He sat down and leaned across the table, stabbing the letter at Barbary. ‘Do you guess who writes this? Not her. Raleigh. Raleigh dictates to her while I wage a war against savages ignorant of its etiquette, who stab and run like cowardly rabble, who promise fair battle and attack our hindquarters.’
‘Unfair, my lord.’
Essex wiped the froth from his lips. ‘Only those like you and I, who suffer it, plumb the full damnation of this forgotten waste.’ His eyes were kindly and cunning. ‘Lady Betty, you know something of Tyrone, you knew his wife. If he should offer truce…’
He could retrieve the situation yet. The secret emissary from the O’Neill had offered a way out: a meeting between the two of them, face to face. He was in touch with James of Scotland and his spies told him O’Neill was in touch with James of Scotland. There was common ground there; neither of them wanted to precipitate a situation that might change drastically if James could be set on the throne. Why fight each other when, if they waited, they could become the actual rulers of their respective countries under the figurehead of James? They could patch up a truce, he could get out of this awful place and go home to counteract the damage evil-wishers were wreaking behind his back. Elizabeth would rant, but he could pacify that old carcase into doing what he wanted, he always had.
But could he trust the O’Neill? That’s what he needed this woman to tell him. ‘…if I met him face to face. For all his lack of true nobility, he bears the title of earl. Should I meet him if he offers?’
He tried to read the expression that came into the frozen green eyes, and if she hadn’t been such a tragic object he might have thought it was amusement.
‘I wouldn’t if I was you,’ she said.
He sat back. He loathed wrong answers; he shouldn’t have demeaned himself by asking. What did a slut like this know of high politics? Well, but she was famished, her fingers round the stem of his cup were twigs, grubby twigs.
‘How can I serve you, mistress?’
She became alert enough at that. ‘Can you take me and some others to Kinsale?’
‘Kinsale? Mistress, I couldn’t take you through to Cork, let alone Kinsale. Both are heavily besieged. It would need all my army to win through, and tomorrow we march north.’
She looked down again. He heard her muttering: ‘Must get to Kinsale, must get to Kinsale.’
‘Endure a little longer, mistress,’ he told her. ‘You will be safe enough here with the garrison I shall leave behind to protect the area.’ He terminated the audience. There was much to do. ‘Go with my sergeant here and order what supplies you need from the sutler to see you through the winter and they shall be carried with you to… where was it?’
‘Ballybeg Abbey.’ She got up and crouched down on her knees, clutching his boots with her twiglike hands. ‘I am grateful, my lord.’
He stood at the flap of his pavilion, watching her being led along the duckboards. Pitiful, pitiful.
His officers rejoined him, men of rank and title, many of them knighted by himself. He’d added another quarter to the English knighthood since he’d been in Ireland; his detractors were saying his sword never left its sheath except to tap some acolyte on the shoulders, but, by God, these friends who endured this place of torment with him should have loyalty rewarded. They played cards before he decided he was tired, and flung himself on his cot, noticing with irritation as he did so that his boots had lost two of their gold buckles.
* * *
The soldiers staggered back and forth from the cart to what remained of Ballybeg’s refectory, unloading the provisions, three barrels of flour, two flitches of bacon, dried herring, sacks of beans, match, a tun of ale. The sergeant was bitter at the advantage the woman had taken of his commander’s generosity. ‘Sure you got enough, lady? Didn’t fancy our eyeteeth?’
She shook her head, being too intent on her loot to say goodbye or thank you. The sergeant spat and ordered his men back to the cart, glad to get away. The morning was misty and the ruins were blurred shapes dark with ivy. There was no movement or sound, not even birdsong, but after a year in Ireland the sergeant knew when he was being watched and he knew it now. If they got back to the camp without being sniped at they’d be lucky.
Barbary listened to the hoofbeats and creak of wheels fade away down the road. Eyeteeth. If eyeteeth were edible she’d have taken them.
She’d listened to what Essex had to tell her about the situation in Ireland, but she’d only taken in the situation as far as it affected her. Ireland had dwindled to the few square miles around Ballybeg Abbey, her trap, and once she’d understood that it was still impossible to get out of it, she’d lost interest.
