The Irish Bride

THE IRISH BRIDE

Cynthia Bailey Pratt

Chapter One

August 1816

To be a
traveler is to be beset by a swarm of tiny annoyances, petty in themselves, but accumulating into a large sense of frustration. This feeling drove Nick Kirwan on toward home despite the fact that the sun was dropping toward the west. “Not long now, my boy,” he said, patting the silken brown neck of his horse.

His voyage from France had been delayed by a storm in the Channel. Then his ship’s captain had taken ill and the first mate had been a fool who had miscalculated his course to Wexford Harbor and had been too stubborn to admit it until they’d spied the shipping at Dublin. Next, Nick’s horse, which had carried him through half a dozen campaigns including Waterloo, had come up lame after only a day on the cobbled streets of Dublin. Nick would sooner abandon his head than Stamps, so he waited until he was fit again. And these were only the largest of the frustrations that had harried him.

He’d set out two weeks ago to cover the hundred and sixty-odd miles between Trinity Street and his home, Greenwood. The same current of delays, small and large, had held him back. Now, however, he was but five miles from home. Every foot of stone wall dividing the landscape into crofts and yards held memories of his childhood. The scents of cow byre and sheep pen spoke to him of long days spent riding over this very country, sometimes to visit tenants with his father, sometimes in wild steeplechases with his friends.

Involved in memories, it was only the sound of a lady in distress that made him look up. He saw a carriage fallen to one side, the two horses being held by a boy, and a man and a girl standing in the road. Despite the man’s burly looks, it was plain from their postures that she was giving him a piece of her mind.

“Oh, it’s too bad, John Garrity! Can’t you fix it?”

“No, Miss Blanche, and asking me twenty times in a minute won’t make my answer change none.”

“But I can’t stand in the road all night. I’ll catch cold. Or there might be robbers!”

“Your sister’s gone to beg you some shelter for the night. Then I’ll to Galway and have your father send out the landaulet.”

“Rietta may relish the thought of spending the night in some smelly peasant hut, but not me! I won’t! I won’t!”

She turned then and saw Nick, and Nick saw her. He’d never seen a flowerlike face, for all the poets might say, but he saw one now, glowing like a white rose against the deep green hedge behind her. She was pale, but with pink charming her round cheeks. Her hair was a deep rich gold, hanging beneath a piquant bonnet to the middle of her back. Nick began to feel much better about this delay.

Walking Stamps up to the oddly assorted group, he asked, “May I be of some service?”

The beautiful girl clasped her hands with an almost childlike expression of delight. “Oh! You look just like the knight in my book! Except your horse isn’t white and you don’t have any armor on.”

Nick smiled down into her eyes. “I am indeed a knight, though my horse be brown. Sir Nicholas Kirwan, at your service.”

The coachman, a burly figure in a stuff weskit and heavy overcoat, touched his forehead with two fingers. “We had a bit of an accident, as your honor might see. The rear wheel’s unpinned itself as we came around the corner.”

“How awkward,” Nick murmured, staring with fascination into the lagoon-blue depths of her eyes. The pink in her cheeks increased and she looked down at the ground, only to smile sideways at him like a born flirt.

“That it is. T’lad ain’t strong enough to raise the wheel, while I lift the coach up.”

Nick looked a little harder at the coachman. He was a square figure with powerful thighs and a broad torso while his coat sleeves bulged over muscles as well developed as Nick had ever seen. “You can lift the coach?”

“John Garrity, Sir Nicholas, formerly of Penlow’s Circus. I was strongman there for over twenty years.”

“Pleased to know you, Mr. Garrity,” Nick said. He turned again to the dainty face of the girl. “And you are?”

She turned her pretty head to the side as if embarrassed and said cooingly, “Miss Blanche Ferris of Galway, Sir Nicholas.”

He swung himself down purely for the purpose of raising her soft white hand to his lips. “An unlooked for, but much appreciated, pleasure, Miss Blanche.”

She simpered, an undoubted outward push of the lips and a little wriggle that set her enchanting hair swinging. Ordinarily, he would not be pleased by such a fatuous trick but in one so lovely surely much must be forgiven.

“Oh, sir. I can no longer count this accident as anything but the kindness of Providence as it has brought you in our way.”

“And here I am thanking Providence for it myself,” Nick said and found her giggle surprisingly delightful.

What promised to be a delectable flirtation was cut short by her expression of very real distaste focused, not on himself naturally, but on the woman walking none too elegantly down the hill. “My sister, Rietta. My
older
sister.”

“If she is half so charming as yourself...”

“She isn’t.”

“Now what was I thinking? Of course, she couldn’t be.”

Lovely Blanche giggled again and said frankly, “I like you, Sir Nicholas, but she won’t.”

Rietta Ferris was taller than her sister, longer through the waist, and presented a much less girlish figure to a gentleman’s eye. Under a close-fitting bonnet, her cheeks were flaming from her exertion. She stood in the road a moment, catching her breath.

Nick saw that she took in his sudden appearance with a flash of her eyes, but it wasn’t until she could speak without gasping that she approached. By then, she’d apparently had her fill of looking at him, for her attention was entirely given to the carriage.

He could, therefore, study her. Though not as instantly striking as her sister, her face was modeled on the same lines of delicacy and harmony. She had perhaps a tad more chin than a lady really needed and a way of carrying it, high and haughty, that boded ill for anyone who crossed her will. Nick couldn’t catch even a glimpse of her hair color, but her eyebrows held more than a hint of red. His theory that she was a high-spirited red-haired woman was further proved by her translucent skin, the color only now fading.

