Read The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell for Free Online Page B

eyes, she thought, even barbaric. She smiled as she put them on. Sure the meeting was an important one, but there was no reason she should not amuse herself at her enemy’s expense. Now the image that peered back at Grace satisfied her. Perhaps she wasn’t terrifying, as the reputation preceding her was bound to be, but she was striking, even distinguished.
    This occasion, she thought, was long overdue. All the other great clan chiefs of Ireland knew the Queen of England personally. “Black Tom Butler”—known as the Earl of Ormond here—was treated as family, and spent as much time on English soil as Irish. Gerald Fitzgerald, God curse his blighted soul, the queen’s so-called earl of Desmond, before his misbegotten Munster rebellion had spent seven years in the Tower of London, all the while his wife Elizabeth’s confidante. And then there was The O’Neill. Raised in Sir Henry Sidney’s English country house, Hugh O’Neill had surrendered to the queen and, after helping to put down the Desmond rebellion, had assumed the earldom of Tyrone.
    He ’d treated with the English on many occasions, but had broken most of the treaties he had made. His loyalties, despite outward appearances, had always been very clearly with Ireland.
    What would her father think to see her gotten up like the dog’s dinner for this occasion? He would think it momentous to be sure, though he ’d caution against any hint of groveling. After all, he ’d never groveled to the queen’s father. Whilst all the other chieftains had succumbed to King Henry’s nonsense—surrendering their allegiance to England, giving up the old ways and the Brehon laws, to be given in return their very own lands back to them, and an English title that everyone knew was phony as the year was long—Grace ’s father had refused to budge. ’Twas a clear fake, this Surrender and Regrant program, for all knew full well how reviled were her countrymen. To the English they were savages.
    Scum. White monkeys. “The Wild Irish.” The policy, Owen had lamented, had appealed to the worst in the clan chiefs’ natures. Had wreaked more havoc with Ireland than any could remember. But Owen O’Malley had clung steadfastly to the old Gaelic ways and refused to add a title to his name.
    Grace had herself, many years before, allowed her husband to submit to Henry Sidney, but it had been for expediency’s sake. And she had never taken an English title. In fact, she thought with a small smile as she pushed open her cabin door, she ’d not even taken her husbands’ names after she ’d married. Grace O’Malley she ’d been born, and Grace O’Malley she would die.
    She was ready to meet the queen, she thought as she climbed to the deck, already bathed in evening shadows. She had come with a purpose and meant to have her way, no matter what it took. Lives were at stake here, and she would accept nothing short of success.
     
    THE AUDIENCE had been hastily thrown together, but the gathering in the Presence Chamber, decided Essex, was a distinguished one nonetheless. He ’d rounded up the Earl of Ormond and sent frantic and no doubt mysterious messages to Southampton and Francis Bacon to attend him at Court immediately. They were just now taking their places with the other courtiers along one wall of the wood-paneled chamber, as Elizabeth’s waiting ladies took theirs along the other.
    Katherine Bridges was amongst the women, coyly attempting to catch his eye, but he only answered with a brief nod before turning back to the business at hand. It would be unseemly, he knew, to appear to be flirting with his mistress so soon after Elizabeth’s admonition to seriousness.
    The queen, seated on a small throne, was looking altogether severe, though Essex knew there was excitement seething beneath the chilly facade. Leaning down to whisper in her ear, his hunched back grotesquely exaggerated in this posture, Robert Cecil appeared a living gargoyle. How, wondered Essex, could she