The Irish Princess

by Karen Harper

  “If I were you,” I blurted, “I would take service afloat, for I think it would be wonderful!”

  I could have cursed myself at that. I sounded such a child, and presumptuous that my opinion would be of any account to this king’s man.

  “Then I shall weigh that in my decision,” he said quite seriously, though a little smile lifted one side of his mouth.

  It began to rain, big, plopping drops from the gray clouds clotted even closer overhead. I felt crestfallen that I could not converse with him more to learn about his lord Dudley and the king. Saint Brigid forgive me, but I would have liked to have stayed up on deck with him in wind and rain as the ship plunged on, but Alice and Bates hustled me back down below.

  The Swiftsure landed us at Liverpool before going on to London, much to Magheen’s relief and my regret. I looked for Lord Clinton as we disembarked and mounted waiting horses, but I did not see him again. I wondered if I ever would, for Alice had said that Uncle Leonard’s estate was at the edge of the deep forest of Charnwood, encircled by the River Soar, seven miles from the village of Leicester and three days’ hard ride to London. I pictured myself in eternal exile there, an Irish island in a thick, river-girt forest, never able to reach the power wielders of the realm who might be convinced to spare my family or upon whom I could wreak vengeance.

  After two days’ jogging ride, I saw a grand mansion emerge from the trees of Charnwood forest. I gasped aloud. A long gravel lane led toward a massive gatehouse and two turreted towers that stood like sentinels over a distant, sprawling manor of rosy brick, with its windows blinking in the sun.

  “No,” Alice said to me from her mount with one dog in each saddle pack, “that’s Bradgate, not Beaumanoir. It is the country seat of Lord Henry Grey, your kin, but more important, his wife, Frances Brandon, is niece to the king. They have a one-year-old daughter, Lady Jane, though I reckon they wanted a boy, as ambitious as they are, and rightly so, if the king does not have a legitimate son, but only his two daughters. I tell you,” she added, lowering her voice even more and nearly leaning out of her saddle toward me, “little Lady Jane Grey, through her mother’s royal blood, stands fifth in line to King Henry’s throne, should anything befall his daughters, Mary or Elizabeth, but they are out of favor anyway. You see,’tis said he’s even wearied of Queen Anne now too and seeks another.”

  This time I was so weary that her prattle barely sank in. I warranted that if the king of England threw off his lawful first wife, he could dispense with another, the one I’d heard called “the Boleyn whore.” But I already knew who Henry Grey was, for I had been schooled in Mother’s royal relations as well as my father’s. It was a veritable spider’s web of Grey kin: Henry Grey’s great-grandmother was also mine, so we were second cousins, and I would be a third cousin to their young child, Lady Jane Grey.

  “But I’m sure you’ll meet the Marquess of Dorset—that’s Lord Grey’s title—and the marchioness soon,” Alice went on, “for they oft hunt deer in these woods and stop by Beaumanoir for sustenance or a respite. Oh, yes, they love to hunt.”

  My eyes sought the mansion at the end of the other fork in the gravel lane, the home of my now hated enemy Lord Leonard Grey, but the place where my dear mother, sisters, and brother awaited. I could barely keep myself from spurring my mount onward. So close to my loved ones at last, I even forgot my hatred of the king for a moment.

  We passed through a gate in a waist-high stone fence and rode on. Also built of rosy brick, though not as large or grand, Beaumanoir emerged from trees, hedges, and gardens. At least a dozen deer grazing on the lawn scattered as we rode in. My heart beat so hard it almost shook me in the saddle.

  I looked up and saw Cecily’s face pressed to an oriel window and waved at her madly. Edward, his legs so much longer than I remembered, came tearing out the double doors, screaming, “She’s here! She’s here at last!” Mother and Cecily hurried out, Mother weeping with her arms wide open. I dismounted and threw myself into her embrace.

  “My darling girl. My darling, beautiful girl,” she kept saying as even Cecily hugged me and Edward patted my back so hard he almost hurt me. Over Mother’s shoulder, I saw Margaret run out, gesturing to me with our hand signals that meant, Miss you, love you!