She’d been here… how long? She couldn’t remember. Months and months. At first, she and Sylvestris and the others had cowered in the comparative safety of Tadg’s house in the ruins while the massacre of the undertakers went on around them. The small house had been constructed above the crypt and it was in the crypt she and Sylvestris and the other English children Tadg had taken in hid when the MacSheehys rampaged into the abbey grounds, looking for Rosh’s killer. Tadg had denied all knowledge of them. The blind old Irish poet was one of the greatest Christians Barbary had ever met, determined not to abandon his English refugees to their enemies.
When, later, a long time later, a phalanx of English cavalry had managed to battle their way through to Mallow and had come to the abbey looking for Irish to kill, it was Tadg and the Irish children who hid in the crypt, and she who’d saved them.
‘I am Lady Betty,’ she’d told the English captain. ‘I should like you to escort me and my family to Kinsale, if you please.’
He’d looked at her as if she was mad. ‘I couldn’t escort you round the corner, madam. I’ve lost half my men getting this far. The bastard Irish army’s to the south and north and pressing hard.’ He looked at her suspiciously: ‘How have you survived, if you’ll pardon my asking? You’re the only Englishwoman in the area that isn’t a corpse.’
‘Luck,’ she’d told him, shortly. ‘But we can’t stay here. We’ve no food.’
The captain had lacked sympathy and time. ‘You managed to last this long, you’ll have to hang on a bit longer, till we’ve wiped this murdering scum off the face of the earth.’
But it was the captain and his men who were wiped off, the next day. An ambush by Tyrrell’s men killed them all. After that, it was the Irish back in occupation.
The Irish were out to slaughter anyone who couldn’t speak Irish, the English anyone who couldn’t speak English. And Tadg, blast him – she began to hate his Christianity – took in more and more orphaned children, so that Irish-only speakers joined the English-only speakers he’d rescued during the massacre.
Even so, at that stage, as the only two who were completely bilingual, she would have taken Sylvestris and left the rest to their fate while she attempted to get through to Kinsale and Cuckold Dick’s promised boat. Kinsale was still in English hands, although it was besieged on three sides by the Irish. But, she reckoned, they couldn’t besiege the sea and Dick would rescue her somehow if she could only reach it. The journey would be hideously dangerous, she knew, but it was worth the risk if she could get out of this butchering ground.
She waited for a lull in the fighting that never came. At one point they had to evacuate Ballybeg completely and take to the open countryside while a battle for possession of the abbey raged across its pitiful ruins. When the dust settled and they were able to return, it was to find that Tadg’s house had been destroyed, and they had to move into the crypt for shelter.
Gradually, inevitably, the day came when she realised she couldn’t go, not unless Tadg and all the children came with her. They’d become her children, nearly as precious as Sylvestris himself. She’d keep the little buggers alive somehow. They must become bilingual so that they wouldn’t be killed by whatever army was in occupation, no matter whose lines they had to cross to get to Kinsale. More than that, they must learn to steal and cheat as she had
. They must survive.
Alone, hungry and desperate, in the ruins of an Irish abbey, Barbary had begun creating an Order of her own.
She counted again the barrels that she’d brought from Essex’s camp. ‘Three barrels of flour…’
A knifepoint pricked her spine and a voice hissed: ‘Your money and your life.’
She stood still. ‘Or,’ she said. ‘Your money or your life. Give them a choice, Gill.’
‘Not me. And the name’s Giolla.’
She squinted into the mist and pointed to a scrap of material that hung above the remains of the abbey bell tower. ‘Is that red?’ Sulkily, he nodded. ‘Then today you’re English, so speak it. We didn’t have nationalities in the old Order, and there won’t be any in this one. Get the bigger boys and hide this food. Tell Nanno to put a pan of beans to soak. Bacon and beans for breakfast.’
He loped beside her as she headed for the chancel. ‘Ye didn’t hear me creep up though.’
