The O’Neill sobbed with rage and misery, recognising that it was not so much weakness of character that took these men away from him as the diseased system which had made Ireland useless against invasion for centuries. He could heal it, for a period he had done away with it, but for a complete cure he needed time, and he didn’t have any. If the whole structure was not to crumble around him he needed one of two more miracles to come about: the death of Elizabeth or the arrival of the Spanish.
* * *
The death of Will Clampett brought Barbary to realise that she had been waiting. Always into the blackest moments of her life a deus ex machina in the shape of Will, or Cuckold Dick, O’Hagan or her grandmother had appeared out of the shadows and in these, the blackest times of all, she had been unable to rid herself of the idea that one or other of them would do it again. Now Will was dead and the others weren’t turning up. There was no hope left. Sylvestris watched in panic as she lost more and more energy.
‘We’re managing,’ he said, trying to urge her to eat. ‘In the spring we can get to Kinsale with the help of God. Cuckold Dick might be there. Perhaps O’Hagan will come and marry you. We could steal a boat and get to Connaught.’
There was no Cuckold Dick, no O’Hagan, no Grace O’Malley, and there was certainly no God that would help. ‘I’m just not hungry.’
‘You’re useless,’ he shouted at her. ‘You’re a coward. You took us on and now you’re leaving us.’
But before she could die, Treasa did. She was the baby Sylvestris had found hidden beneath the dead woman on the night of the massacre, and his pride and joy. For some reason Barbary had never fathomed he’d called her ‘Trees’, which the Irish children of the Order had adapted to the ancient Celtic of Treasa. Whatever nationality her parents had been, the child had inherited from them a natural humour; she’d grown into the Order’s clown, shaping words as she learned them with a mouth that had crawled up into infectious smiles or downwards in mock horror. For her Sylvestris had disobeyed Barbary’s instructions never to steal from Lord Roche – Order rule: don’t foul your own doorstep – and filched an old wolf’s pelt from the Roche ancestral wall to make into an all-encompassing garment for her. The small face blinking from under the animal skull had been reminiscent of a hedgehog’s.
In the autumn, when they were gathering, she fell out of a hazelnut tree and broke her hip. Tadg set it, Barbary spooned extra rations into the little mouth, but incipient malnutrition made her defenceless to pneumonia, ‘the old man’s friend’, which befriended her sixty-five years before her time.
Sylvestris’s grief was terrible. Instead of helping Barbary fold the hands, as he had done so many times with other small hands, he picked the body up and rocked it, refusing to let her take it away from him. ‘Leave her alone. Why didn’t you stop it? You could have stopped it.’
She put her head in her hands. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘You could. You’re clever. You rescued me. And now you’re giving up and leaving us here. And she’s dead and we’re all going to die.’
They were in the crypt surrounded by the whole Order because it was the only complete, secure shelter they had. From the corner where Tadg slept they could hear his voice, praying. The rushlight showed pinched, frightened faces; even Gill’s mean eyes were full of tears. And they looked to her.
She hadn’t wanted them, any of them; even Sylvestris had been landed on her in a way. They had no right to demand what she couldn’t give. She’d done everything possible. How could she have done more? There had always been fighting in the countryside that lay between here and Kinsale, and how did they expect her to usher through it twenty-six children, of whom at least a couple had been seriously ill at any one time? And what if they got to Kinsale? Cuckold Dick wouldn’t be there, or he’d have managed to contact her by now. Reports from all the besieged towns spoke of overcrowding and refugees begging in the streets for money to buy themselves a passage back to England. What ‘proportion’ of these twenty-six would survive that?
Twenty-five. They were twenty-five now.
Christ, she envied them the luxury of being helpless. They could die without the agony of responsibility that was here, with her, in the centre of this pathetic circle. She had been like them once, suffering in a cold London cellar with Will trembling from ague, dying of starvation and innocence, and it had been better as that child than it was now as this woman.
It was then, looking back to her tiny self, she saw that into the London cellar had walked the greatest deus ex machina of them all, the Upright Man, an angel sent by the Upright God to teach her that trickery was the most useful of all human accomplishments and survival the only good. Brute beast though he was, the Upright Man wouldn’t have given way as she was giving way.
Aching, she got to her feet and went over to Sylvestris. ‘I’m going to stop it,’ she told him. ‘Give me Treasa.’
Next day they buried the child in the section of the monks’ graveyard where they had buried all the others, and then they started the training.
Until now their survival had depended on crude robbery from the armies encamped along the Blackwater; English or Irish they were always guarded, but their Achilles heel as far as the Order was concerned was their camp followers, because camp followers had children, which meant that guards seeing a few children, more or less, tended to ignore them; they’d chase them away from the food stores, such as they were, but they didn’t question their presence in the camp itself, and once in camp the Order could hide, watching and waiting, until dark. Two of its members, Tabitha the Puritan and ten-year-old Coughlin, were promising pick-locks; Seamus, who was big for his eleven years, could carry large quantities under his cloak, and under the direction of Barbary they could smuggle food out of camp to where the others were waiting with handcarts.