  And so I was really in England at last. Not home, not ever home, but now on the dangerous wilderness path I must somehow learn to tread.

  CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

  During the rest of that terrible summer, I tried to settle into life in rural England, but I felt pent up with frustration and fury. Overseen by our strict tutor in the schoolroom with Edward and Cecily, I missed Gerald wretchedly and worried for my Irish uncles and Thomas. Mother had nearly sealed herself away, frantically writing letters to Uncle Leonard begging him to show Thomas mercy, for he had surrendered with hopes of a pardon and was being sent to England. She also wrote letters to Thomas Cromwell to spare my uncles and Thomas; letters to Princess Mary, whom Mother served when the princess was a child and not cast off yet by the king; letters to her cousin Henry Grey, who was at court.

  Alice Stinchcomb, to my amazement, contributed greatly to my worldly education. I gleaned from overhearing servants’ chatter that, though she used to be my deceased aunt’s maid, she was now Uncle Leonard’s mistress! And they said she would no doubt be cast off when he returned from his duties in Ireland and wed again. Such discarding of once desired mistresses, I learned then, was the way of the world, England’s noble and royal world, at least. Lord Clinton’s wife, Bessie Blount, had been cast off by the king, and it was said Anne Boleyn had more power over King Henry before they were wed than when she was queen and bore his child.

  Whenever I could get outside with Magheen or Margaret in tow, I took walks along the fringe of forest, for we were not permitted to go into it nor ride about the estate on our own. I had been told I must stay within the waist-high stone wall. Uncle Leonard’s man Bates—Fulk was his given name—remained my shadow, though he kept a ways back.

  Today, as I strode out with Margaret into the meadow rippling with thigh-high grass and white oxeye daisies, I remembered crossing the Irish Sea, standing at the prow of the ship with Lord Edward Clinton, the king’s man. On this warm, late-autumn day, the shade of the tall oaks in the forest beckoned me. I turned to Margaret, pointed at the opening in the fence, and said, “That way.”

  She shook her head and made the signs for, “Mother, no,” but I kept going. I knew she and Bates would follow. If he ordered me back, I was not in a humor to heed him, for I was desperate for diversion. The forest ahead of us adjoined the two Grey properties. Farther on lay an alabaster stone quarry, the recently vacated Grace Dieu nunnery, and a priory, one that, I’d heard, had fed nearly one hundred peasants last year during a drought.

  That merciful act reminded me of some of the charity our own family had extended to Irish cotters and villagers in terrible times. But now, with the Geraldines out of Ireland, we feared struggles for power would mean our poor people could have their crops ruined and towns raided. Irish families like the O’Donnels, the Butlers, the O’Briens, and the Desmonds resented not only one another but the occupying English soldiers, and the wild Gaelic chieftains were always out to plunder what they could.

  Feeling trapped here, like a dog in a kennel, I heaved a huge sigh. I had not even seen any of the places near Beaumanoir, let alone the royal court in London, which was my true aim.

  We evidently startled a family of rabbits, for they bounded off. No, they were hopping at us and past us, not away, and I soon reckoned why. Through the ground I felt then heard hoofbeats, a goodly number of horses, and the yipping of hounds. Someone must be hunting nearby.

  Two stags with full racks of antlers lunged from the trees. At least six riders exploded behind them. Rather than leaping the stone fence, the two stags bolted through the opening I was heading for, and the riders funneled through after them as if they would mow us down.

  Bates shouted something I could not discern. I pulled Margaret
behind me, then waved my arms over my head and screeched like a banshee. The first stag barely missed us as he tore past, his eyes wide in his frenzy. The second veered away, running along this side of the fence. The barking pack of hounds rushed past, one knocking into my skirts, then bouncing off as they pursued their prey.

  But the man and woman leading the hunt party reined in, as did their five liveried servants. I did not need to read the colors or the crests to know who they were. Henry and Frances Grey, the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset, to use their proper titles, had returned from London. When Mother heard that, she would be in a fret about how long we should wait before paying them a visit.

