* * *
In February their neighbour and landlord, Maurice Roche, Viscount Fermoy, arrived bearing gifts. Just as astonishing, he and the man leading two mules waited politely at the abbey gates for permission to enter.
Barbary trained the Clampett on him. ‘Get out, Maurice. There’s nothing here for you.’ In fact, they’d survived this winter better than last; the Ballybeg Order was getting into its stride.
‘You pain me, Lady Betty. I bring a Christmas feast for you and the children, belated but welcome, I trust.’
Bemused, she allowed him in and watched him and the servant unpack the first mule’s hampers, flap a tablecloth and lay on it wheaten loaves, four cooked chickens, a leg of beef, another of mutton and a hog’s head with an apple in its mouth, beakers, ale, dried plums and honey. From the second mule came a brazier which they lit with coals, and a churn of milk. The milk nearly undid her; the children hadn’t tasted any for a year, but still she didn’t call them. ‘It’s poisoned, isn’t it? You’re finally going to get rid of us.’
He dipped a beaker in the churn and drank a little, carved a small piece off the comestibles and stuck them in his mouth. ‘I-u-er-ood,’ he said, from which she gathered that he felt misunderstood. She whistled and the chancel was filled with small, furred – they’d held up a consignment of pelts on its way to the besiegers at Cork – and unfriendly looking children, all of them armed with knives or hatchets. The older ones had handguns, a present from an unwitting sutler in Tyrrell’s army.
Viscount Fermoy shuddered. Even the tiny hedgehog of a child, it couldn’t be more than three, and one was unable to guess its sex, carried a useful-looking dagger. ‘The dears,’ he said, ‘may one not bestow a little charity on such innocents?’
She surprised him by taking the apple out of the hog’s mouth and throwing it away, then she nodded to the Order. The tablecloth and its contents vanished under a heaving pile of fur and leather. It was like peering down into a large nest of squirming rats. Maurice averted his eyes. ‘One gathers your curriculum does not include table manners.’
‘No.’ But for all their hunger, she noticed with pride, not one of them turned their backs on either the viscount or his man. She grabbed a drumstick, said ‘’Ware hawk’ to Sylvestris and took Roche out into the nave. ‘What do you want?’
‘One abhors such suspicion in a woman, Barbary.’
‘Maurice, you’ve charged us, you’ve stolen from us, you tried to sell my older girls to the army brothels. Jesus, you tried selling the boys. Every baby that’s landed on your doorstep you’ve handed to me, even when you knew I couldn’t feed it.’
‘The exigencies of war lead all of us along paths we should prefer not to follow.’
‘Don’t I know? What do you want?’
‘Let us walk.’ It was freezing. The branches of the trees were as ossified as the tumbled stones of the abbey, and as they stepped out onto the grass it crackled beneath their boots. Barbary chewed on the chicken bone in her left hand and kept her right inside her sealskin court muff which, as Maurice Roche knew, concealed her snaphaunce.
‘It’s the O’Neill,’ he said. ‘He’s touring Munster, a royal progress. He is everywhere acknowledged as King of Ireland. It is said the Holy Father is sending him a Bull with which to excommunicate all heretics, and having a crown made ready for his coronation.’
‘Well, well.’ She no longer cared. Besides, she’d already heard it from Sylvestris who was in cahoots with Caitlin, Maurice’s cook. Unknown to the viscount, the scraps of food that had helped to feed them in the early days had come from the viscount’s own kitchen.
‘Did you know he intends to visit Roche Castle?’
She shook her head. She did, but it would be unfruitful to betray Caitlin’s friendship. ‘Why?’
‘Why? Because he wants one to commit oneself to his cause, that’s why. Isn’t it enough that one’s sons ride with him? Does he want the head and the body? Oh, that troublesome man. His visit will so compromise one in the eyes of the English if they win this war.’
‘You still think the English might win then?’ Maurice’s judgement was worth having.
