A Game of Sorrows (24 page)

‘You must stay with me. We have much to talk about, and I have sent a message to Finn O’Rahilly; I am taking you to him at dusk. You will see your friend at Bonamargy tomorrow.’

I laid my hand on Andrew’s brow. It was slicked with sweat and his cheeks were burning now. His whole body was shaking under its blanket, and he moaned and mumbled words that were not words.

‘You can do nothing for him,’ said Stephen. ‘No more than he can do for you. You must see the poet, and O’Rahilly will consent to this one time. Let Michael take him now.’

With a heavy heart I realised I had no choice. I had to place myself in Stephen’s hands, and leave Andrew, struggling for life as he was, at the mercy of subversive priests.

I rested while Stephen went in to talk to the still man, and wondered what his business with him might be, but I was learning that the Franciscan would let out knowledge like a length of rope. He would give me only what I needed to cling on to: the rest he would keep hidden in the robes of his order. I did not ponder it long, and passed into sleep instead. Drifts of their conversation came to my semi-slumbering mind, they talked of stores and supplies in the field, but I did not care enough to listen. The hours spent in sodden clothing began to exact their price, however, and I was taken with a coughing fit. The conversation stopped and the priest was through the door again in a moment.

‘So, you are wakened? I would have thought you would sleep longer, but you Presbyterians do not much hold with rest and comfort, they tell me.’

‘Then they tell you wrong. I crave both, but there is none here.’

He assessed me silently for a moment. ‘Perhaps there is an aid to it though.’ He called something to the still man and in a moment the fellow brought us two small glasses filled with a clear amber liquid. I let the whisky warm its way from my tongue to my body and mind, relax my bones, expand my thoughts.

‘Tell me what happened to my cousin,’ I said at last.

He sighed, and refilled his own glass from the flask that had been left with us. He sipped carefully, then he pursed his lips and sucked in hard, tipping the whole glassful down without giving it chance of pause in his mouth. And then he told me what had happened to my family on the night of my grandfather’s funeral.

‘No one saw the girl, but Sean took it into his head that the note was from Macha. He would not let Eachan go with him, telling him to stay with Deirdre and your grandmother. But of course, Eachan did go after him. He followed him until he saw him turn in to St Nicholas church. He would have followed him there, but a moment after Sean entered, he saw a young woman, heavily wrapped against the cold, emerge from behind one of the gravestones and follow him. Satisfied that all was as it should be, Eachan left and returned to your grandmother’s house, to watch over the women there. He was not altogether easy at leaving Sean, and his unease grew as the night wore on. Sometime before dawn, leaving the house under guard of Murchadh and his sons, he went back to the church. All was silent, and he could see no one, but a light burned in the Donegall aisle and he went to it.’ Here the priest filled his glass and emptied it again. ‘There he found Sean’s body sprawled across Chichester’s memorial, his head almost severed from his neck.’ Against my will, I pictured the scene. I had never set foot in that or any church in Carrickfergus, but my mind forced the images on to me; suggestions of candlelight, marble, blood and silence.

Stephen’s voice grew bitter. ‘Eachan lifted him in his arms, as if he had been a fallen child, and brought him home. He laid your cousin down on his bed, and cleaned his murdered body as he wept. And so was Sean betrayed.’

My voice was almost dead in my throat. ‘Betrayed in what?’ I asked at last.

He looked up at me from his empty glass and studied my face a long moment. ‘In everything his life should have been. In everything that was before him to do. In everything that mattered.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Your grandmother’s priest sent word to Bonamargy. He fears she will go out of her mind for grief. The Blackstones were declaring they would leave for the North in the morning – not a moment to lose in moving on your grandfather’s business. Deirdre was in a hysteria, and refused to go with them. Cormac O’Neill and his brothers took her, in their protection, to one of their father’s strongholds. Eachan was fit to kill any who tried to come near to Sean’s body. The house is in a turmoil of despair.’

But there was something more. I asked the question slowly, afraid of the answer I knew would come. ‘Why did the Blackstone women cry out that I was a murderer?’

