The Irish Princess

by Karen Harper

  Gerald and I had decided that Magheen and Collum were never to be parted again, so Collum came home with me, though should Gerald be permitted to return to Ireland, they would both go with him. I was happy for the reunion of our two Fitzgerald servants, so faithful all these years. And I was ecstatic to have Edward with me for several days when we had previously had to snatch at minutes and hours.

  The two of us dawdled over goblets of wine and a late dinner when everyone else had gone to bed. Never one to go’round Robin’s barn, Edward pulled me onto his lap as we sat near the fire and said, “I hope you agree that, like Magheen and Collum, we need to make plans never to be parted again, that is, when I am not at sea.”

  “Is that a proposal, Lord High Admiral?”

  “It is, if you can abide a sea captain. I think, my Gera, you will not be jealous of my mistresses, ships and the sea, for you love them too.”

  “I do.”

  “Then will you say with me ‘I do’ in public?”

  “Not at court again.”

  “No, not at court. At Sempringham, then to repeat our vows someday at your Maynooth.”

  “You have been talking to Gerald to know that name.”

  “No, I was at the council meeting where the deed was restored to him and his future heirs. But all the way across the channel, I was questioning Gerald and Collum about your past in Ireland. I did not know all of you had suffered so much. I wager they suspected from the first that my interest in the fair Geraldine was very personal.”

  “But there is something I must tell you before we—I—can make plans.”

  “Say on, but we cannot live in Ireland, and, I’m afraid, neither can Gerald yet, though we can work on that together—with the Duke of Northumberland, whom you must at least get on with, if not obey.”

  I looked down at our hands with fingers intertwined in my lap. His hand rested heavily on the juncture of my thighs through the thickness of my gown. But I must keep my mind on what I would say.

  “Gera, what?” he prompted, lifting my chin with his free hand. “Is there some impediment, some arrangement with another? If there is, I’m afraid I will have to kill him.”

  “I am barren, Edward. When I lost my second son . . .” My lower lip quivered and tears blinded me. For a moment I could not go on.

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” he whispered.

  “It isn’t! The physician told me he was quite certain I would never bear another child, and you have such fine families. I may be yet of childbearing age, but you need to know I cannot bear you a child.”

  He pulled me into his embrace. Always, I felt lost in his arms, and yet there I also seemed to find myself.

  “Gera,” he crooned, rocking me a bit, “I did not know, but that’s not really what I want from you. You won’t have my children then, but you will always have my heart. I wed Bessie to please the king and Ursula to please John Dudley. But you please me for myself. I am asking you to be my wife, till death us do part.”

  I sat up, lifted my head, and looked at him straight in the eyes. “You want me to wife despite the fact that the people you must yet please surely think I’m a flaming rebel?”

  “You are a flaming rebel, my love, and I wouldn’t have you any other way—and I long to have you in every possible way.”

  “Is that a lewd offer, my Edward?” I asked, sitting up and smiling through my tears. I wiggled my hips on his lap a bit and saw dark fires light in both his eyes.

  “It is, Irish, for I think much deeper relations—foreign affairs, in effect—should be fostered between the Irish and the English, beginning right now—and evermore.”

  To that proposal and proposition, I simply said, “Amen!”

  I was to wed Sir Edward Fiennes Clinton, Garter Knight and Lord High Admiral, Privy Council member—also governor of the Tower of London, I’m afraid—at his manor of Sempringham in Lincolnshire almost a year after Gerald came to England. We would have married much sooner, but Edward was sent to sea again. Meanwhile, I sold Byfleet and moved with Margaret, Alice, Magheen, and Collum to Sempringham.

  I became acquainted with the Clinton children, especially the three youngest: Anne, who was five; Thomas, four; and little Frances, but a toddler. I had them moved from Kyme to Sempringham and spent hours with them each day, also making friends with their caretakers, Edward’s cousins, Lettice and Neville Clinton, who were a good ten years older than I but had no offspring of their own. I vowed to rear Edward’s youngest three when we were in Lincolnshire, where they would live until we found a suitable home in or near London.