Tadg disapproved of the Order’s enterprise – though never to the point where he refused to eat its results – but he had contributed his expertise in showing them all how to quiet a horse, nick a vein in its neck and suck the blood, as Irish herders on a long journey did with their cattle. Barbary and the older English children were squeamish at the idea, but hunger stopped them being finicky when they saw the Irish children taking sustenance from the cavalry horse lines with considerable benefit to themselves and apparently no harm to the horses.
The Order could barnacle, pick locks, steal and, so far at any rate, talk its way out of trouble. Now the training became more sophisticated.
‘Tadg,’ said Barbary, ‘I want you to stand here and walk about a bit.’ They were on the grass outside the chancel. ‘And I want you to put these pebbles in your cloak pocket and shout out the moment you feel someone taking them out.’ She attached a rag purse to his belt.
‘If it’s teaching these little ones to pick pockets, I’ll have no part of it,’ boomed Tadg. ‘Woman, have ye never heard of being poor but honest?’
‘You ever heard of being honest but dead?’
‘Ah, but Barbary, we’ve managed without this. I’ll not help ye hang a millstone round these children’s necks, better they go to the Kingdom of Heaven.’
‘Treasa’s gone there,’ said Barbary, ‘and I wanted her here. If you won’t, I’ll do it myself, but you’d be better.’ Tadg’s blindness had been from birth and he’d developed his other senses to the point where he could feel the movement of air from a passing bird. If they could pick Tadg’s pockets successfully they could pick anybody’s.
Tadg was silenced; Treasa had been his favourite. ‘I’ll allow the indignity,’ he said, ‘for the sin’s on your shoulders, not mine.’
He even began to enjoy the game, though he roared that he could hear them before the children were even close. ‘You don’t know you’re born,’ Barbary told them when they got discouraged. ‘The Upright Man used to beat me if he felt a touch.’
That night Tadg called her to his corner. ‘It’s not just the sin of it, Barbary, it’s the danger to them.’
‘Tadg, if we’re going to
get them out of here we’ll have to move into the towns, and I don’t know any other way to survive in a town than this.’
‘But there’s no law in the towns any more, so they tell me. And where there’s no law, men will take it into their own hands. Will you consider what they’ll do to a sneak-thief, however young?’
‘Jesus Christ, don’t you think I know?’ She’d lain awake sweating at the thought. It had paralysed her into staying in the abbey longer than she should. Being caught by soldiers who believed them to be merely naughty camp children was hardly a risk at all in comparison. Seamus had been stopped when he was carrying four loaves from the sutler’s store of Essex’s army, and explained in good English, as Barbary had taught him to, that he was stealing for his sick mother. Sick mothers always went down well, and there were plenty of them. The sutler had given him a hiding, but let him go, and even given him a loaf to take with him. A Cork or Kinsale merchant with his purse cut wasn’t going to be so benign. ‘But fearing that is what’s keeping me keep them here. And if we stay here they’ll all die. This war’s not going to end, Tadg. We’ve got to get away. I don’t know where to, but somewhere. The Upright Man never worried if one of us got caught.’
‘A lovely character, your Upright Man, then.’
‘He kept us alive. Most of us.’
Sylvestris who, from Barbary’s point of view, was becoming more and more obstructive, also disapproved of the new training. ‘I won’t do it, it’s stealing. “Thou shalt not steal.”’
‘What the bloody hell have we been doing all this time?’
‘That was different. This is… personal. God will provide.’
‘He hasn’t done much of a job so far.’ She tried to be calm. ‘Look, Sir Stayon, I can’t sew, or cook or make anything. I don’t know any other way to survive.’
‘But if we get through to Kinsale, you can go to Henry. He’ll look after you.’
‘He can’t look after twenty-four assorted orphans.’
‘Are we going to keep them then?’ Despite his rebellion against her authority, he still regarded their relationship as special and was occasionally jealous of the others.
‘What do you suggest we do with them?’
He hadn’t thought. ‘There are places.’
‘And I’ve been in them. There’s the streets, that’s all there is. I know. The girls becoming bawds, the boys too maybe. This is the only skill we can survive on until we can work something out for all of us. And, yes, I’m going to keep them. Perhaps we’ll all go to Connaught and become pirates, but your bloody God landed them on me, and unless somebody better comes along, I’m their mother.’
* * *
It was autumn again before the Order was ready.
The summer had been good in one way, bad in another. A lassitude had fallen over the area as more and more Irish troops were pulled back to protect the north. The sieges of the Pale towns were more or less over, though none of the enfeebled refugees who’d been trapped within them dared venture out and reclaim their settlements, and probably never would. Every now and then a force of English arrived in the Blackwater Valley only to leave it again a week or so later under the threat of an Irish attack. Very rarely was there an actual engagement.
Rumours that the Spanish were on their way to take up O’Neill’s cause were repeated up and down the roads as people began to move cautiously about again; an Armada had been seen off Connaught, off Donegal, it would land in the north, in the west, the south, but such rumours had been common currency for too long, and men passed them on almost apologetically.
