The Irish Princess

by Karen Harper

  A voice I did not know—not an Irish voice, an old, crackly one I had to strain to hear—was giving orders. I gasped when I took the words in, falling to my knees on the stone stairs and pressing my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming or vomiting.

  “Yes, every fourth one of the lickspittle rebel Irish to be executed, the traitor Christopher Paris first!” the speaker shouted. “Hang the bag of Judas silver ’round his neck so he takes it to hell with him. What he has done would sicken any brave soldier, and they’ll all be made example of. We’ll call it ‘the Pardon of Maynooth’ when we write King Henry. Line them up; get it done. Hang him and leave his body there; then behead the others. We’ll show the entire Pale that the king of England means business with traitors—traitors to us and even to their own kind, the damned double-dealing Irish curs!”

  Christopher had surrendered the main stronghold of the earls of Kildare into English hands, and yet they meant to execute the constable and one-fourth of the garrison, nigh on twenty-five men? And beheadings? That was what the English king did to enemies in the Tower of London, and now in our tower here.

  I heard shouts overhead, protests, armor clanking. Men’s voices cursing, some crying for mercy, perhaps the very sounds of doomed men in hell itself. That man’s words—no doubt “the Gunner” Skeffington himself—were so dreadful that, after the initial shock, they could not quite sink in. Curse the English king!

  What of us women, then, huddled in the cellars? When word of this got out to Irishmen, would they not all rise to arms or would they cower in submission? For once, I was almost glad that the women who had been seen and dismissed downstairs were apparently of no account. Perhaps they thought the third Geraldine daughter was also with her mother in so-called civilized England.

  Not to panic the women, I went back downstairs and pulled Magheen aside and told her what I had heard. She turned ashen, crossed herself, then walked away to tell the other women only that they must kneel and pray that the earl and his forces came quickly. But once they began to mumble their prayers and I started back for the stairs, she nearly dragged me into the darkest corner of the wine cellar, a separate vaulted area where Gerald and Collum had slept lately.

  “Despite what Christopher has done, I am going upstairs to plead for their lives,” I told her, trying to free my wrist from her grip. “Surely they will not hurt a mere girl, and maybe I can shame or stop them.”

  “And see all that? At the least, you’ll not let them be taking you too, the murderous wretches. What if they try to trade your life for Gerald’s, or even for the earl’s? They’re heathens, cursed of God. You and I, my child, be going out that tunnel lightning-quick to the village, where my sister can hide us.”

  Something struck me then—an awareness, a certain clarity. It was as if I emerged from the fog of childhood, or as if someone had pulled a hood off my eyes so that I could see the sky, to soar like a falcon, for that was Saint Brigid’s sacred bird. Even in my hatred and horror, I saw Magheen was right: that I had to flee, to fly away, not only for myself but for the future of the downtrodden Geraldines.

  “Yes,” I told her, amazed at the sudden calmness of my voice despite the great weight upon my heart, “we must flee so we can tell the truth, maybe find Thomas. But we can’t risk going into the village, because Christopher said the English were quartered there. Fetch our cloaks and anything else you can quickly gather. And give me your apron, because I’m going to take The Red Book of Kildare with me under my skirts, lest they find it. If they get their bloody hands on that, they’ll know exactly who to hunt down and execute in the entire Pale.”

  Looking both proud and terrified, Magheen untied her apron, yanked it over her head, and thrust it at me.

  “And fetch Wynne’s leash,” I told her as I started to pry the lid off the vat that held the book.

  “Gera,” she said, turning back. “No—from now on ’tis Lady Fitzgerald,” she said, emphasizing each word. She had never called me that before, nor had she curtsied to me when it was just the two of us, as she did now. “But, milady, two women fleeing with their heads covered might make it to your uncle James at Leixlip or to Dublin and find a boat to reach your mother, but not with an Irish wolfhound in tow. Wynne is too protective, a barker, and folks hereabout know he’s always at your heels.”