‘How can one tell? One can only say that so far the O’Neill has not. And delay is fatal in Ireland. He has done marvels in uniting the clans, but cracks are beginning to show. One imagines he is waiting for the Spanish to come help him administer the coup de grâce. Or for Elizabeth to die, of course. How that woman does hang on.’ He paused. ‘Yet she had the energy to cut Essex’s head off.’ He looked down at her and gave an elaborate sigh. ‘It’s a lesson to us all not to be hasty. I wager that the young man died neither for his disobedience nor his rebellion, but because he galloped home and surprised her in her bath.’ Lord Roche shook his head. ‘A high price to pay for glimpsing a queen without her wig.’
It was very cold. ‘Are you going to tell me what you want?’
‘Well, can’t you stop this visit? You have influence with the man.’
She stared at him. ‘I’ve got influence? Over the O’Neill? You’re mad.’
‘You must have. He knew you were here. He has informants everywhere. The message from him specifically states that Lady Betty née O’Flaherty is to be among those present to receive him. Send to him. Tell him one has got the plague. Tell him something. The cost alone—’
‘No. He won’t listen to me any more than to you. He never has.’
Maurice sighed. ‘One was afraid of that. Well then, the least you can do is propitiate him to oneself. One feels he may have misunderstood one’s stance during the last few years. Inform him of one’s protection to those little ones, what a guardian one has been to you…’
‘Maurice, what you’ve been to me is a bastard, and if you think a piece of chicken will make me treacle you to the O’Neill, you can think again.’
‘One may not have been able to do all one liked, it is true.’ He stopped and put a hand on her arm, looking down into her eyes. ‘But one thing, Barbary. One never told the MacSheehys who shot Rosh MacSheehy at the sack of Spenser Castle that night.’
She stood still. ‘And you know?’
‘One could make an educated guess.’ He’d never seen her smile before and it amazed him. Despite everything, she was still an attractive woman.
‘Maurice, I never told you that I admire you above any man I’ve ever met, but I do.’
She watched him walk away, knowing he thought she’d been ironic. But it’s true, she thought. You’ve obeyed the precepts of the Upright God with total honesty. You’ve guided yourself and your family through hell and come out alive, and whoever wins or loses, you’ll stay alive. And nothing is more admirable than that.
* * *
As the O’Neill came into view, the chieftain standing next to Barbary said involuntarily: ‘He’s Moses.’
The comparison was not inapt. The child who had been plucked from Irish bulrushes into the house of the English Pharaoh had become the leader taking his people out of captivity. In manoeuvring to keep Ulster free, the man found himself the saviour of a nation and symbol of its hope. More than that, one of the tiny pennants he had once waved for expediency had become a banner in his hand and streamed behind him so that not only the Irish but all the Catholic nations of the world cheered him on. The O’Neill was now the holy warrior who defended the True Faith against the machinations of a heretic queen.
As he trotted past her, his eyes on Roche Castle, Barbary looked for a vestige of the trickster she’d known and found none. He’d let his hair and beard go grey and on his face was the astonished calm of one who has been overtaken by destiny. The diminished population of the Blackwater and Awbeg put out its hand to touch his horse, his stirrup, his boot, it threw handfuls of precious wheat over him, it cheered and sobbed, and it ran along before him, scattering his way with oak leaves instead of palm.
The cavalcade that followed him was almost imperial. Apart from more Os and Macs than could be counted, gallowglass and Scottish chieftains, every pr
ovince belonging to Philip of Spain was represented. Castile, Aragon, Leon, both Sicilies, Jerusalem, Portugal, Navarre and the Indies, as well as a cardinal from Italy, Jesuits in doublet and hose and brown-habited Franciscans. The cardinal was waving his biretta and encouraging the onlookers to cheer louder. ‘Viva,’ he was shouting. ‘Viva Ugo, Conte di Tirone, Generale Ibernese.’
And all Barbary could think was: How’s Maurice going to feed them?
Maurice Roche was thinking the same thing. When she struggled into the hall and glimpsed him kneeling before the O’Neill, she saw his face was screwed up into what others would see as exalted penitence and was actually worry for his larder.
The O’Neill’s voice was clear and cold. ‘You,’ he said, ‘it is you, and those like you, who are the reason why Ireland is not joined together to shake off the cruel yoke of heresy and tyranny. Join us in our holy action, deliver us from the most miserable tyranny and enjoy your religion, safety of wife and children, life, lands and goods, which are all in hazard through your folly.’
