Rainbow's End by Katie Flynn Read Free Book Online Page B

domestic disaster of the hurricane. And there were dead sheep, so they would not starve, and fish, carried inshore by the wild tide and stranded on unaccustomed grass and slabs of limestone rock.
    But it was not enough. Paddy did his best; he went into Ennis to try to see if someone would lend him some money so he could buy stock, a donkey, the makings of a new beginning. The trouble was that the hurricane had affected everyone. People were scratching around trying to repair their own fortunes. The Feeneys would have to manage somehow.
    And then the letter arrived, with a Dublin postmark and a genial invitation to go and stay with Tomas Feeney and to find work so that they might restock the farm once more.
    ‘It makes sense, alannas,’ Paddy said pleadingly when Grainne had read him the letter. ‘I know you want to stay here, but we’ve not even a roof over our heads, not so much as one bonaveen left to us. Tomas will see us right, don’t you fret.’
    The older girls had fought against it, both of them. Grainne had said that she was promised to William and intended to stay on the Burren and marry him, even if they had to live hand-to-mouth for a bit, if his parents disowned him for marrying, as they thought, beneath him. And Fidelma tightened her lips and said she’d plans of her own, so she had, and she wouldn’t be goin’ to old Dublin no matter what.
    ‘Me brother Tomas says to come to Dublin,’ Paddy told the Caseys and the O’Hares, who were rebuilding their cabins and doing everything in their power to keep themselves fed whilst they planted potatoes and built up some stock. ‘We’ll earn easier in Dublin than we can here. The girls can work, I can work . . . me leg’s niver stopped me workin’ here, so why should it stop me there? . . . an’ when we’ve our fortunes made, isn’t it back we’ll be comin’, with all the speed we can muster?’
    Grainne let her father make his plans because she understood that he needed to do so, perhaps he even needed to get away for a while, with two of his five daughters dead. But she told him straight that she wouldn’t go with him, because she just knew that William would want to wed her as soon as his hurts healed, but then rumours began to reach her that all was not well in the McBride household. And one beautiful sunny spring day when her father’s preparations for leaving were all but complete, she took her courage in both hands and walked over to the McBride farm. She knocked and Mrs McBride answered the door.
    ‘I’ve come to see William – we’re promised,’ Grainne had said boldly. ‘I must see him.’
    She expected a flat refusal or an argument, but after staring at her for a moment Mrs McBride stood aside. ‘He’s in the front room, on the sofa,’ she said. Nothing else. Neither welcome nor reproach.
    A front room – how grand, Grainne thought inside her head, but she said nothing aloud, only went out of one door and through another.
    And there was William. He looked just the same for a moment; dark-red hair, brown face, white teeth when he smiled. But there was something different about his smile. He looked . . . empty.
    ‘William?’ Grainne said, going near. ‘William? It’s me, Grainne.’ Almost without thinking, her hand went to her stomach. ‘William, do you remember the night we went to the barn, you and I, and climbed up amongst the hay in the loft? William, I think . . . I think . . .’
    Her voice died away as he stared at her, apparently unheeding. Slowly, she held out her hand and he took it in a vicelike grip. He hurt her fingers. After, there were bruises. ‘Pretty,’ he said. ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty!’
    She was frightened, then. She tried to tug her hand away and he clung, with something so pathetic in his blank face, something so akin to sadness in his eyes, that she could have wept . . . yet the emptiness was frightening, the very fact that he could look at her as he would look at a stranger so