  I glanced over my shoulder to be sure Bates was all right. Then, as those who were our kin and yet our betters looked down on us from their lofty heights, I pulled Margaret into a deep curtsy beside me. I had not yet met the Greys, for they had been away at court since I’d been in England. They seemed a bit mismatched, she so stocky and he so thin. A rhyme I’d learned as a child pranced through my head: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. And so between them both, you see, they licked the platter clean.

  He said to her, “Not the sort of deer we were wanting to catch, eh, my dear?”

  She snorted a laugh, then muttered, “It’s the mute Geraldine girl and the one who went missing.”

  “Yes, my lady,” I said, squinting into the sun to look up at them and rising slowly from my curtsy. “This is Margaret, and I am Elizabeth, called Gera.”

  “She’s a beauty,” Lord Grey said, pointing at me with his riding crop. “Would that our Jane would turn out so well but be properly behaved. Such a shame about the rest of them.”

  I assumed he meant my family and felt insulted that they spoke of us as if they were assessing horses to be bought or sold. I stemmed a sharp retort and said, “Since you have new come from London, have you heard word of my Fitzgerald uncles in the Tower or my brother, Thomas, Earl of Kildare?”

  “You’ve been attainted, all of you,” Lord Grey said with a dour look, though mayhap that was ever his expression.

  They both looked down at me so haughtily I did not admit I couldn’t fathom exactly what that meant. I knew our family name was tainted with what had happened. I suddenly pitied their little daughter for having parents who were so cold that an icy breeze seemed to blow from them. And since this woman was King Henry’s niece, I knew now what the Tudors must be like.

  I swallowed my pride and forced myself to say, “I know my mother would be honored to receive you, my lord and my lady. Can you not come to the house for refreshment and talk to her of London and the court?”

  “Not when we’ve been cooped up at Whitehall and Richmond for weeks on end,” Lord Grey said. “But do tell her she should keep a better eye on such a pretty maid—more than one guard and one other woman at least with you at all times, and not one deaf and dumb. Now you’ve cost us two fine stags, but I’d wager you will cost other stags much more than that over the years, eh, Mistress Fitzgerald?”

  His wife laughed as he spurred his horse away with the other men in pursuit. For one moment more, the king’s niece frowned down at me, then galloped away too. With her swarthy skin and manly jowls, she was not an attractive woman, but I warranted that with her royal blood, she was a catch for any man. Her mother, Mary, King Henry’s sister, had been so beautiful that she’d been called “the Tudor Rose.” She had once been the queen of France, wed to an old, sick man. But when he died, she’d married a man she desired, Charles Brandon, now Duke of Suffolk, a great friend of the king. So how, I thought, had the great love of two no doubt handsome people created this plain, rude, and frowning woman?

  Pulling Margaret along and with Fulk Bates this time walking at my side, I hied myself back toward redbrick Beaumanoir. Bates did not scold me for heading toward the forest. Perhaps he pitied us for how we’d been treated or felt sad that our name had been tainted on top of all our other trials.

  “At least, at last, my Gera, you cannot say you have seen no one of importance,” Mother said the moment we went in through the side door. “The gardener sent word to the house of the approach of the Greys and said they were speaking with you. I was most disappointed they did not stop here, but they are mad for the hunt.”

  I realized that Cecily and Edward must still be at their lessons. But Mother had evidently seen us coming back to the manor and rushed downstairs to greet us, for she was flushed and out of breath. “I intend to ask them directly for help, for it seems . . . it seems,” she stammered, flourishing a letter I saw was not in her handwriting, “that your uncle Leonard has been pressed by debts incurred in the Irish insurrection and has seen fit to strip Maynooth of its furnishings and sell them to recoup losses.”

  “No!” I cried, balling up my fists at my sides. “Everything we had? I hope that doesn’t mean Wynne! The library books too?”

