Barbary absolved her from triumphing at her own fecundity and her, Barbary’s, childlessness; it was jealousy pure and simple. Elizabeth was a good wife and mother, but the cosiness of the family circle she had created included her, Edmund, and their baby boy – whom Edmund, with what Barbary regarded as singular lack of imagination, had christened Sylvanus – and no other. Barbary resented the fact that no enquiry was made about Catherine, and even more the deliberate tendency to exclude Sylvestris.
She was taken on a tour of the house and grounds to have not only their new features but their old pointed out as if she had never been there. She was even introduced to Rosh. ‘Allow me to present my invaluable housekeeper, Roisín.’
Barbary flung herself on her old ally, and was rebuffed. Extricating herself from the hug, Rosh dropped a curtsey and acknowledged her with a polite: ‘Lady Betty.’
Elizabeth was gratified. ‘Rosh is always a little wary with visitors, but you will find her the salt of the earth. We know Roisín’s little ways, don’t we, Roisín?’
Obviously she did, and obviously Barbary didn’t, not the ones she had now developed, at any rate. After dinner she excused herself and ran Rosh to earth in the kitchens. ‘Well, old salt of the earth,’ she said, ‘what’s this with you and your little ways?’
Rosh looked up with disinterested courtesy. ‘Can I get you something, Lady Betty?’
Retiring hurt, Barbary wondered what had happened. Was Rosh offended that she had never sent her word from Connaught? But she had sent her a letter via Edmund, a noncommittal letter, true, but showing that their old relationship was not forgotten. Did her clothes, her reputation smell of that oppressor, the English queen? Or had Rosh indeed transferred all her attachment to her new mistress and family and, following Elizabeth Spenser’s example, shunned all outsiders?
Unlikely. The old friendship between them had been that of equals, something Rosh could not share with Elizabeth who, however good an employer, was patronising and spoke of the mere Irish as if they were breeds of dogs. She was doing it now, as she sewed her embroidery, sitting on a stool as near Edmund’s chair as she could get it, with the baby Sylvanus in a cradle at her feet. ‘I’m not sure we should employ Nuala’s son for the cows, Edmund dear. His father was a MacBrian and the MacBrians are never trustworthy. We should look for an O’Hanlan; they have the proper herding strain.’
‘What happened to Rosh’s father?’ asked Barbary. ‘And Lal?’
‘Dudley died, poor old man,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and Lal was a disappointment. Went off. Just disappeared. Rosh was so upset; she felt he had let us down.’
‘Where did he go?’
Elizabeth shrugged. ‘Nobody knows. They do that occasionally.’
‘And do you still get trouble from the MacSheehys?’
‘Oh my dear, the MacSheehys were rooted out years ago.’ Elizabeth changed the subject which might lead back to a past she hadn’t been involved in. ‘Edmund, do read Lady Betty your “View of the Present State of Ireland”.’ She looked towards Barbary. ‘It’s the answer to all those on the mainland who still think you can pat the Irish on the head without getting your hand bitten. Edmund points out that there can be no lasting peace until all the mere Irish are wiped out, don’t you, Edmund?’
‘It’s not quite that, my dear.’ He put his finger in his book to mark his place. ‘My plan, Lady Betty, is that to Anglicise this country for once and for all it should be properly garrisoned. The rebellious septs would receive twenty days’ warning, and if they did not submit after that, they should be hunted to extinction, their crops destroyed and their cattle killed. It would only take one winter; there would be little trouble with them the following summer.’
He warmed to the theme. ‘That policy must co-exist with enforcement of the old Kilkenny statutes, so lamentably fallen into abeyance, to banish Irish customs and dress and the Irish language. No intermarriage.’
‘Definitely not,’ said Elizabeth.
Edmund held up his hand. ‘It may sound harsh, Lady Betty, and I know you have a sympathy for them, but we who live among them know them to be an evil race which must be extirpated. Legally, of course. I hold no truck with those who suggest assassination of their chieftains.’
