A Game of Sorrows (18 page)

‘Much worse,’ I assured him.

By the time we had washed and changed and descended once more to the parlour, complete darkness had fallen, and more candles had been lit around the room where our host and his family were waiting for us. A brief grace was said, and before I had settled my quandary about whether to cross myself or no, Blackstone was decanting a ruby liquid into the crystal glass in front of me and urging my health. I held it up to him, the light dancing in and out of its many red faces. ‘
Slainte
,’ I said, before helping myself to a thick slab from the haunch of venison in the middle of the table, and ladling onions, leeks and some crimson jelly onto my plate. Andrew followed my lead, and as the master of the house ate heartily, the ladies ate but meagrely and cast sly glances at my hands, a little surprised, evidently, that I could handle a fork. I wondered just what kind of account Sean had given of himself at his sister’s wedding, and what price I was to pay for it. The lady of the house cast a parsimonious eye on my plate; I smiled at her, and served myself another piece of meat.

‘You will find things well ordered here,’ said Blackstone. ‘Your sister has looked to your grandfather’s interests; there are not many who will have cheated her. She has a better mind to business than many a man.’

‘She would do better to set her mind to a more womanly calling,’ said the mother. ‘She thinks herself above the duties of my son’s wife. She has so little notion of embroidery, or spinning, or the making of preserves …’

‘She was brought up in a houseful of servants, to better things. She has Latin and Greek, and mathematics. She will converse with you in French as easily as in English.’

‘Much good may such learning do in the face of slothfulness.’

‘But it is the nature of the people, Mother, they have such little inclination to industry.’

Her father brought his glass down slowly, and deliberately. ‘I will not have you insult the guests of this house, Elizabeth. Guard your tongue better.’

‘I take no insult,’ I said. ‘Our people have no compulsion to labour when labour is not required. There are higher things.’

‘Perhaps. But you will find me a common man, FitzGarrett, and I have brought my family up to be so too, although their mother would often enough have them forget it. There are many fine things in this house, and will be many finer still in the house I am building on my estate, not ten miles from here, but they have all been won by the grace of God and the labour of these hands he gave me. I have little time for your higher things. There is much work on the plantations, and opportunities too, for men of calibre.’ He appraised Andrew a moment. ‘Are you content, sir, to remain in FitzGarrett’s employ?’

Andrew looked at me, directly, as if it was I who had put the question. ‘I will stay in the employ of the FitzGarretts as long as I am needed, but then I have a mind to invest in a mill, and the linen trade on the Braid.’

‘And I wish you good fortune in it. You may have started life the son of a steward – I myself am the son of a brick-maker – but you could finish it a man of land and means, if you took the right turn. The son of a brickmaker I am, but I have built half the walls of Londonderry, many of the houses within those walls, castles on two plantations and bawns on many more. I will have me a title and see my wife “ladied” before the Lord calls me to that better place. All by the grace and gifts of God and the work of these hands.’

‘If the king does not take it from us,’ said the sly-eyed sister quietly.

‘Hush, girl,’ said her mother.

‘Why should the king wish to take it from you, when you do his work so well?’ I asked.

Matthew Blackstone drained his glass and filled another. ‘Because he thinks we do not do it well or fast enough. The London Companies cannot work the lands they have been granted without granting leases to many of your people. And truth to say, the Irish will pay higher rents than anyone else to get access to the land that they once thought theirs. But this does not conduce to the king’s plans of civilising this province, of spreading the true faith, and the tongue and customs of the English. What is more, it is an arrangement potent of great danger.’ He looked hard at me. ‘I will not dally with pretty words, sir. There are many of the Irish who have not accommodated themselves so well as your grandfather or some of your grandmother’s people have been willing to do, to the king’s arrangements for the tenanting of his land.’

‘The place is alive with savages,’ said his wife.

‘With men who had their land taken from them,’ I said.

‘It was forfeit by the treachery of O’Neill and O’Donnell.’

