The Irish Princess (8 page)
Read The Irish Princess Online
Authors: Karen Harper
Tags: #Ireland, #Clinton, #Historical, #Henry, #Edward Fiennes De, #General, #Literary, #Great Britain - History - Henry VIII, #Great Britain, #Elizabeth Fiennes De, #Historical Fiction, #Princesses, #Fiction, #1509-1547, #Princesses - Ireland, #Elizabeth
As we passed under overhanging tree boughs and saw the familiar swallows and kittiwakes going our way too, the sky grew ever brighter. I imagined I smelled the gorse-scented air of early spring, though we were barely past mid-March. I pictured the glens near the Lyreen and the Liffey with golden furze breathing out its clove scent, my favorite out-of-doors aroma. I fancied I smelled peat fires from the village, for I wanted to take every memory of Maynooth and Kildare County with me and—
Magheen sat straight up in the boat. “Do you smell that on the breeze?” she demanded, craning to look back toward the village. “Smoke. A fire. The brightness we just passed. The village is burning! The English bastards have put it to the torch!
Antragh, Antragh!
” she kept keening, rocking with her head in her hands. “Too late, too late!”
Antragh, Antragh!
” she kept keening, rocking with her head in her hands. “Too late, too late!”
Our boat swept on, but I could see she was right, for gold and orange flames slashed into the early morning sky behind us. Magheen’s sister and her family—all those she and Collum knew and loved. The market square, the shops, the houses of wattle and thatch. Did the English have to ruin everything? Did they intend to obliterate all the Fitzgeralds had owned and commanded? And without our family to keep the peace, would Gaelic raids increase or would civil war split our land? The Fitzgeralds had been able to keep the English out, and now here they were, stomping on all of us with their brutal boots.
As if I were her nurse and comforter, I held the sobbing woman to me as the current pulled us on. I knew how desperately my dear friend wanted to run the boat ashore and rush back to see if her family and friends had escaped, to help any way she could. But I also knew she would stay with me to the very gates of hell, and I loved her all the more for that. High- and lowborn barriers be damned; Magheen McArdle was more my mother in that moment than my birth mother, granddaughter of an English queen, had ever been.
That afternoon, as we passed through the glens of the Liffey with their mossy rock ledges leaning overhead, I felt closed in by fear. We were sitting in the boat but not wearing ourselves out with rowing in the brisk current. When necessary, we pushed away from rocks with the oars. But where were we really going and what must we do to escape the Gunner and his men?
“Saint Brigid has let us down,” I told Magheen, who was still wiping her eyes and nose with the hem of her skirt.
“That be blasphemy! We’re alive and away from the fiends, are we not?”
Eager to keep our strength and spirits up, as if I were a child—which was not possible ever again—I asked her, “Will you tell me anew the story of Saint Brigid’s cloak?”
She nodded and sniffled. Her voice was muted at first and, after all her tears, she hiccoughed through the first of it. “There be dozens of stories of miracles and wonders the blessed Brigid did after she received the veil from Saint Patrick himself. Like you, milady, she was a chieftain’s daughter, and young when duties first fell to her.”
I let her talk, perhaps the best diversion from her pain, and mine too. As ever, she went off on side stories now and then as I watched streams pouring into the river, swelling its width and depth.
“Though she traveled far and wide as abbess in her nunnery,” Magheen went on, “Brigid hosted gatherings of important people and intervened in disputes and brought peace to warring factions.”
Which made me think, if she did all that, why did she not do the same now for those who venerated her? But I held my tongue and nodded to urge her on.
“As you recall, she accepted a site near Kildare for her small community from Dunlang MacEnda, king of Leinster, and built a church there. But she required extra land for farming to support her people. When the king refused, she said ever so sweetly to him, ‘Just give me as much as my cloak will cover,’ and, of course, he agreed to so simple and small a request. But as she laid her cloak upon the ground, it began spreading till it be covering the entire plain. ’Tis amazing what a lot the Lord can do with what little we give Him.”
“And she was bold enough to risk challenging and besting a king,” I said almost to myself. Yes, our Saint Brigid of Kildare would not have gotten what she wanted if she had railed at him. She was clever to the core. And so would I learn to be if I ever met the vile English king or any of his reeky, hedgepig, murderous lackeys.
