by Karen Harper
The bed was not only huge but high. At least it had a three-step mounting stair, which the king himself or those who lifted him up had needed. I climbed the first step and knelt upon the third. It creaked, but then, at the last moment, I hoped to wake the king so he knew why his life was forfeit. But if he called out for help, would his voice carry clear to his guards or to someone who might be just beyond in his formal bedchamber? Was this gigantic but ill man yet strong enough to stop me?
I parted the bed curtains so I could see within. At first, I thought I saw only a pile of pillows, but the king was propped upon them. After all his harsh breathing, he was so quiet now. Was he awake, watching, or had he just died?
I cleared my throat to see if he would move. Finally—now or never, I told myself. Let him die in peace, some would say, but I would never have peace that way. In my mind, I heard the shouted, futile but bold words of my family’s battle cry: A Geraldine! A Geraldine!
I knelt upon the mattress, dragging my skirts and the shawl. I crawled closer, my fingers gripping the handle so hard that my entire frame shook as I began to lift it.
I held my breath and positioned myself better to strike. I would awaken him now, to pass judgment on his brutal life.
Then a wheezing voice came from the depths of the black bed and the huge, fleshy frame: “You’ve come to bed at last, my dearest love, my angel.”
PART I
My Youth
Love that doth reign and live within my thought
And built his seat within my captive breast,
Clad in arms wherein with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest . . .
And coward Love, then, to the heart apace
Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and ’plain,
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.
For my lord’s guilt thus faultless bide I pain,
Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove,—
Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.
—HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
CHAPTER THE SECOND
MAYNOOTH CASTLE, COUNTY KILDARE, IRELAND
June 4, 1533
I, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, called Gera by my family, descended from the famous and infamous Geraldines of Italy and Normandy, enjoyed early years of a protected, even pampered childhood before catastrophe came calling. The first day I can recount when my sweet security began to fall apart, I was barefooted and boating with my siblings on the River Lyreen in a craft of lath and tarred canvas called a naomhóg, as ever under the watchful eyes of our guardians Magheen and Collum McArdle. I loved to sail, even at that age, and rowing to me was so slow.
Born in January 1523, I was but ten years of age that day, the middle child of our brood of five, though I was ever being told—and scolded—that I was the most willful and talkative of us children. Mayhap that was to make up for my dear sister Margaret, age twelve, the eldest of us all, for she was deaf and dumb. Next came Gerald, age eleven, who would have been the heir to Father’s earldom but for our older half brother, Thomas. Then came Cecily, age nine, and Edward, almost eight.
Oh, yes, my parents loved each other dearly in every way, to have a child nearly each year, but that was oft the way of Irish families. Why, even the poor folk, who could hardly feed their brood, had large ones. My mother, Elizabeth Grey, was the second wife of our sire, for his first, Elizabeth Zouch, a well-connected Englishwoman as was my mother, died young, leaving him with two children, including Thomas, Lord Offaly. He would someday be the 10th Earl of Kildare and, so we thought then, would also inherit his father and grandsire’s title, lord deputy of Ireland, given by the English kings. Gerald and I—though I was younger than him and a female to boot—were the leaders of our little band.
“Row harder!” Gerald ordered as if we were Roman slaves and he emperor. Even Margaret could follow along easily today. She sat next to me and copied my pulls on the oar. We had a score of little hand signals we used between us, since she was deaf and dumb. She was learning to read, but that was slower going than we were rowing.
“No, you beef-wit!” Gerald shouted at his younger brother. “You’re splashing me, Edward!”
“Leave off!” I challenged Gerald. “You are the one who wanted the tiller, and the helmsman always gets wet. You’re acting like Thomas, always thinking of keeping his fancy garb clean and dry.”
