The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell Read Free Book Online

bear such a creature so close to her?
    Then again, he realized, this was not the first time she had taken a fancy to a warped, disfigured man. The queen had been engaged for eight years to the French dauphin. The Duke of Alençon—she ’d called him “my frog”—had been short, pockmarked, and misshapen, and although the long engagement had most certainly been for show, she had truly seemed fond of the little troll.
    The tall double doors were pulled open, and with a trumpet fanfare that Elizabeth had expressly requested for her unusual guest, the rebel woman Grace O’Malley strode into the chamber.
    Indeed, thought Essex, she was striding . He ’d seen no other woman but Elizabeth use such a forceful gait, exude such a presence. Grace was tall—perhaps a hand taller than the queen—but whilst Elizabeth was straight and as thin as a rail, her visitor, he could see, was full-bodied, with rounded breasts topping the square-necked bodice. Despite her obvious strength there was a willowy quality about the woman, a gracefulness, as though she were quite at home in her body, as an animal might be. Her face had once been darkly beautiful. He imagined her at twenty, at the height of her womanly charms, saw her with a cutlass clutched in her hand, fighting on the deck of her pirate ’s galley. Astonishing, thought Essex, a feminine sea captain!
    “Quite the picture,” whispered Francis Bacon as he moved up beside Essex. “I owe you a favor for this invitation, Robert.” He was greedily devouring the richness of the scene with his eyes.
    “I’ll want your opinion when it’s done. Come, stay close to me. I want to get nearer.”
    As the O’Malley woman approached, the queen suddenly rose from her throne. Soft gasps were heard round the chamber, as this action strayed mightily from protocol. The rebel was stopped in her tracks at the sight of Elizabeth, and the queen, her eyes planted squarely on her audience, took the two steps down and met her guest in the center of the dead-quiet room.
    Elizabeth raised her hand to be kissed, indeed was forced to raise it as high as she would for a tall man. Without hesitation Grace took the queen’s hand and touched the fingers gently with her lips. But she did not lower herself into the expected curtsy.
    “Your Majesty,” Essex heard the woman say in fluent Latin, “I would drop to my knees, but my joints would protest it.” Elizabeth cocked her head to one side, both with surprise that the audience was to be conducted in Latin, and the realization that, with her first sentence, Grace O’Malley had challenged her authority. All subjects, despite their age or infirmity, bowed or curtsied to the queen. No excuses were tolerated.
    Elizabeth recovered her wits the next instant, choosing gracefully to ignore the slight. “We welcome you to England,” she said. “Come, meet my men.” One by one Elizabeth made her introductions. Only the Earl of Ormond knew Grace O’Malley—his countrywoman—and Essex heard her say to him with more than a hint of irony, “You seem altogether too at home in this place, Thomas.” When she approached them, Essex and Bacon—in unison—bowed low to the queen.
    “The pair of you remind me of your stepfather and his brother,” she said to Essex. “The earls of Leicester and Warwick were my beloved Fric and Frac.” As they rose Elizabeth said in the Latin she knew both understood perfectly, “Meet Grace O’Malley, our loyal subject from the west of Ireland. Mistress O’Malley, my lord the Earl of Essex. . . . And a very clever lawyer named Francis Bacon.”
    “Your father was Walter Devereaux,” Grace said to Essex, more a statement than a question, and stared searchingly into his eyes.
    “He was,” replied Essex, taken completely off guard. Both knew of his father’s bloody deeds in Ireland. And it was strangely unsettling to be reminded of them by this forthright woman.
    “Let us walk,” Elizabeth suggested to her guest. Before