My current boy toy likes me but doesn’t love me-he’s said so, yet we continue… Sex alone pales in comparison to Elizabeth’s passion that after six centuries still torments her husband killer’s hotel in Room 21, the age she reached at death. I wish I could take some potion to cure me. I understand I’ve loved the wrong men for decades. Their romance defined them and ruined them. The past and future didn’t exist for them in the tunnel they lived intensely and completely inside the wavering plane of the present, so impossible to balance in the now and breathe. Their meetings proved too few and brief, like fleeting rain after drought.ĭid they fight back? Did he die first as she watched in horror? How does one swing a rapier in a tunnel? Is it worse to have known something that true only to feel the loss of honey coursing through veins? Her plaited head turns from him, into the stronghold, but even their closed eyes betray simmering, blind passion.Įlizabeth and her soldier risked everything for that brief sugar kiss, for that sweetness beyond all judgment that’s too big to hold for any length of time. A man in light armor and a broadsword plants his lips inside the soft arm of a voluptuous maiden on curved steps. In the fort gift shop, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency stocks thematically appropriate postcards of Frederic William Burton’s romantic painting The Meeting on the Turret Stairs. The Irish consider a house ghost as good luck certainly this one sells rooms. Somewhere in the 14th century, the hotelier returned from Crusades to catch his wife, Elizabeth Dobbins, and a Norman soldier in an embrace and killed them both, maybe with a sword and maybe in the mythic tunnel. We (my roomie Joan and I) read online that a two-block-long tunnel once connected the fortress to the crooked hotel. Fresh bundles of flowers lie at his boots.
In 1690, King Billy landed at the Carrickfergus sea wall on his way south to the Battle of the Boyne. King William of Orange’s diminutive statue guards the parking lot, fenced and life-sized, considering the Marine Highway’s constant traffic. Belfast Lough laps on one side of the castle and a wide expanse of lawn the other. Brightly painted mannequin warriors point replica rifles out of battlements. Two round stone towers flank crenulated walls. Instead, we reserve the adjacent room 22 in the 700-year-old Dobbins Hotel in quaint, Protestant Carrickfergus, just beyond Belfast at the gateway to the Antrim Coast (or as my favorite Catholic poet calls it “north of the wall”) and guarded by a dark, hulking Norman citadel. We request the most haunted room, but 21 isn’t available-it’s very popular in summer. Playwright and UB prof Kimberley Lynne travels to Ireland with students each summer–and, frankly, she sometimes encounters specters in her hotel room.
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