Free The Irish Princess by Karen Harper

waist, it fit my slender form perfectly.
    I only fretted that my cloak concealed the gown’s grandeur from the people who recognized us or heard we were coming and carefully, quietly, from alleyways or upstairs windows, cheered us on our way with the familiar cry, “A Geraldine! A Geraldine!” They dared not make much ado, since English soldiers were about in the cobbled streets. But one man’s voice called out as if in warning, “Remember the Pardon of Maynooth!”
    Dublin town always amazed me with its tall, protective walls and cheek-by-jowl tumble of buildings overhanging narrow streets. I could smell the sea from here, and terns and gulls screeched overhead. The big bay lay beyond, sadly, we had heard, now crowded with English ships. How I had loved the several times Father or Uncle James had taken me sailing on the bay. I had reveled in the toss and sway of the big ship and wished I could help steer her myself. Now I wondered how Father’s fine town house had fared, but I dared not ask.
    “Today at the banquet we are to attend,” I had heard Uncle Walter tell his brothers, “peace will be bargained for and the future of the Fitzgeralds and of all Erin settled for years to come.” We could only pray that, since our family had helped keep the peace for nearly a century, it would be settled in the Fitzgeralds’ favor.
    Our party clattered through a great park and up a gravel lane toward the venerable old castle of Kilmainham with its nearby Saint John of Jerusalem Knights Hospitallers’ priory. Lying on land south of the Liffey, the castle had long been the residence for the English viceroys in Ireland, so it seemed the right place for this conference today.
    But above all, I was excited to be with my five Fitzgerald uncles, for they were the ones who now represented my father, the former earl, and Thomas, the current earl, albeit he was in hiding with a price on his head. Surely, all of that would be rectified today. Uncle Leonard had recently arrived with English reinforcements and several more ships, yet I had no doubt he would want a truce. I knew full well that Christopher had been rash and wrong to be overly certain that the English would parley at Maynooth so they would not have to spend more money and time in what I had heard they called “wild Ireland.” But with the Gunner dead and Uncle Leonard charged with calming the Pale, praise be, the outcome now partly hung on family loyalty, not just politics and power.
    Yet something else made me feel important today. For the first time in my life that I could recall, Magheen was not with me as if I were some child to be tended and corrected. Although she was coming to Dublin later today, she was back at Leixlip, packing what things she could assemble for our voyage to join my mother, which had been arranged through messengers between my English uncle and my Irish ones.
    And, with my petticoats wrapped around it, Magheen was enclosing The Red Book of Kildare in the false bottom of my specially made traveling chest. Even if the English knew of its existence, they might assume it was with Gerald and not with a young woman, a colleen, as the village folk would say. So that was one of the few benefits, as far as I could see, of my feminine gender. Although I did miss my family, I was loath to leave Ireland. Still, I had always wanted to sail the Irish Sea, so I tried to buck myself up.
    As the six of us dismounted, Uncle James helped me off my palfrey and gave me a wink. “With our Fitzgerald brains and brawn and your beauty, Lady Gera, we shall win the day.”
    We were greeted by one of Uncle Leonard’s lieutenants and escorted into a banquet chamber with a fine table laid out, even silver saltcellars and glass goblets. Servants and guards with yeomen’s halberds stood about, and then we heard men coming, boots on the stone floor. Flanked by at least a dozen men, Uncle Leonard Grey—I assumed it was he, and he did vaguely resemble Mother—entered through