Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [291]
Margaret had done nothing about it. What could she do? She did not even try to find out anything more about the woman. When her husband had asked her that evening why she seemed upset, she had made up some excuse. She wanted to put the incident out of her mind.
But now, standing on the waterfront, she had discovered who the woman was. The wife of a rich alderman, with a big house no doubt, and all the luxuries that money could buy. Not, she reminded herself, that she had anything to be ashamed of. Doyle might be rich, but he was still a merchant. Her own husband was a gentleman, a grandson of Walsh of Carrickmines, no less, and significant enough to be invited to take part in the Riding of the Franchises today. Their estate might be down in the southern borderlands rather than in Fingal, as she would have liked, and it might yield only a modest income, but her husband had been educated in England, and his earnings as a lawyer made up for the shortcomings of the estate. She had no reason, she told herself, to feel at any disadvantage if she encountered this woman whose family had stolen from hers. But when she remembered that ugly little smirk, she still found herself tensing with anger. It would be better to avoid her entirely. Stay away, and not think about her.
So what spirit of self-destruction was it that caused her, a few moments later, to edge forward in the Doyle woman’s direction?
“There he is. There’s my man.” Joan Doyle waved a silk handkerchief. “He still doesn’t see me,” she said laughing. “One thing we know,” she announced cheerfully. “They’ll be hungry.”
Joan Doyle had known sorrow; but it seemed to her nowadays that she was the luckiest person alive. At eighteen she had been married, very happily, to a gentleman near Waterford. Six years later, having lost two children to fever, she lost her third child and her husband in a shipping accident. At twenty-four she was a widow, and for many months she entered a place of silent sadness from which she did not see any escape.
But then she met John Doyle who, with great patience, coaxed her out of her misery and, after more than a year, into marriage. That had been six years ago and now, with a home and two children, Joan Doyle knew more happiness than she had ever dreamed to be possible. And being in any case a warm and affectionate soul, and having known what it was to suffer great pain, she made a point never, if possible, to give pain to others. She was always doing little kindnesses; and it would amuse her rich and genial husband that hardly a week went by without her coming to him with a new scheme to help someone in trouble.
“It must be your Spanish blood that makes you so warm,” he would laugh. Having no malice herself, she could never imagine it in others. This, too, her husband loved: it made him feel protective.
Joan became aware of Margaret when she was still a dozen yards away. She didn’t turn to look at her, at first, because the woman beside her had just started to engage her in conversation; but even out of the corner of her eye, she could see that it was the woman she had noticed the other week at Donnybrook Fair. For there couldn’t, surely, be two women in the Dublin area with such wonderful darkred hair. Not a trace of grey in it, either, though she guessed that the woman might be a little older than herself. Joan’s own hair had a few strands of grey, which she skilfully disguised; indeed, she had been smiling with rueful amusement at the thought that this red-headed woman clearly had no need of such artifice, when Margaret had seen her and taken that expression for a contemptuous smirk.
For Margaret’s assessment of Joan Doyle was based upon a misapprehension. Of the quarrel between their two families, Joan knew nothing at all. The dispute over the inheritance had been so ancient that Henry Butler had never bothered to tell his daughter about it. As for the present, Joan hadn’t the least idea who Margaret was.
So it was unfortunate that by chance,