The Irish Princess Page 13

  I ran along the gallery to a window in time to see a string of men ride in with hunt hounds yapping at their heels. And there in his huge saddle on a massive steed—it was easy to pick out which one he was—sat Henry Tudor, king of England, Scotland, and—curse his evil soul—lord of Ireland.

  The first time I saw Henry Tudor up close that very afternoon, when I was formally presented to him, I wanted to spit in his face and claw his eyes out. But I gritted my teeth, curtsied, and braced myself as he touched my hand to raise me, and his sharp, sunken eyes went thoroughly over me. What would it avail me to be thrown into prison for defying him outright? Mother had been sore ill off and on, so it might be the death of her. She had forbidden me to so much as come home for a visit. I would like to escape with my life, even after I sought justice for the Fitzgerald fatalities, though if not, I would die for what I hoped to do. But how to do it; how to do it? repeated in my brain as Henry Tudor still looked me over and seemed to approve.

  But, I noted, the queen did not. Her lower lip thrust out, she pouted. She even stamped a foot, mayhap because, for this moment at least, she was not the center of her lord’s and everyone’s attention. Yes, I learned that later about her—despite all she had and how heads always turned her way, she was ravenous for attention and affection.

  And speaking of attention, it was the first time I noted how avidly her closest maid of honor, Lady Jane Rochford, of whom I knew nothing then, watched the queen’s every move as she stood slightly off to the side. It was almost as if the middle-aged Lady Jane were living her life through the young queen of whom she was obviously so proud, for she hung on her every word and move. When Cat Howard smiled, Lady Jane did too. When Cat looked affronted, it seemed to me Lady Jane Rochford wanted to slap away the perpetrator, even the king. The woman’s smothered passions made me almost understand her. She had, I thought, a fierce fondness for her royal charge, one that made me miss Magheen’s affection for and loyalty to me.

  “My dear lord,” Queen Catherine said with a pert smile as she clung to his arm, even as he seated himself heavily in a massive chair, “I have told your daughter Mary that I shall take Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald for my own maid, someone a bit closer to my age. Of course, Mary said she considered her—your,” she said, nodding at me as I tried to cover my surprise at this turn of events—“services as a gift to me. Oh, my dear lord, I am so happy you were pleased with your hunting today, and the new necklace is so lovely—look!”

  Despite at least twenty courtiers looking on—Lady Jane giggled and simpered when her mistress did—the queen tugged her taut bodice away from her breasts and leaned toward him so he could glimpse the rubies on a gold chain that plunged between her plump, pushed-up breasts. I could not but help think that if my mother or Magheen had seen one of us girls do such in public, even to a husband or family member, we would have been soundly cuffed and scolded.

  “How prettily it sets off my fair skin, see?” she shrilled with a giggle that was soon drowned by the king’s guffaw of approval. I could tell he yearned to plunge his big paw down her neckline, and not to fondle the necklace. And so, in just a few moments, I learned that a lady-in-waiting—me—could be traded off to humble someone—a king’s daughter—just as a pretty bauble might be given for favors or power.

  Indeed, my first impression of the monarch I so loved to hate was that, as dangerous and wary as he was, he was stupid enough to be besotted with a silly girl. Yet he was no doddering fool, for his eyes, deep-set and small like a pig’s in his jowly, florid face, were watching everything, even as Jane Rochford did. Despite his obvious happiness now and hail-fellow-well-met demeanor, I knew what he was really like.

  As he and Cat—so they called her behind her back—walked away toward the royal apartments, Mary Tudor came up to me and took my hands. “Once she heard of your youth, she was determined to have you in her service, but if she’d seen you first, I warrant I’d still have you with me,” she said, almost plaintively. “Surely she, like queens before her, has learned not to surround herself with fetching ladies-in-waiting. I shall miss you greatly, but she desires new things—and the young.”

  “But you are young,” I protested loyally.

  Frowning, she shook her head. “Too old at heart, after . . . after everything,” she whispered, though the presence chamber had greatly emptied of people. “I shall write your mother to explain—a step up, really, to serve a queen, so I am certain she will be pleased. I hear she is ailing.”

