The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell (46 page)

Essex drained his glass. “I’ve noticed that,” he said with a good-natured grin. “Let me have my fun, Christopher. I enjoy these men.

I’ve enjoyed this dreadful march. Christ knows it could be my last engagement.”

“Spare us, Essex,” Southampton said. “Leave the high drama to Shakespeare. You will outlive us all.”

Essex smiled indulgently and, cheered by his friends’ concern, slept that night like a well man, long and deep, suffering neither sweats nor chills nor night terrors. But on waking the next morning, August third, a dreadful, prescient pall descended over him, as dark as the black hood pulled over a man’s head before hanging.

Riding before the vanguard and quite alone—his premonition demanding quiet and solitude—Essex had marched the army to a few miles south of Dundalk where the River Lagan flowed through some low hills. It was therefore with no surprise, though no less horror, that he laid eyes for the first time on Tyrone ’s rebel army.

It was vast beyond even Essex’s worst nightmares. By his count there were ten thousand foot and one thousand horse—together, more than doubling the numbers of the English army. His own troops—for all their recent improvements—were still, many of them, ill with dysentery and other divers distempers. Here before him stood a home-grown force of soldiers, fresh in body and roused to a fine fever of loyalty behind their new, courageous, and hitherto triumphal Irish king.

The O’Neill had made them promises of victory over the English, and had
given
them promised victories—the Yellow Ford, the Wicklow Mountains, the Curlew Pass. And now he had delivered to their feet a puny and diseased enemy commanded by a broken and dangerously uncertain leader.

That which spread out before Essex in the valley in the shape of a great army was, in fact, the dreaded doom that had plagued his dreams and now informed his bleak future. And Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, was the Black Prince himself.

Southampton and Christopher Blount came riding abreast of Essex.

Blount’s horse reared up in surprise, mirroring his rider’s own. The men gazed down at the boggling sight below, their always peppery banter silenced with one glimpse of the enemy.

“Leave me,” Essex whispered.

Blount and Southampton exchanged a dubious glance.

Southampton spoke. “You must allow us to—”

“What, advise me?” said Essex with the utmost calm. He closed his eyes and rubbed the space between his brows. “I am beyond advice, I’m afraid. I do wish to be alone.”

“May we send your physician, at least?” Blount offered.

Essex managed a weak laugh. “So you think I’ll be in need of my physician?”

“The strain, the awful decisions . . . you cannot afford a relapse now,” Southampton insisted.

“I am beyond doctoring, my friend.”

“Robert . . .”

“Leave me.”

Most reluctantly, Blount and Southampton wheeled about and rode back the way they’d come. Robert Devereaux found himself gazing benignly at the scene below and he wondered at his sudden calm. Such an army would surely dismember his own. Thousands would die. All that English blood soaking the Irish soill. . . Surely God and his angels were laughing at him.
Punishment
, he thought,
for a multitude of sins.

Essex turned his horse and rode slowly past the long column of his soldiers. Those who could see the rebel army below—farmboys, towns-men, soldiers with whom he had marched, broken bread—looked to him with pleading eyes. As he trotted past them attempting to quell his rising panic, he could feel the rumble in his watery gut, feel the familiar sick heat rising in his veins, the draining of strength from his limbs.

Was this inevitable defeat his reward for so long and glorious a career? he wondered. Would his bodily weakness prevail in the next days of trial? Or perhaps death would be so kind as to snatch him from the midst of the coming catastrophe, this unbearable disgrace. But no. There were the men to consider—thousands of Englishmen under his watch.

There was greatness still pounding like a heartbeat within him. A battle to be fought, and by the grace of God and His angels, won. He could not fail.
He would not fail.

“Make camp,” he said, signaling with a flick of his hand to his company officers, “and raise my tent.”
The temple
, he thought with equal parts hope and dread,
the temple of my final inspiration.

BUT THE DISEASE HAD, in the end, seized Essex and shaken him like a rag doll, though in the past days there ’d been moments of clarity. He ’d paraded his troops in a St. Andrew’s cross before Tyrone ’s huge rebel force, the English cavalry proudly prancing at the cross’s flanks and rear, hoping that Tyrone might attack him on open ground.