I began to respond in defence of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, as I knew Sean would have done, but was interrupted by the younger girl. ‘We have heard such politics often enough at this table from your sister, sir. It is a wonder, if she had such leanings towards the way of the savages, that she does not …’

‘Elizabeth!’ said her father sharply. ‘I will not have that talk at this table. You will hold your tongue, or you will oblige us by going to your chamber.’ Blackstone did not notice the resentment that burned in his daughter’s eyes as he settled again to his former conversation. ‘The king and his agents are not sufficiently pleased with the speed and manner of our plantation. There are those in London – and some of the disaffected English who were here before us – who have been urging him to revoke our grants.’

‘Matthew! No, it cannot be.’ His wife’s face had gone the waxy yellow of old linen. ‘We could lose everything.’

‘Not everything, but much.’

I contemplated the matron opposite me and wondered how she might enjoy life as a brickmaker’s wife.

‘But it will not come to that,’ her husband reassured her. ‘Our detractors will overreach themselves, and the king must know that should he throw us from this land, after all the time, money and labour we have invested here, not a soul in their right mind would be willing to take our place.’

‘But we could return to London,’ said the slower girl, who had been less forward with her opinions than her sister. ‘If we were forced to leave here, we could go back to London, to the old house there. What would it matter not to have an estate, a grand house, if we could have company, and some semblance of a life, instead of withering in this half-empty town on the edge of a wasteland where wolves and savages roam?’

‘It would be a shameful thing to go back now, Mary. We have moved beyond those people and that company. And there is nothing to be bought in the streets of London that your father cannot have sent to us here.’

‘But to what purpose, Mother? To what purpose?’ And in those words I saw played out before me the tableau of her life in this place. Few friends, little entertainment, and even less chance of finding a husband. Of what her life in London had been, I knew nothing, but it must surely have been something better than this.

Once the women had retired, we moved towards the hearth and Matthew Blackstone took out his pipe. Within a few moments, the smell of burning peats in the fire was joined and mingled with an unmistakable aroma of Virginia leaf that took me back to another place and another hearth. How Jaffray would have relished drawing Andrew out of himself, and intriguing on the mission before us. I had not been in Banff for many months, but I could have wished myself back there now, with the doctor and Charles Thom and Ishbel, and the cares of that small town. My host’s voice broke into my reverie.

‘Your sister gave us to understand that you had no great interest in matters of business.’

‘I am more at home out on my grandfather’s estates in Down, or with my grandmother’s people in Tyrone. The charms of the marketplace hold little attraction for me. But I cannot shirk my responsibilities for ever – they are finding me out. Without Andrew, I would be lost.’

‘Well then, after you have spoken to your agents in town tomorrow, you must come with me to the port. A ship from Bristol has been trying to dock these three days, but the seas have been so bad of late, and I fear there will not be many more before the year’s end. My work at Monavagher is held up for want of nails and bolts, and I have two good carpenters wasting their time and losing their stomachs on that barque while wood lies idle in Londonderry city, waiting on them to turn it into house frames. But if it should happily dock tomorrow, you may pick up some bargains at the customs house, and no little experience either. Or perhaps you already have some interest in its cargo?’

Before I could form a reply, Andrew was there with his own. ‘My old master had ordered a consignment of good Madeira wines for Sir James Shaw of Ballygally. It was sent by this ship, since the vessel it should have travelled on met with misadventure on the way out to Spain.’

‘Piracy or tempest?’ asked the old man.

‘Piracy. Basques.’

‘Ach.’ Blackstone spat. ‘A plague upon the seven seas, they are.’

We spoke an hour or so longer, although in truth most of the conversation was between Andrew and the older man. Their topics did not stray far from business – trade, investment, expansion, the scarcity of coin – and I soon stopped attempting to follow them. The role of Sean came easy to me on this point. My mind drifted to other matters. It had been three weeks now since I had left Aberdeen, three weeks since I had set sight on a face that wanted something from me that I also wanted to give. What would they think had befallen me, or that I had done? William Cargill, Sarah, Dr Dun, would they comprehend my hastily scribbled notes, or would they believe that I had left the town after my denied debauches of the previous night, fled of my own accord with the ‘ill-favoured Highlander’ whom I had denied having known? Or would they think that I had been taken in the darkness, against my will? I looked into the cooling embers of the fire and wondered if they thought I was dead.

