She took the knife out and put her court cloak over the body before she went to fetch the lad. In death the woman’s face had relaxed into the same nice intelligence it had worn in life, a woman who had followed the wrong man to the wrong country.
While the boy was carrying his mother down to the gate, she unwired Ellis so that his son wouldn’t have to do it, trying to detach her mind. Just a fiddly job. The body slithered further down the gate as each wire was detached until it slumped at her feet. The boy was in such shock that he dithered about whether to put his father or his mother over the mule, and for a moment she didn’t know either; a mule was less honourable than a horse. Her horse was the more tired, and Mrs Ellis was the lighter, so they put her on it and Ellis on the mule and led them back to Mallow along a road deserted of everything but the wind.
The body of its mayor and his wife were taken into the castle to await services and burial, if a priest could be found to do it. The household had gone. There were more refugees, Sir George Bouchier with his wife and grandchildren, the Aylmers, some others, and the hall sounded with fear-pitched indignation that the Norrises had fled. When the bodies were carried in, the place fell silent except for crying babies. Barbary sat on a bench with Robert Ellis, holding his hand as much for her own sake as his.
He only said one thing during the whole of that long night. He looked round at her and said: ‘I was going to marry an Irish girl.’ It was an outburst of guilt before he began to cry, a confession that he would have defied his father and the queen, who had railed against intermarriage. And now he thinks they were right, thought Barbary, and that most reasonable solution to all this isn’t an option any more.
Sir Thomas Norris and a strong force of militia turned up in the morning, and they were all transferred to carts for the journey to Cork. Sir Thomas had already taken his family there, but he said he would be making a continuous patrol of the road between to keep it open.
But it was open, that was what bothered Barbary. There were some trees down from the wind, but the only danger was from others falling and the whipping of torn branches across the open carts. No people, no bullets, no howls except the wind’s. The militia had reported that there was indeed an enemy force concentrating in the Aherlow, but so far it hadn’t moved outside the valley.
She understood now. It wasn’t the enemy army the English settlers were afraid of. What they were afraid of was exemplified in the two bodies now lying quietly in Mallow Castle’s chapel. The enemy at home. It was why the aristocratic undertakers had been so quick to abandon their castles and their residences, because they had always been afraid, even if they hadn’t known it, of the people they had dispossessed; even as they had subjected them, turned them into servants and labourers, raised their rents, shown them cruelty or sometimes even kindness, denied them their language, their dress and their customs, shamed them into inferiority and then made jokes about them, they had feared that one day these domestic animals would lower their horns and turn on them. Neither army nor militia could save them from their own livestock, and they’d known it. She fell asleep.
She woke up as they arrived at Cork and passed through gates into hell. What had been an alarmed but functioning city – yesterday? It couldn’t have been only yesterday – had deteriorated into a vast refugee camp. The carts from Mallow had trouble getting through the streets, not just because of the crowds but because angry residents kept trying to turn them back. Two well-dressed men, merchants by the look of them, leaped up onto Barbary’s cart and wrested the reins away from the driver. ‘Turn round and go back. There’s no more room.’ They were trying to back the cart, and merely getting tangled up with those behind, when Norris, who’d been riding ahead came back. ‘What’s all this?’ One of the merchants recognised him.
‘The city’s overflowing, Sir Thomas, we can’t take more. There’s no food. We’ll get the plague.’
Thomas Norris drew his sword. ‘Get down.’ They got down. The carts went on, bumping over packs which overflowed into the street out of the press crammed into its sides. Barbary had never seen so many people in one place, families hunched stubbornly onto flights of steps that had become desirable perches and put them above those having to squat in the mud of the street. Windowsill flower boxes were cots for babies whose mothers squatted underneath, one arm up to hold their child in place. Open doors showed hallways carpeted with sleeping bodies. A finely robed woman was hammering on the knocker of a large front door which refused to open.
A beadle barred their way. ‘Sorry, Sir Thomas. Orders. The Council says you’ll have to go on to Kinsale or Youghal. There may be room there.’
