‘O’Flaherty, you look terrible,’ O’Hagan said.
‘So do you.’
‘It’s time I made an honest woman out of you.’
‘I thought you’d make an honest woman out of one of those lovely Spanish haciendas.’
‘Ach, I never met a hacienda with red enough hair.’ And hers was, still was, red enough for him. He didn’t see how old she was; his eyes went over her face as if he was licking it. Neither could she see how old he’d become; at least, at moments she glimpsed for the first time what he would look like when he was very old, at other moments he was younger than he’d been in Spenser Castle’s gatehouse. They weren’t in love with each other’s age, just each other.
‘Why didn’t you get me back?’
‘I didn’t know where you were. I thought you were in England. I didn’t enquire too closely, I didn’t want to hear about you if you were back with your husband. Then Grace O’Malley turned up in Spain and told me you’d been in Munster at the time of the massacre.’ He passed a hand over his eyes as if trying to eradicate a memory. ‘Jesus Christ. Why do you do these things? Even then I couldn’t leave. And either you were dead by then, or you’d survived.’
‘Your hair’s quite grey,’ she said.
‘That’s your fault. And Ireland’s affairs in Spain. They wouldn’t move, and the O’Neill needed me there to bang my head against their damned bureaucratic wall and get worn down by officials and their damned etiquette, to wait for days in corridors in the damned Escurial, to eat my heart out, begging for invasion, begging for help, begging for bread. It seemed important at the time.’ The deep lines down both his cheeks had been carved by years of attrition.
‘The O’Neill tricked us.’
‘I know. Grace O’Malley told me.’
‘He tricked us.’
He grimaced, but only as at a forgiveable sin by a loved child. ‘He’s the O’Neill. I’ve thought about it, and would we have done any different? Wouldn’t you have gone to England to spy for him? And wouldn’t I have gone to Spain?’
‘It’s not been worth it.’
‘Don’t say that.’ He leaned across the table and shook her, the first time he’d touched her. ‘You’ll not say that. Ireland’s worth everything we have to give her. Christ help me, if I start kissing you now I’ll never stop. I’ll have you on the floor.’
‘Why don’t you?’
Don Aguila tiptoed into the room again. ‘My apologies. Not long now.’
They went back to chins on hands. ‘Tell me how bad it was,’ he said.
Everybody asked her that, as if it was describable. ‘It was bad for the whiskey trade.’ They were so close, knowing what they needed to know, that it was disconcerting to be informing each other of things that had happened when they were apart. Almost reluctantly, she gave him a precis, dwelling mainly on Sylvestris and the amassing of the Order.
He was the man for her; he thought it was funny. ‘No time to consummate the marriage and already I’m the father of twenty-five children.’
‘Get me Sylvestris back, O’Hagan.’
‘Ach, he’ll be my wedding present. You stopped me becoming a priest, I don’t see why he should have the privilege.’
‘Did I?’ She was enchanted.
‘I considered it. But no man who spends his nights thinking of a woman the way I thought of you is fit for the priesthood, I can tell you that.’
‘My friends, it is time,’ said Don Aguila.
The wedding procession dodged its way to the church through puddles and a cannonade. The eastern battery had got the range of the square’s south side and was staggering its fire so that the bombardment was almost continuous; the marriage party sheltered in the doorways of the road leading to the square, waiting for a chance to sprint. O’Hagan clutched her against him as part of a roof on the opposite corner fell majestically down, and shouted in her ear: ‘Why can’t the bastard throw rice like everybody else.’
She knew how he felt. Mountjoy was going to get them sooner or later; he might let them marry first. At last there was a pause in the firing and they raced through the rain to the church.
Cuckold Dick, she knew it was Dick, had worked wonders. The interior glowed like an illuminated manuscript with candles that lighted up the foreign, painted and gilded saints the Spanish had brought with them. By the pulpit the flames of massed offertory candles were a blinding white against the reredos, sending out warmth. The Order stood at the front on the bride’s side of the nave looking smart in their looted clothes. Dick had also liberated evergreens from somewhere, so that each of the girls carried a posy. Priests in gold-threaded copes moved back and forth across the altar.
