The Irish Princess

by Karen Harper

  CHAPTER THE TENTH

  LONDON

  July 16, 1537

  As we rode through the ornate Aldersgate entrance to the city, I was so excited that, for once, I could barely speak. Not only were we in London, close to the king, but we were to stay in a house once lived in by his sister, Mary, “the Tudor Rose,” who had wed the Duke of Suffolk, and the house now actually belonged to the king himself! How I hoped that Henry Tudor might visit while we were there. Then I could enact my swift and sure revenge—though, of course, Mother and I would try humbling ourselves first to plead prettily for the pardoning of our family members. I was young then, so young and so foolish.

  “Are we to pass the Tower itself?” I asked Bates as we turned from Cheapside onto Bread Street. He had lived in London in the service of the duke, so was a great source of information I hoped to put to good use. He had ridden beside me nearly all the way, as if his horse’s flanks were sewn to my mare’s.

  He raised his voice to be heard over the hubbub of street hawkers. “No one of import or sense in London rides about the streets if they can take the Thames. We’ll be ferried from the water stairs at the bottom of the street, but you’ll see the Tower in the distance—and from the upper floors of Suffolk House. The house lies on the far side of London Bridge, nearly across from the Tower. And the bridge is cheek by jowl like this too, so don’t you be begging to ride across it.”

  With all his scolding and fussing over me, Bates was starting to sound like my brother Gerald, whom I missed so much. We’d received glad news that Gerald had been safely spirited out of Ireland and was in France, probably heading for Italy. I recalled that, despite our dangers during the siege of Maynooth, he’d blurted out that he would be thrilled to see the continent. Well, I was thrilled to see London at long last, and that would have to do for a female Geraldine, one with a purpose if yet no plan.

  All the way within the city, three-storied houses and shops leaned over our heads as if they would tumble down upon us. We passed livery stables, hostelries, and inns with fantastical names, such as the Serpent’s Head or the Keys and Crowns, all with painted signs that bore the replicas of their names but no written words. Margaret would have found those signs a help to know what lay within. And the smells and sounds, sweet or rank, everything from yeast breads and herbal nosegays to swine being herded past and the contents of last night’s slop jars thrown into the central channel of the street.

  Bates pointed out apprentices in blue smocks darting hither and yon on errands for their masters. I could easily pick out gaudily garbed gallants who swaggered down the streets, elbowing others out of their way with a curt, “By your leave.” Several strumpets with their skirts hiked up and breasts nearly falling from their tight bodices displayed themselves with the rest of the wares.

  “Hot mutton pies!” came the continued cries from hawkers with ramshackle booths or wooden trays of items strapped to their bodies, including pick-tooths and pin cases. “Live periwinkles! Fresh herring! Seville oranges!” And where was Seville? I wondered. I had so much to learn. “Any wood to cleave?” came the cry of a man with a hatchet. “What do ye lack? What do ye lack?”

  “We lack the Fitzgerald men,” I muttered with a glance at Mother and Cecily, who rode just behind. My sister had even put her book away to gawk. But all too soon we were at the water’s edge of the broad gray Thames where the cries became, “Oars east!” or “Oars west!”

  “East!” Bates shouted at a man with a barge that could also take horses, but then our party was large enough that he also had to hire a second barge for our other guards and luggage.

  I liked being out on the wide river, with its panoramic view of shops, houses, and great buildings—countryside too. I knew we were headed for an area called Southwark, so I peered in that direction. The breeze blew brisk here, and the waves and four oarsmen rocked the craft a bit. The water was so crowded that they had to avoid wherries, galleys, and other craft I could not begin to name. A far cry, I thought, from sailing the sea. A great wave of homesickness assailed me— for our little boat in the River Lyreen, for Gerald at the helm of it, and . . . and then Edward Clinton’s face flashed through my mind.

  Mother, Cecily, and Alice stayed seated on a crude single bench, but Bates came to stand by me where I held on to the railing. “There,” he said, pointing ahead. “London Bridge—”

  “Are those shops built right on it?” I asked, amazed.