With the eternal optimism of the peasant, Irish churls began to gather in a pitiful harvest in the hope that this would be the year when it wouldn’t be taken away from them. Their greatest, sometimes their only, sustenance over the past few years had been provided by one of their greatest oppressors: the potato patches they had planted to feed themselves when they worked for the English undertakers had not only flourished, but had been frequently overlooked by marauding soldiers who did not recognise the tuber as a source of food. Barbary and Sylvestris had made a night raid on Hap Hazard’s cottage gardens and stolen some from under the noses of the MacSheehys to plant them in a lazy bed dug within the walls of the roofless abbey refectory.
‘Say what you like about Sir Walter,’ Tadg had said, as day after day their only meal consisted of potato soup or boiled potatoes, potato pie or potatoes roasted, ‘but he did the Irish a great service when he brought this damned thing to our shores, God rot him.’
On the other hand, the summer’s weather had been chilly and wet and now, as they prepared to leave, one of the English girls, Priscilla, was coughing.
‘It may be the lung sickness, Barbary,’ Tadg said. ‘She shouldn’t be travelling.’
‘She’s got to. She won’t improve if she stays here for the winter. We’ve got the handcart, Seamus shall push her. I wish you were coming, Tadg.’ He had frequently driven her mad with his principles and his religion, she blamed him bitterly for filling Sylvestris’s head with priestly nonsense, but he had gone without when the children starved and wept when they died. He’d been the only adult with whom she could consult, and had at least given her the illusion that she wasn’t bearing the burden of responsibility totally alone.
‘I’m too old. I’d be useless on roads I don’t know and don’t know me. Maurice will provide for me when you’re gone, as he did before. You’ll be fine.’
‘Fine.’ She sat down beside him and leaned her head back against the crypt wall. ‘I’ll be fine. I don’t know where we’re going, or why, or what we’re going to do when we get there. I’m scared to go and I’m scared to stay. And I’m so bloody tired. I didn’t want this… this being out of control. Did you know, Tadg, I once thought I could save Ireland? Get O’Neill his guns, get rid of Bingham, trick this one, verse that one. What a pillock. I can’t even save a bunch of starving children.’
Sylvestris, who’d developed adenoids, was snoring slightly in his corner, Priscilla was coughing, the rest of the Order was asleep, except Gill who was on guard up in the bell tower watching out for marauders. Muffled by the weeds and elders which hid the top of its steps, the screech of the owl from the refectory reached them in the crypt as it went hunting.
Tadg’s hand patted down her arm until it found her hand and held it. ‘I’ve been thinking lately that maybe it’s not by chance that you called these children the Order. There’s Gaels and Gauls here, Celt and Saxon, and though it’s stealing they combine at, combine they do. Stolen it may be, but they share their food without thought of ancestry, or country, or even religion, God pity them. Save Ireland, you say, and maybe you will, and England too. You’re no pillock, Barbary O’Flaherty, whatever that may be.’
She didn’t understand what he was on about, but the sonorous old voice was comforting. She rubbed his veined hand with her thumb, and went to sleep on his shoulder.
* * *
First stop was Mallow. Though only five miles away, the journey would be quite long enough for the smaller children to manage. If the town was deserted, they’d cross the river and try and find shelter on the south bank, ready to press on in the morning; if it was occupied then the Order might as well start work there as anywhere. Barbary felt her stomach churn at the risk, but it had to be taken.
The last time she’d visited Mallow had been between the town’s occupations to fetch some of the water which issued warm from the limestone rocks around its Lady Well and was reputed to cure rheumatics, ague, and the flux. Since most of the Order suffered from one or the other, she and Seamus had risked the journey, although, for all the good the water did, they could have saved their trouble. The town had been completely deserted except for an old woman rootling among a pile of stones who’d hidden when she heard the rattle of their handcart. Where shops had lined the street going down to the river there were now mere oblongs of walls, not higher than three feet, and you could look over them to the stumps that had once been the castle.
‘I told you,’ Barbary said to the Order as the men went ahead, ‘we’re noticeable. We’re going to split up like I told you. We’ll skirt the town to the west and cross the river near O’Callaghan Castle and decide on a rendezvous where we can meet up later. What don’t you do?’
‘Never find your way into town, inn or prison you can’t find your way out of,’ they chorused.
‘Damn right.’
So when they approached Mallow eventually it was from the south. They broke up to cross the bridge in unrelated twos and threes, mingling with the surprising number of people who were crossing it with them. Barbary pushed the handcart, talking to Priscilla, whose coughing subsided under the interesting happenings around her. Red-cloaked English soldiers with pikes were on the bridge, urging on the traffic. ‘Come on, come on. Stretch those bandies. Don’t you want your free ale?’
An old man beside Barbary said: ‘What are the Saxons shouting?’
‘They’re going to give us free ale.’
‘Free ale, is it? A free hanging is all we’ll get from them.’ But he hurried forward just the same.
A gaunt-looking woman with a baby showed Barbary her basket, which was full of damsons. ‘Will the Saxons be buying these off me, now?’
The Pirate Queen Page 70