He was hesitant to begin and poured himself a third glass from the flask and me a second. ‘Your grandmother, as I told you, has been driven from her senses by the curse of Finn O’Rahilly and all that has followed. She has never been a kind or loving woman. Quick to suspect and slow to trust, swift to accuse and never forgiving. She was murmuring that she had brought it all upon her own head, and telling, to any who would listen, the story of Diarmuid and the boar.’ He paused a moment, a sad smile on his face. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did Sean never tell you the tale of Diarmuid and the boar?’

‘Never,’ I replied.

He nodded, as if he had expected such a response. ‘And I’ll wager your mother never did either?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘she didn’t.’

‘Then I’ll tell you. Diarmuid was a warrior, of the
Fianna
of Finn McCool, the god-king. Diarmuid had a half-brother, the offspring of an illicit union of his mother and his father’s steward. When the child was born, the husband took it and dashed it against the rocks. But Diarmuid’s foster-father took pity on the bastard child, and through magic, brought it back to life in the shape of a boar. This creature dedicated the rest of its life to the pursuit and killing of its half-brother. There came the time when Diarmuid was tricked into joining the
Fianna
in a boar hunt. At the climax of the hunt, the boar fatally gored Diarmuid, just as he was driving his spear into its heart. At the moment of death, the beast transformed at last into its human form, and Diarmuid saw that it was his brother.’

‘A fine fable,’ I said, when I realised it had come to its end and its moral had not presented itself. ‘But what is it to my grandmother? Why are you telling it to me?’

He looked me steadily in the eye. ‘That you might think on it, as I have been.’

‘I am not in the humour for riddles,’ I said.

There was a long silence before he spoke again. ‘Alexander, the reason that you were pursued from Coleraine, that you are pursued still, is that your grandmother has put it out, has called down judgement from the heavens, that it was you who murdered your cousin.’

I felt the glass drop from my hand and saw the golden liquid seep into the rushes on the floor.

Carrickfergus

She was tired of walls: walls surrounded by walls, the damp cold of rooms that would never get warm. But here in her garden it was different. The slight breeze off the sea brought air that was fresh, not foetid. It was a clean cold that the rugs the servants had brought her, fussed around her with, kept from her bones. The wood of the bench was warm in the last of the autumn sunshine. A few blooms still clung to the stems of old roses that cloaked the western and northern walls, sending to her a faint scent of apricot and lemon. She closed her eyes and felt the hint of warmth on her cheek, and let herself think of Connemara, of fifty autumns past, and riding for miles along the endless sands with her mare, Emer, dancing in the spray.

The cook’s child was gathering the last of the apples from the orchard. She remembered Grainne, on such an afternoon, running barefoot along the coast path at Whitehead, her small chubby fingers stained with the juice of the blackberries they’d been gathering, the startled delight on her childish face when a rabbit shot out of the bushes in front of them. When she had been young.

She called to the cook’s child to bring her an apple, and the boy ran to her quickly with the best from his basket. She drew from her girdle the small jewelled knife she kept there and cut the fruit carefully, giving him a piece before dismissing him.

Murchadh had gone, at last. She was mistress in her own house once more. She should have mastered her grief quicker, held her tongue sooner. His rage, on learning of Grainne’s Scottish son, had surpassed what even she had expected. It had taken some work on her part to convince him that she had no love for the boy, not a trace: he was not Sean. Perhaps Deirdre had been right, perhaps Alexander Seaton had not killed his cousin. Indeed, in her quieter moments she herself knew there could be little reason for him to have done so, but that he lived while Sean lay cold and dead, that she could not forgive. When Murchadh had been calmed, eventually, and begun to think, as Maeve had, it had not been a great work of persuasion to show him how the Scotsman might be of use to them, might salvage some of Sean’s legacy and lay it at Murchadh’s feet. What happened to the boy after that was of little interest to her. She suspected Murchadh had it in mind that he should not long survive his cousin. So be it: she had no further use for him, and greater concerns.

