‘Everybody thought she’d be a doner after his death,’ continued Dick, ‘with grief like. But when the Commons got uppity about her monopolies, she goes to the House and makes a speech as had them wetting their bibs.’ He shook his head with admiration. ‘Upright material there, Barb.’
He was Upright material himself. He got them into Cork, through it and settled in an inn. He saw the children fed as they hadn’t been for years and helped Nanno put them to bed. Then he sat down with Barbary, urging her to eat more: ‘I seen fatter pea-sticks.’ He touched her hand with one finger. ‘Was it bad, Barb?’
‘Yes.’ There was no point in telling him, nobody unless they’d been through it could imagine how bad it had been. And she was almost blind with fatigue; she just wanted to sit with him by the fire and look at his beautiful mutton-fat face and let him take over all responsibility. But she did tell him about Sylvestris and his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
‘Wants to be a patrico?’ Dick was shocked. ‘That’s bad, Barb.’
‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, Dick. I daren’t go back to England with him. He’ll land himself in the Tower, or worse. And young Gill… What am I going to do, Dick? Where can we go?’
‘We’ll come up with something, Barb. Battle the watch.’
He helped her to the long, communal, plank bed she was to share with the girls and tucked her down between Dorren and Priscilla for warmth, but Dorren had nightmares and Priscilla coughed and both conditions flowed into Barbary so that she had a bad night. She was back on the Kent foreland and ropes were holding her to the ground so that she didn’t go over the cliffs; one by one somebody was loosening them. She was losing her hold.
The next morning she managed to get up on the cart next to Dick for the drive to Kinsale. Dick intended to drive straight through the town and along the left bank of the River Bandon, which cut Kinsale off from the headland that protected its harbours, to the ferry, cross the river and on over the headland to his hidden cove and The Barbary. But by the time he reached Kinsale it was raining and Barbary was muttering with fever, so he drove to his house instead.
The next morning a Spanish force under the command of Don Juan del Aguila landed at Kinsale with 4,000 men.
* * *
The Spaniards’ choice of Kinsale for their landing was argued all over Europe then and after. When he heard of it the Venetian ambassador in Paris reported the French belief that, by landing on the south coast so far from his allies’ strongholds in the north, King Philip had thrown his men away.
The Spanish reasoning was that it was not an invading army but a support group to help the O’Neill and the O’Donnell sweep the English out of Ireland and that Kinsale was a convenient jumping-off point for the secondary objective which was to be a later invasion of England. As well as that, King Philip had not forgotten the fate of his father’s Armada on the hostile west and north coasts.
The O’Donnell would very much have preferred the landing to be nearer to his lands in Donegal. He knew that by leaving his own territory at this stage he risked having no territory to come back to; his cousin Niall Garv would see to that. But he was not a man to squawk. He moved immediately and came south in bad weather on what one of Mountjoy’s generals, Carew, later described as the ‘greatest march that was ever heard of’, avoiding the army Mountjoy sent to cut him off by crossing the Slieve Phelims, usually a quagmire, when they had become frozen with ice.
The O’Neill was less precipitate. More than anybody else, he knew the dangers and considered them with his usual care. But he had pleaded for Spanish help and it had come. Slowly, gathering his men, he moved south.
The fastest mover of all was Mountjoy. He heard of the landing when he was at Kilkenny in Leinster on 27 September. Within the week he was outside Kinsale. This was his opportunity. The war as it was being fought at the moment would never come to a conclusion to satisfy his queen, but if he could entice his enemies out onto the open, sweeping hills behind Kinsale, he would have the chance to meet them in pitched battle instead of the bogs and woods they used so well.
After considerable fighting he managed to dislodge the Spanish from the two strongholds of Rincorran and Castle Park which dominated the Bandon River to the south, forcing the Spanish into the town itself. There he bottled them up.
Dublin squealed that it was being left undefended, even Elizabeth expressed concern that her entire Irish army was concentrated in one place, but Mountjoy was unmoved. He demanded more men and supplies and stayed where he was.