Maurice, Viscount Fermoy, said one didn’t have many goods left to enjoy, but one would do one’s best.
All the local chieftains swept up to do homage. Then it was Barbary’s turn to be led before the chair that had been set up on the dais as a throne.
He questioned her courteously, like royalty briefed to ask the right questions of an overawed subject. And she was overawed. She had expected that he would expect to be berated for having tricked her, that there would be, not apology, but side-stepping, a nudge, some self-conscious banter to get her back into a good mood. And there was nothing. The old channel that had always allowed them to understand each other was not just stopped up, it might never have existed; he was his own hagiography so completely that history had been rewritten. She and other victims of the doubling, weaving strategy, like the strategy itself, had been sponged from his memory. The divide was terrifying and so impenetrable that she heard herself answering his questions with the bashfulness of a new courtier.
‘We understand you have gathered many of our local orphans into your care,’ he said.
‘Yes, my lord, I have.’
‘How interesting. Did you seek the task, or was it thrust upon you?’
‘They just came.’ Where there was war there were orphans. Babies conceived by rape on mothers whose husbands, and sometimes they themselves, couldn’t bear to countenance them. Children whose parents were dead. Children whose parents couldn’t feed them. Children who’d just got lost.
And as surely as war created them, it destroyed the institutions that cared for them. No Protestant Poor Laws, no Catholic monasteries. Perhaps because Tadg’s reputation and the ruins of Ballybeg Abbey still retained some odour of sanctuary, it was there that they were taken or found their own way. In those early days after the massacre when she and Sylvestris had been hunting for food, they had heard others crying in the woods. One day she’d found three babies left before the altar where some desperate, devout soul had entrusted them to a miracle by the Mother of God. They’d all died from exposure.
As chief man of the district, many were landed on Lord Roche. And he’d landed them on her: ‘They need a woman’s care, Barbary.’
‘They need food,’ she’d told him. ‘I can’t take them. We’re starving.’ But take them she had to, because he wouldn’t. And starve they did.
‘How many do you have?’
‘Twenty-six alive, my lord. Fifteen died.’
‘Not too bad a proportion,’ he said encouragingly.
A good word, proportion. Practical. There was no vomit in it, or dysentery or haemorrhaging. A word that muffled screams, choking, coughing and the calling for their mothers, and obliterated those that had died making no sound at all.
Pleasantry out of the way, he proceeded. ‘It has been brought to our attention that you may be acquainted with the Englishman Charles Blount.’
Blount? Blount? That was Lord Mountjoy, Essex’s friend and Penelope Rich’s lover. ‘I can’t say acquainted; I’ve played cards with his mistress.’
‘What sort of man would you say he was?’
Why did he want to know? ‘In what connection, my lord?’
‘He is the next to be sent against me by Elizabeth.’ This time his condescension was not for Barbary but for the poor Protestant queen who kept kicking against the pricks.
Mountjoy. White and black satin against one of the tapestries in Essex’s card room, a puff of smoke, a light voice that spoke a great deal on the subject of food, a whisper in Essex’s plotting. She shrugged. ‘A great smoker and a fop. I can’t speak for his generalship.’
The O’Neill nodded. ‘You confirm what we have heard.’ He turned to the chieftains around him. ‘We will beat him in the time he takes to finish breakfast.’
While they laughed, she was thanked, blessed and dismissed. Only as she turned obediently to go did she realise what was happening and turned back. ‘For God’s sake, O’Neill, don’t treat me like this,’ she said. ‘At least tell me about Will. How is he? Where is he? Where’s Grace O’Malley. Where’s O’Hagan?’
Why hadn’t any of them come to rescue her?
The hall hushed; was the woman going to commit that worst of lese-majesty, a female scene?
The O’Neill raised his eyebrows. ‘Mistress O’Malley is well, I believe. And if you also refer to my ambassador in Spain, then I have word that he, too, is well.’
Still in Spain. He probably believed she was still safely ensconced in England.