On the groom’s side were the Spanish officers with shining cuirasses over their doublets and their helmets tucked in the left arm. The prostitutes from ‘The Conquistador’, who would be going with them through the lines, clustered round the door, wishing her good luck, a few of them dabbing their eyes with scented handkerchiefs. They screamed as a cannon ball hit the far side of the square.
O’Hagan left her side to stride up the nave and take his place at the chancel steps. Don Aguila joined him. Cuckold Dick joined her. He put a wreath of silk flowers on her damp hair. ‘All right if I give you away, Barb?’
‘Nobody if not you, Dick.’ But she thought of Will Clampett as slowly, holding Dick’s arm, she walked up the nave to the altar. ‘Baa Baa.’ Priscilla broke away from the restraining Nanno and walked with them, holding Barbary’s other hand.
Sylvestris was acting as server, dressed in a white surplice, and smiling at her. It didn’t take long, there wasn’t time for an address, and Father Dermot as the officiating priest rattled through the service in a speedy monotone, drowned out from time to time by the cannonade. Later, she found a ring on her finger and could only remember O’Hagan’s face as he put it there. When the ceremony was over, he kissed her, and Don Aguila had to pull them apart. ‘A little time to drink and then we go.’
‘One moment,’ O’Hagan said. He took Father Dermot to one side and talked to him. The priest nodded. O’Hagan put an arm round Sylvestris’s shoulders and took him into the vestry.
Barbary sat down on the chancel steps and disappeared under the hugs of the Order. Don Aguila and other officers were distributing wine from a side table to the congregation. Sylvestris was standing in front of her: ‘I’ve promised I’ll look after you until the battle’s over.’
She held him tight. ‘Thank you.’
It was as if bliss had been accumulating somewhere, building up until it couldn’t be contained and poured down an overflow pipe with its outlet coming through the roof of the church; she tried to absorb details which would enable her memory to come back here and wander around in a perfect re-creation, but all she could fix were certain scenes with no links between them. O’Hagan and Dick were shaking hands. It was astounding to hear Dick say: ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
‘And I you.’
Dick held out a piece of parchment with a seal. ‘Wedding present.’
‘Thank you. What is it?’
‘A passport.’ He was so proud of it he knew it by heart. ‘Entitling Mr Robertson, whiskey merchant on behalf of Mr Secretary Cecil, and a servant, to pass unhindered by any of Her Majesty’s subjects. You speak proper English, Mr O’Hagan?’
‘I can sound the “th”, Mr Robertson, when pushed.’
‘Well, you be Mr Robertson and I’ll be the servant.’ Barbary watched them quarrelling and wondered if any of the plaster saints in the church had ever performed such miracles as St Cuckold Dick, now giving the clincher: ‘Well, I look more like a bloody servant than you look like a bloody woman.’
Don Aguila was ushering them out into the grey square and she heard the doors of the church shut behind her to keep out the rain. All the way to the East Gate O’Hagan argued that they should be given a horse and cart. ‘Do you expect my wife and children to walk in this weather?’
‘Pardon. We have no horses.�
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‘You’ve got the one I rode in on.’
Don Aguila shrugged. ‘I fear not. At this moment the cooks stew him.’
‘Mother of God, that was a good horse. Mules then. Come on, Juan, you haven’t got the fodder to keep them anyway.’
‘Very well. Two. But you Irish must attack soon.’
‘I’ve told you.’
Cuckold Dick wanted to take what was left of his whiskey barrels alongside the two kegs of tobacco but Don Aguila’s generosity had been exhausted once the mules were harnessed to a cart. He waved them through the East Gate as if they were going on an outing into the countryside and would be back soon.
Nearly 300 women and children were going with them. Barbary watched wives kissing their husbands goodbye, girls clinging to their sweethearts, some of them Spanish soldiers. It would be her turn soon. She made the oldest women get in the cart with the frailest of the children, and would have walked up the hill by the side of O’Hagan, but he lifted her up and sat her down so that her legs swung over the open tailgate.