Sir Thomas focused noble, bloodshot eyes. ‘The Council can go and fuck itself,’ he said. He turned round to his charges. ‘Out. Get down.’ To the militiamen he said: ‘Circle round the town and back to the North Gate. Rest in the carts. If anybody tries to take the horses, kill them. We’ll go back when I’ve had some sleep.’
Lady Bourchier clung onto his stirrup. ‘But where shall we go?’
Sir Thomas flung out an exhausted, expansive arm. ‘Take your pick, madam.’ And rode off.
Barbary got down, clutching her pack. It still contained the presents she’d bought for the Spensers. Gifts for when she found them. Boyle, that was the name Edmund had said. Richard Boyle, Elizabeth’s uncle. She stopped a man who seemed to know where he was going. ‘Where can I find Richard Boyle’s house?’
He raised his fist as if to punch her, but paused. ‘Was that English you spoke? Ach, I thought you were Irish in that cloak. I’d take it off. We’ll be hanging every Irish bastard in town this night, if only to make room. Over by the East Gate and ask again.’
She didn’t take the cloak off, the wind was increasingly cold, but she turned the distinctively Irish fur collar under and made for the East Gate. Some of the side streets were too blocked by people to get through and she had to make detours, wondering again and again at a fear so strong it had driven men and women and children out of their warm country homes to crouch in the wind-tunnels of a city.
At one point she found herself down at the quays of the river, and paused to watch English soldiers disembarking from a transport. A boy, typical of dockside boys everywhere, was pestering them for souvenirs. ‘Have you any English pennies, sorr?’ One of the soldiers kicked him so that he fell. The last, tiny straw of viciousness broke Barbary’s back.
‘You bastard. What did you do that for?’
The soldier turned, surprised. He was very young. ‘He’s Papist Irish, ain’t he?’
‘He’s a Palesman, for God’s sake. He’s on your side.’
‘Is he? What’s he talk like that for then?’
Wearily, Barbary said: ‘His family’s probably been here for generations. Protestant, as you are. Or loyal Catholic.’
‘Oh.’ The complexity was beyond him, but he meant well. ‘Sorry, son.’ He fumbled in his pack and threw the boy a penny.
‘Are you one of Essex’s men?’ she asked him.
‘Advance guard, lady,’ he told her cheerily. ‘Arrived in the estuary before the wind got up and been tacking up the bastard ever since. Old Essex’ll still be stuck in Wales waiting for an easterly to Dublin. What’s this here Cork like anyway?’
‘Crowded,’ she said.
Richard Boyle’s house when she found it was imposing, but full. Stepping over people who were camping in his hall she enquired for Elizabeth. ‘Oh, the niece. Upstairs,’ a woman told her, tartly. ‘Got a room to herself.’
It was a small, pretty room with rattling windows looking out to the eastern hills. Elizabeth was sitting in a chair feeding her baby, but Barbary’s attention went to a table which had bread and cheese and a ham on it. She said crossly: ‘I went back to look for you,’ sat down and immediately began to eat. She couldn’t remember when she’d last tasted food. As she munched she waited for questions, sympathy, some praise and petting. It occurred to her she wasn’t getting any of them. She looked round. Elizabeth was stari
ng at her. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ Barbary asked her. ‘Where’s Sylvestris?’
Elizabeth shrieked and covered her face with one of her hands. ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord. When I saw you I hoped… Haven’t you got him?’
Barbary stopped eating. ‘What do you mean?’ All, Robert Ellis had said. He’d seen them. All the Spensers. Oh God, he’d only seen the family he knew and he didn’t know Sylvestris. It was her fault, she should have questioned the man. God, oh God, it must be all right. He’s here, he must be here.
‘Barbary, he’d gone somewhere. It happened so fast, it was so frightening, and I wasn’t used to him being around. I only thought of the baby.’
She was still trying to understand. ‘You forgot him?’ Then she did understand. ‘You stupid, stupid bitch. You forgot him.’