  She spoke truth. Another bitterly hard decision: I must leave Wynne too. Only Magheen and I must go on the run like criminals, mayhap with a hue and cry out for us soon. We had no time to waste, though no doubt all above were concentrating on the bloody executions. Damn Christopher Paris, once one of our family, constable of our castle—a fool, covetous for power, now paying the price.

  I tried to tie the apron around my waist in a sling up under my skirts, but I saw the book would bang against my knees, so I bound the crimson-covered treasure to my chest and swirled the cloak Magheen brought me around my shoulders. One bag of coins lay in the vat; perhaps Gerald and Collum had taken the other. I thrust the bag in Magheen’s hand and she put it in our food sack. Clasping the book to me, I led her behind the group of praying women toward the tunnel.

  Wynne padded over to me. I bent and, one-armed, hugged my beloved pet around his neck, then for one quick moment buried my face in his thick hair. It was like saying farewell forever to my pretty, pampered past again. “I love you, my Wynne, so much,” I whispered, and choked back a sob, for that was so true of all I was forced to leave behind.

  I saw Magheen had summoned Shauna, her own cousin, from the women praying fervently with bowed heads. Magheen must have chosen her to tell the others to keep our secret. Magheen pressed Shauna’s fingers around Wynne’s collar, and I whispered to that alert, eager face, “Wynne, stay. Good lad, stay! ”

  Dear God in heaven, how I wished that I could stay and relive my days and dreams here. Magheen pulled my elbow and swept aside the hempen curtain covering the tunnel entrance. We had no time for candles or a lantern and could not risk drawing attention by a light.

  It was black as Satan’s soul inside. I had been through here several times, once when all five of us were pretending we were pirates, but we’d had a lantern. Magheen went first as we both felt our way along the damp, earthen length of it. Cobwebs laced themselves across my sweating, tear-streaked face. It smelled more fetid than a bog.

  “What if they know about this escape route because of Christopher going out to parley with them?” I whispered. “They might have a guard at the other end.”

  “Our only chance,” she said. “Oh, Saint Brigid, spread above our heads your bright cloak for protection.”

  I had to keep talking. It helped me beat back the blackness to face my fears. “We may be trapped in here, if he boarded it up again,” I said.

  But from this stale, rank place—had it been like this for Father, with his labored breathing and fatal coughing fits in the Tower of London? I wondered—we began to smell fresh air. And from the lack of all light, I saw grays emerge. Could we be at the river entrance? Already the dark journey seemed eternal, but it had just begun.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH

  Though dawn was just pearling the sky when we emerged from the tunnel, at first it seemed midday to us. Blinking at the brightness, as Magheen started down the path I whispered, “No! We’ll take our boat.”

  “But they used barges to drag supplies up the river,” she protested as she turned back. Like me, she kept her voice low, fearful someone would spring at us from behind the big beeches or the shrubby wood beyond.

  “But that was before the siege, and now they are intent on their bloody work at the castle. It will be faster to float to Uncle James at Leixlip, if he’s still there and not under siege too, but they must have wanted Maynooth above all.”

  Indeed, the English must be concentrated at Maynooth, for no one walked the river path at this early hour, and we children’s naomhóg awaited under the newly sprouted willow boughs. It saddened me to see the double sets of oars we had used and the tiller Gerald had steered. I carefully pla
ced The Red Book of Kildare in the boat’s belly before we shoved the craft into the river and clambered in. As ever, the current took us away. Sitting side by side on a wide seat, Magheen and I rowed together to go even faster.

  With tears in my eyes, I saw Maynooth’s tall silhouette swallowed by the fog. The sedgy banks of the Lyreen, the familiar fields, the few crofts and cots between the castle and the village seemed to rush past. Despite our speed, I felt stunned, mired in the unreality of it all as if my feet were stuck in a bog. But I needed to think—think clearly!

  “We should both lie down in the boat when it goes past the village,” I told Magheen. “English soldiers may still be there, or someone may recognize us and call out.”

