The Irish Princess by Karen Harper Page B

also had convinced myself that no one but Magheen and I should know of its location, for it might put others in danger, especially Geraldine loyalists listed in the book. Mother was desperate to protect her own family, so who knew what she might be willing to bargain for our safety, and I was coming to trust no one. If a foster brother and an uncle could turn traitor, such deceit must run rampant.
    “But what news from our Grey cousins?” she asked me. “You should have asked them in for a visit, so I could learn the latest news from London.”
    “I did invite them and ask them. They said we were tainted, or I think the word was attainted , all of us, but I knew that, so—”
    Crushing the letter to her breasts, she swayed back against the wall. “Tainted or attainted?” she asked, her flushed face going ashen.
    “Yes, that was it. Attainted.”
    “That means we all stand accused with the men, all of us,” she whispered, and pulled Margaret and me to her so hard I almost could not breathe.
    Margaret was making hands signals for, What? Tell me!
    “Does that mean we are all going to the Tower?” I demanded. “All of us?”
    “I don’t know. Surely not, but . . . I don’t know. I must write my brother and the Greys. I must write the king again.”
    Loosing us, she lifted her skirts and rushed up the staircase to the hall from which we heard her chamber door slam. Margaret patted my arm, leaned close, and mouthed nearly in my face, What? What?
    “Nothing new,” I told her, moving my lips deliberately. “Just that we are all Irish rebels.”
    But something cold had coiled in the pit of my belly, worse than how I’d felt before. Now that Mother took refuge in her rooms and in her endless letters to our enemies, and now that I had seen so much of Tudor evil, I must become a mother to Margaret and help protect Edward, whose life could be endangered as one in line to the Irish earldom—especially if Thomas were executed or Gerald was captured.
    “Come on then,” I told Margaret as she watched my lips make each word. “Let’s walk inside so we won’t be hit with rabbits or hounds or Greys.”
    I don’t know if she truly caught all I said, but she nodded, and, until Alice summoned us to supper, we paced the oak-paneled gallery like the prisoners we soon might be.
     
    During that autumn and winter, Uncle Leonard stayed in Ireland to settle things down, and the trial of Father’s five brothers and Thomas began in London. Mother wrote her letters, which I imagined Beaumanoir’s London messenger must be shredding in the forest en route, for she never received a reply, as if everyone had deserted our cause. The Fitzgeralds, all of us, were attainted, which meant we were accused of treasonous activities against the crown, so we were more or less under house arrest.
    But, indeed, the outside world continued to revolve: Queen Anne was arrested for horrid sins against the king, such as adultery and witchcraft and even incest. In the sweet spring of May 1536, she was found guilty and beheaded in the Tower, where my uncles awaited their fate. Anne Boleyn’s child, Elizabeth, was declared a bastard, while the king the very next day became betrothed to Jane Seymour. Ah, I could have warned Queen Anne and her daughter about that madman king, for I had seen such family treachery at close range—all spawned by the terrible Tudor.
    In July of that year, we heard that the king’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, aged seventeen, had died of the wasting disease some called consumption. I hoped the king suffered sore from that loss, though, I must admit, I sorrowed that Lord Edward Clinton, who had mentioned to me that his stepson was ill, must be grieving too.
    Meanwhile, for those long months I prayed, even on my knees, for someone to ride into our rural prison who could help me somehow gain access to that king so I could harm him in any way possible. And then, one cold, windy, and rain-swept day that