The Irish Princess Page 11

  It turned out the king’s guard was next door at the livery stable, so I peeked in at Mother, who was sleeping, and told Cecily I was going to take some air with Bates as a guard. Not exactly a lie, I thought. She urged me to take my cloak and wear my hood up, so I did. We slipped out the back door and, with a few pence of my hoarded coins from the money Magheen and I had fled Maynooth with, I leased us a horse from the livery down the street. Just one mount, for, at the last minute, Bates insisted I ride pillion behind him or he would not go, but how I would have loved to ride my own horse, and astride too.

  We crossed the bridge over the River Fleet and clattered down Holborn Hill amidst growing, shoving crowds, with Bates nervously telling me where we were as if we were on a tour of the town.

  “We must be in time,” I interrupted his nervous chatter. “Surely we are ahead of the procession, not behind it.”

  “Heard tell they have a respite just beyond here.”

  Here seemed more a raucous fair than a sober crowd that was supposed to learn to obey the king today by viewing the condemned and their execution. Jugglers, drunks, dancing girls. Hawkers selling pigs’ ears and trotters and all the other singsong chants we had heard upon entering London yesterday surrounded us. Men hunkered down around a grass ring by the roadside, wagering on a cockfight where two fierce birds pecked and kicked at each other with tiny spurs on their feet. Blood flew faster than in a fistfight farther down the way.

  Bates reined in the horse and backed us into a small space between two shops from which people hung out the windows above us. I saw no church nearby but heard the slow, monotonous tolling of a distant bell, no doubt a death knell. The crowd hushed and heads turned and . . . there came the procession of the condemned en route to Tyburn. My stomach clenched; it was like a triumphal parade, and headed by a man with a scarlet sash around his chest and an unsheathed sword in his hand, who seemed to be the grand marshal of this obscene display.

  “Who is that man?” I asked Bates. “The constable of the Tower?”

  “Only seen him once when he was the king’s champion at a joust, but that’s John Dudley. Climbing fast in the king’s eyes, so’s I heard. Kind of his henchman in all things now, but works with Cromwell too.”

  Dudley! The very man Edward Clinton had called his mentor when I first met him on the ship to England. The man he’d mentioned in the same breath with Cromwell and the king the night he stopped at Beaumanoir carrying commands to put down the northern rebellion. Dear Lord in heaven, what if Clinton was here too?

  I saw no one else of such obvious import, but John Dudley’s image burned into my brain, florid face and pointed beard, scarlet sash, and a sword that might as well have been a pitchfork, for he reminded me of Satan. I added John Dudley—Clinton too now—to my list of enemies to be dealt with. King’s bootlickers! Killers, every one of them!

  But then John Dudley and everything else faded to nothing. Sounds muted; my vision blurred with tears. The scene now became my nightmare in broad day, not with heads floating past in blood, but at first I could see only the heads of my uncles and my half brother going by above the crowd as they sat in two separate carts. It seemed so unreal that for a moment I just gaped.

  The condemned—my dearly beloved—wore nooses about their necks, so were they to be hanged instead of beheaded or was that just tradition? Already they wore shrouds, which clung to their wasted forms. And then, as if someone were answering my unspoken question, I heard the dreadful words, “Hear tell they’re to be hanged, then cut down and quartered, cut up in parts like a piece of beef.”

  I nearly threw up. Yet it was now or never. Trembling, I managed to stand behind Bates on the horse’s rump and saw they sat on crudely made coffins, when Fitzgeralds were always buried with prayers and pomp. Guards rode before and behind, and constables ahorse were decked out in bright uniforms. Several guards were already eating meat pies and cheese as if on a countryside lark.

  Thomas was in the first cart with Uncle James and Uncle Walter, and the others rode in the second. Though the crowd, like me, seemed awed at first, I could tell they were going to explode with noise again. Mere mutterings rose from the rabble, a few raised fists, but cheers were building. I would have given the rest of my life to have saved them, but I could only think of one way to help send them bravely to their unfair fates.

  “A Geraldine!” I shouted our family battle cry and hit Bates’s hand away as he tried to make me sit down. “A Geraldine!”