‘Please, Barbary.’ Explanation and excuse chattered out of her mouth. A suddenly dark, empty Spenser Castle from which all servants had disappeared. Creakings. Whisperings. Terror. The arrival of the militia as scared as she was, hurrying her. Her and the baby and the unborn child, the most important things in her world, and that world collapsing. ‘I didn’t think of him until Mallow. The militia went back then, but they said he wasn’t in the house.’
‘Where had he gone?’
‘I don’t know.’ Elizabeth wiped her tears on her baby’s head and her voice was muffled. ‘He never liked me.’
‘I don’t either. Does Edmund know?’
‘He’s so angry. He’ll get Sir Thomas to go back. Barbary, don’t look like that. He can’t leave here with all his responsibility. But he’s afraid the boy will be hostage, or worse, because of…’
‘Because of what?’
‘Smerwick.’
The sins of a poet who’d stood by and approved slaughter visited on the head of one grave little boy. Ellis wired to his gate with the apple in his mouth, the knife in Mrs Ellis’s stomach. Debts called in, with torture as interest. She began snatching up the food and stuffing it into her pack.
‘Please, Barbary, Lady Betty. Where are you going?’
‘Back.’
She heard Elizabeth crying to her as she left the house. She made her way through the town and waited by the carts until Sir Thomas Norris returned and led them out through the gates to Mallow.
They passed more refugees heading for Cork, but their class had changed. The noble families and gentlemen farmers had either got inside already or were fortifying their homes. These were the common undertakers, the plumbers and plasterers, shopkeepers, schoolmasters, ex-soldiers, coopers, the people who had answered Elizabeth’s call for settlers and sailed to Ireland for land and a better life. They had furniture, grandparents and children on haywains, they held onto poultry crates to stop the wind blowing them off their pushcarts and drove their milch cows along with them. These people hadn’t left their land on a rumour, they were being driven out. They called up to Sir Thomas as he went by and said their homes were burning, they’d been attacked by their own labourers.
As they got further north, the condition of such refugees they encountered changed again as the Irish who were rising against them grew in confidence and cruelty. The people they met now had no possessions, except their lives. Many of them were naked, all of them injured, some with ears hacked away, their nostrils slit or lips cut off. One group consisted of women and girls stripped, who crouched on a bank holding each other’s hands. They screamed and shrank away as Sir Thomas and some of his men got down to wrap cloaks round them.
Sir Thomas ordered them put in one of the carts. ‘Oh my God. Are we past the halfway mark? No. Here, Francis, and you, George, drive them back to Cork. Are you armed? Then go, and stop for nobody. Oh my God.’
He’d already sent two carts back with some of the worst cases, and Barbary heard him say: ‘I’ll send no more. We need every one for our own now.’ He said no word to her; there’d been no problem persuading him to take her. For one thing he was too tired to argue and for another she disgusted him, he didn’t care what happened to her. She was Irish.
She didn’t blame him, and she didn’t care either. All she wanted was to find Sylvestris. Each fresh atrocity they came across was an intensification of what she could imagine being done to him.
The road became empty; it was getting dark, but here and there the sky was lit up by the flames of a burning house. The wind screeched and tipped the carts like hands trying to turn them over. It bent the flames from Hugh Cuffe’s lodge across the road so that they had to back the terrified horses and turn into a field to avoid the elemental barrier, while sparks and glowing splinters showered down on them. Sir Thomas stared to the left until they could see up the drive and to the house. Hugh Cuffe had been a friend of his, a friend of Spenser’s. The house had two walls still standing up out of a bonfire. ‘Oh my God,’ said Sir Thomas quietly. ‘Oh my God.’
There was a tree down further along, a thin elm. The militiamen dismounted and began dragging it out of the way. A shot rang out and one of them dropped. Crouching, they got the tree to the side, and lifted the man into Barbary’s cart, urging the horses into a canter. She couldn’t see where he’d been hit because it was so dark and the rocking of the cart wobbled him about in her arms. Anyway, he died a minute later and when it was too late she saw the bloodstain on his chest.
