Page 145 of The Pirate Queen

“I like this,” she tells him.

“Tá. Is better than sleeping alone.”

“Was it sleep you wanted, then? I mistook your intentions.”

His laughter rumbles through her chest. “I would rather never sleep again. But if I must, I’ll keep you as my lawful blanket.”

Grace has almost drifted off to sleep when she hears a harsh distant barking on the hills outside Rockfleet. It’s followed by an answering shriek. Back and forth goes this call-and-response for some minutes.

“ ’Tis their mating season,” Richard tells her, but his voice is soft and she thinks that he isn’t far from dreams either. “The foxes, I mean.”

“They’re awfully loud about it.”

He chuckles. “The males not as much. That was him you heard first. The loud part is the ‘vixen’s scream’ as they clicket. That’s how you know she enjoys being swived.” He nips at Grace’s ear. “Same as you.”

She swats at Richard, but he rolls her so that her back is pressed to his torso. He drapes one big, heavy arm over her side and buries his face in her neck so that his breath slides warm across her shoulder.

“The sun will be up soon,” she says. “I didn’t take you for the kind of man who lies abed.”

“Ssshhh,” he whispers. “Where else do ye have to be, Gráinne? And besides, I cut your dress to shreds last night. You’ve nothing to wear.”

Grace is thinking that there is nowhere else in all the world that she would rather be when she hears the chinkling, tinkling call of a goldfinch outside the window. Its song rises and falls, timed to her quiet, swooping breaths. It is nearing dawn somewhere out there, beyond the walls of this warm room, and the bird has found its breakfast. Nettle and thistle, long gone to seed. It sings of success and hunger and, she thinks, love. Three more melodic notes, and then she is asleep.

Matriarch, 1590

“Betrayal”

Grace is sixty years old

Grace stands on Niamh’s deck, anchored just beyond the beach, and surveys the pretty prison where she was sent off to live at sixteen. There is no part of her that misses that life, though she does miss the girl she was then. Oh, what Grace would tell her younger self, if only she could.

She is glad that Merrick was able to retake the barony from Rory. And if he did so at the point of a sword? Well, he is an O’Flaherty, after all. Unfortunately, he is his father’s son, and ranks personal vendetta above family allegiance. It is the only reason she can fathom that Merrick has sworn his fealty to Sir Richard Bingham.

“Easy,” she tells Ultan as her men lower the rowboat. “Merrick cannot know what we’re about.”

Ultan spits over the rail. “I told you we couldn’t trust FitzWilliam to keep his word and have Bingham removed as governor.”

“He was removed,” she reminds her first mate. “For all of six months. Until he convinced the English queen to give him a trial.”

“In which he was acquitted because”—Ultan pauses here to count on his fingers—“it took place in Dublin, before an English council, and not a single Mayo chieftain testified against him.”

Grace lifts an arm and offers a friendly wave to a handful of guards who have come down to the beach to watch them disembark.

“In all fairness, it’s hard to give testimony at a trial that you don’t know is happening,” she tells him.

Grace never got the purported summons. Nor did any of the other chieftains who had cause against Bingham. But all of them received the ultimatum sent by FitzWilliam demanding their submission once Bingham was acquitted. It was duly rejected. Now Bingham, bolstered by support from the English queen, has renewed his aggressions. And his attempts to divide and conquer. He brokered a deal with her son: Merrick’s loyalty in return for his assistance in defeating Rory O’Flaherty. Merrick behaves like a child, avenging a father he never knew.

“What kind of trouble will we get from him?” Ultan asks as he hands Grace down to the three crewmen waiting in the rowboat. The others will stay aboard so as not to cause alarm. Let them think she is little more than a mother coming to visit her son.

“He is clever. And vain. But he wouldn’t dare fight me,” she says. “Still, I don’t intend to give him the chance.”

“Then you think the ruse worked?”

She tilts her head to the wide swath of pale beach. “I don’t see any guards headed for the quay.”

Caoimhe and the Róisín Dubh are docked around the bend, in a jagged notch of harbor between the Hill of Doon and the southerly cliffs that provide a natural harbor. But Merrick and his men, having seen Grace standing on deck waving, are all gathered at the beach to greet them.

“Let’s get this spanking over with, shall we?”