Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [278]
Only a man with the long reach of Doyle could have arranged such a thing—even MacGowan was not told how it was done—but word was carried to O’Byrne and a deal was struck. The Irish chief would lead a convincing-looking raid upon the castle in the middle of the night and make sure that his men drew the defenders well away from Dalkey. It seemed the plan had amused O’Byrne, and he had been well paid. Indeed, a fair amount of the profit of the operation had had to be sacrificed, but Doyle was too far in now to pull back. The Irishman had been warned of the danger from Harold and the squadron, but the risk of the operation had only added to its appeal. “In any case,” he had remarked, “my boys will melt into the night.” It was he himself who had sent the dark-haired girl to hang around at the castle and the harbour. “I’ve told her,” he promised Doyle, “to make sure that she is seen.”
And so it had all been arranged. Doyle, of course, would never be seen. From Dublin, he could even deny any knowledge of the business at all; as for MacGowan, he knew very well that should things go wrong, Doyle would have him safely into hiding, and if necessary across the sea, before the Justiciar’s men ever got their hands on him.
There had been only one problem. He had not realised how difficult it would be to get Tom out of Dalkey. He had done everything to frighten him back into Dublin, exactly as Doyle had suggested, with invented stories of danger and the calculated hostility of the Dalkey people; but when Tom had turned up again on the very eve of the landing, MacGowan had been in despair. In the end, Doyle himself had come to pull him out. The merchant had not been too pleased about that.
However, MacGowan thought now, as he surveyed the successful completion of the night’s work, Doyle would probably forgive him before long for that one error in his calculations.
It was three weeks later that John Walsh, riding up into the foothills, encountered the girl.
Life had been relatively quiet at the castle of Carrickmines since the night of the raid. The plan to inflict a massive defeat upon O’Byrne had not succeeded. Several of his men, undoubtedly, had been wounded. But somehow, in the darkness, every one of them had managed to get away, although the search in the foothills had gone on well into the day. As for Harold and his party, they had finished up wandering around in the dawn, empty-handed, in the woods above Glendalough. The business had been a failure. Yet it was not long—less than a week—before it was accounted a success. “We gave them a fright. We sent them flying. That was a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry.” These were the verdicts that were soon on the Dublin people’s lips, such is the history of warfare.
Walsh said nothing. He knew it had been a trick, a scam of some sort; but he hadn’t quite worked out of what kind. Obviously, O’Byrne had known what was going to happen. If he knew the troops would be waiting for him, then he must have wanted them to be there. As he considered the business further, however, it seemed to him that if O’Byrne, or whomever he was working with, wanted all the available military forces at Carrickmines, it could only mean that they did not want them to be somewhere else. So where had the troops come from? Dublin, Harold’s Cross, and Dalkey. Nothing that he knew of had happened at any of those places, but the more he thought about it, the more his suspicions centred on Dalkey. Perhaps he would never know, but he would remember and watch with interest in the future. Life on the frontier, he reflected with satisfaction, was never dull.
She was lying on a rock in the sun. She must have fallen asleep; he’d never have come upon her like this otherwise. Her long, dark hair had cascaded down the side of the stone. She sprang up and flashed an angry glance at him, at which he only smiled. It amused him to remember that this fleet little