  Thomas’s and Uncle James’s heads jerked up; their eyes sought me. I threw back my hood and, with one hand on Bates’s head to steady myself, cried out again, heedless of what the constables or guards would do, “A Ger-al-dine!”

  Thomas looked struck by lightning. Chains rattling, he stood. His haggard face lifted in a thin smile. All my uncles stood, raising manacled wrists to wave as if they were riding out of Maynooth for just a little while. I could read Uncle James’s lips; how much he looked like my father. I am certain he shouted to me, “Be brave! Stay safe! A Geraldine! A Geraldine!”

  I saw Dudley rein in and turn back, scanning the crowd, looking furious—probably looking for me—but I ignored him. I knew not whether people realized what we Irish were shouting, but they picked up the battle cry, perhaps thinking it was calling down curses on the condemned. As the two carts rolled away with all six Fitzgerald men standing and looking back at me in wonderment with fists upraised, the crowd erupted with the cry, “A Geraldine! A Geraldine!”

  Bates pulled me down behind him and urged the horse away before we could be singled out. Bucking the screaming crowd, we rode back in the direction we had come. Though racked with sobs, I felt I had won the first skirmish in my war against the Tudors and their lackeys.

  CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

  HUNSDON HOUSE, ESSEX

  July 12, 1539

  “It seems you hold all the cards again, Lady Gera!” Susan Clarencieux cried as she tossed hers down in defeat. “The luck of the Irish!”

  My gaze met Lady Mary Tudor’s across the little gaming table where four of us sat playing Primero. We were not to call her princess, for she and her sister, Elizabeth, had not been reinstated in the line of succession. But here at Hunsdon, we did at times address Mary as Your Grace and not just my lady. Mary gave a small shake of her head, and I knew she silently commiserated with me for that careless comment about the luck of the Irish. The fact that my mother had once served in Mary’s household years ago, when Mary had not yet suffered so in the loss of her father’s fickle attentions, made her, I think, almost protective of me.

  Besides, at age sixteen, I was the youngest lady in attendance here. Twelve used to be the minimum age for a girl to be accepted for a court position, though I had heard Queen Jane Seymour had raised that to age sixteen. I was fully aware I was not at court, but here with Mary in her rural exile. Despite how I was saddened that poor Queen Jane had died bearing the king a prince, I reveled in the thought that Henry Tudor was grieving for the loss of one he loved!

  In the few weeks I had been at rural Hunsdon with Mary Tudor and her household of forty-two (which sounded large to me until I learned that, when she was considered heir to the throne, she had nearly three hundred), I had learned she was full of surprises. My expectation that she would be dominating and rude was wide of the mark. Indeed, she was fun-loving, gentle, and kind, though I could tell she, like me, had suffered much.

  She was chestnut haired, and it was said Mary’s coloring was a blend of her Spanish mother’s skin and her palefaced father’s. She had recently turned twenty-three, but she looked and seemed older than her years. Quite nearsighted, she frowned to see at a distance, which gave her lines upon her forehead that aged her. Her petite stature and form seemed so at odds with her deep, almost mannish voice. But most surprising of all, I could see she too feared her royal sire’s whims and commands, even from afar. How she had suffered with her poor mother, Catherine of Aragon, when the king had thrown them both aside to have Anne Boleyn.


  In short, though I tried to detest her, I could not. I remained wary of her, as if feeling my way through the dark tunnel of Maynooth. My plan now was to befriend the king’s daughter so that I might someday get closer to her father. I must strike at the root of the evil tree, not its branches—unless that could harm Henry himself.

  Besides, truth be told, Lady Mary tried to entertain those of us living with her, and I had not had such good pastimes in years, not that it made me forget the Fitzgerald troubles. Mary was generous with her allowance, so much so that she was oft in debt and had to petition Cromwell, who held the purse strings for the king, for funds. She loved sharing things with her ladies and the few visitors she was allowed: good food and music, gambling money and beautiful clothes. She had ordered two lovely gowns made for me, so I now owned four fine ones and could change the sleeves, bodices, and skirts about to suit the day. My time at Hunsdon House in the rolling hills of Essex helped to heal my heart, but I was softened only toward Mary and not her tyrant father. When I managed to maim or murder him someday, it would be for me and mine—but for Mary too, I vowed.

