A Game of Sorrows (4 page)

‘Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett,’ he said with a flourish. ‘Son of Phelim O’Neill FitzGarrett, and grandson of Maeve O’Neill of the O’Neills of Ulster, who has sent me here.’

‘My cousin,’ I said, sitting down at last on the bed.

The face smiled a mischievous smile. ‘None other.’ He pulled over the chair from my desk and turned it around to sit astride it. It was only then that I noticed, lurking in the unlit corner of the room, a stocky form, with eyes that moved as much as his body was still. He was wreathed in some sort of Highland garb, a yellowed linen shirt wrapped over faded red trews of a rough woollen cloth, the whole swathed in a long brown blanket edged with goats’ fleece. ‘That’s Eachan,’ my cousin said. ‘Pay him no heed. He’s a dour fellow but will do you no harm, unless you would wish to injure me, and then he would kill you as soon as look at you.’

‘“The ill-favoured Highlander”,’ I murmured.

My cousin glanced at me quizzically but said nothing.

‘When did you come here?’ I asked.

‘Into the town? We arrived last night. Half-starved and exhausted, the pair of us, by the time we got within the gates – which was when, incidentally, cousin, I learned of our resemblance to one another. The fellow on the watch mistook me for you and let me pass without question. Eachan gave him more trouble, until I intervened – under guise as yourself; the watchman seemed more at ease with that arrangement than any other, and I judged it best not to antagonise him. Aye, half-starved and exhausted we were, and our object nowhere to be found. This is not a hospitable place; I will be glad to be home.’

‘You are a long way from home,’ I said. ‘Carrickfergus.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘You know that much then.’

Still watching my cousin’s servant, I said, ‘My mother spoke of you sometimes, her brother’s child. I have often wondered about you. As a boy I used to wish …’ I stopped. It was pointless to remember that now. ‘It was a great sorrow to her that she did not see you grow to manhood. She is dead now. I think she grieved for her homeland until the day she died.’

‘Ah, did she? I think I have some memory of her yet, Grainne. Of her hair, the scent of her skin, her face sometimes. There has not been a day that our grandfather has not mourned her loss.’

He said nothing of our grandmother, Maeve: there was no need. My mother’s every letter to her had gone unacknowledged, unanswered, until at last she had written no more letters home. I had sometimes wondered how many kind words from the stern old Ulsterwoman of my childhood dreams would have been needed for her to leave my father and this cold and wind-blasted coast of Scotland to return to the land of her birth. I might have grown up all but a brother to the man seated across from me. But there had been no such words, she had never returned home from this place, and the man before me was a stranger.

He regarded me a few moments, as discomfited as I, I think, to learn of another who lived his life in his own exact image. ‘You have no brother or sister?’ he asked.

‘None,’ I said. ‘Nor mother or father either now. And you?’

‘I have a sister,’ he said, ‘Deirdre. Four years younger and twenty wiser than I. Our mother died when she was born, and our father left before she was five years old or I nine, in the train of Tyrone; he fled to the continent.’

‘Tyrone?’ I said, stupidly almost, as some image from my childhood stirred in my memory. A memory of my mother weeping, as I had never seen her do before nor indeed did I ever afterwards.

‘Aye, Tyrone,’ said Sean with some bitterness. ‘My father fled Ireland with the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, when they took fright at only they and God alone knew what. They left their people and their lands to be parcelled up amongst the English and the Scots as your king and his deputies saw fit, and Deirdre and I were left to be brought up by our grandparents, to inherit our grandfather’s wealth and our grandmother’s dreams.’

‘I think my mother was saddened that she had not known her brother better.’

Sean sighed. ‘It was not our grandmother’s way. She insisted that Phelim be brought up in the Irish fashion, fostered with her O’Neill kindred in Tyrone. Our grandfather was much against it, I have been told, but in the end he gave in to her, as he always has done. Our grandmother fell in love with an Englishman and she never forgave him for it.’