Despite Magheen’s and Collum’s coaching from the bank of the stream, we somehow managed to ram the prow into one of the swan nests made of mounded sedge and reeds. The big male swan appeared from out of nowhere, hissing and snorting at the McArdles. They shouted back in Irish at their fine, feathered attacker. My dear Magheen, who had ever been a nursemaid and second mother to me, flapped her skirt at it, then had to run. Finally, my lanky gray wolfhound Wynne came tearing down the path and chased the swan out into the middle of the water. We nearly fell overboard, holding our sides and screeching with laughter until we saw we were drifting away as fast as the angry swan.
“Row, me hearties!” Gerald shouted again, pointing back toward the tall tower of Maynooth Castle that we could barely see over the foliage of the beech forest. “Row or we’ll be swept down to the Liffey and then clear to Dublin Harbor and so to England!”
“Stuff and nonsense,” I muttered. “We’d crash over the falls at Leixlip Castle and have to swim for our very lives. All right, I’ll count and we’ll all pull together.” I nodded to Margaret to encourage her. She always watched my lips when I talked, but I knew she could not have taken in all that, so I started to row as I counted, and she soon caught on. It wasn’t fair, I thought for the thousandth time, that she could not hear and talk, when I liked nothing better than to eavesdrop and chatter. Everyone said that I was the pretty one too. Yet Margaret was the best friend to me in all the world, next to Magheen, because my sister Cecily was always going off in corners to read and sulk over I knew not what.
A deep, distant voice called to us as Magheen and Collum caught up to us again and we struggled against the current. It was Father waving from the bank near the lawn of the castle! He had come home from his duties in Offaly and had come to fetch us himself.
“Slainte mhaith! Good health to you!” The McArdles greeted their liege lord with a bow and a curtsy. Magheen and Collum were the keepers of the Irish brogue and ways, for our tutors were all English, though I more than the others loved to hear Magheen spin her tales of the little folk and the old Gaelic ways. Truth be told, our family, which ruled the Anglicized Pale, was more English than Irish in manners, speech, and dress. Still, Father’s motto was, Ireland for the Irish, though I doubt he told such to the king and his court when he visited London.
But when this tall, broad-shouldered, handsome man—Father to us, but to kin and country Gearoid Og Kildare, Garrett Fitzgerald, 9th Earl of Kildare—spoke, everyone listened, and not just from fear, for we adored him. We promptly put the prow into the riverbank at his feet and scrambled out to greet him, though he’d been away but three days this time. Barking and cavorting, Wynne jumped about in mad joy at our excitement.
However powerful Father was in Ireland and England, too, he was above all warm and charming. He drew people to him not just by his position but by a natural esteem. I think that won him friends at first in the Tudor court. It was his downfall later, but I shall save all that for what is to come. Only our family knew Father’s physical strength was not what it used to be. He had been wounded more than once in battle with Irish rivals, and that had taken a sore toll on him. He tried hard not to limp from a wound in his left leg from the last fray with the O’Carrolls, and on damp days he had trouble breathing from the long-healed slash of his chest by some would-be Gaelic assassin’s scian.
It was said Garrett Og’s first marriage was a love match, and I know his second was, for he and my mother were what Magheen called lovebirds. Father always had gowns made for his Bessie to match his court finery and even when he was away on business in his realm or when he
’d been summoned by King Henry VIII to give account of himself in London, I know Mother slept with a small portrait of him beside her and kissed it each night he was away. I tell you true, for I had seen it.
In many ways, besides their fine faces and forms, my parents were well matched. Mother was the granddaughter of a queen of England, Elizabeth Woodville, wife of the Plantagenet king Edward IV. So she was intricately related to the influential Grey family of England, which descended from the royal Tudor sister of the current king. Indeed, my mother was a second cousin to King Henry VIII, and Father, too, was connected through his first marriage as a cousin to the king. I tell you, whether we children were tutored in English or Irish, we were taught that we were the uncrowned royal family of Ireland.
“Father, we have missed you!” Gerald cried as we surrounded the big man.
“But you must not miss putting the boat back where it belongs,” he said. No matter the occasion, he always pressed us to do our duty. We quickly shoved the boat back up into its hiding place, where a rain-swollen river or a passing fisherman would not take it from among the low-hanging willows. Then our raucous welcome truly began, with everyone talking at once.