  Though I longed for Edward at my side the months he was at sea, with a small entourage of servants I rode Kildare about the area, taking small gifts to folk who owed my lord allegiance, something I had learned long ago from watching my parents visit their people. I took some pretty pewter pieces to the shepherd and his wife who had helped us the night we fled King Henry’s great northern progress, and I stood as sponsor to their twins when they were baptized in the church.

  I read and reread Edward’s barrage of notes to me, sent by ship and horse as if he were afraid I would forget him or change my mind. I used the purse of money he had given me and my profits from Byfleet to buy manor furnishings from Lincoln and London. As best I could, missing Edward as I did, I enjoyed the wild beauties of the area that reminded me so much of my own home, taking Margaret, Magheen, and Alice to pick fresh flowers and walk the shady lanes. And I waited for my mariner to come home to me.

  Finally, on October 1, 1552, we married in the small chapel at the manor, all bedecked in autumn flowers, and had a wedding banquet with Mason Haverhill and Edward’s most important local liege men and all his—now our—children. Through his three daughters by Bessie Blount, Edward was a grandfather, and I had to laugh to be introduced to the little ones as Grandmother. I, who had no children of my own and, but for Mabel, whom I missed terribly, had no lasting bonds of affection with Anthony’s brood, was of a sudden not only Mama to Edward’s three youngest, but also a grandmother!

  Most important of all, I was Lady Clinton, lost in a whirl of love and laughter. I savored each moment with my husband—a month he had promised me for a honeymoon—and quite forgot, for once, the dangerous demons who lurked in the real world. I even set our table with the etched and gilded Venetian goblets John Dudley sent us for a gift. Gerald, who was avidly courting Mabel in London, had sent us a French tapestry, when I had longed for good stout Irish linen, but then, how would he get that?

  Oh, yes, Edward taught me to swim in our fishpond, too, so that, as he said, “The next time you take a dive into the Thames or the Irish Sea, no one will have to fish you out.”

  “I have two more gifts for you,” Edward whispered to me in our big bed the morning after the service and celebration. “One of them just arrived this morning—I hope.”

  “Mm,” I said, cuddling back against his strong, naked body, never wanting to get up even for more gifts. He had already given me a triple-strand pearl necklace and a new saddle for Kildare, as well as a white satin night robe embroidered with green shamrocks. “Let’s just be slugabeds and stay here all day,” I said, exhausted but utterly sated from our wild night of lovemaking.

  “I’m starved,” he said, and tickled me. “But you will like these things, I promise.”

  “I like everything you give me,” I said, turning toward him and holding tight.

  “Well, perhaps later, then, for the gifts . . .”

  He chuckled and began to nibble at me again, his tongue wetting a hot streak down my throat. I had never fathomed wedded love could be like this: mutual, consuming. And then I heard a dog bark.

  “Ah,” he said, pulling back, which spilled chill air into our little cocoon of covers, “I believe the gifts are here, one of them, at least. Haverhill rode to meet a ship to fetch them.”

  “Oh, a pet dog? Well, I shall need all the company I can get when you go to sea, since you cannot take me with you—or will not.”

 
“Let’s not have our first argument, love. And yes, it is a pet dog, the kind Magheen said you would like so—”

  “A wolf hound? Did she tell you about my dear old boy Wynne?”

  “Yes, but this is a female straight from Ireland, one named Erin, I understand, but if you wish to change her na—”

  “Oh, Edward, my love!” I leaped from the bed, dragging the top coverlet around my nakedness and rushing to open the bedchamber door. Collum and Magheen stood there, a small wolfhound in Collum’s arms. I shocked myself by bursting into tears as I cuddled the little mite. All those years I had to leave Wynne behind, and then my uncle Leonard brought him to Beaumanoir, perhaps to make up for his betrayal of our family. The night I had to flee Maynooth and leave Wynne behind . . . all I had to leave behind . . .

  “Oh, my love, I can never thank you enough,” I cried, turning to hug my husband with one arm as he appeared in the hall wrapped in yet another coverlet.

