In the corridor outside her own room, she saw a round-faced, balding man shepherding a woman and two children into another room, then turning and heading for the staircase. The doctor from Philadelphia, she thought at once, and there was something strikingly familiar about him, though she could not say what it was.
“Dr. Koenig?”
He spun around, genuinely startled, when she spoke his name.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just ...we haven’t met, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve seen you before.”
“It is possible,” he said stiffly. His voice had a slight trace of a German accent.
“Were you in Tralee?”
“No. No, we came direct from Dublin.”
“Perhaps I saw you there.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Although this is a common phenomenon, you know. The recognition of strangers. In my business, I am a psychiatrist, we have observed—”
“I hope you don’t mean that I’m unbalanced?”
“Not at all.” She had meant to make light of it, but the psychiatrist seemed to be a totally humorless man. “And it is possible that we have seen each other after all. I am from Philadelphia. Is that by any chance your own hometown?”
“No, but I have been there. I’m from New York.”
“And I have often been to New York. Perhaps we have met on the underground. The subway, that is. One sees so many people. It is possible.”
“Yes, but I just—”
“You must excuse me,” he said. “My wife has found an errand for me. I hope you enjoy Dingle, Miss Cameron.”
It never occurred to her to wonder how he had known her name.
Shortly before dinner, the rains came. It was an on-again, off-again sort of rain, a drizzling mist that let up intermittently, only to resume again before very long. It was, in short, a typically Irish sort of rain, and she knew better than to resent it. The Tralee festival had been mercifully short of rain, with the skies surprisingly clear for long stretches at a time. Now Dingle was due for a downpour, and she could hardly object to it.
“Horrid weather,” Sara Trevelyan said. They sat together in the parlor downstairs, waiting for the rain to let up so that they could go around the corner for dinner. “It’s a pity, really. If they could only do something about the cursed rain this area would be a veritable paradise. The summers never get too hot and the winters rarely get very cold. But it rains all the time.”
“Did you get caught in it this afternoon?”
“I just got back in time.”
“Did you have much luck finding shells?”
“I got a bag of them, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what they are. I’m not one of these passionate shellers who go into spasms over a one-eyed limpet or a double-breasted cowrie, I’m afraid. Never can tell one shell from the next. I just pick the pretty ones and set them out around my house. Very much the amateur, I fear.”
“You probably have more fun that way.”
“Perhaps.”
She went to the door. “It seems to have let up a little,” she said. “Shall we risk it?”
“I think not, for my part. I catch colds rather easily, and my doctor is convinced that I’ll catch one and die of it if I’m not careful. I offered to bet that he’d die before me, but he pointed out it would be a difficult wager to collect, no matter who won it. An unanswerable argument. You go ahead and have your dinner, Ellen. I’ll lie down for a few minutes.”
“Shall I bring you back something?”
“Oh, don’t bother. I’m not that hungry, actually. I’ll go out later.”
It was still raining after dinner, coming down a bit harder than before. She hurried from the café to the doorway of her rooming house and huddled there, out of the rain, while the town of Dingle prepared for the opening ceremonies of the festival. It was quietly comic, with everyone evidently determined not to let the rain spoil things, and with the rain equally determined to come down as hard and fast as it possibly could.
A little band, formed of young boys and old men, their overcoats wrapped about them and their cloth caps pulled down over their foreheads, made several spirited passes up and down Strand Street. The band was not musically balanced, running to bugles and tin whistles and drums, but the old men and the youngsters made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in musical ability. They marched to and fro, playing with spirit and coming close to the desired tunes, and then the rain would pour down more furiously than before and would scatter their ranks, with the band’s members scurrying or hobbling, depending upon their age, to take cover in doorways and pubs.
“And isn’t it a horrid thing, to have rain on a night like this?” a woman demanded. “Eight o’clock it is, and in thirty minutes’ time the Rose herself will sail across the harbor, and we should all of us be there to welcome her. But who’ll be turning out on a night like this? And it’s sad it’ll be for Dingle if there’s a bad showing at the pier.”
The populace had no intention of making a bad showing. Rain or no rain, Ellen saw, the local people were determined to give the Rose of Tralee a fine and proper welcome. By eight-thirty men and women and children were filtering down to the foot of Strand Street to stand exposed to the elements in the little harbor. In spite of herself she was drawn along in their wake. She bundled up warmly — the rain was chilling, and there was a strong wind behind it — and followed the crowd. Her feet were cold and wet, and drops of rain lashed at her face and trickled down over her wet skin. It seemed a great deal to endure for the dubious thrill of a fireworks display and a glimpse of the Rose of Tralee. She had seen the girl — a beautiful girl, admittedly; a Belfast colleen whose father had gone north from Kenmare some years before she was born — had seen her crowned in Tralee to the joyous shouts of the assembled multitude. A beautiful girl, to be sure, but surely one glimpse of the Rose of Tralee was enough, wasn’t it?
They had played the song incessantly at Tralee, with every band piping it interminably through the streets of the town. And now the Dingle band, tuneless but inspired, was giving the familiar melody yet another run-through. She winced at the missed notes and tortured rhythm.
To her left, a freckled little girl was talking earnestly with her mother. “Now we’d better be getting home,” the woman said. “The rain coming down so hard, and you just over a cold.”
“But mother,” the child said, “I want to see the Rose.”
“It’s only a pretty lady, Bridie.”
“Oh, no,” the girl insisted. “It’s a rose, a beautiful rose—”
A buzz went through the crowd. Someone had sighted the royal barge on the horizon. The welcoming committee was in place upon the wooden dock, and the first of the skyrockets was ignited and launched heavenward. It burst in a splash of fiery red, and a great cheer went up from the viewers.
“It’s bad weather, but we’ll give her a good welcome!”
“And why not? This is a day the lass will remember all her life, and the town of Dingle, too.”
“If there’d only be an end to the bloody rain...”
Another skyrocket was touched off, and again the crowd burst into applause. Now, for the first time, Ellen could see the barge that bore the Rose of Tralee. She wondered how the girl must feel, sailing so slowly across Dingle Bay and into the harbor. The runners-up would be present, too — Miss Boston and Miss New York and Miss Dublin and Miss Liverpool, Irish beauties from throughout the world.