  We pulled our oars inside and lay in the bottom of the boat, staring up into the mist as the spring sun ate slowly through the fog. It was but four miles northwest to Leixlip, then twelve beyond that to Dublin, if we needed to go that far.

  What to do? Though Magheen was much my elder and had been my nurse and guardian, I was the Geraldine, the one who needed to make adult decisions now. Should we stop at Leixlip and inquire for Uncle James? Father had a town house in Dublin, but that could be ruined or overrun by the English. If we could get our boat past the small waterfalls near my uncle’s estate, we could reach the point where the Liffey burst into Dublin Bay. But with the English fleet anchored there, could we find safe passage to Uncle Leonard’s estate in the English shire of Leicester? And once we were across the Irish Sea, how would we travel to Beaumanoir, which lay not on the water, but almost in the heart of enemy England?

  As we passed under overhanging tree boughs and saw the familiar swallows and kittiwakes going our way too, the sky grew ever brighter. I imagined I smelled the gorse-scented air of early spring, though we were barely past mid-March. I pictured the glens near the Lyreen and the Liffey with golden furze breathing out its clove scent, my favorite out-of-doors aroma. I fancied I smelled peat fires from the village, for I wanted to take every memory of Maynooth and Kildare County with me and—

  Magheen sat straight up in the boat. “Do you smell that on the breeze?” she demanded, craning to look back toward the village. “Smoke. A fire. The brightness we just passed. The village is burning! The English bastards have put it to the torch! Antragh, Antragh!” she kept keening, rocking with her head in her hands. “Too late, too late!”

  Our boat swept on, but I could see she was right, for gold and orange flames slashed into the early morning sky behind us. Magheen’s sister and her family—all those she and Collum knew and loved. The market square, the shops, the houses of wattle and thatch. Did the English have to ruin everything? Did they intend to obliterate all the Fitzgeralds had owned and commanded? And without our family to keep the peace, would Gaelic raids increase or would civil war split our land? The Fitzgeralds had been able to keep the English out, and now here they were, stomping on all of us with their brutal boots.

  As if I were her nurse and comforter, I held the sobbing woman to me as the current pulled us on. I knew how desperately my dear friend wanted to run the boat ashore and rush back to see if her family and friends had escaped, to help any way she could. But I also knew she would stay with me to the very gates of hell, and I loved her all the more for that. High- and lowborn barriers be damned; Magheen McArdle was more my mother in that moment than my birth mother, granddaughter of an English queen, had ever been.

  That afternoon, as we passed through the glens of the Liffey with their mossy rock ledges leaning overhead, I felt closed in by fear. We were sitting in the boat but not wearing ourselves out with rowing in the brisk current. When necessary, we pushed away from rocks with the oars. But where were we really going and what must we do to escape the Gunner and his men?

  “Saint Brigid has let us down,” I told Magheen, who was still wiping her eyes and nose with the hem of her skirt.

  “That be blasphemy! We’re alive and away from the fiends, are we not?”

  Eager to keep our strength and spirits up, as if I were a child—which was not possible ever again—I asked her, “Will you tell me anew the story of Saint Brigid’s cloak?”

  She nodded and sniffled. Her voice was muted at first and, after all her tears, she hiccoughed through the first of it. “There be dozens of stories of miracles and wonders the blessed Brigid did after she received the veil from Saint Patrick himself. Like you, milady, she was a chieftain’s daughter, and young when duties first fell to her.”

  I let her talk, perhaps the best diversion from her pain, and mine too. As ever, she went off on side stories now and then as I watched streams pouring into the river, swelling its width and depth.

  “Though she traveled far and wide as abbess in her nunnery,” Magheen went on, “Brigid hosted gatherings of important people and intervened in disputes and brought peace to warring factions.”

  Which made me think, if she did all that, why did she not do the same now for those who venerated her? But I held my tongue and nodded to urge her on.

