GRACE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH Joe was changing and becoming more serious.
Over dinner in Sibley’s one night Grace was excited, chatting and laughing as she made plans for next year, wondering where it would bring them, when she realized that Joe seemed cool, detached and uninterested.
‘What about your programme for the theatre next year?’ she pressed, trying to lighten his mood.
‘Who knows?’ he shrugged.
Perhaps he was already bored by it … bored by her … Joe seemed suddenly non-committal. Hurt, she drew back.
Later, sitting in her bedroom reading his letters and poems, Grace felt strangely bereft. Perhaps he had just come into her life like some kind of storm and would now disappear out of it again. Maybe Mother was right – she and someone like Joe Plunkett were not destined to be together.
The next day, however, she received a letter from Joe declaring that he loved her and wanted to marry her. Overcome, she read it again – then her heart sang as she read it over and over again.
Joe loved her and wanted to marry her. It was a proposal of marriage!
Grace scoured every single word of his letter, her heart and mind racing. She laughed at his postscript declaring himself a beggar with no income or earnings and implying there were other reasons no one should marry him. He could be such an idiot sometimes!
A few hours later another letter came, this time apologizing for behaving like a fool, telling her that he loved only her. ‘I love you a million million times …’
Grabbing her pen, Grace immediately wrote back: ‘Yes, yes, yes …’
She didn’t care about what objections her parents or his parents might make to their marriage. She was going to marry the man she loved – Joseph Plunkett.
The Plunkett family were somewhat shocked by the unexpected announcement of their engagement. Count and Countess Plunkett and Joe’s sisters and brothers were surprised that Grace was suddenly going to become his wife and part of their well-known family. Joe, however, assured her that his mother, who was away in America, was delighted with the news.
His sister Geraldine, to whom he was very close, had recently become engaged to Tommy Dillon.
‘Maybe we should make it a double ceremony,’ suggested Joe happily. ‘A Plunkett family double celebration!’
Grace smiled, but she could tell from the slight coolness in Geraldine’s demeanour that her future sister-in-law was not too keen on the proposal.
‘Congratulations,’ Joe’s younger brothers George and Jack echoed each other warmly.
Grace felt like pinching herself – it was all moving so fast. In a few months’ time she and Joe would be married, a proper couple with a home of their own. She dreaded telling her own parents, suspecting that Mother would certainly not approve.
‘We’ll tell them soon,’ she promised him.
Her sisters were delighted for her; they had a high regard for Joe.
‘I am so pleased for you both!’ cried Muriel, hugging her, when Grace told her the news and showed her the ring Joe had given her. ‘MacDonagh and I are so fond of him and soon he will be my brother-in-law!’
‘I intend telling Mother and Father soon,’ she said to Kate, ‘but you know what she will be like …’
‘Pick the right moment,’ Kate advised sagely. ‘Mother’s disapproval is horrendous …’
‘That’s what I fear,’ said Grace nervously.
‘Her bark is far worse than her bite,’ said Nellie reassuringly. ‘Mother has accepted MacDonagh and Walter as sons-in-law, and she will accept Joe too.’
Grace hoped that her sister was right.
‘I never thought that I would actually fall properly in love and get married,’ she admitted. ‘I thought that I would end up the old spinster artist aunt working up in some attic with my paints and covered in ink and charcoal.’
‘That was never going to happen!’ chorused her sisters.
Joe too was happier than she had ever seen him, writing her love letters and proudly telling his close friends about their plans to wed in a few months’ time.
They attended the big Anti-Conscription Meeting that Frank Sheehy-Skeffington had organized in the Mansion House; it drew thousands of people. Joe linked his fingers discreetly through hers as they listened to both Padraig Pearse and James Connolly give impassioned speeches. Grace realized how proud she was of the fact that Joe would always be at the heart of things, always ready to stand up and fight for what he believed in … She could see people looking at them together, wondering, for they were an unlikely couple … But fate had somehow brought them together and decreed that she would marry such a man.