Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [285]
After that, Margaret stopped her ears, and lay there shaking for a long time until at last she fell asleep.
Margaret was eighteen when her father started the quest to find her a husband.
“We shall look,” he told her confidently, “in Fingal. Fingal’s the place,” he said firmly, “for an English girl like you.” She knew what he meant. It was not only that Fingal was the area of English farms, where landlords looked out on huge orderly fields of wheat and barley; Fingal was a family network. There were the Fagans and the Conrans and the Cusacks; the Finglas family, the Usshers, the Bealings, the Balls, the Taylors up at Swords. All English gentry families who married amongst each other and with the greatest merchant families in Dublin. The marriage network spread outwards also, to the Dillons in Meath, the Bellews, the Sarsfields, and the Plunketts—some of the best of the English in Ireland. At the apex of the Fingal families were three, whose lands lay along the coast. The family of St. Lawrence held the headland of Howth; just to the north, by the next inlet, were the Irish branch of the great aristocratic family of Talbot, and nearby the Barnewalls. These were the people her father meant when he referred to Fingal.
She knew a good many of them—not well, but enough to talk to. Sometimes her father would take her with him if he rode over to some fine estate on business. Occasionally the family would be invited to an entertainment in one of the houses; or one of her brothers might come by in the company of a friend who belonged to a Fingal family. Two years ago she had chanced to strike up a friendship with a younger daughter of the St. Lawrence family. For about a year they had been almost inseparable. Margaret would go across and stay with her friend for days at a time. They would walk along the strand above the Liffey estuary to where the Tolka stream came down at Clontarf; or on sunny days they would spend hours up on the headland gazing southwards across the bay and down the coast to where the volcanic hills rose magically through the haze. It was a happy friendship. The St. Lawrence family were always kind to her. But then they found a husband for her friend, who left Fingal; and there was no reason for Margaret to go to Howth after that.
“Margaret’s hair,” her father said, “is her greatest asset.” And no one disagreed.
Some might have said that her face was a little plain, but thanks to her hair, she had only to enter any gathering for all heads to turn. Rich, dark red—if she did not put it up it fell like a gleaming curtain down her back. She hoped that she also had other attractions: good skin, a handsome figure, a lively personality. But she wasn’t a fool. “They will notice you for your hair, Margaret,” her mother told her. “The rest is up to you.”
The opportunity for all Fingal to see her came the summer when she was eighteen.
It was a day in mid-June when her father came into the house one afternoon looking pleased with himself and announced, “Did you hear that one of the Talbot boys has just returned from England? Edward Talbot. He’s been there three years, you know. He visited the royal court. A fine young gentleman by all accounts. There’s to be a great entertainment out at Malahide,” he continued, “to welcome him back. All Fingal will be going.” He paused, so that they should think this was the end of the information. “We’re going, too, of course,” he added with a straight face that only gradually broke into a triumphant grin.
How had her father managed to procure an invitation to such a grand event? Margaret didn’t know. But the next week was spent helping her mother make her a fine new gown and in all the other preparations necessary for such an occasion. As it happened, both her brothers were away at the time, and the