He exaggerated a sigh. ‘It ain’t easy, Barb. I got to go back and tell all them quill-drivers what to do.’
‘What’s a quill-driver?’ asked Sylvestris, who’d overheard, as they stood together on deck to wave goodbye to Cuckold Dick.
She watched the distance between her and the stout figure on the quayside widen as the ship began to move. ‘A clerk. Wave.’
‘Why do you talk funny when you’re with him?’
‘He’s my oldest friend. We were in the Order together.’
‘What’s the Order?’
She told him. While the ship ran to Ireland before a light breeze over a tranquil September sea, she told him practically everything there was to tell, about the Order, about her relationship with Ireland. She was literally putting her life into the hands of a ten-year-old boy, but it was important to her to arm this future Anglo-Irish landholder with knowledge she had withheld from Rob. He should be aware of another Ireland than the one his father knew, and the only way she could explain that Ireland was to unfold it bit by bit, as it had been unfolded to her. They would take him away from her once they arrived in Munster; she had to tell him now.
He listened quietly, occasionally asking questions. ‘Why did you want to save the man who saved the priest?’
‘They’d have killed him. There’d been too much killing.’
‘Is it wrong to kill Catholic priests? It’s legal.’
‘I’m beginning to think it’s wrong to kill anybody.’
The next day, when they were spinning for mackerel, he said: ‘You love a lot of people, don’t you? Cuckold Dick, Grace O’Malley, this O’Hagan, even the O’Neill, for all he tricked you.’
‘It’s not rationed.’
‘But I only love you and Catherine.’
‘That’s not bad. When I was your age I only loved myself. And you love your father.’
Sylvestris stared down at the twirl of silver cloth on the hook in the water. ‘I don’t know him very well.’
‘You don’t have to know people to love them. Look at me and you. I think you’re very peculiar.’ But she saw the trap she’d put him in. ‘Look, Sir Stayon, you shouldn’t have secrets from your father. You can tell him all this when I’ve been and gone.’
She squinted at Sylvestris; perhaps she had been unfair to tear off the blinkers through which he’d inevitably seen the world all his life. She remembered when Philip Sidney had told her that bell-jangler about the man in Italy who’d said the world went round the sun rather than the sun round the world. For a moment, before dismissing the idea, she’d tried to encompass it and felt dizzy, as this boy must be feeling dizzy, from seeing established things somersault into a different position. In one lesson he’d been shown legality through a criminal’s eyes, great men at great crime, an adulteress excusing adultery, and rebellion from the point of view of the rebel. Accepting it, if he did accept it, would be hard. Well, she thought, it was hard for me living it.
‘Phew,’ he said.
She was pleased with him. That just about summed it up.
The rocky southern coast of Ireland opened to the great River Bandon, and the gunpowder ship had to stand off from the estuary, waiting for the tide, before it began its voyage up the river’s long, sickle-shaped progress between the hills. They passed through the high points where the guns of two big English forts, Rincorran on the east, Castle Park on the west, commanded the approaches, and along a stretch of cliffs with spits of beaches at their base. It was a beautiful day. Terns followed their wake. Anglers waved to them from the rocks, while far above them, on the hills, tiny oxen plodded ahead of ploughs turning patches of harvested fields into furrows like corduroy. The earth was reddish.
She remembered now. Kinsale was where Will, a wounded soldier, had been reminded of his Devon home; this was Will’s Road to Damascus. Here he had seen the light that exposed the Irish to him as a people like any other. It was here he had rescued the child that had turned into Barbary Clampett. She looked around, interested to see what Will had seen.
Then she was down on the deck, retching. One of the cliff faces had leaned over and sucked her into its own perspective so that she was the child clinging to it, looking back over her shoulder at the river, afraid of the drop, afraid of the soldiers running along the top above her. A man in a boat was beckoning to her. She wouldn’t make it. They’d shoot her before she could get to him. Fear was using her up. Fear and grief. They’d hanged her mother. How long had she been running and hiding? Too long. She’d drop and let them shoot her.
‘Aunt Margaret. Oh please, Aunt Margaret.’ Sylvestris was leaning over her and she clung to him, sobbing.
