They sculled out to the Grace of God where a long row of heads lined the gunwale, cheering at their approach, though some of the faces were green with sea-sickness. Barbary looked at them as she climbed up the net. Sylvestris, Priscilla, Nanno, George, Gill, Peter… She counted them, all present and correct in their Order which, she supposed, had to matter more to her than the man she’d just parted from or she wouldn’t be here.
Other women were on board with their children, Grace’s people, and they were trying to minister to her unseaworthy Order, but as she came aboard they were pushed aside. Priscilla staggered towards her and vomited down her dress. Gill clutched at her: ‘Am I going to die?’ Nanno’s round face was pinched and green, staring at her with the hopelessness of the living dead.
Perhaps, later, she’d have time to dwell on tragedy, on men who preferred honour to real life, but not now. She couldn’t blame men. Reality was vomiting children; the process of cleaning them up would never get into song or go down in legend that could be recounted around flickering fires to remind its hearers of past glory. Where was the romance in a sick, snotty, crying child?
But here were her ropes, twenty-five of them, twenty-six if you counted Cuckold Dick, twenty-eight with Grace and Cull, to hold the saker back. Enough to keep her alive for a bit longer. And here with the smell of vomit were other familiar smells, lanolin, sailcloth, Connaught.
Grace had regained herself and her ship. She was giving orders, men were pulling on ropes. Barbary glimpsed old friends among them, Keeroge, Kitterdy Two – they were too busy pulling up the anchor to greet her but they waved, bless them, and smiled.
Like a mother pelican the Grace of God’s canvas flapped and bellied out and, with the two smaller galleons beside her, began moving towards the mouth of the bay.
She wanted to go astern and watch the shore in case, at the last minute, there was a thin figure on it waving at her to come back, but spray was whipping onto the deck and wetting her children. She caught a glimpse of the shore as she took them down to Grace’s cabin under the quarterdeck and it was empty.
Her grandmother came in, pushing back her wet hair: ‘Did I tell you I’d brought that bloody pony of yours along? He’s down in the hold, bad-tempered quadruped that he is.’
‘Spenser?’ Another rope, well, more a piece of string, but she was glad of it. ‘I thought you’d have eaten him by now.’
‘We might yet. It’s going to be a long voyage. And while we’re about it…’ Bad-temperedly, Grace hoisted Dorren off a chest she’d been sitting on, opened it, and brought out a tattered parchment. ‘Can ye still write? Then you can employ yourself on the Kishta. If men won’t do my remembering, a woman will have to.’
Barbary was fully alive now, back in touch with worries and responsibilities. ‘Where did you say we were going?’
‘If you listened instead of mooning,’ said her grandmother, ‘you would know. The wind’s right and we’re making for the New World. I said to your Saxon queen would she go with me, but the woman has no initiative. Ireland’s too small for the likes of me, and I’m hoping the Americas will be bigger.’
The full realisation came to Barbary at last. The course directions had meant nothing to her. ‘Grace,’ she said, ‘we won’t make it. The Americas are thousands of miles of ocean away. Raleigh told me. We’ll run out of food and water, we’ll founder.’
‘I’ve never foundered yet and we’ve provisions a-plenty. And what does Raleigh know? Has he been there?’
‘No,’ said Barbary slowly. ‘No, I don’t think he ever has.’
‘There ye are then. And with that bloody Cuckold Dick giving me weed to the Saxons, I’ve nothing to fill me pipe, so I’m having to go to the source. Cut out the middleman. Will ye stop worrying? We’ll make it well enough. And if we run out of provisons, we can always stop another ship and pilot some more.’
Barbary regarded her grandmother. The woman’s losses were greater than her own and she was cutting them. Here, perhaps, was the truth of Finola’s She-God. Here was true legend, the implacable, the unforgiving strength of female survival. If Grace O’Malley was heading for the Americas with her shipload of pirates and versers and pickpockets and cony-catchers and crossbiters, a Noah’s Ark of tricksters, then the Americas had better look out.
‘Why not?’ she said.
The course directions would remain on the lintel of Cuckold Dick’s hut, and she hoped one day her man would read them. Maybe he would.
The Grace of God and its fleet sailed away from Ireland before an east wind which plucked up the sea into dapples like a million-strong shoal of mackerel, heading for the New World.
Epilogue
Trickery was pursued to the end.
The O’Neill was hunted up and down a famine-ridden north and in March 1603 was at last forced to surrender. He was given the promise of terms and came in, to Mellifont Abbey, where Mountjoy kept him kneeling before him for an hour. The English negotiators were already aware that their queen had died, but the news was kept from the O’Neill in case, knowing that a more sympathetic James was now on the throne, he should ask for better terms. They told him afterwards.
He dragged out a few more years in Ireland but, on 14 September 1607, with ninety-nine companions, he sailed away and died in Rome in 1616 aged sixty-six.
Immediately after Kinsale, Red Hugh O’Donnell had gone to Spain, still hoping to enlist more help from King Philip. He was poisoned a few months later, it is said by an English assassin named Blake who’d been sent after him.
Mountjoy returned to England and enjoyed a happy, though short, reunion with Penelope Rich. He died in 1606, aged forty-three.
The legitimate Earl of Desmond, having spent most of his life in the Tower of London, was sent back to it, and nine months later, died there, as did his cousin, the ‘Hayrope Earl’.
Grace O’Malley’s son, Tibbot, fought against the Irish so well during the battle of Kinsale that he was knighted and was eventually created the first Viscount Mayo. He died in 1629 and tradition says he was murdered by his brother-in-law, Dermot O’Connor.
Although Grace O’Malley herself has become an Irish legend, she was never mentioned by her contemporary Irish annalists, and it is only because she was such a nuisance to the English that there is considerable record of her activities among the Elizabethan State papers. When she died or where she is buried is a mystery.
Author’s Note
The last twenty years of Elizabeth I’s reign over Ireland were so chaotic and involved so many personalities and clans that, for the sake of clarity, I have kept together leading characters who represented the various prevailing frames of mind. This has involved some playing around with dates and places. For instance, Sir John Perrot’s recall was actually in 1588, the year of the Armada, and the execution by Bingham of the pitiful Bourke children was in Ballinrobe, not Galway.
Also, it was the O’Connors who were alleged to have flayed Captain Mackworth, not the MacSheehys, but with so many atrocities committed on both sides during that atrocious war the wrong attribution of one will, I hope, like the other changes, be forgiven in the interests of coherence.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1991 by Headline
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © Diana Norman, 1991
The moral right of Diana Norman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788635103
This book is a work of fiction. Names, character
s, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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