Page 104 of The Pirate Queen

More tittering from the serving girls.

“Does ’e need bathing?” one of them offers.

“Not by you.” Cook swats her with a dish towel, but the girl doesn’t budge from her place at the table. Her eyes rove up and down, taking in the strong legs and muscled stomach. Biceps and buttocks. Other parts. Her cheeks flush.

“Oh for feck’s sake,” Grace snaps. “Take him to the privy chamber.”

Later that night, Grace sits alone in the Great Hall. A small fire burns in the hearth. Candles drip onto the mantel. It’s been months, and still, she misses her children. They went to fosterage, one after another after another, and she finds all this silence in the evenings unnerving. She is used to their bickering, their laughter and games. But Maeve was right, as usual, and the alliance with the O’Neills is already proving useful. Grace has an ally in Ulster now, and a regular source of news from that territory.

She settles deeper into her chair and says nothing when Cook arrives with a glass of whiskey. Grace accepts it with a weak smile.

She drinks alone.

Later, once she’s tired and pleasantly tipsy, Grace makes her way upstairs, past the privy chamber, and up again to her old garret room. She listens at the door to the sound of Maeve’s snoring. Sometimes her mother still cries at night. Maeve refused to sleep in the privy chamber after Eóin died. Says it belongs to Grace anyway, since she is now the Bean an Tí.

Grace pauses again at the privy chamber door. The serving girls chatter as they tidy her room. They’ve taken every opportunity to fuss over the shipwrecked man, to be there when he wakes.

“Did ye see ’im during ’is bath?” one of them asks.

Curious, Grace leans against the wall instead of announcing her arrival.

“Tá,” says the other. “Handsome devil, isn’t ’e?”

A lower murmur of approval. “He’s a donkey, sure enough.”

“I wouldn’t turn him from bed.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind riding ’im.”

They giggle and Grace can feel her cheeks grow warm.

“He’s the look of a man who knows what to do with ’is hands.”

“And ’is tongue,” adds the other.

“Had a man once,” the first girl says with a laugh, “who had me quim shaking for near an hour. Begged ’im not to stop. Then begged ’im to do it again.”

“Did ’e?”

“That beard splitter had me three more times afore sunrise.”

The other serving girl sounds as though she’s pouting. “I’ve only had sailors.”

“ ’E was a sailor. But a Scot. Across the bay in Newport, near two summers ago. Been looking for ’im ever since.”

The girls continue chatting as they sweep and tidy the privy chamber, as they move around the pallet where the shipwrecked man lies. Grace wonders at their boldness. Do they not care that he might wake up and hear them? Or is that the point entirely? To ensure that he’s aware of the invitation? She stays there listening as they swap tales of pleasure and bedroom acts that Grace has never experienced—some she’s never heard of. She is both intrigued and scandalized. Never in her life has she had a friend to talk with in this manner. Her eyes are closed and her head is tilted back against the wall when suddenly the serving girls are standing in the hallway before her.

“Bean an Tí,” the first says, ducking her head in respect. She slips away, blushing.

“Bean an Tí,” says the other, and follows after.

Grace steps into the privy chamber. Several candles burn low, revealing the shipwrecked man still asleep. A blanket is pulled to his chest, but he’s otherwise naked. She stands there and stares at him until he twitches. Then she hurries into the bedchamber and shuts the door tight behind her. Grace readies herself for bed, wondering what it would be like to feel anything but duty or disgust while lying beneath a man.

His name is Hugh de Lacy. Of Wexford. Or so the shipwrecked man claims, at any rate. Grace suspects that name is a lie. At least the surname. De Lacy is a moneyed family from Leinster. But this man sounds as Irish as she does. As wild. If he’d come from that long line of Anglo-Norman invaders, as he says, there would be more of the Pale in him. Some English gentility. Some elocution. Grace thinks he’s borrowed the name to make himself sound important. The bigger problem, however, is that she’s beginning to think he was never on that ship in the first place.

Grace meets him on the stairs as she heads down to breakfast.

“Ah,” he says, all charm and smiles. His hair is wet and curling at the ends, his face washed. “Was just coming to find you.”