By the time they rounded the long bend where the river turned to go south again, nearing the quays of Kinsale, she had gathered herself up and was cross. ‘The name’s Barbary,’ she told Sylvestris.
She could see what Cuckold Dick had meant about Kinsale. The curve of the hills round its harbour was terraced with cottages washed in different colours. There were plenty of grand houses as well, but, grand or common, their windows all looked down onto where ships of diverse nationalities discharged and loaded cargo. The town’s warehouses and offices were pushed back as far as possible, as if they’d skipped out of a flood’s path, to make more room on the vast quays which were crammed with goods and people.
She didn’t wait to see who came aboard to buy Dick’s gunpowder. They were rowed ashore and picked their way round trays of fish, linen and bales, hides and dockers who asked her to ‘Mind your back dere, please, madam’, in the Pale accent which owed more to Irish than English. There were other accents in the crowds of shouting, bargaining men and, Dick had been right, one group of brightly-dressed gentlemen were speaking exactly as had Don Howsyourfather. Nobody but her blinked. Kinsale was, as Dick said, a selling town and it didn’t mind who it sold to.
One export dominated all others – wood. Sawn timber lined an entire quay, and more was being offloaded from barges that had just come upriver from the interior. There were more new wine barrels than she’d ever seen, stacked for loading with their staves loose at the top, and beside them piles of the finishing hoops. A docker hammered the lids on boxes containing hundreds of wooden pipe staves and on each lid was stamped the crest of Sir Walter Raleigh. Crates being handled with more care than most contained glass, and glass needed massive amounts of charcoal for its manufacture. Somebody, somewhere was using up a lot of trees.
‘There’s Father,’ said Sylvestris.
Edmund was attended by various dignitaries, the least of whom was the Mayor of Kinsale. Edmund was, after all, an important man: Clerk to the Council of Munster. Opting to be a big fish in this provincial pool had been a wise choice on his part, Barbary decided, even though he’d been given little choice. He was a provincial man. Here, where he was looked up to, he had gained authority. It was she, in her modern court mourning, who looked outlandish among the Munster ladies, who tended towards the conservative styles more suited to their figures. Munster ladies, at least the ones who had come to greet her, ran to width, like their cows. In Connaught, she remembered, the phrase for a fat woman was ‘thick as a Munster heifer’.
She was surprised she warranted such an exalted welcome, and assumed that it was extended to all of Edmund’s visitors as a compliment to him, but the same reception awaited her in Cork that night after the long drive in Edmund’s coach. Here she was given a corporation dinner. She was Lady Betty, widow of brave Sir Rob of the Yellow Ford’s glorious dead who had laid down his life fighting the Great Satan, and in paying respect to her they were paying respect to Rob. ‘He’ll be avenged,’ she was told, time and again. ‘The queen and Essex will avenge him.’
The two names were synonymous. The loyal toast was ‘To Our Gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, and Our Lord of Essex, God bless them’. Essex’s policy to exterminate the Irish threat was one they had been urging on the English government for years, and now it was about to be implemented they were cock-a-hoop. The M
ayor of Cork, wittier than most, spoke of the O’Neill as having embarked on a course that would wreck him ‘on the Essex coast’.
Barbary listened for any sign of panic beneath the laughter and could detect none; there was less worry here than in London. By the very act of colonisation they had proved the Irish to be inferior. Clontibret and Yellow Ford had been hiccups in a status quo as ordained as the Ten Commandments, to be blamed, saving her presence, on an ill-equipped army having been taken by ambush. The north and Connaught had never been settled like Munster, they explained, O’Neill would never reach Dublin, and Essex was coming…
The same certainty awaited them at Mallow Castle, where they spent the next night with Sir Thomas Norris, Lord Justice of Munster, and his wife, and by this time Barbary had begun to accept it. The town had grown in the years she’d been away, its slope down to the river now a street of prosperous houses and shops. The coloured and very English inn signs, the stone bridge, the chunky garrison whose doors were patrolled by slow-marching, red-coated soldiers, the castle above it with its gardens gave out a sense of rooted stability. Everything Irish had been banished, except the accent of some of the shopkeepers and soldiers, but such shopkeepers had a portrait of Elizabeth in their window and such soldiers shouted ‘God Save the Queen’ as they opened the gates to Edmund’s coach.