‘No,’ she said, tiredly, ‘you did well.’ He was nine years old and she didn’t like him much, but she supposed that stabbing to death when he was eight the English soldier who was raping his younger sister had stifled much of his natural charm. The real Order would have thrown him out as too unstable, sent him to Paltock’s.
Outside the empty jambs of the doorway to the south aisle she paused to get her breath and whistle the passnotes. The nave was bare and open to the sky, the only shelter being the chancel’s half-roof, kept in place by bramble and creepers. A hand held back one of the elders that had grown up by the cracked steps and hid the chancel from view, so that she could go through. The mist coming through the light at the east end was beginning to show yellow, but it was cold and the children sitting on tussocks in front of the altar were huddled together. Apart from craning their necks to look at her they didn’t move. Tadg, like an elderly, white-haired, blinded Samson, was standing behind the altar, teaching them their catechism, and Tadg could hear a feather fall. She nodded assurance that she’d brought food and they turned back.
‘Is the Son God?’ asked Tadg.
‘Yes, certainly He is,’ they chorused.
‘Will God reward the good and punish the wicked?’
‘Certainly; there is no doubt He will.’
She’d told him and told him; what was the bloody good of teaching them in two languages if, when they spoke English, they did it in typical Irish manner and used four words where one would do. She wasn’t up in the catechism but she was damn sure English children just answered ‘Yes’ or ‘He will’, not ‘Certainly, there is no doubt He will’.
The elders moved and Sylvestris beckoned her to join him out in the nave. ‘Did you get any food?’
‘Yes. Gill’s putting it in the crypt. Not enough though.’
‘We’ll manage.’
‘We won’t. We’ve got to get through to Kinsale before the winter.’
‘We can’t.’
‘I know that, don’t I?’ Her scream echoed round the bare stone walls; starvation temper. From the chancel, Tadg’s deep voice shouted: ‘Quiet out there.’
She pushed back her hair. ‘I got these too.’ She opened her hand and showed him the gold buckles she’d removed from Essex’s boots. He grinned and nodded. He was in better shape than she was; he hadn’t grown much, but his voice had broken. She and Tadg kept their rations down to leave more for the children, but Sylvestris was beginning to notice and insist on an adult’s right to go without as well.
He said: ‘Roche’s Caitlin said she heard there were some sheep for sale over at Doneraile. These’d buy two.’
‘Buying them’s not the problem. It’s getting them back without Roche taking them off you.’
‘What did Essex want with you anyway?’
She tried to remember. ‘Oh yes, he’s moving out with the army tomorrow. The O’Neill must have got word through to him. He said did I think he could trust O’Neill if he met him face to face and made a truce.’
‘What did you say?’
‘No point in saying anything. He’s desperate. He’s frittered away the army Elizabeth gave him without achieving anything. If he agrees to meet the O’Neill, and he will, he’ll be chewed up and spat out in whatever sizes O’Neill wants him to be. He’s not clever.’
‘A truce, though.’
She supposed it was his youth that kept him hoping. ‘If Essex doesn’t succeed, Elizabeth’ll send somebody who will. It’s never going to end.’
‘Have faith in the love of God. Did he have news of Henry?’
‘He’s well. The queen’s watching over him.’
‘Praise God and his saints. I’d better see about breakfast. I’m teaching them the Iliad later, but I can’t remember much of it.’
‘Teach them what you can.’ They were all handing on what they knew; Tadg taught the children Irish poetry, and how to find their way in the dark. Sylvestris taught them English. She taught them survival.
As he left, the boy genuflected in the direction of the altar and crossed himself.
‘Don’t do that,’ she screamed at him.
He turned on her. ‘I’m going to. I meant what I said. You can’t stop me.’ He’d said he wanted to become a Roman Catholic priest.
Oh God, she thought. He does mean it. Even if we can ever get away from here, we can’t go back to England. He’d only have to open his mouth to give away his conversion to Papism. In his own way, and for his own beliefs, Sylvestris was fearless. He’d be martyred in England.
