by Karen Harper
Later, much later, the guard opened the door and stepped in, nearly slipping in the mess I’d made on the floor. “Aye, milord, she seems ready to listen now,” the man announced, and Uncle Leonard stepped past him into the room. His boots gritted through broken glass as he entered. I sat in the far corner from the door, a heavy pewter candlestick in my hand like a battle mace.
“Put that down and grow up, girl,” he said. “Some things are not fair, but it’s the way of the world.”
“The way of the king of England and those who serve him, perhaps.”
“Judas priest, do you not think your father and uncles fought underhanded when they had to? Do you think Gearoid Og Kildare or Silken Thomas just asked for power and it was given them—or that whoreson foster brother of yours who gave Maynooth over to Lord Skeffington? But I am sorry that you had to see all that—and act like a strumpet when you must learn from your mother to be a lady. It will take you much farther in life.”
“I don’t want to go to a land where your king rules.”
He snorted and sat down, both warily and wearily, I thought, across the table from where I sat with the candlestick, a pitiable weapon against him and his men.
“Elizabeth,” he said, sitting up a bit straighter and resting one arm on the empty table as if to prop himself up, “your maid will be here soon and you are sailing tomorrow and will be delivered to your mother and siblings, where I hope you will learn to be a good influence on them all and they on you. With your remarkable beauty and pluck—properly controlled, of course—you will do well in great Henry’s England.”
I wanted to curse great Henry, England, and this man, but, as I had reasoned out before, honey might catch more flies than vinegar. Sometimes I truly wearied of everyone remarking on or reacting to my physical form and face as if there were naught beneath all that. Yet both Magheen and this man had suggested I could use my fair countenance as a weapon over the years, maybe to climb high, maybe to reach the king and his family so I could finally have justice for my kin and country.
“I am not a monster, my girl,” he went on, though his frown made him look like one. “I am a widower who would like to wed again. I am a good brother to your mother and enjoy having her children about my home. I care deeply for your fatherless family and want you to rise high, as befitting the royal heritage from which we descend. But let me add one thing, should you yet want to gainsay my orders.” He sat forward in his chair and pointed a thin finger at me like a threatening schoolmaster.
“You did, you know,” he said, “attack the royally appointed deputy of Ireland with a knife in your hand, so I could make a fuss over an attempted murder charge and leave you here in a cell awaiting trial for, oh, who knows how long? That would be one alternative to your not wanting to go to England.”
I hated this man, my uncle. He had dashed my fervent hopes for help and healing. But I knew when I was beaten—at least for now. I dropped the candlestick on the floor, where it thudded dully onto the sweet rushes strewn there.
“Good,” he said, smacking his palm on the tabletop. “King’s orders that the Fitzgerald men come to London for questioning and, hopefully, your half brother, Thomas, too, when he sees the futility of holing up like a trapped animal in the middle of a wood, just as I hear you and your uncle James did. Oh, yes, we are fully aware of where Silken Thomas hides within his moat and entrenchments. You know,” he went on as he rose and went to the door, “I rather fancy a woman with spirit, but not when she gainsays me, and it’s the same with Henry Tudor, so remember that. I’ll send Alice for you again. She’ll take you to a room, where I suggest you and your maid get a good night’s sleep when she arrives.”
Was he insane? After all that had happened here today, let alone since Thomas threw down the sword of state in the Irish Parliament and cursed the king? I wanted to say something dreadful to him, but nothing seemed bad enough—or safe enough, now that I had pretended to capitulate so I could learn how to play a woman’s game. I was not yet grown, but maidens were contracted to wed at my age, though they were not bedded. Maybe I could eventually seduce or wed someone I could convince to help me kill the king.
“And, Elizabeth,” he said just before he rapped upon the door for it to be opened by the waiting guard, “don’t think for a moment that you can get word to Thomas or any other rebels that your uncles can be rescued from here. The five of them are going to England on the morrow too, earlier than you. At break of dawn they are sailing like precious, sent-for cargo in the hold of a ship called the Cow.”
I gasped. Five earls . . . in the belly . . . of a cow . . . upon the sea . . . But that silly superstition ended, never to return again. For the first time in my life, I fainted.
PART II
My Maidenhood
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale;
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs . . .
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.
—HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
As our English ship, the Swiftsure, bucked the waves, I insisted on tending Magheen myself. I wiped her sweat-damp brow and carried slop buckets, for she was sore stricken with mal de mer. I myself reveled in the tilt and roll of the great, creaking wooden vessel, for it made me feel alive again. Since I had seen my uncles dragged away, I had lived in a sort of shell, but this sea voyage, and now Magheen’s needs, had brought me back to myself.
“Gera—milady,” she whispered with a groan, “grateful I am for your help but I’d best be left alone. I had no notion sailing could be like this—aaah.”
“I’ll not leave you, for you did not desert me when I was—” I began, but when Alice came back in with fresh linens, I stopped in midthought. Though the woman was overseeing the care of both of us, I could not forgive her for locking me in the chamber at Kilmainham while my uncles were penned in like cattle being taken to England in the belly of the Cow. And how did I know this woman was not a spy? I saw Alice had also brought another woman with her, who began to care for Magheen.
