The Irish Princess (19 page)

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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

BOOK: The Irish Princess
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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 comrades 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.”

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