* * *
Barbary’s illness was compounded by malnutrition, exhaustion and relief; handing over her responsibility to Cuckold Dick robbed her of the energy that had sustained it and she gave in to the luxury of being ill in a feather bed. The journey to Kinsale had been equally hard on the children, many of them in no better state than Barbary, and several of them succumbed to a variety of coughs, fluxes and fevers. Always a man to respond to a crisis. Cuckold Dick hired two Irishwomen to assist Nanno in looking after them, transferred his goods from his warehouse to his own cellar and gloomily retired to a nearby inn until the situation should resolve itself.
Had the Spanish landing taken place in an English port town, there would have been immediate wholesale evacuation to get away from an enemy believed to have a forked tail and smell of sulphur. In England, Don meant Devil. Most of the well-to-do and important citizens of Kinsale, including the mayor and corporation, fled the moment they saw the Spanish ships sail into the bay, but a considerable proportion of the population, shopkeepers, innkeepers, brothel-owners, decided to stay rather than become refugees dependent on the charity of their trade rivals in Cork and Youghal. Her Majesty’s loyal Anglo-Irish they might be, but they were also more cosmopolitan than most. They had been trading with the Spanish Don for years, all through the war, and had found him a willing and courteous customer. Trade, after all, was trade.
Barbary woke up to hear Priscilla screaming, the only sound that could have activated her limbs into moving. She found herself scrambling out of a strange bed in a strange room, hobbling out onto a strange landing and looking down over a balustrade into a typical merchant’s hall. A large group of children were cowering away from the front door in which stood a man with darker complexion than any man’s had a right to be, a turban on his head, barbaric gold earrings, and huge, bat-winged pantaloons. He was also wet.
‘Baa-baa’s coming, pigsney.’ Omnipotent, because she thought she was dreaming, she managed to get down the stairs and stand between Priscilla and the apparition. She waved it away. ‘Cut off.’ The man’s teeth gleamed in a grin. ‘Cut off, I said.’
Entering from outside, also drenched in rain, Cuckold Dick squeezed past the Saracen and showed him a piece of parchment from which dangled a large seal. The man grinned, saluted and disappeared. Barbary sank to the floor and gathered up the sobbing Priscilla. ‘That showed him.’
‘Showed a good deal of you and all, Barb,’ said Dick. She was staring at a pair of thin, bare legs; her own. She was in a skimpy night shift and the Order were peeking and giggling.
‘What’s happening?’
Nanno and Dick helped her up the stairs, into a cloak and a chair by the window which overlooked a square, talking all the while. This was Kinsale, Dick’s house, Spanish in occupation, not to fret, everything well. Barbary took in some of it, but mostly she stared at Nanno. ‘You’re fatter.’ The girl’s hair had acquired a sheen and her cheeks were rosy.
Nanno preened. ‘Isn’t it grand? Two square meals a day, Barbary. Two. And a fire in the hall, and warm clothes and boots, Barbary, oh beautiful boots that Uncle Dick rescued from Spanish occupation, like the grand gentleman he is. Will you have this blanket round your knees now? Priscilla says Daa-daa now when she sees him. I’ll run and fetch you a nice cup of milk.’
Barbary watched her go and turned her gaze slowly on Dick. ‘Uncle Dick?’
He shuffled. ‘Cut it, Barb, it wasn’t my idea.’
‘W
hat was that black man doing downstairs?’
‘Requisitioning. One of Don Aguila’s Afriques. But I got an order from him says we can stay. Beneship is Don Aguila, and a good taste for whiskey.’
It was these two attributes, he explained, that had permitted him to keep his house when so many of the Irish were being turned out of theirs to accommodate Spanish officers, and having to make do in the town hall opposite. ‘I took him round a case right away, Barb, no point in not being friendly even if he is a Don. And his men behaving beautiful and all. Don Aguila’s told them if they so much as stare at a lady’s ankles, he’s going to have their nutmegs off.’
‘So we’re trapped.’