The welcome here was more muted than at Cork. Rob and Sir John Norris, Sir Thomas’s brother, had been venturers together and there had been genuine shock at Rob’s death. Sir John was ill upstairs, making it no occasion for feasting. And besides, Barbary herself was remembered as having arrived in the district trailing a disreputable history, something about being dressed as a boy, and then disappearing in peculiar circumstances. Out of courtesy to her late husband and to Master Spenser, and to the fact that she had been consorting with some of England’s highest nobility, even if she was of Irish birth, Sir Thomas must entertain her, but he did it at the family table with no other guests.
Lady Norris, particularly, was in contortions as to how to behave to this upstart whose behaviour – Lady Norris was vague about what form it had taken – disqualified her from sitting at her table but who was at the same time qualified to be there, if Master Spenser was to be believed, through having been a familiar of the queen’s and Mr Secretary Cecil’s. Lady Norris did not approve of Mr Secretary Cecil and his feeble policies towards the Irish, any more than she had approved of his father for the same reason, but she had all the colonial woman’s reverence for Her Gracious Majesty.
It took Barbary, who was tired, two courses of the heavy supper to realise that verbal darts were flying at her over the venison. Her hostess was trying to take her down a peg for airs which she had not been aware of putting on, while at the same time trying to impress her with her knowledge of the English social whirl.
‘My brother-in-law, Sir John, was amazed when you popped up out of Lough Neagh, Lady Betty. Quite Arthurian, he said. The Lady in the Lake.’
‘Yes,’ said Barbary. ‘I had been to visit the Countess of Tyrone. How is Sir John?’
‘Not well, I fear. Sir Thomas is acting Lord General at the moment.’ Lady Norris picked up another dart. ‘Ah, poor Mabel. Quite mad at the end, they say. But what can you expect from a mixed marriage?’ She smiled, having scored a nice inner. ‘Of course, my dear Lady Betty, that does not apply to yours. I am sure you and Rob were of the happiest, though you were so many times absent from each other.’
Oh krap, thought Barbary, I’m too old for this. Nevertheless she began mentally to turn up her sleeves. ‘Indeed. How wise you are, Lady Norris, to stay at Sir Thomas’s side, even if it does mean exile from fashionable life at court.’ An outer, but she was beginning to get the range. Further down the table she saw Sylvestris imperceptibly lift his thumb.
Lady Norris shifted her grip. ‘Nevertheless, dear Lady Betty, we are in the closest contact. My mother-in-law, as you know, is the queen’s dearest friend and has never had the shame of a falling-out with Her Majesty and being excluded from it.’ A good inner; old Lady Norris even had the distinction of a royal nickname, being the queen’s ‘Crow’. Before Barbary could take the next throw, Lady Norris went on: ‘She has suggested Her Majesty should make her first visit to Ireland on the occasion of the masque we intend to give in the spring.’
‘You must allow me to advise you on it; Sir Rob and I gave one for her not too long ago.’
‘Its theme was criminality, was it not? I wonder why?’
‘I know Her Majesty’s humour, and she was graciously pleased to say it was the best of any she had been to.’
By the end of the dinner Barbary had lost count of the score, but she found herself, to her own surprise, invigorated as she had not been for a long time.
The next morning, back in the coach, Sylvestris said: ‘You won.’
‘Are you sure? She got a couple of golds.’
‘Who got golds?’ asked Edmund. ‘What do you two talk about?’
The five-mile journey to Kilcolman was one she knew well, but she was shocked by the view out of the window. ‘What have you done with the trees?’ An old and handsome friend had suddenly become bald. The countryside was sleek under rich September sun, hedges edging fields in which stooks of corn leaned against each other, but to Barbary these were mere wisps of hair left by a galloping alopecia; Munster’s crowning glory had gone. What had been mysterious was exposed as suburban as the countryside around London; where glades had rung to the hunting horns of the Fianna, cows now grazed in uninterrupted meadowland.
They passed the lane that led to Hap Hazard. Edmund Spenser fell back in his seat as Barbary turned on him: ‘Where’s my bloody woods? You let that bastard Ellis cut down my woods?’
‘Compose yourself, Lady Betty. Deforestation has had to be deliberate policy, a matter of security.’