  “It’s an ailment that seems to come and go, Your Grace.”

  “Well, I have said it before, but I understand how desperate one can feel when kept away from one’s mother who has lost much and is sore ill.” Her eyes filled with tears. “And I asked if you might keep your maid, Alice, and the queen acquiesced, so that she won’t be sent back and you will have someone with you from home.”

  Home, I thought. Home was still Ireland, and as much as I got on with Alice now, who was grateful she could ride along on my petticoats, I wanted Magheen with me.

  Perhaps noting my sad expression, Mary squeezed my hands before she moved away with her faithful ladies sweeping along in her wake. I imagined Alice and I would be expected to move our things from Mary’s ladies’ chambers, but to where? I wondered. And what scolding and warnings would Edward Clinton have for me when he heard that in one fell swoop, through no effort of my own, I now served the person who was closest to the king?

  As I turned away, I saw a girl, perhaps of six or seven years, in the doorway to the corridor. What had she seen and what was she thinking? As Mary Tudor had just mentioned, I sensed this girl was older than her years. She stood silhouetted by a late slant of sunlight that gilded her silken gown and red-gold hair and etched her slender body. Both maidens, we wore our hair—much the same hue, as if we were sisters—spilling from small, gabled French hoods that Cat Howard had made the fashion. We both stared at each other, and I noted we had worn the same hue of willow green. Only the color of our eyes seemed different, for hers were as dark as mine were light.

  I felt I gazed in the mirror of memory, for the young woman looked so much like me—her face intelligent but restless. She was struggling for control, yet felt overwhelmed and afraid. Oh, yes, I recognized all that in her at once because it was so familiar.

  Then in a rustle of skirts she was gone, with a matronly lady I had not seen following close behind her. It was the next day when my new royal mistress fussed over the girl as if she were a pretty pet that I learned who she was. The uncanny image of my past self was Elizabeth Tudor, the king’s youngest daughter.

  Despite so much going on that autumn at court, the winter months of 1541 dragged on. Everyone moped about inside with the inclement weather, first at Hampton Court and then at Whitehall in London, bored and melancholy. The king—the center of every courtier’s universe—kept to his rooms, where his physicians cauterized his weeping leg sore. His terrible temper threw a pall on everyone, except me, who was glad he suffered in any way.

  Those of the queen’s household still chattered and danced and laughed in her chambers, before she sent us all away early each evening. Then, I took it, she dictated letters to family and friends. I saw she could barely write her name and never glanced at a book, but her young, handsome secretary, Francis Dereham, went in to take her dictation. Sometimes only her closest companion, Lady Jane, who I learned had been wed to Anne’s Boleyn’s brother, George, tended her at night and put her to bed. But eventually Cat the queen became more subdued and moodier than before. Even visits from the Earl of Surrey, spouting poetry and compliments, lifted no one’s spirits.

  I did gather information that might be useful to me against John Dudley and the king, the best of which was that the king had a small, secret suite of rooms behind his presence chamber and state bedroom at both Hampton Court and Whitehall, and, I assumed, other palaces. These rooms were accessed by narrow passageways that connected to inner palace halls by hidden doors. ’Twas said no one but a few close comrad
es had access to those privy rooms. When the king was alone—unfortunately ever zealous for his own safety—he evidently slept in them, rather than in his grand state bedchamber. Carefully, surreptitiously, I tried to reckon where those hall entrances could be, but without success.

  In March I was finally summoned “home” to Beaumanoir for the first time in twenty-one months, though not for a reason I had expected or wished. My mother had died.

  CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

  BEAUMANOIR

  March 1541

  I grieved not only for my mother’s death, but that she had kept me away from her and my siblings for so long, however much I understood her passion to resurrect our family’s good name and position. Cecily had written that Mother’s world had shrunk to her chamber, where she ever kept my father’s picture close. They had heard her speaking to him as if he were alive. I had written back that I would be home straightaway and that they should place the small portrait of our sire in the coffin with her.