Word had come last night from the North, the word they had waited so long for, and Murchadh’s dark mood had dissipated entirely on the hearing of it. He had thrown his arm around her and lifted her into the air, before shouting for drink, the best that was to be had from her cellars.

‘By God,’ he said, as he set her down, ‘we have had little enough to celebrate these last days, but we have it now!’ He appraised her, as if he had never seen her properly before, and shook his head in a kind of wonder. ‘I’ll own it to you now, Maeve: I thought you played too risky a hand, but you have known this game a long time and I should not have doubted you.’

She would not tell him how she had doubted also, that only a sort of desperation, a sudden madness had suggested to her the course she had taken. Deirdre had thought by her marriage to spurn her, but in so doing she had gifted her that unforeseen chance, the glimpse of a man’s venality, and when Maeve had seen it she had taken it. ‘It was the only way we would ever get the arms. We could not wait for Spanish help for ever.’

‘And now we will do it without the Spaniards, because you did not flinch. Through all your losses, you have never flinched.’ He laid a gloved hand over her cold, ringed fingers. ‘I know your grief. Sean should have been with us, at our head. But his name will not be forgotten: in three days we will start our march; we will blast the English from Ulster with guns of their own making. They have “civilised” us more than they know. And the name of Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett will be written into the legends of Ireland. Three days yet, Maeve, that is all.’

It was a wonder to her that fifty years of life had not been enough to teach her kinsman how much might be lost in three days. ‘Nothing must be permitted to go wrong, Murchadh. Deirdre …’

‘You cannot be sure she knows.’

‘She knows; she all but taunted me with it on the night I sent Seaton north.’

‘Do not fear for her. Cormac has her safe; no one will be allowed near Deirdre.’

‘Should the words of her loosened tongue reach the wrong ears, everything would be imperilled.’

‘The preparations of your apothecary have dulled her mind and her tongue, and should they fail, Cormac has his instructions.’

‘Murchadh, I have known your son all his life. He is the best of Ireland. Like Phelim, like Sean. But my granddaughter is his great weakness. Should the time come for her silence, we cannot rely on Cormac.’

He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I have other sons, Maeve, and they will not have a lover’s qualms.’

And so Murchadh had left, and she was alone again, and waiting. The clouds had gathered and obscured the sun. The wind off the sea had grown stronger and the garden was cold now. She got up wearily from the bench and began to walk back towards the house, the apple lying uneaten where she had left it, the white of its flesh already brown and rotting.

They had said it often enough: she was going mad. Finn O’Rahilly and his curses, Deirdre and her vision of Maeve MacQuillan, grief over the husband she had deceived for so long. And now the loss of Sean, her hope, her future. But what madness could create in her heart this hatred of me?

My mind was fracturing, and my head and eyes ached as I struggled to keep hold of what I thought I had understood. All my life, I had not known my cousin, and then I had known him, and loved him. I could look in a glass and see his living image, but he was dead. I had played his part, I had been Sean FitzGarrett in the eyes of others, I had walked in his very boots, and all the while he had been dead. The grandfather I had never known had loved me. The grandmother I knew despised me. I had come here for Sean, abandoned all that I knew and all that knew me, for Sean, but there was no Sean now, only Alexander. The grief that many years ago had threatened to rip me apart when I had learned of the death of Archibald Hay had hunted me down across the Irish Sea, and found me once more. And if ever Alexander Seaton saw Scotland again, it would be from Dunluce, from the Hanging Hill. I would never look again on the face of the woman I loved, never know what it was to touch her. Oh, God help me. The man in the clothes of a priest, hung round with the trappings of idolatry, calling on his God.

Stephen reached a hand out to my shoulder. His voice was gentle, but urgent. ‘We must tarry here no longer, Alexander, if we are to be at Kilcrue before sunset.’ And so, within the half-hour, I found myself on the road again. I had passed the middle of the day in sleep, and was again walking towards the night. Favoured words of my counsellor and friend Mr Gilbert Grant, late schoolmaster of Banff, came to me: ‘Yet a little while is the light with you, Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.’ Blind at the end, these had been the last words to pass the old man’s lips.