‘You’re such an old softy-boots, Edmund,’ said Elizabeth fondly. To Barbary she said: ‘He quite rebuked Sir Walter Raleigh’s suggestion that the O’Donnell be sent poison. Sir Thomas Davis has offered to worm himself into O’Neill’s presence and stab him to death, but my lord here would have none of that either. Personally I see nothing wrong in it. Well, let’s hope the queen will read and take note of “The View”.’ She looked up at her husband. ‘You’ll show it to my lord Essex when he comes, won’t you, Edmund?’
‘He’ll love it,’ said Barbary. She stood up: ‘I’d like to go to bed.’
Elizabeth lit a candelabra. ‘Edmund has it in his head that you should like to occupy the old gatehouse during your stay. I said you’d be more comfortable in the house, but when my lord speaks… We have made it fit for you, I hope. I’ll light you to it.’
She turned in the doorway: ‘Don’t pick the baby up, Sylvestris. He’s unused to strangers.’
As she stood on the old familiar steps of the gatehouse, candelabra in hand, and said goodnight to her hostess, Barbary supposed it had been thoughtful of Edmund to remember her previous fondness for the place, but she felt a reluctance to go inside and, once inside, to go upstairs. She didn’t think of O’Hagan every minute any more, she didn’t think of him every day; whole weeks had begun to go by without her being surprised by that beautiful, terrible pain, until, eventually, it had lost all its terror and some of its beauty. The anger in his letter, even the O’Neill’s lie, had become mossed over by time.
The candles made shadows on the wall and her footsteps echoed as she passed the door to the well, awaking other memories. She had crawled back here after seeing the hanging mother and child. Time hadn’t managed to blur that; it had been the watershed of her life. She climbed up past the first storey to the bedroom more briskly. Men came and went, mostly went. What were they? Mere machines to provide women with the generation that came after them, and in order to disguise the fact that they had no other purpose than this one, they blustered about, making war on each other, thereby endangering the reason they were here in the first place.
With something like bravado, she swung open the door to the top room.
Elizabeth had refurnished the room for her, a single bed with a tester from which hung sprigged lace curtains, a most beautiful clothes press, a side table on which was a pot of sweetmeats and a crystal glass. A lamb’s fleece was on the floor to greet her feet when she arose in the morning, a warming pan sticking out from a lace bedspread, another small table with a bowl and ewer. There were shutters on the window, open to the autumnal night. This was not the room where a man had cursed her for nursing him and muttered that her hair had the colour of wine in it. And a good job too.
It was as she was getting into bed that she saw the bat. It hung in the corner its ancestor had made its own, looking at her from the same wicked, upside down little eyes, a dark and atavistic reminder in the prettiness of the room that some things were unchangeable. Time, after all, had mossed over nothing. Certainly not pain.
* * *
Somehow Ellis had managed to become Mayor of Mallow, a member of Munster’s Council, a fellow of Cork’s Guild of Merchant Venturers, Commander of the Awbeg Militia, a magistrate, and remain as big a boor as ever.
He’d learned to put a flimsy veil of joviality over his aggression, but only in order to complain of those who took offence that they couldn’t take a joshing.
His greeting to Barbary on the steps of Hap Hazard was: ‘You’ve done well for yourself. Who’s going to be husband number two?’
‘I see success hasn’t spoiled you, Master Ellis.’
He was complimented. ‘That it ain’t. Ellis didn’t get where he is today by fancy talk and beating about the bush. I
’ll pay you three thousand pounds for this house and land which is what your better half paid for it, Ellis knows, and not a penny more. But come in. Come in and welcome to some vittles. Wife! Get along and fetch our fancy lady here drink and meat.’
Concealed somewhere in Ellis’s hoglike soul, Barbary decided, there must be taste. Hap Hazard had flourished under his tenancy, if you discounted the rape of its woods, and he had been wise enough to make no alteration to the crazy, chevronned black and white exterior of the house, which had been an innovation in Ireland when Rob’s mason built it, and was now the vogue in the towns, although it was still the only one of its kind in the countryside that she knew of. Ellis’s furniture, which she had expected to be ostentatious, was limited to good, black oak pieces redolent and softly shining with beeswax. The white plaster was expertly moulded. Bowls of potpourri, late roses and holyoaks were reflected in the sheen of an old refectory table. The portrait of Ellis over the white stone fireplace, while kinder to his nose than it deserved, had been painted after the manner of Holbein.
