The Irish Princess Read Free Page B

night he was away. I tell you true, for I had seen it.
    In many ways, besides their fine faces and forms, my parents were well matched. Mother was the granddaughter of a queen of England, Elizabeth Woodville, wife of the Plantagenet king Edward IV. So she was intricately related to the influential Grey family of England, which descended from the royal Tudor sister of the current king. Indeed, my mother was a second cousin to King Henry VIII, and Father, too, was connected through his first marriage as a cousin to the king. I tell you, whether we children were tutored in English or Irish, we were taught that we were the uncrowned royal family of Ireland.
    “Father, we have missed you!” Gerald cried as we surrounded the big man.
    “But you must not miss putting the boat back where it belongs,” he said. No matter the occasion, he always pressed us to do our duty. We quickly shoved the boat back up into its hiding place, where a rain-swollen river or a passing fisherman would not take it from among the low-hanging willows. Then our raucous welcome truly began, with everyone talking at once.
    “Gerald cheated when we played Skiver the Goose,” Edward said as Father ruffled the boy’s hair and patted Margaret, Cecily, and me on our flushed cheeks.
    “If that is so,” Father’s voice boomed out, quieting the jumbled greetings, “I am sorry to hear it, for the Geraldine Fitzgeralds do not cheat, but they do speak their minds and are ever ready with an answer or a defense. Gerald?”
    “I only peeked once before I poked him, Father, and if I hadn’t I might have hurt him with the stick.”
    “Gerabeth?” he asked me, using my pet name that only he and my brother Gerald used anymore. As ever, I thrilled to have his attention, but I know now he reckoned I would always tell true, even to my own disadvantage. Margaret, of course, had never spoken, and Cecily would tat-tale everything Gerald and I had done amiss while he’d been gone. I tried to throw the best light on my brothers’ spat that I could.
    “They had a bit of a disagreement, Father. We all had our eyes closed, so I can’t say. But we all pulled together in the boat.”
    “As it should be. Now,” he said, seeming distracted and looking back at the McArdles, “I have news for my family and retainers, so you are to join your mother and Lord Offaly in the great hall to hear of it. Your uncles have ridden in with me too.”
    An entire family gathering of the Fitzgerald males, I thought. Father had five brothers, all younger than he, of course, since he was the earl. Lord Offaly, our half brother Thomas, our elder and our better, was oft here, but what was this occasion? I wondered. I straightened my skirts and pushed back my flyway red hair, which had come loose in a torrent, and tried to remember where I had put my shoes.
    I should have worn a straw hat, I suppose, for my skin was milky and freckles could pop out on my nose and cheeks in a trice. And Thomas, even more than Father, believed in looking one’s best at all times. I’d overheard Thomas tell Mother I’d be a raving beauty someday, but she’d best watch that I didn’t turn into a saucy hoyden. It had taken me nearly a fortnight before I dared ask Magheen what a saucy hoyden was, because she would pry out of me where I heard it and I feared that it was something frightful.
    We children stretched our strides to keep pace with Father as we, all barefoot, ran along in the grass just off the gravel lane toward tall, gray-stoned Maynooth Castle, our main residence in Kildare County. It stood—still stands, though much the worse today—like a stone sentinel amidst almost six hundred acres of fields, forest, and the largest deer park in all Ireland. We were eleven miles from Dublin, at the gateway of what was called the Pale, the civilized area over which Father ruled—with permission of the English kings, of course, though we’d all have much favored independence and equality. But Father’s