Alice Stinchcomb had finally explained she was from Uncle Leonard’s household at his estate of Beaumanoir. She had been brought to Ireland with him to accompany me until I was delivered safely to my mother. Through Uncle Leonard’s wife’s long illness, Alice had been her maid. She was a comely woman with shiny black hair, dark brown eyes, and quick, birdlike movements. Perhaps to make amends for her initial treatment of me, she shared tidbits about my family, my mother’s nervous fits, how my siblings’ schooling was faring when, I must admit, my book education had been lacking of late. She thought Cecily “a bit standoffish,” a novel way to put my sister’s snippiness, I thought. My heart softened toward Alice a bit when she told me things she had done to amuse poor Margaret, who missed me dreadfully—that was Alice’s very word for it—dreadfully.
I was surprised Alice was allowed to take her two spaniel lapdogs everywhere she went; my uncle did not seem the sort to have permitted that. Most lady’s maids would not be allowed such, but perhaps they had been the pets of my aunt Eleanor. Posy and Pretty were ever underfoot and, once again, made me miss my Wynne, who could have covered those two little yippers with both front paws.
I had decided that being kind to the spinster—Alice admitted she was nigh thirty with no husband or family—would be good practice for what must come next. I must learn to tolerate, mayhap even cultivate the English so I could earn my way into their trust. That way I could climb the ladder to reach the king or his men—his vile henchman Thomas Cromwell, for example—and find a way to wreak justice for all the Fitzgeralds.
“Magheen just wants to lie there,” I told Alice while the other woman changed the sheets on the narrow built-in bed that was to have been mine. “
But I will go stark mad if I don’t get some fresh air.” That was God’s truth and I risked the request, for it had seemed Alice must have orders from my uncle to accommodate me somewhat.
“We can take our guard and go up on deck for a little while,” she said, wrinkling her nose either at the foul air in the cabin or at my request. “Now that we’re out of Dublin Bay,’tis allowed.”
I told Magheen where I was going, but she only moaned and gestured me away again, so I swirled a cloak around my plain blue gown and, with more excitement than I would admit, followed Alice down the companionway and climbed a set of stairs onto the deck. Bates, a brawny guard, the very one, I learned, who had seized me when I attacked my uncle, followed behind us as always.
My spirits lifted, and I sucked in the tang of crisp sea air. I saw what we called a mackerel sky, with rows of clouds like marching men. In the slant of morning sun, the Irish Sea was a restless, rich blue-green topped by whitecaps as bright as the bigbellied sails straining overhead. Aloft, royal sailors in their sky blue shirts clung to ratlines as the great vessel plowed through the shifting waves.
I followed Alice to the railing, and Bates brought up the rear of our little band. I gripped the railing and steadied my stance to take the plunge and roll. The wind ripped back my hood and yanked my hair free. My cloak billowed back as if I had great, flapping wings to fly away.
For one moment, staring out over the vastness of the sea, I almost forgot my troubles, till sorrow sat hard on my heart again. Where, out there, were my uncles? My father had not survived the Tower of London, where they were being taken. Could they? And Thomas. The English knew where he was and how his haven was fortified.
But most of all, I feared for my dear brother Gerald, for I had overheard that the king’s chief minister, Cromwell, had told Uncle Leonard that he must pursue Gerald, boy or not though he be, until he was caught or killed. I must not forget, I warned myself, that whatever pleasures came my way, I was now living among the enemy. And I must ever keep in mind that, since Thomas seemed doomed, my brother Gerald must be helped to return to Ireland and aid our fellow countrymen we all loved.
With Alice and Bates quickly falling into step again, I walked to the other side of the ship and gasped. Indeed we were far out from Dublin Bay. My beloved Ireland was but a thin green line on the western horizon. I sucked in a sob, but stemmed my tears.
I forced myself to look away and saw a tall, broad-shouldered man, as dark-haired as I was fair, standing alone at the very prow of the ship. Unlike me, he wore no cloak or cape but high boots, leather breeks, and a jerkin over a white linen shirt. Like me, he seemed to revel in the pitch and yaw of the ship as he looked ahead, not seeing or else not heeding us.
“Is that the captain?” I asked Alice.
“Not him. I’ll introduce you to him later—the captain, I mean. That is Lord Edward Clinton, sent along to test his sea legs, so I hear. A ward of the king, rising fast at court and even in Parliament, they say. Tied to Lord John Dudley, one of the king’s key men,” she went on, sounding puffed up just to know all that.
I realized Lord Clinton would be a good man to know. However many steps he was away from the king’s presence and power, I had to start somewhere.
“Am I forbidden to speak with others?” I asked, though if she said I was, I intended to make a fuss. “I have much to learn of England, and not only midland ways.” Midland ways, for Beaumanoir was in the English midlands, Alice had told me more than once.
“He’s from the far north, way up in Lincolnshire, almost to wild Scotland,” she said, with another wrinkle of her nose. “And,” she added, turning slightly away from Bates as if to shut him out from whatever tidbit of gossip she would impart next—I must admit I was all ears—“he helped himself immensely last year by wedding the king’s former mistress, Bessie Blount.”
