ‘Know why they’re bringing us home? Because we’re no bloody good. See that?’ He held up a filthy fist with a tremor like a palsy. ‘Afraid? I’m still afraid. All bloody afraid. So you go home, lady. Don’t think about it. Bury him like a bloody hero, whoever he was. You go home and blame bloody O’Neill. I’m staying here and blaming Bagenal.’
After he’d cried himself to sleep she slipped a mark in his purse and told Nell to look out for him.
On the dockside she said to Cuckold Dick: ‘I’ve ordered a headstone for Galloping Betty.’ There’d just been enough cash left after paying the servants.
‘That’s good of you, Barb.’
‘I don’t want you to say that. I don’t want you to say anything.’
‘What you going to do. Barb?’
‘I don’t know.’
Edmund Spenser wrote from Ireland asking for his children back because, with Rob dead, they would no longer benefit from his position in society. The letter didn’t put it like that; it was full of sympathy for her, anger at O’Neill, gratitude, but she must not be further burdened in her grief, and in these dreadful times a family should be together.
When she told them, neither Catherine nor Sylvestris wanted to go. Catherine had always liked life in London and her move to Betty House and its higher society had put her in her element. Barbary had been unable to become as close to her as to her brother, though the girl was affectionate enough; they talked clothes together and enjoyed shopping trips, but gradually Catherine had made her own niche among her contemporaries, well-born girls who were also nearing womanhood, and had been invited for long, gossipy stays at the Cumberlands’ and at Penshurst and Wilton, the home of Philip Sidney’s sister, Mary, the Countess of Pembroke.
Catherine was desperate at the thought of being returned to Ireland: ‘But it is so dangerous.’
‘Munster is a long way from the north.’ The question of danger was one of the things that kept Barbary awake at nights, but Spenser’s letters assured her that Munster wa
s so well defended and, now, so settled that there was no possibility of trouble.
‘But my lady Pembroke has invited me to stay at Wilton.’
Barbary thought about it. Mary Sidney was a scholar and a level-headed woman, a much more suitable guide and companion for Catherine than most, and because of the old connection between Edmund and the Sidneys, it might be that she would take Catherine in, for the time being at any rate.
‘I’ll see. I must write to Lady Mary. And to your father, of course.’ Catherine kissed her and ran off to the kitchens where she and the cook were concocting a specific against freckles.
Sylvestris was re-reading his father’s letter: ‘Are we a burden to your grief?’
‘No.’ In fact they were. The world was shaking and she was terrified for all of them. Henry she could barely look at without wanting to shield him, and if Sylvestris had been vulnerable before he was doubly so now. But Edmund Spenser had been particular in stressing that his son should return to the ‘sylvan simplicity’ of Spenser Castle and learn to manage the very considerable Munster estates he would one day inherit. She put her arm round his shoulders. ‘Haven’t you had any invitations, Sir Stayon?’
He tried to smile. ‘Perhaps the Lord Admiral’s men will ask me to join their playhouse.’
She smiled back. He’d been given one line to speak in the masque, ‘Stay, sweet Sir Actaeon’, but had been so nervous that it had come out as ‘Act, sweet Sir Stayon’. She said: ‘But you’ve wanted to see Spenser Castle again. And put flowers on your mother’s grave.’
‘You’re my mother,’ he said.
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