Blanche said, “Come meet Sir Nicholas, Rietta.”

“Has Sir Nicholas a family name?” she asked, her voice husky compared with the lilting tones of Blanche.

“Kirwan, Miss Ferris. Sir Nicholas Kirwan.”

Rietta recognized the name. Indeed, one would have been hard-pressed to find someone from Galway who didn’t. The Kirwans belonged to the Fourteen Tribes, the semi-mythical founders of the town. Names of some of the Fourteen had been lost in the mists of the past, leaving no descendants, but others went on, up or down with the turning of Fate’s great wheel.

This Kirwan did not look as though life had been treating him very well lately. His face was thin and far more tanned than became a gentleman. Though he spoke and moved like a young man, there were lines carving the skin around his mouth and shadows haunted his blue eyes. Yet he smiled with something of a devil’s charm when he looked at Blanche. Rietta sighed as she recognized the symptoms of another man instantly slain by her sister’s allure.

She turned to the driver. “Well, Mr. Garrity?”

“It’s a right to-do, miss. But if the gentleman would be so good as to help me, we may yet see home this night.”

“With pleasure,” Sir Nicholas said, but he was gazing only at Blanche.

Rietta thanked him and stood back. He stripped off his coat and laid it with a smile onto Blanche’s extended arm. Rietta took it from her before she committed the impropriety of nestling it to her bosom.

“Isn’t he handsome, though?” Blanche whispered.

Rietta had already noticed Sir Nicholas’s strong arms when he’d taken off his coat. Nor was it tailor’s padding that made his shoulders so broad. Beneath his hat, worn at a jaunty angle over straight brows, his hair was black, but with a touch of frost that again struck her as odd in such a young man. She would put his age at no more than thirty, despite hints to the contrary.

“Is he? I hadn’t noticed.”

“You should have your eyes seen to! Such address, such a way of looking ...”

“Don’t be mooning over some chance-met stranger, Blanche. Think of Mr. Mochrie.”

“He hasn’t enough money to buy a candle in church.”

“Then think of Mr. Joyce. He has fortune enough.”

“He’d never be able to help Garrity by lifting a wheel. He can hardly lift those books he reads all the time.”

“I suppose it is useless to urge you to consider Mr. Greeves, then?”

“He may be rich but if I marry him, I’ll never be a lady. I’ve been wondering if a title wouldn’t suit me. ‘Lady Kirwan ...’ ‘Lady Kirwan of... of...’ Let’s find out if his property has a name.”

“He probably doesn’t have a property. The one doesn’t necessarily follow the other.”

“Of course he does. A big, grand house with a twisting staircase that I can come down whenever we give a party.” Blanche gave a blissful sigh and looked so completely angelic that she could have been mistaken for a saint in the throes of spiritual ecstasy.

Rietta rolled her eyes toward heaven for quite another reason as she saw her sister fall in love yet again. Blanche had fancied that she’d found the perfect man on countless occasions, from the accordion player at an inn they’d stayed at when she was fourteen to her latest whim of thinking it would suit her to be the darling of an elderly, wealthy man. Somehow she managed to keep three notable gentlemen on her string even though she’d given none of them either a yes or no once the inevitable proposals were made. To be fair, she had a gift that turned flirtation into an art.

Rietta tried to look disapproving as she watched Sir Nicholas’s muscles strain under his shirt as he lifted the wheel into position. Though not as muscular as Garrity, his body showed that he had not spent any time recently sitting at his ease in comfortable chairs. The faded stripe on the outside of his riding breeches told the tale.

Now that England’s war with France was over, many soldiers were coming home. Ireland had been officially neutral, though national sentiment inclined toward France rather than the old enemy. Yet many Irishmen had served in England’s army and navy. Rietta wondered what side Sir Nicholas had chosen.

To Rietta, the soldiers’ return meant there’d be even more opportunities for Blanche to lose and regain her ever-elastic heart. Would one ever come to win her permanent affections? Sometimes she wondered if Blanche didn’t enjoy the chase so much that she never would consent to be caught.

In her own heart, she wished Sir Nicholas Kirwan, already showing signs of being smitten, all the luck in the world. If only she did not have to be there to see the romance unfold in the usual style.

Blanche stood by until the men had finished, then tripped nimbly forward to offer a lace-embellished handkerchief to Sir Nicholas so that he might wipe his brow.

“Thank you,” he said, and tucked it into his sleeve.

Blanche simpered. “Oh, but you must give it back!”

“So I will. When I call upon you.”

She pressed her lovely hands to her bosom. “Oh, will you?” she cried, showing her delight like a child.

His gaze went past her to Rietta. “May I?”

“I see no way of preventing you, sir,”

“You might refuse to give me the address.”

Rietta found, to her surprise, that she was not yet entirely immune to charm. She liked that he did not plead with her, or make any overt attempt to win her approval. He only looked at her with a dancing challenge in his sharp eyes, daring her displeasure.

She knew perfectly well what he saw—a starched-up maiden lady, duenna to a winsome younger sister. It was an appearance she worked hard to project and it rarely pained her anymore. Yet if she was to be honest with herself—and she always was—she could wish for a different appearance in his eyes.

She smiled, thinly, tightly, for it was against her will that she smiled at all. “Naturally, sir, whether you call upon us must be left to the judgment of my father.”

Mr. Garrity coughed meaningly. Rietta shot him a narrow-eyed glance so that by the time Sir Nicholas looked around, the coachman was the picture of innocence.

“We live on Prospect Hill,” Blanche said quickly, taking advantage of the pause. “Anyone might tell you the way. My father is Augustus Ferris—the mill owner.”