The Irish Princess by Karen Harper Page B

Did the English have to ruin everything? Did they intend to obliterate all the Fitzgeralds had owned and commanded? And without our family to keep the peace, would Gaelic raids increase or would civil war split our land? The Fitzgeralds had been able to keep the English out, and now here they were, stomping on all of us with their brutal boots.
    As if I were her nurse and comforter, I held the sobbing woman to me as the current pulled us on. I knew how desperately my dear friend wanted to run the boat ashore and rush back to see if her family and friends had escaped, to help any way she could. But I also knew she would stay with me to the very gates of hell, and I loved her all the more for that. High- and lowborn barriers be damned; Magheen McArdle was more my mother in that moment than my birth mother, granddaughter of an English queen, had ever been.
     
    That afternoon, as we passed through the glens of the Liffey with their mossy rock ledges leaning overhead, I felt closed in by fear. We were sitting in the boat but not wearing ourselves out with rowing in the brisk current. When necessary, we pushed away from rocks with the oars. But where were we really going and what must we do to escape the Gunner and his men?
    “Saint Brigid has let us down,” I told Magheen, who was still wiping her eyes and nose with the hem of her skirt.
    “That be blasphemy! We’re alive and away from the fiends, are we not?”
    Eager to keep our strength and spirits up, as if I were a child—which was not possible ever again—I asked her, “Will you tell me anew the story of Saint Brigid’s cloak?”
    She nodded and sniffled. Her voice was muted at first and, after all her tears, she hiccoughed through the first of it. “There be dozens of stories of miracles and wonders the blessed Brigid did after she received the veil from Saint Patrick himself. Like you, milady, she was a chieftain’s daughter, and young when duties first fell to her.”
    I let her talk, perhaps the best diversion from her pain, and mine too. As ever, she went off on side stories now and then as I watched streams pouring into the river, swelling its width and depth.
    “Though she traveled far and wide as abbess in her nunnery,” Magheen went on, “Brigid hosted gatherings of important people and intervened in disputes and brought peace to warring factions.”
    Which made me think, if she did all that, why did she not do the same now for those who venerated her? But I held my tongue and nodded to urge her on.
    “As you recall, she accepted a site near Kildare for her small community from Dunlang MacEnda, king of Leinster, and built a church there. But she required extra land for farming to support her people. When the king refused, she said ever so sweetly to him, ‘Just give me as much as my cloak will cover,’ and, of course, he agreed to so simple and small a request. But as she laid her cloak upon the ground, it began spreading till it be covering the entire plain. ’Tis amazing what a lot the Lord can do with what little we give Him.”
    “And she was bold enough to risk challenging and besting a king,” I said almost to myself. Yes, our Saint Brigid of Kildare would not have gotten what she wanted if she had railed at him. She was clever to the core. And so would I learn to be if I ever met the vile English king or any of his reeky, hedgepig, murderous lackeys.
     
    We had more trouble than I’d thought getting the boat safely out of the water and up on a stony bank just above the waterfalls where our gentle Lyreen joined the Rye Water to birth the big River Liffey. I secured the Red Book to my chest again and hid it under my cloak. We ate what soda bread we had left and drank from the flask of ale Magheen had brought. The roar of the falls was soothing, almost luring, and that gave me time to think.
    “We have two choices,” I told Magheen as she bent to fill the empty flask with river water. “One, I follow the rocky path and you let the boat