“Gerald cheated when we played Skiver the Goose,” Edward said as Father ruffled the boy’s hair and patted Margaret, Cecily, and me on our flushed cheeks.
“If that is so,” Father’s voice boomed out, quieting the jumbled greetings, “I am sorry to hear it, for the Geraldine Fitzgeralds do not cheat, but they do speak their minds and are ever ready with an answer or a defense. Gerald?”
“I only peeked once before I poked him, Father, and if I hadn’t I might have hurt him with the stick.”
“Gerabeth?” he asked me, using my pet name that only he and my brother Gerald used anymore. As ever, I thrilled to have his attention, but I know now he reckoned I would always tell true, even to my own disadvantage. Margaret, of course, had never spoken, and Cecily would tat-tale everything Gerald and I had done amiss while he’d been gone. I tried to throw the best light on my brothers’ spat that I could.
“They had a bit of a disagreement, Father. We all had our eyes closed, so I can’t say. But we all pulled together in the boat.”
“As it should be. Now,” he said, seeming distracted and looking back at the McArdles, “I have news for my family and retainers, so you are to join your mother and Lord Offaly in the great hall to hear of it. Your uncles have ridden in with me too.”
An entire family gathering of the Fitzgerald males, I thought. Father had five brothers, all younger than he, of course, since he was the earl. Lord Offaly, our half brother Thomas, our elder and our better, was oft here, but what was this occasion? I wondered. I straightened my skirts and pushed back my flyway red hair, which had come loose in a torrent, and tried to remember where I had put my shoes.
I should have worn a straw hat, I suppose, for my skin was milky and freckles could pop out on my nose and cheeks in a trice. And Thomas, even more than Father, believed in looking one’s best at all times. I’d overheard Thomas tell Mother I’d be a raving beauty someday, but she’d best watch that I didn’t turn into a saucy hoyden. It had taken me nearly a fortnight before I dared ask Magheen what a saucy hoyden was, because she would pry out of me where I heard it and I feared that it was something frightful.
We children stretched our strides to keep pace with Father as we, all barefoot, ran along in the grass just off the gravel lane toward tall, gray-stoned Maynooth Castle, our main residence in Kildare County. It stood—still stands, though much the worse today—like a stone sentinel amidst almost six hundred acres of fields, forest, and the largest deer park in all Ireland. We were eleven miles from Dublin, at the gateway of what was called the Pale, the civilized area over which Father ruled—with permission of the English kings, of course, though we’d all have much favored independence and equality. But Father’s power kept the best peace to be hoped for with the Gaelic chieftains still so warlike. As for pirates oft pillaging the coastline, well, that was more trouble.
When Father whispered something to them, Magheen and Collum rushed ahead of us, Collum pulling Wynne along by his collar as they climbed the staircase from the first-floor entry, probably to fetch Mother or our guests from the living quarters overhead. Maynooth was already centuries old and had been built for fortification, so the rooms were stacked in a tall tower. The Church of St. Mary’s and the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Maynooth, the latter which Father had founded, were attached to the castle. Within the courtyard behind the castle were domestic buildings where servants slept and supplies were kept.
The castle itself was richly furnished in fine style. The chamber I shared with my sisters had rich, imported hangings and Turkey carpets and overlooked the forest to the river and fertile fields beyond, some planted in rye, some peppered with black sheep. Out the other side we could see the market town of Maynooth, which also supplied many of the castle’s needs.
But on this ground floor we entered, cool and vast and usually peopled only by Father’s reeves and reckoners, lay the great hall, the place of ceremony and administration of Fitzgerald power, a place that awed us all anew as we followed him toward it today. We had dined here ceremonially on a dais and we children had stood at the side sometimes for investitures or pronouncements, but never had we been summoned so suddenly. Others were gathering too, from some of our kin to squires and even a smattering of liveried galloglass, Father’s armed foot soldiers who guarded him when he traveled but seemed to melt into the walls at Maynooth.
