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Father had seen fit to bring here from Dublin Castle.
    I felt deserted and scared, but I was also a Fitzgerald and kept my head held high. I was helping my half brother and three of my uncles, who were commanding the Irish troops, I told myself. During those days when our tutors and most of the castle musicians had fled and I hadn’t seen Mother for so long, Magheen was my teacher, and I became more Irish, more fiercely independent, and, however terrified, more bold.
    “I’ll be telling you, your mother wouldna approve of you wearing your hair loose all the time, that she wouldna,” Magheen scolded me one day while we worked side by side, making beds. “Nor are you wearing the proper petticoats, and your skirts drag.”
    “Magheen, just take a look at how we’re living,” I said with a sweep of my arm around the room. We had moved the living quarters for the castle’s women to the top tower room, for we hoped cannon fire could not reach us here. Our wool-stuffed mattresses on the floor were cheek by jowl, and we had extra foodstuffs piled everywhere. Outside, sheep, cattle, and horses had been brought into the inner courtyard, and the smell of them drifted clear up on the breeze at times. The castle’s fine furniture had mostly been made on site in the rooms below, since the staircases were too narrow for them to be carried up or moved. I told myself and others we were doing our part to live a bit crudely, for weren’t our Fitzgerald forces sleeping on the ground?
    “I just wish I knew what was going to happen next, and I wish I could help fight,” I told Magheen as I leaned my elbows on the narrow window ledge, looking out over the lawn and fields where the siege cannons were being set up.
    “Stuff and nonsense. Women don’t fight—at least that way.”
    “I would like to find a way. Won’t Thomas attack them from the rear before they start pounding us to pieces? And are my uncles safe?”
    “Did you never tell her of the prophecy then?” Sinead, one of the chambermaids, who was helping, asked. “About the ship to England?”
    “What ship? What about a ship?” I demanded, rounding on Magheen. I loved ships, and my dearest delight was to sail in one of any size. “Have you heard something of an escape that Gerald and I weren’t told?”
    “No, my colleen. Just a prophecy from the old days, nothing to fret for, and Sinead can just learn not to flap her lip, that she can.”
    “If it’s just a story, no harm in telling me,” I insisted. “You know I love the old tales.”
    “By Saint Brigid!” she muttered, but she gave me an answer anyway. “Just that someday five earls will be carried to England in a cow’s belly and never return.”
    “In a cow’s belly? Though my uncles be earls in their own regions, Thomas said last time they are being careful never to be together these days so they cannot be rounded up like cattle—in a cow’s belly, indeed!”
    It was then, that very moment, and I can even recall what I was looking at—Magheen swatting Sinead out of the room—that the first cannon blast against Maynooth battered all I had ever held dear.

 
    CHAPTER THE FOURTH
     
    March 22, 1535
     
    “If Lord Thomas doesna come with more troops soon,” Magheen muttered, “Maynooth will be rubble.”
    “You must not say or even think so,” I protested from my perch on a wooden barrel where we all huddled in the cellar below the great hall. “Thomas—the earl—said the castle withstood a long siege a hundred years or so ago.”
    Collum said, “Not against King Henry’s new artillery, overseen by the Gunner. And not with no reinforcements on the horizon.”
    “We must all be brave,” Gerald put in, trying to keep his voice steady. It had not yet lowered to a man’s tones and sometimes came out reedy and shrill. “Thomas will surely come with an army and make them leave us be.”
    The crash of cannonballs had tormented us day and night, nigh on a week of it. My wolfhound, Wynne, had