  “All right, ladies,” Mary said, popping up from the card table, “time for our afternoon constitutional. I feel quite ready to walk for miles, so come along.”

  Despite sallying forth today, she was oft ailing and kept to her bed, sometimes with horrid headaches she called megrims, sometimes with painful menses or terrible toothaches. And, Lady Susan had told me, each November when the weather was sunless, Her Grace was assailed by such melancholy that she took to her bed for days.

  “Lady Gera,” Mary Tudor called, and gestured me to her as we went out into the sunshine for a brisk stroll.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” I responded, and hurried to catch up with her. She pulled me along and we walked together, leading the others down a narrow gravel path through full-blooming gardens.

  “Susan was not thinking of your past, which weighs so heavily upon you, when she said that about the luck of the Irish.”

  “I know, Your Grace. She was reacting to my luck with the cards.”

  “And I know your purse for wagering is not bottomless, so I was glad to see you win. There have been times when I too have been in households where I did not wish to be, and ill supported too.”

  “But I am happy to be with you for more than one reason, and you have been more than generous with me.”

  She nodded and took my elbow as if to steer me along. “But surely you would prefer to be with your mother,” she said. “I . . . I understand that too, you see.”

  Yes, I missed my mother, but she shut herself up more than ever now, even when we needed her. And the day we’d parted, as pleased as she had been that I would enter Mary Tudor’s household, she had made her plans for me plain at last.

  “Gera, my dearest, Edward is still so young and Gerald a hunted criminal, so you are indeed our best hope for recovery right now.”

  “But won’t Cecily be placed in a prominent household too, for she is only a year younger than me and—”

  “And won’t make her way in the world as you, not with her solitary ways. You have the Grey and Fitzgerald good looks, if you can but learn to bridle your . . . your passions.”

  My eyes widened. “I am our best hope for what?” I threw Mother’s words back at her, ignoring the sugared compliments.

  “Why, to make a fine, important marriage, and as soon as possible—a betrothal at least. Keep your eyes open, a smile on your face, and your temper tamped down. We cannot rely on the generosity of my brother forever, so—”

  “Forgive me, Mother, but I wish we did not have to rely on him at all, because he is more than unreliable—he is not to be trusted. How do we know he won’t hand Edward over to them when he returns, or use us as hostages to make Gerald come home and give himself up?”

  “Do not become political, my Gera! See what it gets us? Nowhere. In exile. Now, I have it on the best authority that about ten years ago Anne Bourchier—I used to know her mother—wed a man named William Parr when she was but ten, though of course they didn’t live together for years. King Henry’s own sister Margaret was betrothed at age twelve to the king of Scots, and went to live with him at age fourteen. And Catherine Willoughby, who is now Lady Suffolk, wed the duke Charles Brandon, a great friend of the king’s, when she was but fourteen and he was forty-eight. Older men, allies with wealth and power—that is the best we can hope for since our Irish heritage is gone.”

  “It isn’t gone, but has just been pirated from us for now! That’s what the king of England is—a pirate, as daring and immoral as those who used to plague Ireland’s shores! The last thing in the world I want is to be wed or betrothed to any Englishman. But . . . but I see what you mean . . .” I had to admit, for had I not dedicated myself to getting access to power and the king any way I could? Mary Tudor might be one way, but indeed, a man who closely served the king could be another.

  “I just want to tell you,” Mary Tudor said, bringing me back to the present, “that we shall have among us for supper this evening a visitor, a man I’m sure you have not met, one who rather likes the ladies, if you catch my drift. Since you are new and the youngest here, I thought it best to warn you.”

  I stiffened, for mayhap she implied instead that her father would visit here. Hunsdon was his house, and servants still talked of how many deer he had slain in its vast forests and how he had favored the place as a rural refuge from the plague. The king and Queen Jane had once visited Mary here, so one of her other ladies, Margery Baynton, had said, and it was only twenty miles from Greenwich Palace. So did she mean a suitor or a sovereign was coming?

