Susan Wiggs - At The Queen's Summons

“Eat something,” he urged her. She gave him a vague smile and picked up one of the pies. She ate methodically and without savor. The Sassenach were terrible cooks, Aidan thought, not for the first time.

A hulking figure filled the doorway and plunged the tavern deeper into darkness. Aidan’s hand went for his dagger; then he remembered the girl still had it.

As soon as the newcomer stepped inside, Aidan grinned and relaxed. He would need no weapon against this man.

“Come sit you down, Donal Og,” he said in Gaelic, dragging a third stool to the table.

Aidan was known far and wide as a man of prodigious size, but his cousin dwarfed him. Donal Og had massive shoulders, legs like tree trunks and a broad, prominent brow that gave him the look of a simpleton. Nothing was farther from the truth. Donal Og was brilliant, wry and unfailingly loyal to Aidan.

Pippa stopped chewing to gape at him.

“This is Donal Og,” said Aidan. “The captain of my guard.”

“Donal Og,” she repeated, her pronunciation perfect.

“It means Donal the Small,” Donal Og explained.

Her gaze measured his height. “Where?”

“I was so dubbed at birth.”

“Ah. That explains everything.” She smiled broadly. “I am honored. My name is Pippa Trueblood.”

“The honor is my own, surely,” Donal Og said with faint irony in his voice.

Aidan frowned. “I thought you said Trueheart.”

She laughed. “Silly me. Perhaps I did.” She began licking grease and crumbs from her fingers.

“Where,” Donal Og asked in Gaelic, “did you find that?”

“St. Paul’s churchyard.”

“The Sassenach will let anyone in their churches, even lunatics.” Donal Og held out a hand, and the alewife served him a mug of ale. “Is she as crazy as she looks?”

Aidan kept a bland, pleasant smile on his face so the girl would not guess what they spoke of. “Probably.”

“Are you Dutch?” she asked suddenly. “That language you’re using to discuss me—is it Dutch? Or Norse, perhaps?”

Aidan laughed. “It is Gaelic. I thought you knew. We’re Irish.”

Her eyes widened. “Irish. I’m told the Irish are wild and fierce and more papist than the pope himself.”

Donal Og chuckled. “You’re right about the wild and fierce part.”

She leaned forward with interest burning in her eyes. Aidan gamely ran a hand through his hair. “You’ll see I have no antlers, so you can lay to rest that myth. If you like, I’ll show you that I have no tail—”

“I believe you,” she said quickly.

“Don’t tell her about the blood sacrifices,” Donal Og warned.

She gasped. “Blood sacrifices?”

“Not lately,” Aidan concluded, his face deadly serious.

“Certainly not on a waning moon,” Donal Og added.

But Pippa held herself a bit more stiffly and regarded them with wariness. She seemed to be measuring the distance from table to door with an expert eye. Aidan had the impression that she was quite accustomed to making swift escapes.

The alewife, no doubt drawn by the color of their money, sidled over with more brown ale. “Did ye know we’re Irish, ma’am?” Pippa asked in a perfect imitation of Aidan’s brogue.

The alewife’s brow lifted. “Do tell!”

“I’m a nun, see,” Pippa explained, “of the Order of Saint Dorcas of the Sisters of Virtue. We never forget a favor.”

Suitably impressed, the alewife curtsied with new respect and withdrew.

“So,” Aidan said, sipping his ale and hiding his amusement at her little performance. “We are Irish and you cannot decide on a family name for yourself. How is it that you came to be a strolling player in St. Paul’s?”

Donal Og muttered in Gaelic, “Really, my lord, could we not just leave? Not only is she crazy, she’s probably crawling with vermin. I’m sure I just saw a flea on her.”

“Ah, that’s a sad tale indeed,” Pippa said. “My father was a great war hero.”

“Which war?” Aidan asked.

“Which war do you suppose, my lord?”

“The Great Rebellion?” he guessed.

She nodded vigorously, her hacked-off hair bobbing. “The very one.”

“Ah,” said Aidan. “And your father was a hero, you say?”

“You’re as giddy as she,” grumbled Donal Og, still speaking Irish.

“Indeed he was,” Pippa declared. “He saved a whole garrison from slaughter.” A faraway look pervaded her eyes like morning mist. She looked past him, out the open door, at a patch of the sky visible between the gabled roofs of London. “He loved me more than life itself, and he wept when he had to leave me. Ah, that was a bleak day for the Truebeard family.”

“Trueheart,” Aidan corrected, curiously moved. The story was as false as a strumpet’s promise, yet the yearning he heard in the girl’s voice rang true.

“Trueheart,” she agreed easily. “I never saw my father again. My mother was carried off by pirates, and I was left quite alone to fend for myself.”

“I’ve heard enough,” said Donal Og. “Let’s go.”

Aidan ignored him. He found himself fascinated by the girl, watching as she helped herself to more ale and drank greedily, as if she would never get her fill.

Something about her touched him in a deep, hidden place he had long kept closed. It was in the very heart of him, embers of warmth that he guarded like a windbreak around a herdsman’s fire. No one was allowed to share the inner life of Aidan O Donoghue. He had permitted that just once—and he had been so thoroughly doused that he had frozen himself to sentiment, to trust, to joy, to hope—to everything that made life worth living.

Now here was this strange woman, unwashed and underfed, with naught but her large soft eyes and her vivid imagination to shield her from the harshness of the world. True, she was strong and saucy as any rollicking street performer, but not too far beneath the gamine surface, he saw something that fanned at the banked embers inside him. She possessed a subtle, waiflike vulnerability that was, at least on the surface, at odds with her saucy mouth and nail-hard shell of insouciance.

And, though her hair and face and ill-fitting garments were smeared with grease and ashes, a charming, guileless appeal shone through.

“That is quite a tale of woe,” Aidan commented.

Her smile favored them both like the sun bursting through stormclouds.

“Too bad it’s a pack of lies,” Donal Og said.

“I do wish you’d speak English,” she said. “It’s bad manners to leave me out.” She glared accusingly at him. “But I suppose, if you’re going to say I’m crazy and a liar and things of that sort, it is probably best to speak Irish.”

Seeing so huge a man squirm was an interesting spectacle. Donal Og shifted to and fro, causing the stool to creak. His hamlike face flushed to the ears. “Aye, well,” he said in English, “you need not perform for Aidan and me. For us, the truth is good enough.”

“I see.” She elongated her words as the effects of the ale flowed through her. “Then I should indeed confess the truth and tell you exactly who I am.”

It is a mother’s lot to rejoice and to grieve all at once. So it has always been, but knowing that has never eased my grief nor dimmed my joy.

In the early part of her reign, the queen gave our family a land grant in County Kerry, Munster, but until recently, we kept it in name only, content to leave Ireland to the Irish. Now, quite suddenly, we are expected to do something about it.

Today my son Richard received a royal commission. I wonder, when the queen’s advisers empowered my son to lead an army, if they ever, even for an instant, imagined him as I knew him—a laughing small boy with grass stains on his elbows and the pure sweetness of an innocent heart shining from his eyes.