‘But our grandfather’s family have been settled in Ireland for many generations, have they not?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Sean. ‘And they have our Irish tongue and can ape our Irish ways when it suits them, and they have not, thank God, embraced the Protestant heresy that has infected these shores.’ Here he crossed himself and it sent a shiver to my soul to see my own image do so. ‘But for all that,’ he continued, ‘they are still the English, no more accepted by my grandmother and her like than she was accepted by them. She married for love, the one weakness, the one mistake of her life. To our grandfather’s wealthy family in Dublin, a marriage alliance with the O’Neills was potentially useful for business in the North, where Maeve’s family held sway, but in other ways it was beyond their powers of acceptance and they never did accept her. As for Maeve’s family, the O’Neills were well used to accommodations with the English for their own benefit, but for her to marry into a trading family was almost beyond disgrace. She soon gave up trying to find favour with her husband’s family and instead set herself to salvaging some with her own.’

‘And did she succeed?’ I asked, becoming interested, in spite of myself, in this woman who had been little more than a shadow in my life.

‘Oh yes, she did. And the fact that her son Phelim rose with the Earl of Tyrone against the English, and then went in to exile with him on the continent, has given her much honour with the native Irish of our land, but it is an empty honour.’

‘An empty honour? What do you mean?’

Sean’s face became grave. ‘Because the Irish have no honour in Ireland any more. Tyrone’s rising was the last hope for our people – for our language, our laws, our customs. Perhaps even our religion. The lands the earls left are being settled now by the English and the Scots. The native Irish are being pushed to the margins – untrusted and yet needed still for their labour. Those who had honour amongst their people must now till their scraps of land like beasts, and pay the English Crown for the privilege.’

‘I am sorry for that,’ I said, ‘but what has it to do with me?’ Sean got up and walked over to my bookshelves. He picked up an edition of Horace and leafed through it a few moments before putting it back on the shelf and turning to me. ‘Nothing, cousin, it has nothing to do with you. With your books and your pen and ink, and your drab Presbyterian garments in your cold northern town. Your mother went far to ensure that your life should be free of such concerns, and had it not been for the happenings of Deirdre’s wedding, I think she would have succeeded.’

And here, I saw from his face and from the increased tension of Eachan by the door, we had come to the point.

‘Tell me about Deirdre’s wedding,’ I said.

Sean stretched out his feet towards the fire which had also, I only now noticed, been lit. I wondered how long they had been here waiting for me, whilst I, unknowing, had whiled away the evening with William. I saw, hanging where my own cloak would normally have done, another mantle of the sort his servant wore, but of much finer stuff and trimmed with fur. Over the back of the chair, a jacket of a soft, dark brown leather, quilted and stitched with gilded thread, had been hung. My cousin was evidently a man of wealth. He said something to Eachan and then asked me if I kept glasses in my room.

‘The life of a college regent is not that of an Irish gentleman,’ I said; ‘but I do have beakers.’ I took down the two pewter beakers I kept with my own plate and knife on a shelf, and the unspeaking servant poured into them some amber liquid from a flask he had hidden somewhere in the folds of his clothes. ‘Are you having none yourself?’ I asked, as he stoppered the flask. He answered me in words I did not understand and returned to his place by the door.

Sean smiled. ‘Eachan could drink us both under the table and through the floor, if he had a mind to. But of late, he has not been of a mind to. He prefers to keep his wits about him. Do not be fooled by his sullen looks – he has wits enough for both of us, and at times has needed them.’ He downed the liquid in the beaker and formed a resolution. ‘Deirdre’s wedding. Where do I begin? You will think me biased in her favour, but I assure you I am not. My sister would have been a prize for any man in Ulster, and many sought her hand, but two months ago she turned her back on everything she had been brought up to, taught to value, and had herself married to the son of a wealthy London planter at Coleraine, on the north coast of our province. Her new husband’s father is a builder, a master mason, and in great credit with the English authorities there, for that he has built many of their properties and walled their town of Londonderry for them.’

‘Then our grandmother must have been well pleased at the match,’ I said.

