Poor Kinsale. It was a town she’d grown to admire. Dick had told her that after the massacre it hadn’t waited for refugees to start dying as had Cork and Youghal. Instead, its merchants, recognising the risk of plague, had voluntarily paid for them to be shipped to England where they could be somebody else’s problem. The motive was self-interest, but the ends had been worthy; at least in England the penniless settlers would have relatives who could take them in. And now what had been a prosperous, enterprising community was being reduced to just another devastation in a devastated country.
Something hopped over her feet and she lowered the rushlight to see two frogs hop away down the streaming gutter. Nice weather for frogs. She wondered if they were edible.
The slant of rain was hypnotic and she stayed crouched where she was watching it and listening to the wind coming in from the west. The west. She ran to the trapdoor of the cellar and poked her head down through it. ‘You got any tobacco, Dick?’
‘Taking up the fume, Barb? Good for damp in the bones, so they say.’
‘Have you got any?’
‘Two kegs. I bring some for your gran every trip. Proper tobacconist she is.’
‘Is it here?’
‘Never leave it on the ship, Barb, in case the crew smokes it.’
She went down the ladder and joined him. ‘How long’s the wind been in the west?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Barb. Weeks. One of the Dons was laughing that the wind wasn’t helping the English like it did against the Armada and that poor old Mountjoy wouldn’t be getting no supplies from England till it dropped.’
She poked him in the chest. ‘And no tobacco, either.’
‘Probably not, Barb.’ He was patient, as with a child. ‘I should get some sleep if I was you.’
‘But that’s the beauty of it, Raleigh was telling me. Tobacco’s add… add something, once you start you can’t do without it, and Mountjoy goes from one pipe to the other without a rest in the middle. I’ve seen him.’
He squinted at the idea, and liked it. ‘Worth a try, Barb. I’ll go and see Don Aguila.’
‘Not without me, you’re not.’ She wasn’t as old as she’d thought. ‘What can I wear?’ She’d been going about in her old cloak and a pair of boy’s boots liberated from an absentee cobbler’s shop.
‘There’s a nice chest of duds belonging to the mayor’s family.’
She remembered the mayor’s wife. ‘I want to wear it, not live underneath it.’
‘The mayor had slim daughters,’ said Cuckold Dick.
Nanno was still awake and helped them rummage. ‘Isn’t this the darling robe now with its purple and popinjays.’
‘You wear it. I’m too old for purple popinjays.’ Eventually they pulled out a neat, close-bodied gown of sea-green with a Medici collar and trunk sleeves edged by grey ribbon. Barbary cursed the mayor’s daughters for being nearly thirty years out of date but, with the judicious use of pins, it fitted.
Ignoring Nanno’s effusions, she looked in the tiny mirror attached to its ribboned waist band and groaned. The skin of her face stretched so tightly over her bones that it made her eyes slant, and was so white that her freckles looked like scattered toast crumbs. Her hair had gone grey at the temples, but as the mayor’s daughters’ taste in hats was unspeakable, she let Nanno play it under a silver-filet, snatched up the nearest decent cloak and left it at that.
The Spanish were relaxed about the curfew as long as nobody showed a light; the easing of the bombardment at night-time meant it was safer for their girls to visit the barracks then, but she and Cuckold Dick were stopped twice by patrols as they made their way to the harbour. Each time they were allowed to pass. ‘Ah. Señor Whiskey.’
‘How much have you been selling them, for God’s sake?’ asked Barbary as they hurried on.
‘Got to think of future markets, Barb.’
Don Aguila had sensibly made his headquarters out of the Port-Reeve’s house, which nestled so closely under the north-east hill that the battery on the top could not bear down on it. But if it was safe it was noisy. Waiting on the doorstep while a guard took their names to his commanding officer, she looked up and saw the sky light up from flame belched by a cannon. She ducked as shot screeched towards the west end of the harbour; Dick had learned not to flinch when he knew there was no danger to his vicinity; she never could.
They were taken up a nice staircase to a long, imposing room hung with Spanish arras – Don Aguila had obviously brought his comforts with him – where supper things were being cleared from a table. The number of dishes indicated that it had been for a large number of people, while the smell of cheap scent suggested they hadn’t all been male.