‘Unless you fancy crawling over the defences and getting shot by the English, Barb, which I don’t, I reckon we are. Don Aguila’s tried to parley with Mountjoy to let the women and children go, but Mountjoy said no.’
He would. Mountjoy was an exponent of total war, and total war meant leaving as many mouths as possible in a besieged town to eat up its supplies.
‘But I tell you this, Barb, I’d rather be tucked up here nice and warm than out there on them hills with Mountjoy and his trenches filling up with water. You never see such rain, Barb. And so far we got plenty of food.’
But for how long? Eventually a besieged town must run short or there would be no point in besieging it. ‘I’ll not let the Order starve again, Dick.’
He soothed her. ‘’Course you won’t, Barb. ’Course not. Something’ll turn up. But there’s not much we can do till you’re better.’
Getting better took longer than it had before. The image of the saker and the loosening ropes haunted her; death had moved closer than her years warranted. The period since the massacre had taken time away from her that she would never get back. She minded for herself, but she minded even more for the Order, whose anxious faces appeared round the door every morning to see if she was improved. For their sake she tried eating everything set before her, sleeping when she was told and spending her days resting in a chair while she looked out of the window.
At least she had entertainment. Despite incessant, driving rain, the square was the centre of social activity in Kinsale. Spanish officers in their flanged helmets, rich doublets and sawdust-stuffed wide breeches moved in and out of their requisitioned houses, pausing at the stalls which still sold fish – part of the harbour was out of the English snipers’ view – and the last of the fruits from the Kinsale gardens. She watched them visiting the ‘Mercy Me’ brothel at the back of the square, which, with typical Kinsale enterprise, had changed its name to ‘The Conquistador’ the moment the Spanish had landed, or flirting with the maidens who leaned from the town hall balcony despite all that their scolding mothers could do to prevent them.
Priests and monks were everywhere, readying themselves to bring their services back to spiritually starved Ireland. Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, Benedictines touted for business and the church at the top of the square was re-consecrated with ceremony and a procession of reliquaries and the gilded statues of saints, while its bells rang joyfully for the reinstatement of the True religion. Barbary was too irreligious to care that a church which had once heard prayers for the health of Queen Elizabeth now rang with pleas for her damnation, but she sensed an artificiality, as if the priests themselves were conscious that the colour of their ritual and their foreign, alien saints did not belong in the neutrality of this rain-washed Irish town.
What she minded was that Sylvestris, although he regularly enquired how she was, visited her less frequently than the others and was to be seen more often going into the square’s church in priestly company. She waited until she felt strong enough, then opened her window as he passed and called him. Somewhat reluctantly he spoke to the man he was with, who nodded, and brought him to stand beneath her. ‘May I introduce my mother, Father Dermot?’ She noticed it was she who was introduced to the priest, rather than he to her.
Father Dermot was one of the new Jesuits, black velvet doublet and hose and worldly eyes. The only sign of his religion was the large gold cross on his breast. ‘Ah, mistress, I am having the pleasure of instructing this lad of yours in the Faith.’ His Irish accent was overlaid with Spanish emphasis. ‘And a promising subject he’s turning out to be. I’ve told him he’ll be welcome in the seminary of the Society of Jesus in Madrid as soon as we can get him there.’
She was too weak for the subtle approach. ‘He’s not old enough to make up his mind about such a thing,’ she said, and saw how hideously she’d embarrassed Sylvestris. He blushed and opened his mouth to protest, but Father Dermot put a warning hand on his shoulder.
‘The females don’t understand these matters, my boy. Leave it to me.’ He turned his face up to Barbary’s. ‘You’ll not interfere, woman. The boy hears the call of God and to God he shall be given. He has work in his own country to bring the heretics back to Holy Mother Church.’
They walked away, Father Dermot’s arm round her son’s shoulders. ‘You shan’t have him,’ she found herself saying. ‘You shan’t have him, you bastard.’ Sylvestris had the nicest mind of anyone she’d ever met, and if she could do anything about it, it was going to pass on to his children. She’d rather die than have it warped into thinking that suffering was a good, or have it obliterated by some executioner’s disembowelling knife. She flopped back onto her chair. They had to get out of here, they had to.