Our still-bare feel felt the cold stone floor as we walked through the eastern side of the great hall, which oft served as a waiting room for petitioners, then as we entered the formal area with its wall buttresses and central line of pillars. There our five uncles joined us and, despite the evident solemnity of the occasion, bent or knelt to give us hugs and greetings. Uncle James, the eldest, who was most like Father, and whose Leixlip Castle was barely four miles away, was my favorite. They were all wed; what fine times we had at yule or on St. Patrick’s Feast Day, when our families were together. Such strapping, fine-looking men, James, John, Richard, Oliver, and Walter—I can yet see their ruddy faces, their blue-green eyes, and hear their boisterous voices, though muted for this mysterious occasion. Too soon their smiles from seeing us sobered that day at Maynooth.
A shiver snaked up my spine when I saw Thomas, his handsome face marred by a frown as he looked everyone over as if he would bid on a new horse at the fair. He stood off to the side, finely arrayed in half armor and a rich green surcoat, one booted foot upon the elevated dais with the two carved chairs set under the crimson-and-white silken banner with the Fitzgerald crest. Thomas had soundly smacked Edward once for laughing at the chained ape upon the crest. We had all learned well the story of how a tamed ape had once preserved the Geraldine line by snatching the infant son of Maurice Fitzgerald, a thirteenth-century Earl of Kildare, from his crib during a fire.
But, Father had said, the ape then dangled the baby over the parapet of the castle. Father said the story should warn us that one who seemed our savior one moment might turn to traitor, though we could trust the Lord Jesus himself and Mother Mary. And, I always added silently, certainly Saint Brigid of Kildare, whom Magheen said watched over us all. Ah, I could recite entire prayers to Saint Brigid, the saint of healing and fertility and protector of unwed maids, my favorite prayer to her being, Saint Brigid, spread above my head your bright cloak for protection. Little did I know then how much I would need that and how much she would betray me.
An expectant hush fell that day in the great hall as Father and Mother came in and took their high-backed, ornately carved chairs. In the hush of concern and anxiety, Father stood and motioned Thomas closer to him.
“The king of England, His Majesty Henry the Eighth by grace of God,” Father’s voice rang out, echoing . . .
I dared for one moment to think we would have a royal visit. Or surely the king had not died and left his kingdom with n
o heir but a daughter, Mary, whom my mother had once attended before her marriage. Besides, King Henry had dared a divorce—hardly popular in Ireland—and to wed a Protestant. Now everyone awaited the birth of his hoped-for son by that second queen, the seducer and shrew Anne Boleyn.
“. . . has summoned me to England to give account of my duties here and in the Pale,” Father announced. “The king is most displeased that I have seen fit to move his ordnance and armaments from Dublin Castle to be stored here at Maynooth, which I believe is my right, and sound judgment too.” He cleared his throat, suddenly looking nervous instead of confident. “I am praying,” he added after a pause, “that I will not be detained in England, as has happened before, while I explain my strategies and rights to the king and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.”
Twice Father had been held against his will while answering such a summons, but then I’d heard him jest that he would never have met either of his lady wives had he not been kept about the court there. Before any of us were born, he had been years away at times, as if King Henry held him hostage for the Pale’s good behavior.
“Is Mother going too? All of us?” Gerald whispered beside me as we watched Father draw Thomas closer to his side.
“And so, in my absence, I am naming my heir, Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly, as deputy governor of Ireland, and overseer of all Geraldine affairs.”
“Oh, no,” Edward muttered at my other side. “He’ll order us about and slap us too.”
“Sh!” Cecily hissed.
Thomas made a flowery speech about how he would uphold Geraldine pride while Father was away and keep us all safe from outsiders. I suppose he meant the Gaels beyond the Pale, but he might have actually meant the English too. Everyone listened raptly, including one man I saw shaking his head. It was Christopher Paris, our foster brother—not because he was adopted but because he had been fostered out to our family by his own.