  “And houses. As for the Tower, you can only see its turrets and pennants from here, that monstrosity of pale stone.”

  “It’s more than one tower,” I marveled, squinting into the breeze. “I wonder which one Thomas and my uncles are kept in.”

  “And on the other side,” he said, all too obviously to change the topic as he pointed again, “Suffolk House.”

  It was not a house at all, for it was larger than Maynooth or Leixlip castles, if not as tall. We had been told that the king had recently traded another London residence with Charles Brandon for it. No wonder Mother had been delighted that her cousin Henry Grey had arranged for us to stay there. Perhaps, she thought—for she was ever grasping at straws—our permission to lodge here was a sign the king was softening toward the Fitzgeralds.

  As we alighted from the ferry, I saw that redbrick, sprawling Suffolk House dominated the surrounding shops and tiled or thatched houses. Only the Church of St. Saviour seemed to hold its own space, though beyond lay acres of fields. In the central cobbled courtyard, windows gleamed down at us like blinking eyes. After we dismounted, I pulled my gaze away from the vast expanse of brick, ivy, and glass just in time to see Mother waver on her feet.

  Cecily and I leaped forward to steady her and seat her on the wide lip of the central fountain. Alice wetted a cloth in it and dabbed at Mother’s forehead as the July sun beat down. The large door into the courtyard opened, and a man who announced himself as the house steward—wearing green-and-white Tudor livery, no less—came out to meet us and extended his hand. No, it was a piece of folded parchment for Mother. It bore a red wax seal with a looped ribbon stuck in that.

  “Let us go inside,” Alice urged, but Mother only nodded and opened the missive where she sat.

  “A welcome from the king himself?” Cecily whispered, leaning close to catch a glimpse of the writing. “Or word you finally have the interview with him or Lord Cromwell that you have been so hoping for?”

  “I regret to say,” the steward broke in, “that it would be best for your ladyship and companions to return to Leicestershire on the morrow. We sent a rider to find you on the road and tell you to turn back, but he must have missed you. Of course, you may stay the night.”

  My stomach twisted in foreboding. I too hovered close as, with trembling hands, Mother broke the seal. Cecily and I helped her to hold the stiff parchment open. I could tell Cecily read it faster than I or Mother, for she gasped. And I . . . I wanted to scream and pull down this vast pile of bricks one by one and throw them at everyone in London, starting with the king’s steward of Suffolk House.

  For the paper we three women skimmed, signed Henry R in a big, bold scrawl with flourishes, was actually from the Privy Council and countersigned Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal. It read, in part (I have it yet today, though I cannot bear to look upon it),Act of Attainder of Treason Declared and So Ratified by the Privy Council and here signed by His Majesty, King Henry VIII, by the grace of God, King of England and Lord of Ireland, against the rebellious and insubordinate and traitorous Irish family of Gerald Fitzgerald, 9th earl: to wit, Thomas, 10th earl and his five uncles, now prisoners of the realm adjudged guilty, having had a lawful trial, and against Gerald, 11th earl, and their close kin both in the English realm and the Irish realm. Seeing that the blood of the Geraldines is corrupted toward the crown of England, be it enacted and established by the authority of the present Parliament and the Privy Council that said rebels against the lawful English crown and their liege lord, King Henry VIII, by the grace of God, King of England and L
ord of Ireland, listed above shall be executed for said treasons and rebellions at Tyburn on July 17, the year of our Lord, 1537.

  “That’s on the morrow!” Cecily shrilled, and burst into tears.

  Mother swooned again, and Alice kept crying, “What is it? What?”

  And I blurted to the hovering steward and to Bates, who was wringing his cap in his hands, “Where, in Saint Brigid’s name, is Tyburn?”

  It was sheer nightmare from then on in London. That night, in the house and city and realm of the king, our enemy, despite my exhaustion I lay awake. I churned my side of the bed to huge ruffles as if they were waves on the sea. We three Fitzgerald women slept in the same room, in the same huge bed, though three chambers had been appointed for us, and Alice slept in a trundle near the door as if to guard us. Cecily, gently snoring, lay between Mother and me.

