The Irish Princess by Karen Harper Read Free Book Online Page B

overhead, then a shuffling followed by sudden cries, shouts, and running feet. A bit of clashing steel—swords on armor? Our guard ran up the stairs, his armor clanking. Had Christopher at the last decided to resist? I told Magheen to hold Wynne and peered up the stairs again. Our Irish guard was nowhere in sight, but a tall, half-armored pikeman stood at the top of the twisting staircase, his back to me, facing the great hall. I could hear an echoing hubbub. I darted back where the stairs made the turn, pressed myself against the stone wall, and listened. Wan, flickering light from moving torches above made it seem the stone walls and stairs were shaking.
    A voice I did not know—not an Irish voice, an old, crackly one I had to strain to hear—was giving orders. I gasped when I took the words in, falling to my knees on the stone stairs and pressing my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming or vomiting.
    “Yes, every fourth one of the lickspittle rebel Irish to be executed, the traitor Christopher Paris first!” the speaker shouted. “Hang the bag of Judas silver ’round his neck so he takes it to hell with him. What he has done would sicken any brave soldier, and they’ll all be made example of. We’ll call it ‘the Pardon of Maynooth’ when we write King Henry. Line them up; get it done. Hang him and leave his body there; then behead the others. We’ll show the entire Pale that the king of England means business with traitors—traitors to us and even to their own kind, the damned double-dealing Irish curs!”
    Christopher had surrendered the main stronghold of the earls of Kildare into English hands, and yet they meant to execute the constable and one-fourth of the garrison, nigh on twenty-five men? And beheadings? That was what the English king did to enemies in the Tower of London, and now in our tower here.
    I heard shouts overhead, protests, armor clanking. Men’s voices cursing, some crying for mercy, perhaps the very sounds of doomed men in hell itself. That man’s words—no doubt “the Gunner” Skeffington himself—were so dreadful that, after the initial shock, they could not quite sink in. Curse the English king!
    What of us women, then, huddled in the cellars? When word of this got out to Irishmen, would they not all rise to arms or would they cower in submission? For once, I was almost glad that the women who had been seen and dismissed downstairs were apparently of no account. Perhaps they thought the third Geraldine daughter was also with her mother in so-called civilized England.
    Not to panic the women, I went back downstairs and pulled Magheen aside and told her what I had heard. She turned ashen, crossed herself, then walked away to tell the other women only that they must kneel and pray that the earl and his forces came quickly. But once they began to mumble their prayers and I started back for the stairs, she nearly dragged me into the darkest corner of the wine cellar, a separate vaulted area where Gerald and Collum had slept lately.
    “Despite what Christopher has done, I am going upstairs to plead for their lives,” I told her, trying to free my wrist from her grip. “Surely they will not hurt a mere girl, and maybe I can shame or stop them.”
    “And see all that? At the least, you’ll not let them be taking you too, the murderous wretches. What if they try to trade your life for Gerald’s, or even for the earl’s? They’re heathens, cursed of God. You and I, my child, be going out that tunnel lightning-quick to the village, where my sister can hide us.”
    Something struck me then—an awareness, a certain clarity. It was as if I emerged from the fog of childhood, or as if someone had pulled a hood off my eyes so that I could see the sky, to soar like a falcon, for that was Saint Brigid’s sacred bird. Even in my hatred and horror, I saw Magheen was right: that I had to flee, to fly away, not only for myself but for the future of the downtrodden Geraldines.
    “Yes,” I