‘Krap.’ She had no deep feeling for the Hap Hazard estate, but there’d been a view of it against beechwood enhancing the light falling through branches into slanting columns. And bloody Ellis had cut down the lot, so that the house was just another English residence in orderly parkland.
‘I beg you to remember the boy, Lady Betty. It is true. The trees harboured the rebellious Irish and became our enemy as much as they.’
‘How can a tree become somebody’s enemy?’ She remembered the quays at Kinsale. ‘Became somebody’s ship, you mean, somebody’s wine barrel, somebody’s bloody pipe stem.’
‘Lady Betty, please. It is true again that much of the province’s wealth has derived from its timber, but the profit was unlooked-for and arose out of a greater expediency.’
She sat back, muttering. The trees had differentiated Ireland from England, giving it a touch of Eden which was now prosaic and tamed, lost for ever. They’d take the sea away from Connaught next. She was wholly Irish again, rebel against the Lady Norrises, the Ellises and other such woodsmen. She remembered with poignancy the wonderful evening when she had barnacled Rosh through the wooded Ballyhouras to the place of the Mass, the evening that had led to O’Hagan.
And Spenser’s Deer Park had gone, or at least a real deer park replaced the woods which had flanked the road to Kilcolman’s entrance. Selected oaks stood in carefully casual groves, dappling their section of sward. A herd of fallow deer feeding and whisking their tails gathered in the ornamental shade. Probably nailed their hoofs to the ground, thought Barbary, but she did not complain; the old Deer Park had contained Maccabee’s ‘namelesses’, and Captain Mackworth, and the hanging people. Perhaps there were some trees that had to be erased. But as they turned into the drive to the house, she looked back and saw that, behind the Deer Park, the Ballyhouras had gone too. There were mountains there sure enough, but they were shorn down to their bones, the great canopy of varying green ripped away to display bare mounds on which, at this distance, some sort of moss or fern glowed a dull red as if they were embarrassed.
‘You’ve worked hard, Edmund,’ she said grimly.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Yo
u will see some changes.’
Like the rest of Munster, Spenser Castle had the patina achieved by prosperity. No weeds surrounded the gatehouses, now connected by a lintel and large gates instead of solid wooden doors. They swept between clipped hedges flanked by lawn, glimpsing the cupolas, green with the verdigris of real brass, and twisted brick chimneys. The miserable sticks of yew along the path from the bawn, where she and Rosh had dragged the unconscious O’Hagan that terrible night, were now marvels of topiary. The gravel led to steps on which stood great stone pots containing geraniums. This was no castle, but it was a very fine mansion.
Edmund was rightly and quietly proud. ‘An improvement, I think, Lady Betty. You will remember your first sighting of it.’ She stopped being cross with him, remembering how brave he had been on the morning they had both seen the ridiculous stumps and stones of what he had expected to be a great keep. It was the last time she and Edmund made any reference to the past: Elizabeth Spenser saw to that.
Edmund’s new wife was a big young healthy Paleswoman, fair-haired and already pregnant with her and Edmund’s second child. She came from middle-class undertaker stock – her uncle was the Mayor of Youghal – and had no pretensions to be other than she was. She threw herself in a buxom welcome on her new stepson and her visitor and for a while Barbary thought: Uncomplicated, bless her. Sylvestris will be all right.
Later she mentally kicked herself for believing that the world contained an uncomplicated anybody. Elizabeth Spenser, though much younger than Edmund, adored her husband, thought herself the luckiest woman in the world to be married to such a great man, and was eaten away with jealousy of the time when she wasn’t.
Whether Edmund had represented his previous marriage as idyllic, Maccabee as a paragon, and the time since her death as a period when he had walked, admired but sorrowing, with princes, Barbary couldn’t be sure. Whatever its cause, Elizabeth tolerated no mention of any of them. If the conversation so much as veered in the direction of England or any time pre-dating her and Edmund’s meeting, she waded into it like a master of hounds sorting out a dog fight and commanded it back into behaving itself with interruptions such as: ‘My Lady Norris has commended her own children’s wet nurse to me, Lady Betty. Should I accept her?’ Or, ‘Would you look at the tetters on this baby’s forehead, Lady Betty, and give me your opinion.’
The Pirate Queen Page 62