A World Apart by Gretta Curran Browne

Author:Gretta Curran Browne [Browne, Gretta Curran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912598083
Publisher: Seanelle Publications Inc
Published: 2018-02-23T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The pretty Sarah, wife of Hugh Vesty Byrne, had grown up some fifteen miles away from Imaal in the vicinity of Rathdrum. The first time she had ever set eyes on Mary Doyle was on the night of her wedding to Michael Dwyer. The two girls had spoken very little to each other that night, for Mary had no eyes or words for anyone but her husband.

Sarah had not particularly liked the new bride that night. Sarah had looked at Mary with her shy smile and soft brown eyes and thought Michael had made the biggest mistake of his life. In truth, Mary Doyle was the loveliest girl Sarah had ever seen, but she looked fearful and doltishly dependent – qualities that filled Sarah with contempt, for although she herself was a frailly built girl, she had been as ready as any man to risk her life for liberty in 1798.

In view of all that had happened since then, Sarah smiled now at her thoughts on that night in October 1798. Mary lived a harder life than any other female in Wicklow, and over the years had proved herself in all ways admirable, bearing all her difficulties and discomforts without complaint. And she was now Sarah's dearest friend.

`Thank God they're all asleep now,' Mary murmured tiredly. `Are you coming to bed soon, Sarah?'

From where she was sitting on an old settle, Sarah looked up from her contemplation of the fire and silently nodded at the girl sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark shadows of the room, pulling a comb through the tangle of dark hair around her shoulders. Her dress was folded neatly on the back of a chair, her arms and shoulders were bare, she sat in a white petticoat which revealed the swell of full milky breasts that had recently given sleepy comfort to a suckling infant.

They were in a harbourer’s house deep in Glenmalure, at a relative of Hugh Vesty's. The larger of two bedrooms had been given over to the two young women and their children, while the parents of the family willingly insisted on sleeping on a straw pallet in the small open loft above the living room.

Sarah and Mary shared the bed, while their children slept on a straw mat on the floor, and the two babies snuggled side by side under warm blankets in a big wicker laundry basket beside the bed. Like Mary, Sarah had also born three children now: Philip, Michael, and baby Rose. And like Mary, Sarah adored her husband.

Sometimes Sarah raged at Hugh Vesty against the hardness of their lives, the long separations, the pregnancies that resulted from a few nights of love that were more ecstatic because they were brief and stolen. And he would apologise sadly, and she would be filled with guilt at her outburst, for the women at least had the joy of the children, but all the time the hunt for the men went on, English regiments, militia regiments, Rathdrum and Baltinglass yeomanry; and occasionally, rebels were killed.

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