  “Best tell her the other, Collum,” Edward said.

  “Ay, milord. Besides this pup, his lordship sent to Dublin for an Irish namhóag, much like the one you and Gerald used to row on the Lyreen,” he said as Magheen beamed at his side and I cuddled Erin in my arms. “It’s a big one, though, with a mast and a sail. ’Tis out on dry land in the courtyard, but—”

  “But we will put it in the river here and go for a sail,” Edward said as he reached in to scratch the puppy behind her ears.

  “You’ve given me so much,” I told him as I swiped at my happy tears.

  “And maybe, someday,” he said, reaching out to cup my wet cheek in a big hand, “a trip to Ireland to find Erin a mate and find the past you Fitzgeralds left behind.”

  But, as ever, my happy times were so fragile. The next summer, just when Edward had returned yet again from sea to spend several weeks with all of us at Sempringham, word came that the young king, who had been ailing, was sick unto death. We hastened back to London, where I rented rooms for us while Edward attended crisis council meetings.

  I could tell that even Edward was now doubting the morality of Dudley’s tight hold on the king, for he allowed few admittance to the king’s chambers at Greenwich. I wondered perversely if he had moved the king into the secret, small rooms behind every royal chamber that the boy’s father had built.

  “Gera! Gera!” Edward called to me, bursting back into our bedroom after he’d been gone only several hours this time. He sailed back and forth between London and Greenwich, where the council had hunkered down for now. I sat at a small desk with Erin asleep on my lap, writing a note to go with gifts for our three youngest children back in Lincolnshire. My husband nearly shouted, “King Edward has signed a document setting the succession of his sisters aside!”

  I jolted so hard, I bent the nib of my quill and splattered ink on the page. Erin jumped to the floor and began to yip, running in circles. For once we ignored the pet we both fussed over. I saw Edward was truly distraught as he began to pace with Erin at his heels. He had been worried that his longtime mentor would lose his power when Mary became queen, but if Mary—and Elizabeth—were set aside, did that not mean civil war?

  “Set the princesses aside in favor of whom?” I demanded, jumping up and hurrying to him. “Dudley himself?”

  “Not exactly. Hell’s gates, now I know why he arranged for his son Guildford to wed Jane Grey.” He threw his hat on the bed and raked his fingers through his hair. “The ailing king—he’s in great distress and pain—has signed a document leaving the realm to Guildford and Jane, since Jane is of Tudor blood. The new will completely cuts out the Tudor sisters.”

  I sucked in a huge sob. My husband, usually so stalwart and strong, was shaking and looked stricken to his very soul. I sympathized with him in his betrayal by someone he trusted—oh, yes, I knew how that felt. Years ago I would not have believed I could be in anguish over King Henry’s children being set aside, but this was wrong, so wrong.

  “Then Dudley plans to rule through his son and Jane,” I whispered, my mind racing.

  “I fear so. I told him I don’t like it, but he said to stay in line, or he’d revoke my admiralty command and ruin your brother’s chances to regain his title. He’s . . . he’s stepped over his own line of sanity, morality.”

  I bit my lip to keep from screaming, I told you so! Years ago, I could have told you so!

  “I’ve been so loyal to him all these years,” Edward plunged on, “and owe him so much. He’s been almost like the father I lost so young. At least this will keep England from a half-Spanish queen rumored to want to wed Spanish royalty.”

  “And it overturns King Henry’s will.”

  “A will Dudley claims was never legally signed—or rather that the king cut his signature off later when he reconsidered the succession of mere women.”

  “Mere women!” I muttered, hating Dudley even more. I collapsed on the coffer at the foot of the bed and put my head in my hands, not picking up Erin, who pawed at my slippers. I broke out into a sweat. I had that royal signature, but it had been dug up yet again with The Red Book of Kildare and hidden under floorboards in the corner of this very bedroom. I planned to give the book into Gerald’s care and knowledge only when and if he sailed for Ireland, for I knew he had been questioned about its location and contents already. But the king’s signature had been made by what was called a dry stamp and then inked in by someone. Dudley could claim it was a forgery, and he already suspected that I had done something amiss with his dagger the night the king died. What if he reasoned that I could have the signature he did not want found?