We had more trouble than I’d thought getting the boat safely out of the water and up on a stony bank just above the waterfalls where our gentle Lyreen joined the Rye Water to birth the big River Liffey. I secured the
Red Book
to my chest again and hid it under my cloak. We ate what soda bread we had left and drank from the flask of ale Magheen had brought. The roar of the falls was soothing, almost luring, and that gave me time to think.
Red Book
to my chest again and hid it under my cloak. We ate what soda bread we had left and drank from the flask of ale Magheen had brought. The roar of the falls was soothing, almost luring, and that gave me time to think.
“We have two choices,” I told Magheen as she bent to fill the empty flask with river water. “One, I follow the rocky path and you let the boat loose over the falls, and I try to snare it on the far side so we can get clear to Dublin town to find an Irish ship to England. Or we go on foot from here, first to Leixlip Castle, hoping to learn whether my uncle or some retainer of his we can trust is in the area and can assist us. And,” I said, getting to my feet and shaking out my skirts, “I think we need to go on foot. With our village put to the torch, there may be women on the roads now anyway, or those put out of their houses by the quartering of English troops.”
“Thinking clear you are, milady. All right then, off we go. May Saint Patrick and Saint Brigid be our guides.”
I knew the path from the falls to the castle, for we had visited here many a time and played about the grounds. Leixlip Castle somewhat resembled Maynooth, a gray stone structure, but it perched on a rocky outcropping of limestone in the wide valley. It too had a crenellated tower, but a round one, and not so high as ours.
Though I was tall for my age, surely a mere girl mingling with some local folks to overhear what had happened here would not be overly suspicious. But we went not twenty strides toward the castle gate when I saw that the English soldiers were here too, though not the swarms of them we’d seen outside Maynooth. Their horses were bigger than our Irish breeds, and that gave them away, as well as the horrid pennants flying from the castle walls. In place of the usual crimson-and-white Fitzgerald banners, I saw green-and-white pennants with Tudor roses and some sort of mythical beasts.
“Beasts, all of them,” I muttered.
“What’s that, milady?”
“Best go back to calling me something else hereabouts. Call me Shauna.”
At least other Irish were about, some pulling carts, evidently provisions for the castle. When we approached the guarded gate to the castle’s inner courtyard, I walked slowly past as my bravado evaporated. I could not let them take me or my precious book. But then I saw a face I knew, a rhymer who had been at Maynooth but whom Father had loaned to Uncle James, since he liked the epics of the Irish past so dearly. Liam, I think. Liam the rhymer.
“Magheen, go talk to that man there with the green cap. See if his name is Liam, a rhymer, and what he can tell you about Uncle James. But tread carefully. If Christopher sold out, who knows who else has done the same.”
“Aye, I remember him, a bawdy one with the kitchen maids, he was,” she muttered. While she sauntered after him, I stood against the outer castle wall and watched her talk earnestly to him. To my disappointment, without so much as a glance my way he walked toward the path she and I had come up from the river. Taking her time, though I was so impatient I could have screamed, Magheen strolled back my way.
“It wasn’t him?” I demanded, crestfallen.
“Oh, ’twas, and don’t you be telling me Saint Brigid be letting us down again,” she scolded. “It seems since your uncle didna take direct part in the rebellion nor put up a fuss when the English demanded use of his castle, they merely turned him out and took over. He’s sent his family to relatives in Meath, but he’s secretly living in that very forest by the falls we just came through, though deeper in, at his hunt lodge, and Liam knows the way.”
I sucked in a sigh of relief. So easily accomplished? Had the tide turned for me? But what dreadful news I had to tell Uncle James. I beat down my anger that he’d handed this area over to the bastard English, but he had no armaments with which to fight, and we’d heard he’d pledged all his men to Thomas’s army.
“Will Liam take us there now?” I asked. “Do you think what he said can be trusted?”
“Do we have a choice?” she countered. “Come, then.” She began to whisper even more, so I almost had to read her lips. “He’s awaiting us just off the path to the falls, and I tell you again, Lady Gera of Kildare, that Saint Brigid of Kildare is holding her cloak above us.”