Dick introduced her. ‘Ah, Doña Offlarty, how you grace these poor apartment with your beauty. You are Irish, yes?’
‘Yes.’
Don Aguila was small, dark, with a nose like a bowsprit and heavy brows over amused eyes, an ugly man with charm. ‘Do me the honour to taste these wine. Is good?’ It was lovely. ‘How do I have the honour to serve you?’
She sipped some more. ‘Don Aguila, I understand that Lord Mountjoy refuses to allow women and children here to pass through his lines.’
‘We have parley,’ explained Don Aguila, ‘but I regret. The man is without chivalry. Perhaps if he see your beautiful face…’
It was flim-flam but, like the wine, it was lovely. It had been a long time. ‘I also understand that he cannot be receiving any supplies from England.’
Don Aguila smiled, showing nice white teeth. ‘Is a Spanish wind. Not like English wind in eighty-eight.’ Then his face went into a ridiculous grimace, like a sad monkey. ‘On other hand, he does not let me have any too. When do the Irish come, do you think?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ She refused to be sidetracked. ‘The thing is, Don Aguila, that Mountjoy is a smoker. Do you know about tobacco? To-back-co?’
‘Beautiful lady, we invented it.’
‘Oh. Well, if he’s not getting his supplies, he’s not getting tobacco. And I should imagine he’s wanting some. Very badly. My friend here happens to have two kegs and we thought that it could be offered to him on condition that he lets the women and children go.’ Dick had his passport given to him by Cecil, and would be able to go too, but she didn’t mention it, not knowing where Don Aguila stood on the subject of Mr Secretary Cecil.
‘You believe him to be such a fool?’
‘I believe him to be such an addict.’ She’d remembered the word.
‘Is good,’ said Don Aguila. ‘We do it.’ She was taken aback by how swiftly he adopted the idea; she’d expected argument or, at the very least, discussion, but Don Aguila had called for an aide, ‘Pronto, Don Abruzzi,’ and was giving instructions for the trumpet to be blown for a parley.
‘Isn’t it a bit late?’ She didn’t want Mountjoy to receive the offer while he was irritable from disturbed sleep.
‘No, no. He likes the parley. He is bored, like me. It is monotonous, a siege. And he has no beautiful lady to visit him.’
Better strike while the iron’s hot. ‘Don Aguila, there is another matter on which I should be grateful for your assistance.’
Don Aguila spread his hands to indicate that he had landed with 4,000 men on this foreign coastline merely to be of use to Doña Offlarty.
‘It concerns my son. He is very young and has fallen in with one of your priests who wishes him to go back to Spain and take his vows or whatever it is. He is too young yet. I beg you to tell this man to let him alone.’
Don Aguila frowned. ‘What is these priest?’
‘A Father Dermot.’
‘Father Dermuchio. The Jesuit.’ His eyebrows said extraordinary things about the Society of Jesus. ‘I regret, Doña Offlarty. I cannot help you in these. I dare not. I am military, I cannot come between Holy Mother Church and her souls.’
‘But I’m his mother.’ It wasn’t Holy Mother Church who’d sat up nights with him when he was ill, who’d stolen for him, killed f
or him.
‘I dare not. I regret.’
She sank back in her chair, angry and desperate.
He’s prepared to let me relieve him of the burden of his dependants, she thought, but he won’t lift a finger to help me. He didn’t know she wasn’t Sylvestris’s real mother; he was quite prepared, as the Church was, to let the boy be taken away from her, and she was helpless. If I’d been his bloody father, she thought, that’d be different. A father has rights, a mother none. And you’ve done it now, Barbary Clampett O’Flaherty. If the Order is allowed to leave Kinsale and Sylvestris stays behind, what are you going to do? Kidnap him? She considered it, imagining trying to smuggle a resisting potential young priest through Spanish and English lines.
Don Aguila was pressing more wine on her and trying to include her in his conversation with Dick, as if she was a girl sulking because she hadn’t been allowed a second helping. ‘When Señor Robertson come to Spain with his whiskey after the war, Doña Offlarty, I beg you come with him. I will introduce you the corrida des toros, the Alhambra, our lovely haciendas.’ She was too angry and upset to reply.