  “But they have searched high and low for The Red Book of Kildare,” she went on, ignoring my outburst. “He asks if I know where it could have gone or been hidden. Dear God in heaven, if they find that, they will have the list of all our precious goods, our rental records, and the names of our kin and retainers. Oh, where could it have gone?”

  “I believe it was hidden somewhere on the grounds,” I told her.

  “But who knows where? Would Gerald?”

  I shrugged. I had never lied to my mother before and tried to tell myself it wasn’t really such a lie because I had hidden the book on the grounds—these grounds, Lord Leonard’s very grounds, under a big yew hedge out by the fishpond full of trout. I also had convinced myself that no one but Magheen and I should know of its location, for it might put others in danger, especially Geraldine loyalists listed in the book. Mother was desperate to protect her own family, so who knew what she might be willing to bargain for our safety, and I was coming to trust no one. If a foster brother and an uncle could turn traitor, such deceit must run rampant.

  “But what news from our Grey cousins?” she asked me. “You should have asked them in for a visit, so I could learn the latest news from London.”

  “I did invite them and ask them. They said we were tainted, or I think the word was attainted, all of us, but I knew that, so—”

  Crushing the letter to her breasts, she swayed back against the wall. “Tainted or attainted?” she asked, her flushed face going ashen.

  “Yes, that was it. Attainted.”

  “That means we all stand accused with the men, all of us,” she whispered, and pulled Margaret and me to her so hard I almost could not breathe.

  Margaret was making hands signals for, What? Tell me!

  “Does that mean we are all going to the Tower?” I demanded. “All of us?”

  “I don’t know. Surely not, but . . . I don’t know. I must write my brother and the Greys. I must write the king again.”

  Loosing us, she lifted her skirts and rushed up the staircase to the hall from which we heard her chamber door slam. Margaret patted my arm, leaned close, and mouthed nearly in my face, What? What?

  “Nothing new,” I told her, moving my lips deliberately. “Just that we are all Irish rebels.”

  But something cold had coiled in the pit of my belly, worse than how I’d felt before. Now that Mother took refuge in her rooms and in her endless letters to our enemies, and now that I had seen so much of Tudor evil, I must become a mother to Margaret and help protect Edward, whose life could be endangered as one in line to the Irish earldom—especially if Thomas were executed or Gerald was captured.

  “Come on then,” I told Margaret as she watched my lips make each word. “Let’s walk inside so we won’t be hit with rabbits or hounds or Greys.”

  I don’t know if she truly caught all I said, but she nodded, and, until Alice summoned us to supper, we paced the oak-paneled gallery like the prisoners we soon might be.

  During that autumn and winter, Uncle Leonard stayed in Ireland to settle things down, and the trial of Father’s five brothers and Thomas b
egan in London. Mother wrote her letters, which I imagined Beaumanoir’s London messenger must be shredding in the forest en route, for she never received a reply, as if everyone had deserted our cause. The Fitzgeralds, all of us, were attainted, which meant we were accused of treasonous activities against the crown, so we were more or less under house arrest.

  But, indeed, the outside world continued to revolve: Queen Anne was arrested for horrid sins against the king, such as adultery and witchcraft and even incest. In the sweet spring of May 1536, she was found guilty and beheaded in the Tower, where my uncles awaited their fate. Anne Boleyn’s child, Elizabeth, was declared a bastard, while the king the very next day became betrothed to Jane Seymour. Ah, I could have warned Queen Anne and her daughter about that madman king, for I had seen such family treachery at close range—all spawned by the terrible Tudor.

  In July of that year, we heard that the king’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, aged seventeen, had died of the wasting disease some called consumption. I hoped the king suffered sore from that loss, though, I must admit, I sorrowed that Lord Edward Clinton, who had mentioned to me that his stepson was ill, must be grieving too.

  Meanwhile, for those long months I prayed, even on my knees, for someone to ride into our rural prison who could help me somehow gain access to that king so I could harm him in any way possible. And then, one cold, windy, and rain-swept day that year—early October, it was—my prayers were finally answered. Delivered to our doorstep was the very one, if I’d had the power, I would have chosen out of all the Tudor world.