Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [324]
So they feasted and sang and danced late into that night, which was the eve of Corpus Christi.
There were several great days of pageant in the Dublin calendar. Some years there was the Riding of the Franchises; there were always parades upon Saint Patrick’s Day and Saint George’s, the patron saints of Ireland and of England. But the greatest pageant of all came in July, four Fridays after midsummer, at the Feast of Corpus Christi.
Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, the celebration of the miracle of the Mass. What better day for the city’s corporate bodies, religious fraternities, and the guilds to celebrate themselves. For if the mayor, aldermen, and freemen of the city were the rulers of Dublin, nearly all of them were members of one or another of these. There were the great religious fraternities, like the mighty Holy Trinity to which Doyle belonged, which had its chapel in the Christ Church and concerned itself with charity and good works; and there were the numerous guilds—merchants, tailors, goldsmiths, butchers, weavers, glovers, and many more—which regulated their own trades and most of which had modest chapels in the lesser city churches. And on Corpus Christi day, they had their great pageant.
It had followed a set pattern for generations. Each guild had its carnival float, with painted scenery like a little stage. Eight feet wide, so that they could just pass through the Dame’s Gate, drawn by six or eight horses, they were proudly maintained to make a splendid show. Each one depicted a famous scene from the Bible or from popular legend. The order of procession was laid down in the Chain Book of city regulations kept in the Tholsel. First came the glovers, depicting Adam and Eve; then the shoemakers; then the mariners, who represented Noah and his Ark; then the weavers, followed by the smiths—nearly twenty pageants in all, including a splendid tableau of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table performed by the city auditors. Finally, making its way like a two-man pantomime horse, and nodding in a stately manner to the crowd, came the great dragon of Saint George, the emblem of Dublin corporation.
Congregating in the early morning on open ground near Ailred the Palmer’s old hospital outside the western gate, the procession would make its way through the gate, up the High Street to the High Cross by the Tholsel, past Christ Church and the castle, and then down through the Dame’s Gate, finishing by the archery practice grounds on the edge of Hoggen Green, where some of the guilds would perform short plays from their floats.
Tidy was excited. This year he had been selected by his fellow glovers to play the part of Adam. During the procession he would be standing on the float in a white hose and vest, wearing a huge fig leaf of vaguely indecent design; but afterwards he had a spoken part to learn, and for weeks Cecily had listened to him solemnly rehearsing such lines as, “Oh foolish woman, what have you done?”
The sun was already bright when Tidy set off, looking pleased but determined. An hour later, Cecily left the children with a neighbour and went into the city to watch him.
It seemed to Margaret as if the entire region had converged upon Dublin that day. So thick were the crowds that she was obliged to leave her horse at a tavern near Saint Patrick’s, for an outrageous charge, and to join the throng making its way on foot through the southern gate. This had the advantage of making her inconspicuous, but she wondered if she would ever catch sight of her husband.
Walsh had left at dawn. She had waited an hour, then telling the groom that she’d be back that evening, she had ridden after him without a word of explanation. She had wondered if she might catch sight of him ahead, but he had been too quick for her and she had failed to do so. As for how she would explain her absence from home on her return, that would depend upon what happened today.
She had wondered whether to confront him with his affair with the Doyle woman, but