It was a relief to them all when Don Abruzzi came back to announce that the parley had been arranged and would take place at once under a ceasefire.
‘You may come,’ said Don Aguila, suddenly stern. ‘But you watch. I talk, you say nothing.’
They put on their cloaks and followed him out into the rain and down to the harbour and the East Gate. It had been immensely fortified by banks of earth on either side, but it had received a direct hit earlier in the day and men were hammering a sheet of iron over the hole. Torches were lit, and she realised how long it had been since she’d seen blackness lit up by anything but cannon fire. Trumpets blew, drums beat and then the gates opened to show a group of men on the other side.
Don Aguila bowed to a figure made squat by the fact that it had left nothing at home in the muffler line. Good God, was that Mountjoy the Fop? He was bowing with less ceremony, and she was concerned that he was irritable. But no, he was standing there, patiently listening in the rain.
Perhaps Don Aguila was right. Sieges were so boring that any break in routine was welcome. She could imagine what it was like out on those bare hills in the rain and she found it awesome that a man such as Mountjoy, used to comfort, had been prepared to endure it for weeks on end, his army dwindling with the inevitable desertion and disease, waiting for the Irish to come up on his rear. Awesome to the point of frightening. The Irish had never faced an opponent like this before. She gave up hope for her plan; someone as single-minded as that wasn’t going to allow his enemy an advantage just so that he could smoke a pipe.
But Don Aguila was talking and talking, putting it nicely, using his Spanish guile to disguise the fact that he was offering a bribe. And, by God, the muffled figure was nodding. Had this ridiculous plan worked? Perhaps Mountjoy had a regard for his reputation and wasn’t prepared to let women and children who were, after all, his queen’s own subjects, starve to death. Or perhaps in these long days of mud and monotony the idea of a smoke was overwhelmingly attractive.
Anyway, the parley was drawing to its end. More bowing. More trumpets. The English contingent was turning away to go back up the hill.
And something was coming down it. They heard hoofbeats. A rider and horse were galloping down the hill at a speed which risked both their necks. They didn’t slacken as they reached the group of Englishmen, which had to scatter to avoid being run down.
She saw the horseman’s cloak blow out behind him as he jumped over a Spanish soldier who’d fallen down in his haste to get out of the way, and then he was through the gate and the impetus was carrying him past her.
Don Aguila screamed at his men to shut the gates. ‘Pronto, pronto. Esta Don Haguenne.’
The gates banged shut and hid the astonished, angry face of Mountjoy and his aides. Spanish officers were running after the rider to accompany him back to where Don Aguila stood waiting, his arms spread out in welcome. ‘Olé, Don Haguenne. Olé, Don Haguenne. Bravo. Bravo.’
She caught hold of Cuckold Dick’s hand. Nobody noticed them as they walked away.
Dick was disgruntled. ‘I don’t know who that bugger was, Barb, but he’s scuppered your idea. Mountjoy’ll be so fokking cross that some bastard got in while he was parleying, he’ll never let nobody through, not for all the fume in the Americas.’
‘It was O’Hagan,’ she said.
She’d known him on the instant. She’d tucked the thought of him away in some fenced-off part of her mind where it couldn’t hurt her any more. Then a mud-spattered shape crouching low over a horse’s neck had leaped out of the darkness, and in mid-leap the old, beautiful agony was back in her life. He was all right. He was here in the glorious rain of this wonderful place.
For a second she’d stood in an enchanted garden, and then she’d taken Dick’s hand and walked out of it. She couldn’t cope with the emotion; better to stay in limbo than risk knowing he’d married, or forgotten her, or even that he loved her but, sorry, he was just on his way to somewhere else and couldn’t stop. Above everything else, she couldn’t bear his seeing her, watching his face change as he saw what she’d become or, worse, not recognising her at all.
There were running feet splashing through the puddles behind them. She urged Dick on, but two soldiers stood in front of them. ‘Don Aguila,’ they were shouting. ‘You, señora, and you, Señor Whiskey.’ They had to go back.