Men moved in from all sides and ushered her away. She was taken to a room and found herself alone with Hoveden, the English secretary, his face composed into official sympathy. ‘My lord wished me to tell you privately,’ he said, ‘and to express his sympathy that Master Clampett died last month.’
He waited but she was quiet, so he went on. ‘An accident, I believe. A cannon that was being inefficiently loaded onto a trailer overturned and fell on him. He died the next day.’
Will.
Hoveden coughed. ‘Though indeed my lord has found less use for cannon in his warfare strategy than he first envisaged, Master Clampett was buried with all honour due to a man who worked usefully for our cause. A priest was with him and tells us that he made a good end.’ Hoveden coughed again. ‘I can’t tell you his last words, because the priest didn’t understand English. But he made a good end. You were related in some way, I believe.’
‘He was my father.’
She walked back to the abbey through fields that were returning to the wilderness from which they’d been created, and Will Clampett walked with her every step of the way. Mostly he was silent, but sometimes she heard his Devon voice propounding scientific theory. She’d brought him to this country in her heedless pursuit of balance and left him to die in it attended by some priest pestering him with mumbo-jumbo he didn’t believe in and couldn’t understand.
‘Oh Will,’ she said to him. ‘why didn’t you leave me to be shot by the English soldiers? Then you could have died in your bed of old age, and I wouldn’t be lost without you like I am now.’
Being a personal, he didn’t answer the question.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Elizabeth’s new general arrived in Ireland with the new century.
Mountjoy’s father had ruined himself and his family by a dogged pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone that would turn base metals into gold. He left his son four things, an ancient name, doggedness, the ability to know a fool like his father when he saw one, and the knowledge that there was no such thing as a Philosopher’s Stone.
Though Dublin and the Pale towns were screaming for him to relieve them of O’Neill’s besiegers, as they had screamed at his friend and patron Essex, he refused to make Essex’s mistake and listen to them. He was here to win a war, not make friends. ‘The baseness and dishonesty of the English–Irish inhabitants have been the chief causes of this kingdom’s hazard,’ was how he dismissed them. And with that statement time switched from being o
n the O’Neill’s side to being on his.
He had one great advantage in a queen as dogged as himself and prepared now to bleed England to death if by doing it she could defeat O’Neill. For a while Mountjoy sat quietly in Dublin and did his groundwork. His allies, he decided, were going to be Famine, Time and the Irish themselves. Then he took off his black and white satin, put on a heavy jerkin, four pairs of woollen stockings, three waistcoats, a cocoon of scarves, packed a plentiful supply of pipes and tobacco, and went to war.
Leaving Munster, Leinster and Connaught with little more than their English garrisons to defend them he marched north and began what Elizabeth had always been too mean with her money to do before, make the invisible Hadrian’s Wall into a reality. Forts went up in a long, defensible line. Sooner or later, Mountjoy reasoned, he was going to pen the O’Neill behind them. Wherever he found livestock he killed it, and cut down and salted each field growing corn.
It wasn’t done without loss. ‘Every day we did work and almost every day fight,’ he wrote. O’Neill opposed him all the way, but O’Neill’s forces were diffused throughout the country, and Mountjoy concentrated his on one objective at a time.
His single-mindedness, a trait the Irish did not possess in any great measure, was frightening. The chieftains were not used to someone who couldn’t be distracted, and they were tiring of this long and hungry war. Their overlords, the O’Neill and the O’Donnell, inevitably had to make choices between the interminably contested leaderships of the clans, selections that equally inevitably led to powerful men being passed over and not liking it.
Where he heard of such men, Mountjoy wooed them. ‘Return to your allegiance,’ he said, ‘and you shall be regranted your lands and leadership.’ Some refused, but those who didn’t amazed him by the speed and energy with which they turned their coats. Chief among them were members of the O’Neill’s and O’Donnell’s own families, both typical would-be dynasts who were incapable of rising above their tribal concepts, Sir Arthur O’Neill and Niall Garv O’Donnell. Mountjoy wrote home almost in horror at the eagerness with which they gave him food and helped him deny it to their former allies.
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