A Game of Sorrows (41 page)

But the constable had not finished. ‘You have not asked why I should take O’Neill’s word over Blackstone’s. Perhaps you already know.’

I suspect from my face he registered that I had no idea what he meant.

He hesitated and looked to Sir James, who nodded for him to go on. ‘Andrew Boyd, under the supervision and instruction of your grandfather for some years now, has been an agent of the king in these parts.’

He’d as well have told me Andrew was an agent of the Pope. I did not believe him, and looked from one to the other for some explanation.

‘Your grandfather was one of the most trusted of the Old English subjects of the Crown in Ireland. Despite his marriage to your grandmother, the treachery of his son, and his clinging to the old religion, he was never anything other than a true and loyal servant of the king. When King James of his grace gave his blessing to the plantation of our northern counties, he had great need of such men, and your grandfather’s trading connections made him the ideal man for keeping an eye on the new merchants and planters in the North. There have been many others, of course, but few so well established as Richard FitzGarrett. As age overtook him he turned to his late steward’s son, who had grown up in his house, to aid him in this invaluable work.’

I had heard of such things, of course, but I could not believe it of the old man whose hand I had briefly held just over a week ago, or of the companion of my trials in the days since then.

‘You wish me to believe that my grandfather used Andrew Boyd to spy on his own wife and grandson?’ I could not keep the anger out of my voice.

The constable was unmoved. ‘Cool your passions and
listen
. Richard FitzGarrett was employed to report upon the planters, the new English settlers of Coleraine and Londonderry. He did from time to time transmit information about Murchadh to the king, but there were others whose primary function was to do that. Many of the planters who have gone to the escheated counties from England have become duplicitous, greedy. They think not of the higher purpose of the plantation, which is to civilise these parts with men of our own speech and religion, to break the dependency of the Irish on their kin, and to bring them under our laws. Some of these planters aim only at their own profit, plunder the rivers, denude the forests; they keep their workers ill-supplied and ill-paid, so that many of the best craftsmen will not come. Worse, they lease great portions of the land with which they have been entrusted not to decent English Protestants, or even Scots, but to the native Irish who will pay the highest rents for lands they once thought their own. Under such circumstances, the plantation will fail. And it has been getting worse of late, for the planters are falling out amongst themselves, bickering over their rights and sending conflicting tales to the king. Men like Andrew Boyd, paid by the Crown and with no interest in the plantation themselves, or like Sir James here, a loyal campaigner of long standing, have become more and more important for the gathering of intelligence to be sent back to London.’

I looked to Sir James. ‘And my grandmother, Sean, Deirdre – they knew nothing of Andrew’s activities?’

‘Do you think your grandmother would have had him in the house a moment after she knew of it? And as to Sean – if he had known of it, Andrew Boyd would not have lived to draw another breath.’

I sought to defend my cousin. ‘No, Sean wouldn’t …’ but the constable stopped me.

‘Your cousin was in league with Murchadh O’Neill. What country is it you think you have come to? Have you learned nothing of it yet? In this place, men have to make choices. There is no room for nobility in friendship that will compromise a man’s loyalty. I do not doubt your cousin was a man of honour – indeed, I know him to have been so, for all his faults – but he could only have one loyalty, and that loyalty was not to the king. He would not have waited for word from Murchadh or Cormac: he would have slit Andrew Boyd’s throat himself had he known.’

And Deirdre? How much of it might Deirdre have known? There could be no doubt now that Andrew had reported to Sir James all he had heard – where? At Armstrong’s Bawn, as I’d thought he slept, drugged? At Dunluce, between the priests? But no, he had been too far gone in his injury, and even I had been able to make out little that was said there. He had not been with me to Kilcrue, to the Cursing Circle, where Finn O’Rahilly had told me little enough anyway. He had not been to Dun-a-Mallaght, but how much had I told him of what had passed there? How much had he seen and understood of what passed at Bonamargy? But it didn’t matter, for he had been at Ardclinnis, and as he had not hidden from me himself, he had heard every word that had passed between Stephen and me on that last night. Andrew Boyd knew everything about the planned rising that I knew myself, and now everyone in it was being hunted down by the English authorities. But what was there for him to tell of Deirdre? And Macha? Macha, who carried Sean’s child.

