The Irish Princess (14 page)

Read The Irish Princess Online

Authors: Karen Harper

Tags: #Ireland, #Clinton, #Historical, #Henry, #Edward Fiennes De, #General, #Literary, #Great Britain - History - Henry VIII, #Great Britain, #Elizabeth Fiennes De, #Historical Fiction, #Princesses, #Fiction, #1509-1547, #Princesses - Ireland, #Elizabeth

“But my mother is so—”
“I mean the royal missives you were after for some reason I’d not care to contemplate. Some pitiful retribution against His Majesty? We’re all no more than replaceable spokes in the big wheel of state, with Henry Tudor at the hub, and you’d best learn to accept that, Irish rebel blood or not. You can’t stop that wheel, Elizabeth; you can only contribute to its revolving as best you can and so profit from its progress.”
“That wheel grinds people into the dust and mud,” I told him, trying to shake his hands off. “High and low, even his own wives—and your wife.”
At that he shook me again. “Hell’s gates, I am telling myself you are only a maid, a naive but disturbingly comely one at that, so I don’t need to be caught with you here—but then, it would be quite obvious you came to me, wouldn’t it? Stranger things have happened between maids and men, even married ones.”
“Let go of me! I had no intention of any of that. I just wanted—”
“I’m going to let you go back upstairs to a warm bed, but do not try such a stupid trick with any other man who stumbles in here—or especially if you are called to court. Despite your dangerous heritage, I doubt if you’d just be let go next time without some sort of . . . of compromise. Ours will be that you will agree to tell me the truth on all things next time we meet, or I will be forced to summon your mother now and write to your current guardian, Lord Leonard, as if he—and I—don’t have enough on our hands right now.”
As he said
on our hands
, he loosed his hard hold of me but ran his palms and fingers down my upper arms to my elbows, then back up, smoothly, strongly. It was like a comforting caress, only that, but it shot a shiver clear up my spine that almost made me dizzy.
“Do we have a bargain or not?” he demanded, and I had to struggle for a moment to recall what he had just said. Oh, yes, that I would tell him the truth about all things next time we met. I doubted if we would meet again, for I was cloistered here like a nun, and he was heading north to do his vile king’s bidding.
“Agreed,” I said.
He lifted me off the table, making a snatch for his linen toga as it nearly came undone—undone, that was how I felt. I wanted to curse and strike him, but I wanted even more to ask him if he had decided to take service afloat, tell him I was sorry to hear he’d lost his stepson. No! What was wrong with me?
“Ordinarily,” he was saying, “I would insist on something to seal the deal, but not with a mere maid who has so much to learn, and sadly, from someone else.”
What was he talking about? Did he know I would be sent where I would see him again?
And sadly, from someone else
? Such as whom?
With his hand in the small of my back, he pushed me to the door and out. I darted across the corridor to recover the pewter cup, then lifted the hems of my night rail and cape and darted up the staircase. At the top, I looked back. He was still standing there, watching. The light aslant from the single lantern or the glow of embers from the solar made his eyes gleam as if lit from within.
In the morning, when I woke after a restless night, he and his companion were long gone.
 
After a long, bitter winter, word came that my uncles had been declared guilty of treason charges and would soon be sentenced. Needless to say, Silken Thomas was chiefly blamed for the Fitzgerald rebellion and was also adjudged guilty. The most we could hope for, Mother said, was that they would all be kept in the Tower as Father had been, but that they would live to be released someday. We hoped and prayed that King Henry and Queen Jane Seymour might produce a son, heir to the Tudor throne—for it was said she was with child. But I only wished for them a son if it would mean the king would be more secure and magnanimous and permit Fitzgerald pardons someday, on the condition, of course, they return to keep Ireland under crown control, as they had for nigh on eighty years.
But a bit of good news: Somehow Mother had convinced Uncle Leonard that she could spend a fortnight in his London town house so that she could petition the king and Cromwell for at least a visit to her stepson and imprisoned brothers-in-law in the Tower. After all, she’d been able to visit Father there. Perhaps her deluge of letters finally wore the deputy of Ireland down, or he felt guilty for his traitorous arrest of the five Fitzgerald brothers. But the most amazing thing of all was that Mother was taking Cecily and me with her.
Edward was angered that he could not go, but she felt one of the spares to the heir was better off hidden away in Leicestershire. Though the family had been named in the Act of Attainder, it seemed we women were considered harmless and were free to leave Beaumanoir—if we had permission. Poor Margaret was crestfallen that she would be without me for nearly three weeks, but Magheen vowed to take good care of her. Cecily hoped to visit the booksellers near St. Paul’s Cathedral, so she was in whirls over our journey.
As for me, I had no hopes of getting near the court, especially when I heard we would be staying not at Uncle Leonard’s town house but at Suffolk Place, the city home of Frances Grey’s father, Charles Brandon, which was clear across London from the king’s palaces of Westminster and Whitehall. Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk and a close friend to the king, would not even be there, for he was “mopping up the northern rebel problem,” as Henry Grey had put it when he’d ridden in to give Mother permission for our visit. At least perhaps, I thought, if I pleaded hard enough I could visit my uncles in the Tower of London with her, for she said it was but a ferry ride across the Thames or a ride ahorse over London Bridge.
London Bridge—whenever I saw that bridge, any bridge, I vowed it would be a sign for me to pray to Saint Brigid to build a bridge between me and someone at court, someone who would give me access to the king or his family. How dared Edward Clinton call me naive, however Irish, rural, and young I might be, I fumed as we rode with several guards in a pack train past the walls and through the gate of Beaumanoir in July. Despite the beauty of the day, Cecily read a book, even bouncing along ahorse. Fulk Bates was one of our guards, and Alice was attending Mother. And I? I was going to London to find a way to triumph over the Tudors!
 
CHAPTER THE TENTH
 
LONDON
 
July 16, 1537
 
A
s 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.

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