An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War Read Free Page B

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    Sergeant Rory Auchinleck, who was best man, had love in his eyes as he watched his father and Kinky embrace. Archie himself had been a colour sergeant in the same regiment and was so proud of his son’s recent promotion. And Flo Bishop, the matron of honour, wearing a hat large enough to shelter half the wedding party should it come on to rain as they left the church, was grinning broadly and making little subdued clapping motions with her gloved hands. She jigged from foot to foot as if the tiles of the floor were red-hot.
    Although no one would dare interrupt a Presbyterian service with anything as irreverent as cheers or real applause, a subtle murmuring of approval filled the air. It might be a cliché, thought O’Reilly, but the bride did look radiant. The pale green silk of her outfit glowed, her agate eyes sparkled, and her cheek-dimpling smile was vast. O’Reilly today, at Kinky and Archie’s request, had given the bride away and he had had, he thought, almost as much pleasure from doing so as it clearly had given Archie Auchinleck to take Kinky as his lawful wedded wife. O’Reilly stole a glance at Kitty, his own bride of ten months, and was rewarded with a saucy wink. Their marriage had been the keynote event of the year 1965 in Ballybucklebo.
    Mister Robinson was in the middle of preaching what he had promised O’Reilly would be a very short homily. “… And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.”
    The greatest of these is love. The words echoed through the old stone church and O’Reilly took Kitty’s hand and looked at her again while she looked back. In her eyes was the love that had begun more than thirty years ago. Bless you, girl. When you came back into my life in 1964 you helped me move on. Until then it had become a complacent round of work and village life and he could still not believe that he, a confirmed widower of twenty years, could once again have found happiness with a woman. He knew that Archie and Kinky had contentment too. He grinned. And now that their ceremony was nearly done, O’Reilly could, like the “ranks of Tuscany” in Macaulay’s epic poem Horatius, “scarce forbear to cheer.” Well done, Kinky Kincaid. More power to your wheel. He knew that the entire congregation shared his sentiments, so important was she in the life of the village.
    He glanced around. The church was ablaze with the harmoniously arranged flowers which the competing groups—after yesterday’s nudge from O’Reilly—had happily arranged. White wood anemones, bluebells in profusion from the bluebell wood near Sonny and Maggie Houston’s home, yellow celandine, pale blue forget-me-nots and violets, and yellow coltsfoot—all the April-blooming wildflowers were Maggie Houston and her group’s contributions. Flo Bishop and her ladies were responsible for the red roses that O’Reilly discovered had been bought from a florist’s in Belfast. There was no such facility in Ballybucklebo.
    A half turn to the left let him survey Kinky’s family members sitting in front. Her two married sisters, Sinead and Fidelma, and their husbands Malachy and Eamon and their tribes, as well as her bachelor brother Tiernan, had all come up from County Cork, a drive of more than three hundred miles. Given the state of the Irish roads, this was no small undertaking. They all had the rosy cheeks of Irish farming families. He overheard Sinead, who Kinky had, in a moment of weakness this past week, admitted could be a touch bossy, whispering to Fidelma. “Your Eamon will do no such thing. It’s Malachy’s turn to—”
    O’Reilly thought it charitable to look away and he missed Sinead’s pronouncement. To the right, Fingal saw Archie’s eighty-seven-year-old mother, who’d come from Greenisland on the other side of Belfast Lough. There was an elder brother,