That attack never came. There ’d been a moment of sheer folly. He ’d requested that Tyrone meet him alone on the field, that they should fight for the outcome of the whole war, two men with swords and shields.

Tyrone, old enough to be Essex’s father, declined more politely than Essex’s lunatic request demanded. The rebel army steadfastly held their ground, refused to be drawn into battle, a maddening and embarrassing kindness that, as every day passed, caused Essex to fall more and more violently ill. He refused the physician, he refused the company of his friends. He brooded alone, suffering his fevers and chills and blinding headaches as a sinner his penance.

This day, Tyrone ’s messenger had come to request a parlay on the morrow between the two earls, prelude to the battle. Essex scribbled his assent, then collapsed on his cot in a deep swoon.

In his tent the night was filled with phantoms, bloody visions:
Leicester, a rotten corpse in his splendor at Elizabeth’s Court; Philip Sidney dying
of a festering gangrene in Zutphen. His mother appeared. She was beautiful—as she had looked in his youth—lush lips, pearly skin, blue-violet eyes.

They’d not been kind eyes, however, but sharp and accusing. And Elizabeth
had hovered about him, a foul, witchlike apparition with bony fingers that
had caused him to cry out for help.

“It’s all right,”
he heard a woman say. The voice was soothing and the vision that accompanied it likewise reassuring—
Grace O’Malley’s
weathered face, old and unpainted but pleasing nevertheless.
He smiled to think he had conjured up the woman.

“That’s better,”
she crooned. Then the apparition of Grace O’Malley did something peculiar. She placed a cool, wet rag on Essex’s forehead and gently took up his hand in hers.

“Are you real?” he whispered.

“I suppose I am,” she said. “As real as anything can be.”

“How did you . . . ?”

“I told them I’d been sent by the Earl of Tyrone with a message.

Your servant remembered me from Limerick. You must have told him of our adventures. I doubt he saw an old lady as much of a threat. Can you sit up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll help you then. We ’ve some talkin’ to do.”

“Talking? Grace, I stand across the battlefield from England’s gravest enemy, the ‘Father of the Irish Rebellion,’ and you . . . my God, you are its mother!”

Grace snaked an arm behind Essex’s back and propped him against two pillows.

“You’re wrong when you say that, Robert. The Irish revolt was birthed without my help. If anything, I’m its wet nurse, for I admit to giving succor to the war. Men, food, guns—necessary as mother’s milk.”

“Why have you come? Tyrone hasn’t really sent you.”

“No. I lately brought his soldiers Spanish arms. But Hugh O’Neill has no idea that I’m here with you. He thinks I’ve sailed back to Connaught, and I will do as much when I’m done here.”

“ ‘Done here.’ That sounds menacing.”

Grace chuckled. “I haven’t come to murder you in your bed, if that’s what you think.” She grew silent and Essex, his mind gratefully clearing, searched her face for answers. “You’re outnumbered, son,” she finally said. “I don’t have to tell you that. ’Twill be a horrible slaughter if you march out on that field to fight. Another bloodbath on Irish ground.” She looked away, as if trying to remove the image from her mind. “You will lose, but many of us will die as well.”

“I haven’t a choice,” Essex replied. “I’ve promised Elizabeth. She ’s given me everything I asked to wage this war. Now she demands action.”

“Oh, she does, does she?” Grace did not attempt to hide her scorn.

Essex regarded the old woman with puzzlement. “She is the queen,” he said. “She has a right to demand it.”

“A
right?
Oh, you mean the ‘Divine Right ’ given by God to all the monarchs of the world. Of course, I forgot. The queen of bloody England has the God-given right to march thousands of men to their deaths on a bright summer morning. She has the right to send her minions to a country, not her own, to pillage and burn and rape. To murder our gods and rip the living soul from the land.”

Essex was staring at the woman mouthing blasphemy.

“I know who you are, Robert. You’re spawn of a murderous man who thought nothing of bashing out the brains of infants against trees on Rathlin Island. You’re the fine lackey of a queen whose father whacked off the heads of two of his wives. And Elizabeth in her old age is no longer averse to killing when it suits her needs. Killing to feed her pride.

Killing . . . because she can!”

Essex opened his mouth to object, but no words came.

“You can say no to this battle, Robert. Don’t look at me like I’ve grown a horn between my eyes.
You can say no!”

