“Is there any need to ask?” replied Burke. “Grace O’Malley is a powerful princess in Connaught. She has her lands, her galleys, and several hundred well armed men at her back. Is that not enough? Are the English not trying to clip all our wings? But there is far more in the case of your mistress.”
“Go on, go on!” I said.
“This,” said he. “The mind of Sir Nicholas has been wrought upon by the merchants of Galway, who are ever about him, saying this and that, offering him valuable gifts and such things as he loves.”
“To what end?”
“You know as well as I do, that these proud-stomached folk have no great liking for us Irish,” said Burke. “Did you never hear that they have a statute of the town that ’Neither Mac nor O’ shall strut or swagger’ in the streets of Galway? There has always been, however, a friendship between us Burkes of Mayo and one or two of the families here, as, for instance, the Lynches, and I hear through them all that is going on.
“Owen O’Malley plundered the ships of the Galway merchants, making scant distinction between them and Spanish or French or Scottish ships. Grace O’Malley shared in many of her father’s doings before he died, and the people of Galway think that she has inherited her father’s nature and disposition as well as his lands and ships, and that as long as her galleys roam the sea there will be no safety for their vessels.”
The words were nearly the same as those Eva O’Malley had used when she tried to dissuade my mistress from setting out from Clew Bay.
“What would they have Sir Nicholas do?” I asked.
“Break up her ships; scatter her people; hang, kill, burn, destroy them; hold her a prisoner; or—for there is no advantage to be derived from our shutting our eyes—kill her, too, by poison, perhaps, unless she agrees to the terms of the Governor.”
Burke now spoke in great excitement, and with labouring breath; nor could I listen to his words with any degree of composure.