She stretched down her hand and he held it as he walked. ‘Aguila worries me. You’re sure he’ll back you up when you attack?’
‘My good woman, he hasn’t come to Ireland to sit on his arse in Kinsale.’ He picked up Priscilla, who was running after Barbary, wanting to get into the cart, and put her on his shoulders. ‘Isn’t that a stupid woman? That lady there, the one I’ve just married.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘It’s not Aguila that bothers me. It’s the O’Neill.’ He settled Priscilla’s skirts so that he could look around, but the women in the cart and those following were too sunk in misery to be listening. ‘Your man’s never faced a pitched battle before and if he was open to my advice he wouldn’t now. Hit and run is his line, and brilliantly he’s done it. Mountjoy’s cut off from supplies, and this weather’s losing him a hundred men a day.’
‘So what would you do?
‘What I told O’Neill. Let Don Aguila stew, literally. Pick off Mountjoy’s men with quick raids, and starve him out the while.’ He tickled Priscilla’s knee. ‘But what do I know, eh? I’m the man who spent the war safe and warm in Spain.’
And thank God for that, she thought. But his face had relapsed into its deep lines; Spain had been his penance when he could have been having a nice time in danger among the bogs with the O’Neill.
‘He’s going to show off and that’s the truth of it,’ he said, suddenly. ‘He wants to show King Philip and the Holy Father and all the rest of them that he can win a great battle, and he’s been training the army to use the tercio formation.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Ach, an idea the Spanish have used to good effect on the battlefields of Europe. But it’s not Irish, O’Flaherty. Our lads don’t know a tercio from the Ten Commandments.’
‘Is he going to lose?’ She meant: are you going to get killed?
‘Not at all, not at all. There’s more of us than there is of them. If necessary we’ll mass ranks and push the bastards off the cliffs.’
‘When’s it going to happen?’
‘Tomorrow maybe, or the day after. Aguila’s been told to listen for the sound of firing and then charge.’
She looked past him down the hill they’d been climbing to the ruined town, the white Spanish flags with their red saltires flapping prettily from the remaining rooftops, and to the long, drab tail of women and children winding away from it. All over the Christian world men would be waiting for the result of this coming battle, tallying dead men as ‘losses’, the limbless as ‘casualties’, not categorising these homeless walking behind her at all. Love him as she did, she felt an impulse to lean over and take Priscilla away from him.
‘I want my honeymoon,’ she said hopelessly, ‘and I want it now. Let’s go straight to Dick’s boat, and sail away to Clare Castle.’
‘The wind’s wrong just now,’ he said, and smiled at her. ‘I’ll meet you there after the battle.’
She’d known it. ‘I’m not going without you. I’ll wait for you at the boat. It’s in the cove over the headland.’
‘You’ll wait for me on Clare.’
‘I’ll wait for you. At. The. Boat.’
He addressed Priscilla: ‘I should never have married the woman.’
They’d be at the English lines soon. She must tell Sylvestris to keep a close eye on Gill. ‘How did you work the oracle with Sylvestris?’
‘I became his father, and therefore his absolute ruler. Old Dermot and the Holy Church can’t come between a man and his son.’
‘I mean what did you say to Sylvestris?’
They were about to round the last bend. Time to separate. ‘That’s between a man and his son.’ As he helped her down, he said: ‘You’re not to worry now if Mountjoy wants to question Dick and me.’
She watched him climb into the driving seat beside Cuckold Dick and whip the mules into a reluctant trot towards the log palisade and gates that marked the beginning of the English lines. He showed the passport to one of the sentries, who glanced at the seal and nodded the cart through.
Although they were high above the sea, the rain blocked out any sense of altitude, cutting down visibility, holding down the heads of the women and children as they trooped towards the gate in a long gaggle, dripping from hair, noses and fingertips. As usual, the English soldiers didn’t differentiate between loyal and rebel Irish. If it hadn’t been for an officer watching from his horse, the Kinsale women would have been attacked; as it was they came in for verbal abuse. ‘Trollops.’ ‘The Don ain’t choosy who he shags, is he?’ ‘If it was me, I’d hang the lot o’ yous.’
