Page 199 of The Pirate Queen

“I think,” he says, with no small amount of irritation, “that you have your fingers in many conflicts. And ensuring you arrive in one piece will keep a good deal of trouble from my door.”

Tom is wrong to think that Richard and her men have not attempted a rescue. It is only that the dungeons of Askeaton and Limerick Castles were too well fortified for them to penetrate, at least not without a full army and long siege. So they have waited. As has she. But now she’s under military guard on her way to Dublin. Grace is tired of waiting. And of shackles. She is supremely tired of being dirty and cold. She misses Richard and Tibbot, Young Eóin, Margaret, and Merrick. She misses her men and her ships and the sea. Freedom. But if all those long, awful years married to Donal O’Flaherty taught her anything, it was how to wait.

“Tom?” she calls, and he edges his horse closer to the wagon again. “Would you like a song?”

“Please God, no.”

She laughs. Then clears her throat.

Thank God for the Duchess of Gloucester,

She obliges all who accost her!

She welcomes the prick

Of Tom, Harry, or Dick,

Or Baldwin, or even Lord Astor.

Black Tom puts his heels into his horse’s side and trots ahead, mumbling under his breath about “heathen women.”

“Not to your liking?” she calls after him. “How about this one…”

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,

Let loose a fart, and away he run.

But Tom fell in

An auld shite bin

And even Tom stinks like sin!

Certainly juvenile. But no less fun. They have been many long days on the road and Grace is forced to find entertainment where she can. Based on the scattered chuckles of the guards around her, she isn’t the only one.

When they arrive at Dublin Castle the next day, Grace is still shackled but now she is gagged as well. What a dry shite, that Black Tom, no sense of humor to speak of. Grace thinks that she will be dragged to the dungeons again, but this time she is taken up, up, into the Bermingham Tower.

The gag is untied, the shackles removed, then she is shoved inside the small cell. A single window. Low ceilings. A stone bench. The door clangs shut behind her.

“Meals twice a day,” someone shouts from the other side of the heavy wooden door. She listens to the bar fall down, locking her in. “Sunrise and sunset.”

“I want to go home,” Grace says to the ceiling. “But I can wait.”

The thing Grace hates most about prison—other than the grueling boredom—is the way she loses track of time. Minutes, hours, and days all blend together. Stretch out. Constrict. She might have been in this cell for a decade already. Or one month. Grace measures time by the growth of her fingernails. When they extend beyond the tips of her fingers, she calls it a week. Then she gnaws them down and starts the count again.

It is warmer now than when she first arrived. Late March, if she had to guess. There is a barn swallow nesting on the ledge outside her window and geese squawking overhead. Midday. Sunny. Grace is lying on her back, hands spread flat across her stomach, eyes closed. She is imagining herself on board Niamh, the rise and swell of her breath a substitute for the waves. She is listening, imagining. And then comes the clatter of feet in the hall outside her cell. Guards.

She turns her head to the door. Her next meal is not due for many hours. There is no reason for anyone to be at her cell. Carefully, Grace swings her legs over the edge of her stone bench. Sets her feet on the floor. She runs a hand along her left boot, feeling the familiar weight of her dagger. Grace cannot kill them all, not if they intend to drag her to the gallows. But she won’t go without drawing blood.

Her door is thrown back. Another nameless guard. They all look the same. Sound the same.

“Get up,” he orders. “The Lord Deputy has ordered you be brought to him.”

“What does FitzWilliam want with me?” she asks.

“That’s his fecking business, ain’t it?” He motions her forward, then lifts the shackles.

Grace joins him at the door and submits to the restraint. She takes an odd kind of pleasure in his obvious disgust at her aroma. There are three other guards with him. Overkill, she thinks. But together they escort her into the bowels of Dublin Castle to a bathing chamber and a tub of tepid water.