It was all I could do to walk slowly instead of run. I could have hugged Liam the rhymer, for he led us directly to a place where one of Uncle James’s men dropped from an oak tree and blocked our way, then led us on into the thickening forest. Father and Gerald had been to the hunt lodge, but never any of us women. After we told the two men what had happened at Maynooth, Liam said but one thing. I have always remembered it, though it meant naught to me at the time: “Even Ireland’s little people—leprechauns and fairies—are not immortal or important, but they too weep and die.”
More men guarded the small hunt lodge. Someone summoned Uncle James, who burst through the front door with his arms open wide when he saw it was truly me. Thanks be to God—and yes, Saint Brigid—I was in the strong embrace of my favorite uncle, telling him the terrible tidings from our castle and the village too.
Living in a small but cozy hunt lodge in the woods, I saw three months blur by. It was a blessing to be with Uncle James, who sorely missed his family too and reminded me so much of Father. He sent secret word to my mother that I was safe and would be delivered to her as soon as possible. Finally, we heard through Uncle James’s covert communications that Gerald and Collum were not with the family of the traitor of Maynooth—part of Christopher’s plan to betray us all, I feared—but that Thomas’s sister, Mary O’Connor, was hiding them at her home, from whence they would be passed on to others until they could escape to France. Magheen and I rejoiced when we heard that good news.
We also learned that Silken Thomas, whose name was on everyone’s lips, had been bested in battle and was in hiding too. Once things had turned against him, many had deserted his cause and crept to their homes, hoping to claim they were loyal to England. Yet we heard nearly a hundred were tracked down and imprisoned or executed. I felt so torn about Thomas: I admired his defiance and bravery—or was it all foolhardiness and bravado? He had not been patient or planned well enough. Father had used his personal charm and negotiation skill for years, and Thomas had exploded it all in one brash act.
In the sweet summer weather—for the green, green beauty of Ireland blossomed no matter the perils of politics—a letter was smuggled in from Mother, bemoaning that the English were calling our uprising not the rebellion of the Irish but of the Geraldines. She wrote that she feared for all of us and was endeavoring to earn our way back into the English king’s good graces.
When I read that, I thrust the letter into the flame of the single lantern at the hunt lodge. No matter how chilled we were, we lit no hearth fire that would send up smoke. I frowned as the letter turned crimson-crisp on its edges, then burst into flame as I dropped it in a pewter dish on the small table.
“Best to burn covert correspondence, I suppose,” Magheen muttered as she bent over her needle and thread to take in the seams of a plain russet gown for me, one Uncle James’s men had brought us over these long weeks.
I almost told Magheen that Mother had turned traitor too, to want to appease England’s killer king, but I held my tongue even with her. Uncle James had also preached peace to me, insisting that the English might was too forceful to fight. But he had praised me for taking
The Red Book of Kildare
when I fled. It lay wrapped in a thick sheepskin under the floorboards of the lord’s bedchamber he had given to me and Magheen the first day we’d arrived.
The Red Book of Kildare
when I fled. It lay wrapped in a thick sheepskin under the floorboards of the lord’s bedchamber he had given to me and Magheen the first day we’d arrived.
I was ready that very warm mid-June day to take a walk in the woods, guarded by a one-eyed man of Uncle James’s retinue, when a knock sounded on our door. “Enter!” I called out, and my uncle swept it open to rush in. He held in his hand another letter, one that must have come for him in the same packet as Mother’s. His smile lit the room as he picked me up and spun me about madly.
“What? What? Tell me!” I shouted as Magheen clapped and jumped up to dance a little jig. “Gerald is free in France? Everyone is pardoned?”
“Maybe neither or maybe both—soon!” he said, and put me down. “The Gunner has died of some disease, and in his stead King Henry has named your mother’s brother and her host, Lord Leonard Grey, as the new deputy of Ireland! A man of the Kildare clan by blood ties will soon be here in the Gunner’s place, God curse his black soul!”
“Is King Henry mad, or has he changed his mind toward us?” I cried. My pulse pounded, and I could have soared.
“It seems he’s extending an olive branch,” Uncle James said, as he bent over the letter to skim the words again. “Of course, Lord Grey knows Ireland, for he was here over twenty years ago as marshal of the English army. This appointment has been made by the king’s henchman Cromwell. Perhaps the loss of life at Maynooth was the price Thomas paid for his rebellion, and Lord Grey will patch things up now.”
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