Mrs Ellis, another example of Ellis’s good choosing, had lost the worn look which the hard work of the first years had imposed on all the undertakers’ wives and blossomed into a handsome, happy woman.
It was Mrs Ellis Barbary kept her eye on while they sat down and listened to Ellis boast of his plain common sense and bluster about what he would pay for and what he wouldn’t. She was the card-mirror which had overlooked the conies’ hands back at the Pudding-in-a-Cloth. Barbary needed to know Ellis’s cards if she was to get her £10,000. How much did he desire Hap Hazard? At first she had been surprised that he desired it at all; it was a gentleman’s residence undoubtedly, but she could have expected Ellis’s ambition to covet a castle; he could certainly afford it. Munster undertakers, however, had become to some extent victims of their own success; all land that had once been available when it had been taken away from the rebel Irish was now occupied, either by the new settlers or by such old Irish aristocracy as had made its peace with the Elizabethan regime. The inflation that was rampant in England, where the Treasurer was anxiously calling in Crown debts to subsidise Essex’s new army, was affecting Ireland no less. The realisation that the Irish forests were actually a goldmine had shot up the price of timber, and at the rate it was being cut down that same timber was becoming scarcer. Ellis in his early days had managed to acquire more land than his original parcel, but to build on it now would cost him a fortune.
Mrs Ellis wanted to stay at Hap Hazard; she was showing alarm at her husband’s protestations that there were hundreds of greater mansions he could move to. She’d reached the sphere that suited her; she didn’t want to rise to heights where she would be forced to compete with, and be patronised by, the Lady Norrises of the next stratum up. And Ellis placed a great deal more reliance on his wife than he pretended; he kept looking at her for approval.
It was a quietly confident Barbary who clambered onto horseback and trotted off with Ellis to be shown the estate’s apparent shortcomings. That field over there was too wet, that hill too dry. Look at them bloody fences, he’d have to repair the lot and did she know what chestnut paling fetched nowadays?
The only real dilapidation was in the houses of the Irish tenants. The roofs on at least three cottages were so bare of thatch that rain could get in. She was shocked; Edmund Spenser, whatever his opinion of the mere Irish, kept them carefully housed. ‘They’re too bloody lazy to repair ’em,’ said Ellis, and added unguardedly, ‘besides, a new roof puts the rent up.’ Each garden was given over to a potato bed indicating that its cottager was either too overworked or, according to Ellis, too bloody idle to grow anything else. ‘You like ’em, don’t you?’ he shouted at a collection of women picking the last of the apples in his orchard. ‘Eh? You’re a lot of spud-diggers, aren’t you?’
It was obviously a regular pleasantry. The women smiled and curtseyed, and one of them answered him in Irish. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Ellis, waving, and turned to Barbary: ‘Never could get the hang of their lingo. But we understand each other, me and the bog-trotters.’
Barbary doubted it. The woman had said: ‘What can you expect from a pig but grunts?’
Back at the house they went to the library and Ellis made his offer again: ‘Three thousand, not a groat more. It’s not as if a fancy lady like you needs the money.’ All along this had been his theme, that Barbary in making an astute marriage had done very well for herself and, by making another, could do even better. Like those who had never been to court, Ellis laboured under the belief that everybody who had was possessor of an endless supply of fairy gold.
Barbary took a tablet and stylus from her placket. ‘Master Ellis, I shall expect twelve thousand pounds to be paid within the week or your vacation of Hap Hazard at the end of the month when your lease expires.’
‘You’re mad, woman.’ He folded his arms. ‘You’ll not get it.’
‘I think I will.’ She made a note. ‘Item. Ninety-four acres of beechwood cut down without permission, say, two thousand pounds.’
‘Assart,’ bellowed Ellis. ‘Improvements. National security.’
