Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [307]
It was a mistake. She should have gone in the morning. The oppressive atmosphere and the darkening sky in the south should have told her. But she had been slow getting out of the house, finishing little chores that really could have been done some other time. By early afternoon, when they finally left, it was obvious that a storm was coming. “We can still be in Dublin before it reaches us,” she said. As they passed Carrickmines and heard the distant rumble of thunder over the Wicklow Mountains, she remarked ruefully to the groom that they might get a bit wet; and a little later, as the sky grew black and the first gusts of wind suddenly came through the trees, she laughed. “We’ll be drowned.” But when the storm finally swept down from the hills and broke over them, it was beyond anything she could have imagined.
There was a huge bang and a flash of lightning. Her horse reared and almost threw her; and the heavens opened. Moments later the rain was falling so hard that they could scarcely see the road in front of them. They edged forward, looking for shelter. At first they saw nothing, but after a short distance, round a curve in the road, they became aware of a squat, grey mass just ahead to their left. They pressed towards it.
It had been an uneventful day so far. Walsh was now away. Margaret had only one of her daughters and her youngest son, Richard, in the house with her. The boy was making a new chair in the barn; he was good with his hands. Her daughter was busy with the servants in the kitchen. Margaret had just been glancing out at the storm through one of the greenish windowpanes—she was rather proud of the glass windows that had recently been installed in the house’s big hall—when she was called to the door. Finding two bedraggled figures seeking shelter, she naturally took them inside at once.
“Dear Lord,” she cried, “we’d better get you some dry clothes.”
So she was quite astonished when one of the two pulled off the scarf she’d put over her head and remarked cheerfully, “Why, it’s the woman with the wonderful hair.”
It was the cursed Doyle woman. For just a moment, she wondered whether, for some obscure reason, the alderman’s wife had come there deliberately to annoy her; but a huge crash of thunder from outside made her admit the absurdity of the idea.
Seven years had passed since they had met at Maynooth. Occasionally her husband had mentioned seeing the woman in Dublin, and once or twice she had caught sight of her herself, on her rare visits into the city—though she had always turned aside to avoid her. And now here the creature was in her own house, her soft brown eyes lighting up with pleasure and her pretty face, as far as Margaret could see, looking even younger than her thirty-seven years.
“The woman with the red hair,” she cried again, though there were one or two streaks of grey in it now.
“You’d best come to the fire,” said Margaret. With luck, she thought, the storm would soon pass and the unwelcome visitor would be gone.
But the storm did not pass. It seemed on the contrary that, having crossed over the Wicklow Mountains, the storm had come to a halt beside the great curve of Dublin Bay and that it meant to release all its noise, and livid flashes, and its great deluge of water upon Dalkey, Carrickmines, and environs.
While the groom was taken to the kitchen, Margaret sent her daughter to fetch the alderman’s wife some dry clothes, while Joan Doyle cheerfully removed her wet ones by the fire, and gladly accepted the proffered glass of wine. Then, having put on one of Margaret’s robes, remarking that she might be there for some time,