The Irish Princess Read Free Page A

somehow managed to ram the prow into one of the swan nests made of mounded sedge and reeds. The big male swan appeared from out of nowhere, hissing and snorting at the McArdles. They shouted back in Irish at their fine, feathered attacker. My dear Magheen, who had ever been a nursemaid and second mother to me, flapped her skirt at it, then had to run. Finally, my lanky gray wolfhound Wynne came tearing down the path and chased the swan out into the middle of the water. We nearly fell overboard, holding our sides and screeching with laughter until we saw we were drifting away as fast as the angry swan.
    “Row, me hearties!” Gerald shouted again, pointing back toward the tall tower of Maynooth Castle that we could barely see over the foliage of the beech forest. “Row or we’ll be swept down to the Liffey and then clear to Dublin Harbor and so to England!”
    “Stuff and nonsense,” I muttered. “We’d crash over the falls at Leixlip Castle and have to swim for our very lives. All right, I’ll count and we’ll all pull together.” I nodded to Margaret to encourage her. She always watched my lips when I talked, but I knew she could not have taken in all that, so I started to row as I counted, and she soon caught on. It wasn’t fair, I thought for the thousandth time, that she could not hear and talk, when I liked nothing better than to eavesdrop and chatter. Everyone said that I was the pretty one too. Yet Margaret was the best friend to me in all the world, next to Magheen, because my sister Cecily was always going off in corners to read and sulk over I knew not what.
    A deep, distant voice called to us as Magheen and Collum caught up to us again and we struggled against the current. It was Father waving from the bank near the lawn of the castle! He had come home from his duties in Offaly and had come to fetch us himself.
    “ Slainte mhaith! Good health to you!” The McArdles greeted their liege lord with a bow and a curtsy. Magheen and Collum were the keepers of the Irish brogue and ways, for our tutors were all English, though I more than the others loved to hear Magheen spin her tales of the little folk and the old Gaelic ways. Truth be told, our family, which ruled the Anglicized Pale, was more English than Irish in manners, speech, and dress. Still, Father’s motto was, Ireland for the Irish, though I doubt he told such to the king and his court when he visited London.
    But when this tall, broad-shouldered, handsome man—Father to us, but to kin and country Gearoid Og Kildare, Garrett Fitzgerald, 9th Earl of Kildare—spoke, everyone listened, and not just from fear, for we adored him. We promptly put the prow into the riverbank at his feet and scrambled out to greet him, though he’d been away but three days this time. Barking and cavorting, Wynne jumped about in mad joy at our excitement.
    However powerful Father was in Ireland and England, too, he was above all warm and charming. He drew people to him not just by his position but by a natural esteem. I think that won him friends at first in the Tudor court. It was his downfall later, but I shall save all that for what is to come. Only our family knew Father’s physical strength was not what it used to be. He had been wounded more than once in battle with Irish rivals, and that had taken a sore toll on him. He tried hard not to limp from a wound in his left leg from the last fray with the O’Carrolls, and on damp days he had trouble breathing from the long-healed slash of his chest by some would-be Gaelic assassin’s scian.
    It was said Garrett Og’s first marriage was a love match, and I know his second was, for he and my mother were what Magheen called lovebirds. Father always had gowns made for his Bessie to match his court finery and even when he was away on business in his realm or when he’d been summoned by King Henry VIII to give account of himself in London, I know Mother slept with a small portrait of him beside her and kissed it each