  It seemed not a breeze stirred, when I longed to feel sea wind and be rocked to sleep by the rise and fall of a ship, a ship heading home to Ireland. But I knew now that might never be. I could only pray my dear brother Gerald, who would unknowingly inherit the Fitzgerald earldom on the morrow, was safe and far away and could return someday. And I vowed to abet that any way I could.

  At last I slept, or thought I did, swimming in fear and fury. My blood pounded in my veins and head. . . . The blood of the Geraldines is corrupted toward the crown of England. We Geraldine women were named in the Act of Attainder and order for the executions of the men only as their close kin, so were we safe? Back to confinement at Beaumanoir while my other uncle—the traitor uncle Leonard Grey—stomped about Ireland arresting others where he had already tricked and betrayed Thomas and my uncles.

  The dream that haunted me drifted back. I tried to keep it at bay, the drowning, suffocating feel of it, but it was even worse. I was not in a boat this time but was swimming in the cellar of Maynooth while cannonballs shook the castle above me. Swimming not in water but in blood with heads bobbing past, not just Father’s now, but Thomas’s, Silken Thomas with green fringe over his head like a shroud, and Uncle James and the others . . . And one by one they raised their hands to try to grasp something before they were swept away, no—no, they were waving good-bye.

  I tried to reach out for them, seize them, save them, but I woke with a start when Cecily hit my shoulder and whispered, “Loose me! You’re hurting me!”

  I saw I gripped her wrist and pulled my hand back, only to feel my face slick with tears. When Cecily groaned and rolled over, I whispered, “Sorry!” but I resented her ability to sleep. I got up and padded barefoot and sweating to the window.

  Bates had been right. In the wan moonlight I could make out the dark silhouette of the Tower from here. To be so close and yet so far from our loved ones, yet not to be able to comfort them, to let them know that we—I, at least—would carry on and avenge their deaths and fight however I could to see Gerald returned to Ireland as earl someday. But Bates had said that Tyburn was far on the other side of the city, across the river, out in the country. That was good, I thought, though it meant there was no way then for us to glimpse our kin and wave them a farewell. At least men who loved green, green Ireland could gaze at meadows and trees and see the open sky away from all the hubbub of London before they died.

  If only I were a man grown! I would try to free them, but if I could not, I would be there near them, to let them know—

  Mother cried out in her sleep, and I saw Alice get up and go to her, as I did too. “Gera, I must hold him,” Mother whispered, and at first I feared she’d caught a fever that made her senseless. Or like me, was racked with nightmares. “I must hold your father to me and tell him I tried.”

  “Oh, the portrait,” I said, and went to her open traveling chest and felt through her unpacked things until I found Father’s small painted and framed likeness she had kissed each night even in the good times when he was away. I took it to her, crossing through a patch of moonlight, where he stared up at me, handsome, stern, commanding. I kissed it too before I gave it to her, and she closed her eyes and cuddled it close.

  I sat on the edge of Mother’s side of the bed until dawn dusted the sky. All four of us women looked like ghosts of ourselves that morning. Mother’s face had an almost greenish cast. We must start home right after breakfast, the king’s steward had said. We must be away. What a devastating first trip to London, I thought, but I vowed I would be back with a vengeance.

  The surprise of that dreadful execution day—the first surprise, that is—was that the king had sent a guard to be certain we left London and took the road toward Leicestershire. But we managed to get only as far as across the river and nearly to Aldersgate when Mother became nauseous and could not even ride.

  “I can’t go back across the river and cannot . . . cannot make it home,” she murmured as Bates got her dismounted at the sign of the Keys and Crown I recalled passing on our way in yesterday.

