The Virgin's Spy (Tudor Legacy #2)(16)

With that sense of unwilling admiration the Scots girl had wrung from her all week, Ailis admitted that her uncle was getting much more than he’d bargained for in Maisie Sinclair. Finian Kavanaugh believed he’d be able to wheedle more money from her brother, with Maisie simply a means to an end.

Ailis had believed the same. She might have to readjust her own plans in light of who this girl had turned out to be.

—

For two days Carrigafoyle was savagely battered by English guns from both land and sea. At the end of the first hour, Stephen thought he would run mad from the roar. At the end of the first day, he couldn’t understand why the outpost had not yet surrendered. But by the end of the second day, the guns had become merely a fact of life. He could hardly recall a time that he hadn’t woken and slept and eaten and stood guard without the roar and rumble of heavy artillery.

On the first day, Pelham ordered men forward to take the sea wall, but they were pinned down by Spanish guns and boulders hurled at them from above. When the English attempted to raise siege ladders, the Spanish halbardiers flung them back until the sea wall ran dark with spilled blood. Stephen and his men were spared that, at least, for their orders were to stand ready with a company of lances outside the northern wall. That was where the English guns were expected to break through first. Pelham had ordered that none of the rebels be allowed to escape and make their way to the Earl of Desmond, now hunkered down forty miles away in Castleisland.

The conclusion of the battle was foregone. Even supported by Spanish troops, the Irish rebels could not hope to counter the largest English force ever assembled in western Ireland. There were near a thousand men between Pelham and Dane, and by late in the second day it was reckoned those inside the fortress had taken refuge in the great keep tower.

On the third day, the western wall of the keep collapsed under several direct hits from the ships’ guns. Oliver Dane led his men inside the walls of Carrigafoyle to end the fighting and flush the survivors out.

Stephen and his men were charged with rounding up those rebels who managed to slip past Dane. In twos and threes, they could flit through the rubble and smoke and water, but could not long escape men on horseback. Stephen was not sorry when he found Captain Julian among them—the Italian engineer who had built up the keep and led the defenders within. And he didn’t mind taking back the Irishmen. When a man went to war, especially a rebel, he knew the price.

The women were another matter. Within four hours of the fall of Carrigafoyle, Stephen had under guard twenty-three men, women, and children, the youngest just ten years old. Frankly, he would have let more of them slip away if he hadn’t seen the state of the countryside and knew they’d likely starve if left to their own devices. Better to be imprisoned and fed, he argued to himself.

It was oppressively silent as they approached Carrigafoyle. After the days of bombardment, there was something ominous about the lack of guns. Stephen could see where the western wall of the tower keep had collapsed and winced. Surely lives had been lost beneath the crushing stone. Wearily, he gave orders to Harrington to quarter the prisoners for now in their own camp until decisions were made about their destination. Soldiers in the flush of victory could not always be trusted, but at least Stephen knew Harrington would keep their men in order and the prisoners safe.

He rode into Oliver Dane’s camp and found only a handful of men who had suffered injuries. When asked where their commander was, all Stephen got was a jerk of the head in the direction of the fallen keep and a curt, “Finishing off, they are.”

Finishing off what? Stephen wondered. The keep was in English hands, which meant the whole of the river and its approach to the port city of Limerick was secure. This defeat would be painful—perhaps fatal—to the rebellion in Munster. All that was left to finish was the diplomatic maneuvering to get to the Earl of Desmond himself, certainly nothing that could be accomplished on this battlefield.

Stephen had never been more wrong.

He crossed to the island and entered the keep, almost choking on the stench of smoke and rubble and—distinctively threaded through it all—blood. Every sense alert, as though he might be attacked, he kept one hand on the hilt of his sword and stepped cautiously past the outer walls into the courtyard where the rebels had made their final stand.

It was like no nightmare he’d ever suffered—the only thing his horrified mind could conjure were some of the more dismal ancient depictions of hell. He’d expected death, but what he found was slaughter. Everywhere he looked there were men wearing Dane’s red and gold boar badge, with dripping swords and expressions either grimly purposeful or disturbingly casual. Behind and around them, heaped against walls, huddled in corners, lay the bodies of Carrigafoyle’s defenders, hacked down in the moment of surrender. No, worse than that—in the hours after surrender, when tempers should have cooled and negotiations held sway. Even had the English meant to kill the rebels, these men should still have had a brief trial and been properly hung. But this?

This was nothing short of murder.

He might have talked himself into a cooler head—or at least a more prudent response—given time. It was Oliver Dane’s bad fortune to come swaggering up to Stephen while he was still trying to settle his stomach.

“Sorry to miss the fun?” Dane asked.

“What in the name of God have you done?” Stephen demanded, his voice low with fury. It almost scared him, how angry he was. His father never showed anger beyond a few cutting words, never let his temper roil through him and into violence. Stephen had spent his lifetime, all twenty-one years of it, trying to live up to Dominic Courtenay. That habit alone kept him from knocking the smirk off Dane’s face with the hilt of his sword.