  “You cannot support this,” I said, looking up at Edward. “What are we going to do?”

  “I have orders to fortify the Tower, in case it comes to a fight. Jane and Guildford are being moved there soon for their safety, and because monarchs always stay there before coronations. Northumberland—”

  “I knew he was a very devil,” I shouted, leaping to my feet. “Mayhap you will go back to just calling him Dudley now. You cannot play his game. Fortify the Tower? And be prepared to fight there, I suppose, against Mary Tudor and those rightfully loyal to her?” I knew I was losing control, but I could not help it. I sounded like a fishmonger’s wife. Whining, Erin had retreated under the bed.

  “Gera, I need you to swear you will be loyal to whatever I must do through this. I know you have hated Dudley for years, even transferred your wish for revenge to him when King Henry died, but he did save your life.”

  “Saved the life of a mere woman, after aiding and abetting the immoral, brutal, and publicly shameful deaths of my half brother, the Earl of Kildare, and my uncles—all of them. After my father died in that very hellhole of the Tower which you are willing to go to fortify!”

  “I can’t help all that. I want your solemn vow you will do nothing to endanger your position or mine in this! We will have to find our way through this crisis, all of us, the kingdom, Northumberland, you and I, the former princesses Mary and Elizabeth.”

  “Former? Dudley may be able to coerce the king to that, but not the kingdom! I don’t put it past Dudley to have signed the so-called will himself for that poor, sick boy!”

  “How nice that you are now standing up for the current Tudor ruler and his Tudor sisters! I’m going now, Gera. Stay here and stay safe if the streets become dangerous. There are crowds and factions forming. Promise me!” he repeated, and seized my shoulders hard to give me a little shake.

  “I promise you I will do what I must—what I should—as you should.”

  “Don’t make me lock you in here, Irish.”

  “Why not, Dudley’s man? The English have locked up the Fitzgeralds for years, locked them out of their properties and homeland!”

  “I am leaving two guards downstairs. Gera, please don’t let this come between us. It has been my greatest—my only—fear for us.”

  “You might know Dudley would threaten Gerald while he claws his way to power over the body of a sick boy and the rightful royal heritage of two mere
women!”

  Edward went out and slammed the door. I heard his voice, but not what he said, as he spoke to someone.

  I threw myself on our bed and beat the mattress with my fists and sobbed so hard I could barely breathe. I could not believe I had defied and screamed at the man I loved. Everything I had closed up inside so long had come pouring out. And what else shocked me was that, though I had hated Henry Tudor and his henchman Dudley all these years, I, whom my father once called the Irish princess, and who had been deprived of my birthright, was firmly for the Tudor women in their claim to the English throne.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH

  LONDON

  July 6, 1553

  I made myself stop sobbing and sat up on the bed. Erin came out from underneath it with her head cocked, as if to ask me what all that had been about. I patted the mattress and she jumped up, using the mounting stool we had placed there for her.

  As I hugged the dog, I detested myself for losing my Irish temper with Edward, especially when he needed my support and advice, albeit more calmly, cleverly couched. I had shouted like a shrew. Perhaps he was staying loyal to Dudley partly because that bastard had threatened both his admiralty position and Gerald, which, of course, would have hurt me too. Whatever Edward’s reasons, I refused to stay here while events that affected me and my family went on. I was no longer a girl who could merely watch a parade go by, taking my dear ones to their deaths. I would go to Edward and find some way we could help Mary and Elizabeth. What I saw happening to them had happened to me in Ireland—dispossession and defeat.

  When I peeked out through the keyhole, I saw a guard I did not know, sitting on the floor across the hall. Collum would not have stood for this, but he had gone out with Magheen and Alice to market. Saint Brigid, but an Englishman—even one I loved—was not going to hold a Geraldine prisoner in her own bedroom, not even a second-story one.