Overview

Lady Offaly has seized half the ancestral Kildare lands. Now she wants the other half.

Details

Bur so does the rich and powerful English-born Earl of Cork.

Lord Cork arranges a marriage for his daughter Joan to his ward, George Fitzgerald, 16th Earl of Kildare. Her grandmother warns Joan that her husband should be careful. But George Kildare is not a careful young man. He is a charming, feckless spendthrift who resents his father-in-law and quarrels disastrously with Lady Offaly. Each time there is marital conflict, Joan is torn between her desire to be a good wife and her need to please her father.

When the spark of an Irish rebellion is lit, Catholics turn on their Protestant neighbours and the killing begins. With her father in England and her husband out raising troops, Joan is alone at Maynooth with her children and servants when rebels arrive at the gate, demanding she surrender her husband's castle - or else!