As they went up the stairs, the cannon on the clifftop roared out. If its cannon ball had exploded her into smithereens at that moment, she’d have been a happy woman. She pulled the hood of her cloak down over her eyes until she could only just see, and stood in the shadows.
For a moment she thought the room was empty apart from Don Aguila, but then she glimpsed a figure lying on a couch over the other side of the table with its muddy boots crossed and its eyes closed. She felt a desperate surge of tenderness; he had a right to be asleep, riding through the English lines to get here. Why did he have to be in the thick of it? Why didn’t they give the dangerous jobs to someone else?
‘Is Don Haguenne come back to us,’ explained Don Aguila, beaming. ‘Don Haguenne, these is Doña Offlarty and Señor Robertson. Oh, he sleep.’
He turned back to them. ‘I can trust you, Doña Offlarty? You are Irish, yes? You wouldn’t betray me to the English, no?’
‘No.’
‘And Señor Robertson is your friend, a man of all the world. He won’t betray me to the English?’
No, Dick said, he wouldn’t either.
He took their word easily. He’s careless, thought Barbary, or perhaps he’s a good judge of character.
‘Don Haguenne come back to us,’ Don Aguila said again. ‘Brave man, he bring me intelligence the Irish have arrived at last. Now then.’ He dipped a finger in a wine glass and made a shape on the table that resembled half an onion with only two skins. The core of the onion was Kinsale town. ‘These,’ the inner skin, ‘is Mountjoy. And these,’ the outer skin, ‘is Don O’Neill and the armies of the Irish. Soon O’Neill and his army, and me and mine, we meet up.’ His fingers squeezed through the half-onion at three points. ‘But first Don Haguenne must return to the Irish with my message.’
With his thumb he jabbed a line from the core through the inner to the outer skin. ‘He goes with you and the ladies and the children tomorrow. Maybe we dress him like a lady so Mountjoy don’t see him.’
Cuckold Dick looked at Barbary to point out at least one or two of the most glaring flaws in the plan and, when she said nothing, did it himself. ‘The Kinsale ladies ain’t up to much, I grant you, my lord, but I reckon as even Mountjoy’s going to notice one as is six foot tall and sports a beard. And then again, will Mountjoy let us through anyway? Don… er… Haguenne was very brave, undoubted, but he buggered up the parley and spoiled a ceasefire. Mountjoy won’t be best pleased.’
Don Aguila shrugged off Mountjoy’s displeasure. ‘Already I have sent Don Abru
zzi with my apologies. I tell him Don Haguenne was one of his own deserters, an English soldier coming over to Spain.’
Dick raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Even if he believes it, he’ll play the rules of the parley and want the deserter back.’
‘He can have him.’ Don Aguila saw no problem. ‘I send one of my English prisoners to him. I took many in fighting. Mountjoy hangs him instead.’ To conceive the plan was the thing, not whether it would work.
‘Oh. Well. That’s all right then.’ Dick looked hopelessly at Barbary, but she was preoccupied, and moving towards the door. The figure on the couch was as still as a stone crusader, perhaps she could still get out without his seeing her.
‘These is good,’ said Don Aguila, happily. ‘We drink some more wine and then we sleep. Soon be dawn. You are content, everybody? No questions?’
No, nothing. Just let me get out of here.
Without opening its eyes the figure on the couch said: ‘I have a question, Don Aguila.’
Don Aguila looked at it fondly. ‘What do you wish to know, Don Haguenne?’
‘I wish to know if Doña Offlarty will marry me.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
They were left alone in the room while around it officers bawled orders, soldiers were sent out to gather Kinsale’s women and children, trumpets blew, drums beat and Mountjoy showed his displeasure at the violation of the parley by a full barrage from every gun he had.
Occasionally Don Aguila tiptoed through the room, which connected the hall to his map room, with exaggerated pointed toes, like an elf. He whispered progress as he passed. ‘Mountjoy accepts the apology. You go at noon.’ Or: ‘I see to the wedding. Before you leave, uh?’ But he doubted if they heard him. They disappointed him by merely sitting across the table from each other, chins propped on hands. He would have offered them his bedroom if they had shown an inclination for it, but it seemed the Irish were as passionless as the English. What he could catch of their muttering as he went by had no romance, no fire.
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