Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [189]
“There will be plenty to keep her busy helping us in the hospital,” Ailred had explained. “She’d be like our daughter.” And so it had all been arranged. On Saturdays Fionnuala returned to her parents’ house and spent Sunday with them. But from Monday to Friday she lived with Ailred and his wife and helped at the hospital.
The arrangement had worked admirably for nearly a week.
Una remembered so well the day when the Palmer had come to see her father. Fionnuala had been at the hospital only a week. “But it’s wrong for the child to be alone in our house with nothing but old people,” the Palmer had explained. “We’d like her to have a companion, a girl of her own age but a sensible girl, who could help to steady her.”
Why did everyone always call her sensible? Una knew they did and she supposed it was true. But why? Was it just her nature? Or was it because of her family? When her eldest sister had died while her brothers were still little boys, she had known that her parents had relied on her. In a way, it had always seemed to Una that her father needed her most of all.
Kevin MacGowan the silversmith was not strong. With his small, spindly body, he was certainly nothing much to look at. And then there was his face: when he was concentrating hard on his work, he would unconsciously twist it into a grimace, so that one of his eyes seemed to be bigger than the other. It made him look as if he were in pain, and she suspected that he sometimes was. Yet within this fragile body lay a fiery soul. “Your father’s a strange, poetical fellow,” a kindly friend had once said to her. “I only wish he was stronger.” Others saw it, too. They certainly respected his work. For that was when Una loved to watch him—while he was working. His fingers, slim and bony like his body, seemed to take on a new strength. His twisted face might be tense, but his eyes shone, and he became transformed into something else, something so fine it was almost like a spirit. Unaware that she was watching him, he would work on, absorbed, and she would be filled with love for her little father and a desire to protect him.
MacGowan. The family name had made a gradual transition down the generations. Some scribes would still have written it MacGoibnenn, in the old manner, but it was mostly written and pronounced MacGowan now.
In the last few years, her father’s hard work had brought the family some prosperity. Outside Dublin, men still measured their wealth in cattle. But the wealth that Kevin MacGowan had saved was the little hoard of silver that he kept in a small strongbox. “If anything should happen to me,” he would tell Una with gentle pride, “this will see the family through.”
He had planned for his family so carefully. The old church in the centre of Dublin had been raised, some years after the battle of Clontarf, to the rank of cathedral and since then transformed into quite a noble building. Western Europe might be moving to the light and delicate Gothic style of architecture, but in Ireland, the heavy, monumental Romanesque style of former times, with its high blank walls and thick curved arches, was still in vogue, and the cathedral in Dublin was a fine example. With its thick walls and its high roof, it towered over the little city. Officially it was the Church of the Holy Trinity, but everyone called it Christ Church. And it was to Christ Church Cathedral that, at least once a month, Kevin MacGowan would take his daughter.
“There is the true cross on which Our Lord was crucified,” he would say, pointing to a small piece of wood encased in a golden casket. Christ Church was becoming famous for its growing collection of relics. “There is a portion of the cross of Saint Peter, a piece of the vest of Our Lady, and there, that is a bit of the manger in which Christ was born.” The cathedral even had a drop of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s