She held onto him to stop his body flopping and another bullet passed over her head. The cart behind her was hit by two spears and they were still joggling out of its side as they crossed the Blackwater. Militiamen on the bridge had their guns trained ready to shoot, and lowered them in relief when Sir Thomas called out to them. ‘Thank the Lord, my lord.’
As they turned in past the garrison and began the pull up to the castle, Barbary stood up, frightened. She had to shriek against the wind. ‘We’ve got to go on. We’ve got to get to Kilcolman.’
Sir Thomas turned his horse and came alongside her. ‘If he’s not here, he’ll have to take his chance. We’re going no further.’
‘But he’s a little boy. I promised him.’
‘To the Devil with what you promised. I’ve got to hold this place and try to keep the road to Cork open, and I’ve few enough men to do it. I’m losing no more.’
She couldn’t see anything except a ten-year-old boy. In the castle hall she ruthlessly questioned tired, injured men and women. He wasn’t there. Nobody had seen him. Some of them just stared at her in the stupor of horror. She followed Sir Thomas to his room. He was having his boots pulled off.
‘Sir Thomas, there’s a child out there…’ She tried to be calm; the man was exhausted. He became aware that he was being pestered.
‘What?’
‘Please, Sir Thomas. Just let the militia take me five miles more to find the boy.’
‘No.’
‘But he’s only a child.’
Sir Thomas stood up suddenly so that his servant fell over. ‘God’s wounds, woman, if it was my own son I couldn’t venture further north. It’s collapsing, don’t you see? Ireland is collapsing around us and all I can do is keep the road to the sea open so that we can get an army to build her up again. And a damn great army it’s going to have to be.’ He sat down on the stool and put his head in his hands. ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken us.’
Barbary stared. This was more than the strain of coping with one desperate emergency after another. He could do that; the Norrises came of stock that had coped with Her Majesty’s emergencies in more than one part of the world, and were prepared to give their lives in doing it. But Sir Thomas was weeping at the overthrow of a hope that had sustained his country for 400 years: security from an island that was too close and too alien for England’s comfort. The other great landowners were concerned about their personal ruin; Sir Thomas was in terror that the dream of two Englands side by side, twins floating in comradeship on a sea beset by enemy nations on one side and the Unknown on the other, was evaporating before his eyes.
It was only then that the events she had witnessed in the last twen
ty-four hours linked together for her. This could be, might be, the end of English Ireland, a massive, world-shaking event. And it was still nothing compared to the danger facing a vulnerable little boy.
She didn’t have time for tricks of persuasion. She said: ‘I don’t care who God’s forsaking, but you’re forsaking Edmund Spenser’s son.’
His voice came muffled from between his hands. ‘So be it.’
‘I’ll go then. Let me have a horse.’
‘No.’
‘But it’s five miles. I might be killed before I get there.’
He looked up at her and she saw that in his eyes she deserved to be, because she was of the treacherous race that was upsetting his queen’s plan.
‘Not you,’ he said. ‘You’re one of them. They won’t kill you.’
‘I hope you die,’ she screamed at him.
He closed his eyes. ‘I probably will.’
Before she left the castle, she took the Clampett out of her pack, made sure it was primed, and put its cartridge belt over her shoulder under her cloak. Down in the empty kitchens she found a small, sharp knife and stuck it up her sleeve. She threw away her hat, shook out her hair and put on the head-roll.
The guards on the gate, coping with the influx of refugees, didn’t give her a glance as she walked past them and up the hill leading north which was filled with the same pitiable traffic she had seen on the way from Cork. But less than half a mile further on it stopped and the road became as empty as if the wind had blown everything off it.
Keep to the road this time, she thought; easier going and more likelihood of getting news of Sylvestris. Besides, the road still seemed to retain some vestige of normality and was in any case less dreadful than the deserted dark which had contained the Ellises. After all, she’d been away from Munster a long time and she was looking very different from the fine English lady who’d kept company with the hated undertakers, so it was unlikely, at least until she got to the vicinity of Spenser Castle, that she’d be recognised. If she was, well, that would be her going to heaven via Weeping Cross. The insurgents wouldn’t be open to long explanations of her association with their overlords.
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