  “I’ll see if there’s a room where she can rest,” Bates told the royal guard as he and Cecily helped her inside. God forgive me, but I stood at the edge of the busy street a moment, tempted to jump back on my horse and ride westward, for I had gotten out of Bates where Tyburn was. He’d even told me that the long procession through the streets of those to be executed—evidently, to act as a warning to other would-be criminals and traitors against the crown—stopped for a respite at a place called High Holborn, and I reckoned we’d just passed High Market Street that would take me in that direction. But I must not distress Mother more than she already was. Besides, I’d wager the king’s guard would be up on his big steed and after me in a trice if I fled.

  That king’s man, frowning, took the reins of my horse and the others and handed them to our guards from Beaumanoir and told them to find a boy to hold them in the livery stables next door until he knew of Lady Fitzgerald’s condition. I supposed horses were for hire there too, or at the stables just down the way. Evidently not seeing that I tarried outside, he followed the others into the inn.

  Across the street I heard a ruckus, for a comely girl was shoving at a man and shouting loudly enough for everyone to hear, “If you touch me once more, I’ll tell my da you coupled wi’ me by force, and he’ll have your head. Now leave off, or I’ll tell him a pretty tale!”

  I went inside and nearly ran into Bates, coming back out at a trot. He’d obviously realized I had not come inside and was in a fret. “She’ll need some time lying down,” he said. “Hopefully we can set out in the forenoon so we are well out of here when the crowds swell.”

  “More crowded than it is already?”

  He shrugged, then nodded. I could tell I’d caught him at something.

  “Say on,” I demanded, grabbing his wrist.

  “It’s not only a main market day, but the crowds will be heading out toward Holborn and Tyburn, if you must know.”

  “To watch . . . to watch that? They don’t just take them off alone into the countryside to . . .”

  He shook his head. I should have known that would be the way of it in vile Henry’s city. If they paraded condemned prisoners through the streets for folks to see, crowds would flock to the hangings or beheadings, out in the countryside or not. The blood . . . the blood in my nightmares, the tainted blood of the Geraldines . . . the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, slain for us . . .

  “Lady Gera.” Bates’s voice broke into my agonizing as he grasped my arm to steady me. “You aren’t going to be sick too, are you?”

  “Sick to my very soul. Fulk Bates, you must help me. Of course I would not dare to go clear out to Tyburn, but I must glimpse the prisoners when they go past—near here, maybe at Holborn. Mother will be in bed, Alice and Cecily tending her, and we can slip away for a short while.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, pulling me off to the side of the common room, greatly deserted now, even of the king’s man, for perhaps he guarded Mother’s chamber door. “I’ve been ordered to keep a good watch on you—keep you safe, I mean.”

  I liked Bates, despite the fact that
he’d last served my uncle Leonard. He had a kind heart beneath it all. And he was a fount of information I needed. His wit was more for horses than for cleverness, but I knew he cared for me, and not only because he’d been paid or commanded to do so. Therefore, I felt almost guilty for what I did next, but I was desperate. And the fact that he’d let slip that he had been especially ordered to watch me gave me courage—and a certain insight.

  “I swear to you we will only watch the prisoners pass and then ride back,” I promised. “It can’t be far—it isn’t, is it? If you do not come with me, I swear I will tell them you have put your hands on me in a most untoward manner by force, and I a mere maid.”

  His eyes widened, and his jaw dropped open. “You . . . They’d not believe you.”

  “Really? Why do you think they said to keep a good eye on me? I wager it’s because my mother’s cousin Henry Grey said I need watching closely, either because I am pretty or wayward. And, heaven forbid, they must be thinking I’d make a bargain in the marriage market. Yes, I’ll tell my mother and the king’s man too.”

  Bates blanched, then blushed. If I had not just seen the young woman across the street tell a man to unhand her, I doubt if I would have thought of this ploy. I held my breath, thinking he might indeed try to stand against me.

  “All right,” he said, looking as if he’d be next to turn green at the gills. “But you, milady, got to swear you’ll not make a fuss and tell no one—ever.”

  “Of course not,” I vowed. Despite the tragedy of the day, I felt a tiny triumph that I had finally gotten my way.