‘That is the case, is it not, Sean? Sean?’ Andrew was looking at me meaningfully. It took me a moment to come to myself, or rather to that other that I was supposed to be.

‘I am sorry. I got lost in your talk, I was dreaming.

’ Blackstone looked at me curiously. ‘You are a people much given to dreaming, and wandering in realms of the mind that are best left alone. This business of the poet for instance …’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my grandmother has been greatly distressed by it; my sister also. But I am not inclined to wring my hands over O’Rahilly’s words. He has betrayed his learning and his heritage in what he has done. He has sold his honour some-where.’

‘That may well be so. You honour heritage and learning more highly than do I, FitzGarrett, or than your steward here does either, I suspect, but I know a charlatan when I see one, and you are right: that fellow is a charlatan. As are all of his kind if you seek my opinion, but we shall not quibble on that. Your sister had been much against engaging him, but your grandmother would hear of nothing else, and so brought the trouble down on her own head, and much embarrassment upon ours.’

‘My sister told you this?’

‘She did not need to. We saw it all for ourselves when your grandmother accompanied her on a visit up here about a month before the marriage took place, to see to the arrangements.’

‘Of course,’ I said. Sean had told me none of this. Perhaps, in his roving the country with Eachan, he had not known.

Blackstone continued. ‘There were dark clouds over Coleraine on those days, let me tell you. My good wife and your grandmother saw eye to eye on precisely nothing. The girl herself was seldom consulted as to the matrimonial arrangements, and I not at all, thanks be to God. By the afternoon of the second day there was such a freezing in looks and words in this house that you would have thought us caught in the grip of winter. Your grandmother declared that she had no further interest in our “petty proceedings” and would happily cede the “shameful event” to my wife, but that she would have one thing, and without that thing there would be no marriage that she or her husband ever saw: she would have her poet. My wife was too much in a glow at her triumph to protest, and nothing your sister said had any moment with your grandmother.’

‘Did my grandmother go to O’Rahilly from here?’

‘She and Deirdre both. Your sister was determined that the poet should not be engaged to perform anything – what shall I say? – outrageous, or offensive to the sensibilities of others who were to be present at the marriage.’

‘Then she failed in her part,’ I said.

‘Indeed she did. That rogue managed to affront everyone at the table. But something went wrong on their way back here from seeing O’Rahilly. I cannot recall precisely, but your grandmother was much shaken by it.’

‘Something the poet had said?’ I asked, fearful that Blackstone was about to drift to another topic again.

‘Eh? No. Not that: it was later, on their journey back from engaging O’Rahilly. Some nonsense about a woman Deirdre had seen at a window, at Dunluce, or Dunseverick or some such place.’

Andrew looked up with interest. ‘Maeve MacQuillan?’

‘Aye, that was the name, I think. I paid it little heed – there is enough woman’s prattle about this house at the best of times, without adding your Irish superstitions to it.’ He sucked deeply on his pipe, but it had gone out and he did not light it again, instead heaving himself to his feet with a sigh. ‘Well, gentlemen, I must leave you, for these old bones grow weary at their work, and I must rouse them fresh and ready for the labours of the morning. Come down to the port after eleven, sir, and you may see the
Carolina
dock then. There is wine on the sideboard, and tobacco on the mantelshelf. Have what you will and then rest yourselves well. I bid you goodnight.’

We finished our wine in silence. Genial though our host was, we did not yet trust the inhabitants of the house. We had got candles from the girl and reached gladly to our chamber in the attic before the bell of St Patrick’s church tolled ten.

I lay on the truckle bedstead with its feather bed and bolster while Andrew made do with a coarser arrangement of blankets and pillows on the floor, having dismissed my offer of tossing a coin for the comfort with a curt, ‘I play the servant, you the master; the master does not sleep on the floor.’