‘Pleased?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Maeve was about as pleased as you would be by a visit from the Holy Father, I suspect. No. She was not pleased. She was almost unrestrained in her fury that her granddaughter had chosen the same path in marriage as your mother and indeed she herself had done.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sean regarded me for a moment. ‘She taught you so little then, that you do not understand even that?’ He held out his beaker without even looking at the servant, who again silently filled it. He drank a little, then spoke again. ‘My sister married outside the blood of the Irish, the Pure Irish. She married an Englishman, a newly settled planter, worse still than your mother having left Ulster to marry a Scot, and worse than our grand-mother’s crime in having married into the Old English.’

‘And our grandmother could not prevent it?’

He shook his head. ‘For the one and only occasion in my lifetime, our grandfather overruled her. He said he would not lose Deirdre as he had Grainne, he would not demand that they sacrifice their love to her pride. There were such storms in the whole of Carrickfergus over it that I was surprised to see ships still put to sea. But in the end there was something, I think, that may have made her come to believe it was in her interests to let the match go ahead in any case.’

‘What was it?’

He shook his head. ‘I cannot be sure … Anyway, it does not matter; that is a tale for another time.’

I looked at the candle, which had spluttered low in the sconce. I took another from the shelf and lit it, for it was clear that Sean’s tale was not over. He told me then of my cousin Deirdre’s wedding, of the English solemnity of the service and the imagined propriety of the celebrations afterwards.

‘It was not to my taste, cousin, I’ll tell you that. Such long faces and at so cheerless a feast I have rarely seen. The Blackstones could scarcely content themselves between showing their shame at their son’s marriage to a common Irishwoman as they see her – for these people understand nothing of lineage – and their fear of opening their purses for the sake of it. Had I not taken precautions on my journey north to the “festivities” I would surely have died of thirst. My grandmother was in a triumph at the utter Protestant misery of it.’

‘And what of Deirdre?’ I asked, feeling something already, some care and kinship for this girl I had never seen, nor known existed until less than half an hour ago.

‘Deirdre sat still and determined throughout it all. She held herself with such a grace – it is something that the women of her husband’s family could never muster. I fear this marriage will bring her much grief.’

‘But if her husband loves her?’

‘Her husband? Perhaps, who can tell? He has little enough to him. I do not know why she married him – I had thought her eyes were turned elsewhere. Perhaps it was to spite our grandmother.’ He mused a moment on this and then brought himself back to the point. ‘Anyhow, the dreary feast eventually approached its end and it was time for the one thing they had not been able to prevent: the poet’s blessing. Now, Alexander, I know that this is not a land of poets, but ours is, or was. I am not talking here of men who compose pretty sonnets.’

‘I know that.’ My mother had spoken often of the poets, learned men who spent years in their training and were greatly honoured. Like the castes of genealogists, doctors, lawmen, their knowledge passed down their families for generations in the service and under the patronage of the powerful. Their word could legitimise, glorify a leader and his line or cast his name for ever into the ashes.

‘This man’s name is Finn O’Rahilly, the last of a long line of poets who served the O’Dohertys of Inishowen. He claims to remember our parents, your mother and my father, but he can have been little more than a scrap of a thing in the days when they travelled in those parts. He was still hardly more than a child when Sir Cahir O’Doherty’s rebellion was crushed, but he found refuge in Donegal and had some schooling amongst the last of the poets there. Finn O’Rahilly lives in the hills above the north coast, making some sort of living as a hireling poet for those who would keep to the old customs. My grandmother sought him out herself, and hired him to declaim at Deirdre’s wedding, much against my sister’s own wishes and those of the Blackstones.’ He paused, remembering. ‘And such a declamation was never heard at any wedding in my lifetime.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He gave no blessing, but a curse. He damned Maeve for her own marriage outside the blood of the pure Irish, and your mother and my sister for theirs; he taunted her with the loss of her children; he told her our grandfather would soon be dead, and myself also, and that Deirdre’s marriage would be barren. There would be no great rising of the O’Neills from the line of our grandmother, for her line would end before her own eyes. He …’

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘You begin to lose me. What “great rising” are you talking of?’

He looked at his servant, who shrugged his shoulders, and then he looked at me.

‘You know that the land of Ireland is under the control of the English Crown?’