Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [354]
“And you’re asking me to take you on as an apprentice?” he confirmed.
“I am. I’m sure that my father—Sean O’Byrne, that is—will pay the apprenticeship fee.”
“No doubt.”
“If you would consider me.”
MacGowan did consider, but he had no need to do so for long. It was clear to him that with his knowledge of life with the O’Byrnes and his courtly education and manners, the young man would be the ideal grey merchant, welcomed beyond the Pale and in the best Dublin circles, too. He could go far, MacGowan thought, farther even than I.
“There is a problem,” he said.
“What is that?”
“Your name.”
Maurice Fitzgerald. What a name to possess. There would be a splendid dash, even effrontery in a young grey merchant owning such an aristocratic name; but given the present political climate in Dublin, it might be unwise.
“The name of Fitzgerald might put you in some danger now,” he said.
“It’s not my name anymore,” Maurice answered with a wry smile. “You forget that I’m an O’Byrne.”
“So you are.” MacGowan nodded thoughtfully. “So you are.” He paused. “That also, in Dublin, could be a problem.” He smiled sadly. “It’s too Irish.”
Given the young man’s character and manners, he would probably overcome any prejudice in time. But nonetheless, to advertise oneself as the son of Sean O’Byrne—the Irish friend of Fitzgerald, who had tried to kidnap the wife of Alderman Doyle—was not, he gently pointed out to Maurice, the best way to begin. “And you’ll want the freedom one day,” he predicted. “Be sure of that.”
“In that case, since to be truthful with you, I feel more like an orphan than any man’s son, and I mean to make a life of my own, I’d be glad enough to take another name. I really don’t care.” The young man stared at MacGowan for a few moments and then smiled. “Your own name, for instance. MacGowan in English would be Smith.”
“It would. Near enough.”
“Well then, if you’ll have me as an apprentice, let me be Maurice Smith. Would that do?”
“It would do very well,” said MacGowan with a laugh. “You shall be Maurice Smith.”
And so it was, early in the autumn of 1535, while Silken Thomas was on the perilous sea to London, that a descendant of the princely O’Byrnes and the noble Walshes, and, though he did not know it, of Deirdre and of Conall and of old Fergus himself, came down to live in Dublin under the English name of Maurice Smith.
One week later, to his great surprise, Maurice received a visitor. It was his father.
It had taken Sean a little while to find his son. He had supposed that Maurice might have gone to MacGowan, but when he first approached the merchant’s house and asked if there was a young man named O’Byrne living there, he had been told by the neighbours that there was not. He did not seem particularly put out by Maurice’s decision not to use his proper name.
“You’ve been living under another name for so many years, that I expect it has become a habit,” Sean told him with a smile.
He did not stay long, but with him he had brought a square box.
“You may not choose to live at Rathconan,” he said, “but you may as well have something to remember your family by.”
Then he left.
After his father had gone, Maurice opened the box. To his surprise and delight, he found that it contained the drinking skull of old Fergus.
In the Irish Parliament that met from May of 1536 until December of the following year, no member was more assiduous in his efforts to please the king than William Walsh the lawyer.
Acting under the direction of the king’s council in London, the Irish Parliament passed measures to centralise the rule of Ireland in England, to raise taxes, and, of course, to recognise King Henry, and not the Pope, as Supreme Head of the Irish Church, while allowing his divorce and remarriage to be valid. And whether William Walsh and his fellow Members of Parliament liked all these measures or not, they passed them because they had to.
The fall of the Fitzgeralds was terrifying. Silken Thomas, having first been politely received at the English court as promised, had been suddenly transferred to the Tower.