“How can I? ’Tis the largest army the queen in her whole reign has ever assembled. She
must
have Tyrone ’s submission. She will not die till she rules Ireland!”

Grace laughed. “Then pity poor England with Methuselah’s mother on the throne. Listen to me, son. I see through you. You’re in great suffering, Robert, and that suffering has changed you. You
feel
what others feel—their joy, their hunger, their pain. You feel Ireland ’s misery as keenly as you do your own. It is a strange and terrible thing to say, but there ’s more human feeling in you than there is in my own son, a son of Ireland. Jesus, poor Tibbot! He ’s been ripped and torn from this side to that, tortured into an undreamed-of state of confusion. He ’s a man without a country, and sometimes, I fear, without a soul.”

“Grace—”

“No, let me finish. You don’t want to go out there tomorrow and fight. I can see it in your face. You don’t want the blood of those poor young men on your hands. You
know
the right thing to do as well as you know your own name.” She gazed at him, her eyes softening. “Ah, Robert, the world has lately been hard on you.” Essex felt his chin quiver and tears sting his eyes.

Grace reached out and pushed the damp hair off his brow. “ ’Tis a load that no man should be asked to carry.”

“What would you have me do?” he said in a barely audible whisper.

“I don’t quite know, but Hugh O’Neill is a reasonable man. If you go out on that field and fight tomorrow, he ’ll take you down, I can promise you that. But if you talk to him,
just talk
, perhaps he can find a way to forego the bloodshed. Save the lives of your young men.” Essex was silent, thoughtful.

“Your fever’s gone,” said Grace. “Do you think you can sleep?”

“Sleep?” Essex laughed ruefully. “I may never sleep again.” Grace leaned down and kissed his brow. “You’re a sweet man, Robert Devereaux. May God direct you and Jesus protect you.” She rose and, wrapping her shawl about her shoulders, crossed to the tent’s door and in the next moment disappeared.

Essex lay as still as stone, hardly daring to breathe. On the eve of the war’s most decisive battle, he ’d prayed for inspiration, and instead had listened to treason from the mouth of a notorious Irish traitor. He had neither sought to silence her nor even argue. He had accepted the touch of her cool fingers and the comfort of her sympathy. He was no better than a traitor himself.

Essex blinked back his suddenly heavy lids and realized with surprise that he was weary and could, perchance, sleep. He laid himself back down and with a bemused smile pulled the coverlet over his shoulders and closed his eyes.

Slumber took him a moment later, and his dreams when they came in the wee morning hours were as sweet and fine as an Irish faerie ’s wing.

THE MORNING SUN glinting off the River Lagan was beautiful but blinding. Southampton, with Blount, had ridden with Essex to a hill that rose above the river’s south edge, looking down upon Bellaclynth Ford. Essex appeared hypnotized, Southampton observed, staring unblinkingly at the scene below. ’Twas the glittering water, perhaps. Robert always claimed the sight of a river calmed his soul.

But that was not it. His friend had seemed altogether calm when Southampton fetched him from his tent earlier that morning, more easy and self-possessed than he had recently seen him—perhaps
ever
seen him. And more relaxed than he had a right to be. It made no sense. Essex faced the greatest crisis of his military career this day. He ’d been very ill and his army was horribly outnumbered by the Irish. And after the inevitable battle, many—if not most of his men—would be dead. Even now the arch rebel Tyrone, astride a magnificent black stallion, was making his way down to the river from the opposite hillside. It suddenly struck Southampton that Tyrone was descending the narrow track alone, his aides remaining above, watching his progress.

Christopher Blount gave voice to Southampton’s thought. “Why are his men not following?”

“ ’Tis odd,” Southampton agreed. “Robert, shall we go to meet him now?”

“Wait,” said Essex. They watched curiously as Tyrone approached the river’s edge and urged his horse into the water.

“What is he doing?” Blount said, truly perplexed. “Is he crossing to us?”

“I think we should—”

“Just
wait
, Southampton,” Essex sternly commanded.

By now Tyrone ’s horse had waded so far into the rushing water that it lapped at the beast’s belly. The rebel sat tall in his saddle and waited calmly, as if his behavior were entirely natural.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Blount said. “These Irish—”