A Rose in Splendor Read Online Free

what for many of them would be their last ride through their homeland. Having signed the terms of surrender in the Treaty of Limerick a few days earlier, he, along with more than thirteen thousand other men of the Irish army, had chosen expatriation rather than submit to English rule. France promised a freedom that they would not now have here in their Irish homeland.
    It was a hard decision, made worse for the families of the soldiers. As an officer, Lord Fitzgerald was one of the lucky few who had been given the freedom to carry his family with him. Most of the regular troops had been summarily herded aboard ships and shipped across the Channel without even a glimpse of the families they were leaving behind.
    “Damn their English souls!” Lord Fitzgerald tossed off automatically in sympathy with his thoughts.
    It was left to officers like himself to inform the soldiers’ families of where their menfolk had gone. Times were hard. It would be months, perhaps years, before some families could follow their stout-hearted fathers, sons, and lovers.
    As he made his way toward the entrance of his stables, he rubbed his eyes, which ached from road grit and lack of sleep. He smelled of horses, gunpowder, and sweat. Beneath his dust-powdered periwig, his scalp itched from flea bites. Had this been any other day, he would have ordered up a bath, a full meal, and several glasses of port before retiring for a sound sleep. Now he barely had time to gather his family together and race for the docks at Cork, where a French ship awaited them.
    No doubt his famous ancestor, Gerald Fitzgerald, would spin in his grave to know that he had handed Liscarrol over to the care of a Protestant, even if he was a Fitzgerald, but his cousin Neil Fitzgerald, because of his religion, would be able to ensure that he would not lose his home. The English had promised no retribution against the Catholic families who had surrendered at Limerick, but only a fool or one too young to remember the atrocities carried out by the Englishman Cromwell would rely on such pledges.
    With Liscarrol in Protestant hands, even if they were Irish Protestant hands, the government could not readily confiscate it.
    A bitter vetch it was, leaving his homeland in defeat. Well, there was no turning back now. His decision was made, and if his family was bewildered and frightened, they would follow him…as soon as he located his only daughter.
    “Dee! Where are ye, me darlin’? Why do ye not—?”
    When he turned in to the stable and saw his daughter kneeling on the ground beside a fallen man, his first thought was that it was one of his own soldiers. Then reason asserted itself. His men had not been dismissed from the yard. This was a stranger. Trained to note details in an instant, he saw the jack boots of a fighting man and the pistol lying nearby. Though he lay inordinately still, the stranger’s chest rose and fell with the rapidity of a man in distress.
    Lord Fitzgerald’s heart lurched. The outbreak of the plague had taken away thousands of souls a year earlier. War always brought pestilence and disease. Yet, here was his darling daughter trying to comfort the strange man as she would a wounded bird or lamb.
    “Dee, lass. Come away. Let him be.” He spoke in the calm, authoritative voice that had made many a man under his command keep a clear head in battle, but the sweat of anxiousness glazed his brow in the moments it took him to reach Deirdre and snatch her up into his arms.
    “Da!” Deirdre squealed in delight as her father’s arms closed around her and lifted her up high. The strength of his embrace nearly crushed the breath from her, but the pain had a joy in it that she did not mind.
    “Dee, lass, what are ye doing here?” her father questioned.
    Deirdre reared back from the smothering confines of his chest, her young face clouded with worry. “You must help the man. He’s running from the English. They wounded him. I said we’d help him, but he’s