‘Here,’ said a soldier to Barbary as she passed by. ‘What’s meschini mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s what them Papist bastards called us during the trumpet. Thought you’d be fluent in Don by now.’
The officer was urging the women to quicken their pace. ‘You’re not wandering where you like, you know.’
‘Where are you taking them?’ Barbary asked him.
‘We’re not taking you anywhere. You’ve got an escort as far as the Cork road and then you’re on their own.’
‘But it’s twenty miles to Cork.’
‘And the Irish army in between. That’s what you get for opting to stay with the Spanish. Now get those damn kids in line and move.’
‘We’re with that gentleman there. We’re going west.’ She could see the mule cart standing outside a tent with a Tudor pennant flapping wetly on its roof. ‘He’s got business with Lord Mountjoy.’
The officer snorted and spat. No true gentleman would sink so low as to adopt a draggled woman with a score of equally draggled children, but he let them stay where they were as the Kinsale women trudged off through the mud.
Barbary wondered how many of them would see hearth and home again. Not many. But she had worries enough of her own; the Order had reverted to their fur cloaks, as she had to her filthy but warm Irish one – under it was the Clampett – and had managed, thanks to Cuckold Dick, to become well shod at Kinsale, but some of them were shivering. They stood uncomplaining and quiet, like small oxen. Even Gill had stopped glaring about him. The incessant, driving rain took away initiative; she supposed she should be glad that it was affecting the entire camp in the same way, and that they were being spared the curiosity and questions the energy of a bright day might have subjected them to, but she wished she could get the children into shelter. She was desperate with relief when she saw her two men emerge from the tent. Dick had a lantern which he’d already lit and put it carefully underneath his driver’s seat. The smaller children piled into the cart and covered themselves with the tarpaulin that had kept the kegs dry. Mountjoy had taken them both. Barbary got up on the driving seat next to O’Hagan, and Dick shook the wet off the reins. Sullenly, the mules moved off, the older Order walking alongside. They followed a mounted officer who was to take them through the camp to the west.
‘Did he question you, Mr Robertson?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good.’
‘That’s bad. It means he knows everything he needs to know about Aguila’s force. There’s a traitor in Kinsale for sure.’ The lines were back in O’Hagan’s face. He was looking about, estimating numbers, calculating dispositions. Barbary could see only mud, and miserable men bailing out trenches, droop-headed, half-starved horses, unending stumps of trees that now burned on camp fires where soldiers tried to dry their boots and cloaks, more mud, cannon protected by canvas while their crews sat in the rain, clusters of gallows on which hung the bodies of recaptured deserters, their amputated hands stuffed in their mouths.
‘For God’s sake, why don’t they all go home?’ she said.
‘Don’t underestimate them. Look carefully, they’re all on alert.’ He flicked a finger to the right. ‘See that squadron over there? Under the reed thatch. It’s saddled ready.’
She was getting frightened because he was; he’d been disturbed ever since he’d left Mountjoy’s tent. ‘What’s Mountjoy like nowadays?’ she asked.
‘Impressive.’
They were approaching banks of sharpened stakes made into hedgehogs for the impalement of charging horses. Further off, the ground began the slope towards the Bandon, an untidy grey gleam in the grey distance. Their guide spoke to a sentry who called some companions to help him shift one of the hedgehogs and let them through. The officer saluted. ‘If it’s the foreland you’re heading for, you’ll have a job crossing the river. But cross it you’d better. The Irish lines are further up on this side. Long live Her Majesty.’
They long-lived her and set off down a track towards the bank. It was better going in every way; though the rain didn’t let up, the track was rocky and gave some purchase to the mules’ feet; there were growing shrubs and trees again and birds calling. Dick said there should be a ferry further along.
‘Should be,’ said O’Hagan gloomily. He was the only one unaffected by the freedom that existed beyond the camp; Barbary knew he was still back there, working out plans of attack. He’d left her already.
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