Honor is the grand niece of Joseph Plunkett and he's Joe )
Grace was one of six girls and six boys born to a wealthy Unionist family, with a Catholic father and Protestant mother. All the children were brought up Protestant, but the boys were baptised Catholic. However, Grace became a Catholic with all the devotion of a convert.
"Joe was on the rebound when they met," says Honor. "He'd spent five years infatuated with Columba O'Carroll, the subject of much of his poetry, but eventually she told him no more. He started working on a military plan for the Rising. His expertise in this area was respected by the older leaders, and it was he who devised the strategy for the successful Battle of Mount Street.
"During this time, September 1915, he met Grace and fell in love with her. They became engaged on December 2 and announced it in February. She was baptised a Catholic on April 7.
"Joe asked her to marry him in Lent, but she said it didn't suit, as she'd be doing a Lenten ritual known as the Seven Churches. She suggested Easter. He replied, 'I think we'll be running a revolution then.'"
There was another reason for Joseph's rush to the altar - he knew he was on borrowed time.
"Joe had glandular tuberculosis since the age of two or three," says Honor. "Shortly before the Rising, he had an operation and doctors gave him only a few weeks to live. For him, going out to be shot for Ireland was a far better end than dying of illness a few weeks later."
But there may have been a further compelling explanation why they ended up marrying hours before his execution.
"Fr Eugene McCarthy, the chaplain of Kilmainham, was said to have asked Grace: 'Do you have to get married?' She's supposed to have said yes. There was only one reason a couple had to get married in those times, and my grandmother's papers indicate that Grace was pregnant. It also explains why the jail governor allowed them to marry," says Honor.
Joseph may have hinted at their union in his poem, New Love, which begins:
The day I knew you loved me we had lain
Deep in Coill Doraca down by Gleann na Scath.
But it was his sister Geraldine who left the most telling clue to Grace's condition. After the Rising, Grace was disowned by her mother and Geraldine Plunkett gave her a place to live in Larkfield, a family owned estate.
"My grandmother wrote how she visited Grace in her bedroom one morning and found a large chamberpot full of blood and foetus. Neither woman said a word to each other about it."