The air screamed in echo of her mental agony, there was a noise as if two hills had thumped together, and plaster from the ceiling came down in a dust on her head. She knew what it was and had hit the floor before the plaster settled. Mountjoy had brought up his cannon and was bombarding the town. She heard cries from downstairs. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, ‘it’s too much. It’s too bloody much,’ and went down to shepherd the Order into the cellar.
The bombardment, like the rain, was incessant, slowing up a little at nights, but incessant, and the town suffered, mainly through the loss of its larger stone houses which provided bigger targets and were more vulnerable to shot than the wattle and daub cottages which could take a cannon ball through their walls without falling down. There was surprisingly little loss of life; Kinsale was riddled with vast, vaulted underground cellars and into these the shopkeepers, publicans and prostitutes retired to carry on life and business as troglodytes. One inn collapsed on top of its cellar, which was full of customers at the time – luckily, as it turned out, for they helped the landlord to dig through the wall into the next cellar and get out.
Barbary was impressed by the high morale among the townspeople and her own Order, wondering sometimes whether it was the novelty of this extraordinary life which kept them going. It was no novelty to her to be under bombardment and she had to fight panic in order to appear calm in front of Priscilla, the only one apart from herself who loathed the whole business. Peter and some of the other boys became fascinated by artillery as a subject and, when Dick told them she was an expert, pestered Barbary with questions about calibre, trajectory, weights and powder until she yelled at them.
But she got used to it, a person could get used to anything. After a fortnight it was possible to tell from the scream of displaced air where the cannon ball would land, which areas were out of range and which unsafe. Even the unseen gunners became familiar in their habits, so that the townspeople knew when it was safe to go out and draw water because the crew of the saker on the northeast hill always took a break at noon, that the battery situated across the river in Castle Park was lazy and didn’t get up early. It was wearing; people’s faces became haggard from the sense of vulnerability, rather as if they were parading constandy nude in the presence of a rapist. But they got used to it.
The girls had the sense to be afraid of the guns, but Cuckold Dick’s cellar was better equipped, more comfortable than the crypt at Ballybeg Abbey, and smelled of whiskey. In the lulls, Dick took them out for what he called ‘liberating’ and other people called ‘looting’, occasionally finding an overl
ooked sack of flour but more often bringing back chests of clothes which had been left behind by their owners. Barbary couldn’t see the point of it, but the girls spent long, happy hours ignoring the explosions as they dressed up.
Food was beginning to run short at last; the church in the square had provided a daily soup kitchen for the other residents, but one night Dick reported that the Spanish military had ordered its cessation. ‘This Don says to me: “When do your Irish come to save you? Where are your Irish?” And I says: “They’re no Irish of mine, but I wish as they’d hurry up.” And so I do, Barb, because we’re going to be on marvellous short commons soon.’
‘Did you see Sylvestris?’ It was the reason he had gone, to find out why Sylvestris hadn’t come home.
‘Saw that Father Dermot. He said it was easier for the lad’s instruction if he stayed over there.’ He patted her back. ‘He’ll be safe enough, Barb, the church’s out of range.’
‘We’ve got to get out before we lose him altogether and we all starve anyway. We’ve got to.’
‘How, though, Barb?’
There must be a way. The old young Barbary would have thought of a plan to cony her way out, and make a profit at the same time. The new old Barbary could think of nothing, especially in a cellar crowded with playing, quarrelling children settling down for the night. She took a rushlight and went up into the empty house for some peace, and stood in the street doorway breathing the fresh wet air.
It was too black to see anything except the rain glistening in the circle of her rushlight as it slanted past the door, but she knew what was out there in the darkness – the ruins of the square’s west side which had been hit over and over again by the saker’s shot on a trajectory that just missed Dick’s roof every time. There was rubble where the town hall had stood and under it, living in its cellar, were families that would soon be starving.
The Pirate Queen Page 72