Nearly all the children’s experiences on the night of the massacre and since had led to some form of obsession. Six-year-old Tabitha, who’d been hidden by her mother under a woodpile, had heard her parents and brothers being hacked to death. The family had been strongly Puritan, and now she continually repeated, parrot-fashion, its invocations of a stern, militant God in an attempt to keep its memory alive, so that her shrill little voice rang out with ‘Praise the strong arm of the Lord’ and ‘He shall trample sinners under His feet’.
Peter counted everything, branches, stones, steps, the number of beans on his trencher. Gill told rambling stories in which the hero killed armies of English soldiers, and his little sister washed and re-washed her doll.
What Barbary found wonderful was that the hatreds and fears they had picked up in the past did not extend to each other. Irish or English, they were too young, too hungry or too much in need of a community to see one another as symbols of the divide that had destroyed their parents. Gill did not equate English children with his sister’s rapist, Tabitha did not recognise that Tadg was teaching her a catechism which would have made her mother and father despair for her immortal soul. In the early days they’d trotted out the shibboleths – all Irish smelled, the Queen of England was a bitch from hell – but gradually their suffering and mutual dependence had bonded them.
In Sylvestris’s case the memory of his abandonment on the night of the massacre had developed into a desperate grudge against the woman who’d left him. It wasn’t the Irish who’d burned his home he held responsible, but Elizabeth Boyle. Thanks to Barbary, he had some insight into what had caused the uprising, but his stepmother’s had been a personal betrayal, and he refused to extend any understanding to her panic for her baby and unborn child; she’d left him, his father had been absent when he’d needed him most, no militia had come back for him, the whole structure on which he’d relied had let him down. He’d had to find a new one to fit into, and Tadg, with his Catholic litany and ritual, had provided it; he had fallen in love with the holy mother who had not deserted her son at His crucifixion.
When, months after the event, they’d heard of Edmund Spenser’s death, Sylvestris had shed few tears. It was ironic, thought Barbary with despair, that the appreciation of beauty which he’d inherited from his father should respond to a religion his father had loathed. It wasn’t that she cared a damn what he believed in as long as it made him happy, but he didn’t have to go to extremes. And he did. He prattled about the priesthood,
vows, about going back to England one day to lead it out of its heresy and return it to the Only True Church.
‘You just want to get your own back,’ she’d shouted at him. ‘They’ll kill you. They killed Edmund Campion, cut him into bits while he was still alive.’
But he’d merely looked at her as at some lesser mortal whose clumsy, plebeian feet were muddying the pure waters of his soul. Sometimes she was saddened that their old communication had gone; at other times it made her want to clip him round the ear. Mostly it terrified her. If she’d known on the night of the massacre that Tadg would create an oasis for the boy, providing through Catholicism the only beauty he could find in the hideousness around him, she wouldn’t have taken his hospitality. Yes, she would. There’d been nowhere else to go.
She’d have to stop him somehow, if only because it cut down their options for the day when they could get out of here. If they reached Kinsale and Cuckold Dick came in with his boat, they couldn’t go to England with a budding priest on board. She could still see the tortured Campion tied to his hurdle on the way to his death. Where else could they go? Spain? France? With little Tabitha Longman parroting her anti-Papist rubbish? The Inquisition would love her.
‘Help me. Isn’t there anybody to help me?’ The longer they stayed, the worse the mess they got in, and the worse the mess they got in, the longer they had to stay. She believed in God as firmly as Sylvestris and Tadg; only God could have created such a beautifully consistent trap. She could see Him, staff in hand, daubed with pig’s-blood wounds; Upright God of Upright Men, rapist, killer and cheat. He’d sent her children so that He could watch her watch them die. He created a perpetual layer of armies between her and Kinsale and made sure that if she ever got there she wouldn’t have anywhere to go.
If there was a female God, as Finola had said in ‘The Word of Woman’, she was in abeyance, as all women were in abeyance in this mad, male world.
If Essex moved out tomorrow, the Irish would move in and kill the garrison he’d left, the green would flow in as the red flowed out, and the only change would be that the conies her children had to steal from would speak a different language.
The Pirate Queen Page 68