  She was to be buried in the chapel on the Bradgate grounds. As Alice and I reined in with our guards before the familiar facade of Beaumanoir, I told myself that perhaps she was better off in heaven with her beloved lord husband and the others she had fought so hard to save. Then too if her brother Leonard was convicted of and executed for treason and his properties forfeit to the crown, Mother would have been cast on the kindness of Frances and Henry Grey—unless in the near future one of us had our own home to take her in.

  As everyone came out to greet us, Magheen, Margaret, and I blubbered like babies. Magheen had silver hairs among her brown and told me that her dear Collum had written a short note on the last of Gerald’s letters from Italy, which I could not wait to read. Edward and Cecily hugged me too. How they had all grown!

  Margaret was twenty and quite pretty, but of course would never wed. If I only had my own household, I would take her with me. I wished our dear Gerald, 11th Earl of Fitzgerald, now aged nineteen, could be here for this reunion, however sad an event. One of my goals was to help him come home, not to England but to Ireland, to restore and claim the Fitzgerald earldom. Edward, sixteen, so tall now, obviously trying to grow a beard, was in the service of Lord Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset. Cecily, newly betrothed to a ward of the Greys—who I hoped could abide a wife with her nose ever in a book!—was seventeen. I was finally eighteen, an entirely marriageable age, a favorite dancing partner, my company sought by many men at court, though I truly favored none of them.

  On our way upstairs, Margaret clung to me, and Cecily pumped me for information about the courtiers and their ladies. Did she not realize what rulers and their nobles had done to us? I fumed, but I did not scold her. I saved my energy for my return to court, for so far I felt I had done naught but meet new people and help to amuse the spoiled ninnyhammer who was our queen, though I was ever searching for a way to bring our enemies down.

  How happy I was to see Magheen and someone else who awaited me there. For, although Uncle Leonard had been sent to the Tower, he had done a favor for me I could never have imagined. That first day I arrived, I had no sooner gone upstairs with my family than I heard much ado in the downstairs hall that we had just come through.

  “Whatever is that noise?” I asked them.

  “Edward, don’t you tell,” Cecily said, but Margaret was signaling that I should go back downstairs.

  “He was out for a walk on the back lawn with Hemmings when you arrived,” Edward blurted.

  “Who was?” I demanded, my heart pounding. Surely Captain Clinton had not come calling. Curse it that I had thought of him right now, even wished to see him. He had been making quite a name for himself at sea, and when he came ashore he went home to Lincolnshire, for he and his wife had an heir—named Henry, you might know.

  As I rushed back down, with everyone behind me, I recalled the night I had sneaked down these stairs to try to ruin Clinton’s papers. Though he was an enemy with ties to Dudley and the king, I longed to have him about the court to ask for advice. Somehow I trusted him, despite the devils he served.

  Alice had greeted her two yapping, little lapdogs, Posy and Pretty—Margaret had happily tended them while we were away—but no other dogs were in the house as far as I knew. Yet I heard barking and then the scrabbling sound of dog paws skidding on the wooden floor, a big dog.

  The elderly house steward, Master Hemmings, came hurtling into view with a big Irish wolfhound on a leash, pulling him along. Had my uncle brought one home? He reminded me of my long-lost Wynne, but this dog looked thinner and whiter-haired. He pulled his leash free and sprinted straight for me.

  Wynne! I fell to my knees and held out my arms. The old dog bounded so hard into me that we both went down, rolling on the floor.

  “Wynne, my boy, Wynne, my Wynne!” I laughed and cried, letting all the emotions loose I’d tried too long to hold within.

  Madly licking my face, he remembered me. Since I had left him in the Maynooth cellars that night Magheen and I had fled six years ago, what a story he must have to tell. Perhaps, I thought, Uncle Leonard had brought him for me to say he was sorry for his treachery that night he arrested my uncles in Dublin. Could he really have let Gerald escape, as they had accused him? I had heard that they also held him responsible for not producing the precious Red Book of Kildare, so that retribution could be made against those who had supported the Fitzgerald rebellion, the very book I had buried under the hedge here at Beaumanoir.