‘Also sold to Sir Walter Raleigh without permission. Item. One hundred acres of hornbeam coppiced and sold to Master Slade of Kinsale for struts etc, without permission. Item. Three hundred acres of oak sold and sent to Bristol shipyards. Without permission. Item. Two hundred yew trees felled and supplied to the army. Without permission. Seven hundred tons of charcoal sent to Waterford glass manufactury. Without permission.’ She looked up. ‘That’s what I have proof of; of course there may be more. Item. Extra rents raised from tenantry. Without permission.’
She sat back in her chair. ‘I am being lenient in putting it at twelve thousand pounds. The court may adjudge it more.’ Neither on her journey up through Kinsale and Cork, nor in the two weeks since, had she been wasting her time. Ellis, bless him, might think she was unpopular in the district, and so she was, but there had been plenty to come forward with information that would do Ellis down and help Sir Rob’s son get a fair price.
He got it that day. Ellis blustered but gave in with a suddenness which made her wonder whether the old cliché that a bully backed down when faced by a bigger bully was true, or whether he’d become so rich from the timber on this and his other lands that money wasn’t really an object with him. She had even gone up in his estimation. ‘We commons understand each other.’
They agreed that the sum should be paid in 1,000 gold pieces now, and the rest made up in the transference to Henry of Ellis’s interest in three boats at Bristol, the papers to be prepared by a notary at Mallow. He fetched the money from some fastness in a cellar, counted it into a chest and had it put in her cart. ‘It’s people like Ellis as made it safe for a woman to tote gold through Munster,’ he grumbled, but he was affable enough when he saw her off. ‘Tell Edmund to stick his books away,’ he said. ‘I’m calling out the militia for extra training.’
She paused on the step. ‘Why?’
He spat. ‘Bloody Dublin’s persuaded the Council to send most of the Munster army to Sligo under young Henry Norris and Clifford Conyers to halt the O’Donnell. Some idea of diverting O’Neill away from their precious city. Essex is coming, they say. We don’t need the men we got, they say. But I say let Dublin find its own men. Ellis knows.’
As she drove away, Barbary felt that, for once, Ellis did. The peace that reigned over the fat fields of Munster was extraordinary considering what was going on elsewhere. There was no insurrection; not so much as a lamb belonging to the undertakers had been killed in months. The gleaners who passed her at the bottom of Hap Hazard’s drive waved their rakes at her not in revolutionary fury, but a cheery good-day. Around her the hedges were full of rose-hips and late blackberries, the trees were still leafed in their autumnal colours, and she told herself that her unease was because it had been on just such a lovely day that she’d found the flayed body of Captain Mackworth.
No, it wasn’t that. There had b
een small flickers in this even seasonal tenor; nothing dramatic, happenings that would have passed unnoticed in the early undertaking days, which the undertakers themselves were brushing off as unimportant but which, to an Order nose, smelled of fish.
On the Sunday before last, there had been no Irish in the congregation at Effin where Edmund still preached occasionally to make up for the deficiencies of the pleasure-loving Prebendary Chadwick. Edmund had worried about it but when, this Sunday, the church was full again he had decided not to fine the recusants, which as a magistrate he was entitled to do, and submitted them instead to an extra-long sermon on the hellfire awaiting those who ignored the Sabbath.
And Ellis had just told her there had been no single case of drunkenness brought to court in three weeks. ‘What about Prebendary Chadwick?’ she’d asked. ‘I thought he was always sheets to the wind.’
‘I mean mere Irish, woman.’
‘And what does Ellis know about that?’
‘Ellis knows that he’s confiscated all their damned poteen and they’re too bloody idle to make more, that’s what Ellis knows.’
But all the way home to Spenser Castle, through the tang of leaves, dusty lanes and horse manure, Barbary’s nose twitched at the scent of something else.
There was a horse by the mounting block, and the schoolmaster from Buttevant on the steps, talking to Edmund.
‘What’s the matter?’
The schoolmaster turned on her, holding a child’s primer. ‘Lady Betty, look at this. I ask you. I’ve been saying to Master Edmund here, it’s disgraceful, and as a magistrate he should proceed against the children. Flogging means nothing to them.’ He shoved the book under his nose. ‘Look.’
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