I gasped, which seemed to stoke her fires to proceed. Did his marriage bring him closer to the king or build a barrier between them? I wondered. I knew nothing of mistresses, royal or otherwise, but I warranted I needed to learn that and so much more.
“You see,” she went on, “that means Lord Clinton is stepfather to Bessie Blount’s son by the king, a boy not much younger than Clinton, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the lad whom the king named viceroy of your country years ago and then wanted to make—”
“To make king of Ireland!” I blurted.
It hit me with full force then what a splendid opportunity this was. The man at the prow of this ship was the stepfather of King Henry’s bastard son, the one the king had desired to make our Irish king instead of my father!
“But when Fitzroy caught consumption, and because you Irish have such a damp, boggy climate, His Majesty changed his mind on that,” she informed me with a little shrug. “You see, the king’s former mistress had years ago been married off to someone else, and when she was widowed, her lands adjoined Lord Clinton’s—well, you know what I mean. And obviously, though she is older than her handsome husband—I hear he is but two and twenty—I believe she is still lovely and accomplished, or the king would hardly have given her a look in the first place.”
I tried to remember everything she said, all her meanderings, for it could be ammunition for later. Surely somehow this Edward Clinton of Lincolnshire had been put in my path as the first step toward my revenge.
Before Alice could respond or say me nay, though she and Bates were soon at my heels, I walked quickly away from them and approached Lord Clinton from behind.
“Good day, my lord,” I addressed him, then, with the sounds of wind and sloshing sea against the hull, had to say it louder. “Good day, my lord.”
He turned and looked at me, his eyes widening in surprise. He smiled, flaunting white teeth in his sun-browned face, a handsome face with a strong nose and blue eyes like the sea and slashes of dark eyebrows that seemed to work independently when he so willed it. Compared to the whey-skinned, light-haired Irish, he seemed almost devil dark.
Though his collar-length hair was raven-hued, up this close it shone almost bluish in the sun as it whipped about his wide forehead. He had the slightest hint of stubble on his cheeks but sported no beard. He said nothing for one moment, and we seemed to hang suspended, sailing together, without even the ship or sea under us. It was the first time in my life my stomach did a strange little cartwheel at the mere nearness of a man.
I told myself that was simply from the fact that I might have found my first mark, as Alice interrupted our mutual stares with formal introductions.
“I knew the lady was aboard,” he said to Alice, and took my hand in his large one with a little bow. “My lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”
No one else aboard had shown me that sort of respect, so I bobbed him a quick curtsy, telling myself I really wanted to slap the king’s man, however handsome and polite.
Lord Clinton and I turned in unison, as if we had planned it, toward the narrow, plunging prow thrust out over the sea, which forced Alice and Bates to stand not with us but behind. Without even looking, I felt the shrouds and sails thrum with their power as the ship strained forward, toward England yet unseen. On deck or clinging to ratlines, the sailors seemed to disappear. Fine salt spray flew at us, but I didn’t mind, and he barely blinked at it.
“I think we’re in for a squall,” he said, pointing at some distant gray thunderheads. “But, you being Irish, I suppose you are used to rain. Your land would not be so green and fertile without it.”
“I am half English. And does it not rain a great deal in England?”
“It does, and it is green and lovely too.”
As he said lovely too, he looked at me and seemed to emphasize those words. I felt myself blush. I hoped he thought it was windburn on my fair skin.
“I am regretful for your troubles,” he said, speaking just loud enough for me, but not my hovering keepers, to hear. His voice was deep and slightly raspy, and his intonation was a bit flatter than Alice’s or even my moth
er’s.
“I thank you. No doubt your family fares far better than mine these days.”
“I miss my family,” he said, as if I’d inquired about that and had not alluded to his rising star at the king’s court. “I am father to a new daughter my wife and I have named Bridget, and my stepson has not been well.”
Ah, I thought. Then perhaps King Henry is agonizing over his boy’s future, just as we fear for Gerald. But my mind also snagged on the fact that Lord Clinton’s daughter’s name reminded me of Kildare’s patron, Saint Brigid. Was that a sign from her—though I reminded myself I did not believe in miracles—that this was indeed the man I should use to get closer to the king? But how? He was young and I was younger, and he was wed and—
“Lady Elizabeth, you are showing your sadness on your beautiful brow, but I understand why. Again, my condolences.”
I tried not to look at his mouth when he spoke, but it fascinated me. A taut lower lip but a fuller upper one. And his eyes, kind but probing, showed he was truly interested in my plight. When I blinked back tears, he evidently decided it was time to change our topic of conversation.
“I am on this voyage because my mentor, Lord Dudley, has suggested I might want to take service afloat,” he told me.
“Command a ship?”
“Yes, or a fleet someday. His Majesty is most adamant about building up his navy. We are an island, after all.”
We are an island. His words echoed in my head, as did nearly everything he said. I was going to retort that Ireland, too, was an island, but I fell to thinking of myself, feeling—despite Magheen and certainly discounting Alice and Bates—I was an island at sea, soon to be adrift amidst English people and English power.