  “Lady Gera,” Master Hemmings said with a wheeze, “my lord Grey brought your dog back—with some other things from Maynooth for your family. He said . . . he would see you when his name is cleared, and he is returned . . . returned from the Tower. . . .” The old man faltered.

  My face buried deep in Wynne’s hair, I shuddered, for who had ever returned to us from the Tower? Still hugging him, I choked out, “Thank you for tending him, and to my uncle for this too.” It burned my mouth to say that, but I guess even traitors, especially those who were suffering just like those they had betrayed, could be a bit forgiven.

  And so, besides Magheen and my remaining family, I now had two precious keepsakes from the past: my dear Wynne and The Red Book of Kildare, which our English enemies still desperately desired.

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON

  May 26, 1541

  “Ooh, this cloth-of-gold gown will glitter in the sun!” The queen cooed and clapped her hands as her mistress of the wardrobe displayed it for all of us to see. “When I took my motto, ‘No Other Will But His,’ I did not know his will included giving me such pretty jewels and gowns! His Majesty says he wants to show me off to the whole realm!”

  “And he wants to be sure,” I muttered to Alice as we stood in the far corner of the queen’s crowded presence chamber while everyone but me fussed over each new gown, “that a massive display of might keeps the rebellious north under his thumb.”

  But everyone, even me, was excited, for the entire court was going on a summer progress out of hot, sweaty London on a visit to the north. The king’s ulcerated leg was much improved, even though he now walked haltingly with a cane. My former mistress, Mary Tudor, was going along, though not the king’s younger children, Edward and Elizabeth. Except for last yule, I had seldom seen Anne Boleyn’s daughter after that first moment we’d come eye-to-eye.

  “I’ve heard,” Alice whispered as she brushed flecks of something off my brocade peach-hued double sleeves, “that His Majesty is so eager to be certain the northerners stay cowed that he’s ordered huge pieces of artillery to be brought by sea and river to meet us in the north. And,” she added with a smug smile, “your old friend Lord Edward Clinton is in charge of getting the pieces there by ship, some of the very same guns, so gossip goes, that were used to assault your Irish castle back when.”

  I gasped. Why did it ever seem that each thing I heard of Captain Edward Clinton made me hate him more? “Back when,” I spit out, but caught myself before I blurted out the rest: Back when is the present and the future to me. Perhap
s, I thought, on this progress where the entire court would be living in tents each night, at least when manors or castles were not nearby, I could somehow get close to the king. But what to say then, what to do to hurt him?

  And now I must contend with Edward Clinton, whom I had assumed would not be on the progress, even if it would pass through his home shire. If only I could also find some way to bring him and Dudley down, but Dudley, now named Lord Lisle, with more advancements on the horizon, sometimes went to sea too. He was staying behind with several others to oversee royal business in London while we were away.

  I sighed and watched the excited Cat Howard continue to ooh and ahh over each gown presented before her. Her little lapdog peeked out from the hem of the growing pile of brocade and satin gowns. How I missed Wynne already, to have been reunited with him and then to leave him so soon, the story of my life somehow. But it gave Margaret something to do, for now she cared for Alice’s midgets and my mammoth dog. Whom did I have to care for, whom I really cared for? I thought, feeling sorry for myself amidst all this fervid anticipation.

  When the queen excused us, I went out into the Privy Gardens with their great, splashing fountain. On the other side of the high wall ran the Thames, and boatmans’ cries oft echoed here. It was my favorite place in the king’s favorite London palace, a haven for me. Running splashing water—boatmans’ cries . . .

  “Forgive me, Lady Gera, for following you outside, but is it not a lovely day?” a man called to me.

  The sun was in my eyes at first, but I recognized the voice. It was Sir Anthony Browne, the king’s longtime master of the horse, an intimate of the Tudor tyrant. Sir Anthony was nearly sixty but in good physique for his age, much better than his corpulent comrade the king, who was a bit younger. He was widowed, with a brood of adult children who were probably older than I, so at first I’d given no thought to the fact that he seemed to seek me out, for many did.