  Mary stopped abruptly on the gravel path in the knot garden, turned to me, and said, “No need to fear. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is also a fine poet and a friend of your uncle Leonard Grey.”

  I nodded, though I was thinking his tie to my uncle was no recommendation for the man. “We call poets rhymers in Ireland,” I said lamely, trying to cover the faux pas I’d made to look so alarmed. We started to walk again, this time passing through the water gate to stroll the inner edge of the moat.

  “Dear Gera,” she said, for Mother had written to her about my pet name and Mary liked to use it, “poet or rhymer—or rakehell, for he has a bad reputation and vile temper—I warrant Surrey’s been to Greenwich to try to cheer my father, so we’ll hear if his spirits have lifted some in his loss of the queen. At least, praise God,” she said, probably without realizing she was frowning deeply, “the king has his precious prince now, and Elizabeth and I have a brother—a half brother.”

  The ravaged, gaunt face of my half brother, Thomas, flashed through my mind as I had seen him last on his shameful way to the scaffold. It was a miracle Mother had never found out what I had done, but I had told Magheen and was miffed at her for days when she insisted that I would bring bad luck upon myself by my defiance and deceit. But now I noted how Mary’s voice quavered when she spoke of the new prince who had surely supplanted her in her father’s affections and obstructed her path to the throne. Ah, the fate of women, who could never govern alone, never choose whom they would wed, never simply challenge an enemy to a joust or battle.

  It turned out that our visitor was no one eligible as a suitor, for he was wed, but he was the powerful Duke of Norfolk’s son and closely related to the royal Tudors in blood and service. New-fledged hope bloomed in me that I might use him to get nearer to the king. Besides, the Earl of Surrey seemed in collusion with my mother too, for that evening he spoke of how young he and his wife were when they were wed. I had perched in a window seat alone in the gallery to listen to Lady Mary play her virginals; the earl came to sit beside me, rustling my skirts so that I had to move over a bit into the curtained shadows.

  “I heard our hostess call you Gera, so if I may presume . . .”

  “You may presume, at least to call me Lady Gera.”

  “Ah, a sharp wit for one so young. Lady Gera, we hardly had a chance to chat after our introduction earli
er,” he whispered, leaning so close I could smell a rich pomade from his person mingled with wine on his breath. Attired in finest peacock blue brocade, and for a country visit too, he had been drinking a great deal and still had a goblet of wine with him now. Stretching out his legs as if to display his gartered hose wrapped around well-turned legs, he gave a satisfied—or a yearning—sigh.

  When he just studied my face overlong, I decided to put him off a bit. “I believe,” I told him, “Her Grace asked at table how your wife, Frances, was doing, but I did not hear your reply.” He had been watching me all evening over supper, enough to make my face heat once or twice. I might be painfully young yet, but I did not want him to think I was a green girl—a wild Irish colleen—who could be taken advantage of.

  “Ah, yes. Frances and I wed at the lofty age of thirteen but have only lived together these last two years, when we turned twenty. And lately I’ve been away from her quite a bit, in service of God and king—perhaps not in that order, or perhaps they are one and the same,” he said with a muted snicker.

  I must admit I did favor the bitter undercurrent to his words whenever he mentioned His Majesty, as everyone liked to call the man, a term of worshipful adoration I tried to avoid using.

  “Such a difficult way to begin a marriage, I warrant,” I whispered back. “And I hear your sister Mary is the widow of the king’s dead oldest son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond.”

  “So you’re a student of the spiderweb of titles and relationships,” he said, “or at least a student of court gossip. Yes, keep your ear ever to the ground on that,” he said with a smirk, and shook his head at something else he evidently dared not say.

  He leaned back toward the window, set ajar, looking now not jaunty but most melancholy. Such quicksilver moods, I thought, but then Her Grace had warned me that he had a sudden temper. He frowned and sighed again, took another swig of wine, then stared down at his knees while I covertly studied him. His expression was somewhere between a grin and a grimace. His eyes, sleekly arched brows, close-combed hair, and a small, pointed beard were all of the same auburn hue. Lanky and loose limbed, he nevertheless carried himself with great pride, oft flinging flamboyant gestures when he spoke, however still he sat now. Magheen would have said he had his nose in the air.