  “As you recall, she accepted a site near Kildare for her small community from Dunlang MacEnda, king of Leinster, and built a church there. But she required extra land for farming to support her people. When the king refused, she said ever so sweetly to him, ‘Just give me as much as my cloak will cover,’ and, of course, he agreed to so simple and small a request. But as she laid her cloak upon the ground, it began spreading till it be covering the entire plain. ’Tis amazing what a lot the Lord can do with what little we give Him.”

  “And she was bold enough to risk challenging and besting a king,” I said almost to myself. Yes, our Saint Brigid of Kildare would not have gotten what she wanted if she had railed at him. She was clever to the core. And so would I learn to be if I ever met the vile English king or any of his reeky, hedgepig, murderous lackeys.

  We had more trouble than I’d thought getting the boat safely out of the water and up on a stony bank just above the waterfalls where our gentle Lyreen joined the Rye Water to birth the big River Liffey. I secured the Red Book to my chest again and hid it under my cloak. We ate what soda bread we had left and drank from the flask of ale Magheen had brought. The roar of the falls was soothing, almost luring, and that gave me time to think.

  “We have two choices,” I told Magheen as she bent to fill the empty flask with river water. “One, I follow the rocky path and you let the boat loose over the falls, and I try to snare it on the far side so we can get clear to Dublin town to find an Irish ship to England. Or we go on foot from here, first to Leixlip Castle, hoping to learn whether my uncle or some retainer of his we can trust is in the area and can assist us. And,” I said, getting to my feet and shaking out my skirts, “I think we need to go on foot. With our village put to the torch, there may be women on the roads now anyway, or those put out of their houses by the quartering of English troops.”

  “Thinking clear you are, milady. All right then, off we go. May Saint Patrick and Saint Brigid be our guides.”

  I knew the path from the falls to the castle, for we had visited here many a time and played about the grounds. Leixlip Castle somewhat resembled Maynooth, a gray stone structure, but it perched on a rocky outcropping of limestone in the wide valley. It too had a crenellated tower, but a round one, and not so high as ours.

  Though I was tall for my age, surely a mere girl mingling with some local folks to overhear what had happened here would not be overly suspicious. But we went not twenty strides toward the castle gate when I saw that the English soldiers were here too, though not the swarms of them we’d seen outside Maynooth. Their horses were bigger than our Irish breeds, and that gave them away, as well as the horrid pennants flying from the castle walls. In place of the usual crimson-and-white Fitzgerald banners, I saw green-and-white pennants with Tudor roses and some sort of mythical beasts.

  “Beasts, all of them,” I muttered.

  “What’s that, milady?”

  “Best go back to calling me something else hereabouts. Call me Shauna.”
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  At least other Irish were about, some pulling carts, evidently provisions for the castle. When we approached the guarded gate to the castle’s inner courtyard, I walked slowly past as my bravado evaporated. I could not let them take me or my precious book. But then I saw a face I knew, a rhymer who had been at Maynooth but whom Father had loaned to Uncle James, since he liked the epics of the Irish past so dearly. Liam, I think. Liam the rhymer.

  “Magheen, go talk to that man there with the green cap. See if his name is Liam, a rhymer, and what he can tell you about Uncle James. But tread carefully. If Christopher sold out, who knows who else has done the same.”

  “Aye, I remember him, a bawdy one with the kitchen maids, he was,” she muttered. While she sauntered after him, I stood against the outer castle wall and watched her talk earnestly to him. To my disappointment, without so much as a glance my way he walked toward the path she and I had come up from the river. Taking her time, though I was so impatient I could have screamed, Magheen strolled back my way.

  “It wasn’t him?” I demanded, crestfallen.

  “Oh, ’twas, and don’t you be telling me Saint Brigid be letting us down again,” she scolded. “It seems since your uncle didna take direct part in the rebellion nor put up a fuss when the English demanded use of his castle, they merely turned him out and took over. He’s sent his family to relatives in Meath, but he’s secretly living in that very forest by the falls we just came through, though deeper in, at his hunt lodge, and Liam knows the way.”