‘Is my family to be arrested?’

‘Do you think they ought to be?’

The constable had talked of loyalty, of choices: he had mistaken the one I’d made. ‘They should be left in peace.’

He appraised me a while. ‘For the time being, they will be, for I have enough on my hands with tracking down Murchadh’s rabble, and trying to get MacDonnell to deal with these accursed Franciscans of his. By God, I’ll hang the lot of them if I can. And then there are the Blackstones.’

‘Cormac told you what happened to their son,’ I said carefully.

‘It’s not that business I’m talking about. When Boyd was in Coleraine, he collected documents proving Matthew Black-stone’s son Edward, your cousin’s husband, has been avoiding customs, having secret landings and sailings of goods from creeks and bays along the coast, outside the jurisdiction of Londonderry or Coleraine. We had our suspicions, but he over-reached himself when he intrigued to bring in weapons for the rebels, all for profit.’

The avoidance of customs, the secret landings, I could believe, for such things were common enough near any major port, but this last, this bringing in of weapons for enemies of the king, could have one name only: treason.

I cleared my throat. ‘He was dealing with Murchadh?’

‘Not Murchadh: Blackstone was too closely watched; the only connection he had with the rebels was through your family. He was dealing with someone, but it was not Murchadh.’

‘You think Sean?’

‘That is not our information.’

‘You cannot think Deirdre had a hand in it?’

He shook his head. ‘She has always made her sympathies clear. She has never been suspected of favouring rebellion.’

‘Then who?’

‘Who is left?’

Maeve. Only Maeve. Ready at last to play her own part in the story of the O’Neills. ‘My grandmother.’ My voice was flat. For all she had done to me and to others that I cared for, I could not wish her the fate that would befall her should she be found a rebel against the king. But yes; Sean had told me how she’d raged against Deirdre’s marriage into the Blackstones, then gone into an unaccustomed silence on the matter. I recalled his words now, and wondered just how much Sean had known about her dealings with them: ‘in the end I think she may have come to believe that it was in her interests to let the match go ahead in any case.’ She had not gone to Coleraine with Deirdre to make preparations for a wedding she had no interest in: she had gone to buy guns.

The constable sighed. ‘We believe so, but we have not the evidence, and to take one of her age and standing in for … questioning’ – he had not meant questioning; I knew what he had meant. ‘To take her in for questioning without evidence would have caused more uproar than I have the men to deal with.’

I straightened a little at this, sensing some hope. ‘And what have you got?’

‘We have the papers Andrew Boyd received at Coleraine, sent from London, detailing Blackstone’s contraband shipment of weapons and when and how they were to be landed.’

‘The crates of slate,’ I said, almost to myself. Under my own eyes, Matthew Blackstone had taken delivery of the guns they were to sell to my grandmother. And under his eyes had been landed the very letters that would condemn him, ‘and the Madeira.’

Sir James raised a good-humoured eyebrow. ‘I believe a cask of that sort played its part. The papers were sealed in an internal compartment, with no damage to the liquid goods either, I am glad to say. It is a blessing on a man of fine tastes that these coopers know their trade.’

‘And that is why the Blackstones are so keen to hunt Andrew down.’

The constable nodded.

‘But Andrew does not have the papers. I am certain of it. I saw him half-drowned, stripped, treated and clothed all on the night of our flight from Coleraine: he had no papers with him.’

‘He knows better than to carry such papers on him. Shortly after the cask was landed, he checked its contents. Within an hour it was in the hands of another of our agents there, a man very close to the centre of Blackstone’s operations …’

‘The master of the brickworks,’ I said.

‘I cannot say. The man is still in the field. Let us say simply that within another hour, that cask was on the back of a cart of goods and on its way to me at Ballygally.’

I marvelled at the ingenuity of it, and at how easily duped I had been, I who had suspected nothing. ‘So, you had much news to convey to the castle here.’ The news of English treachery contained in the letters, the word of the coming rising, out of Andrew’s own mouth.

‘Much. Andrew Boyd has saved many English lives, and Scots. Not just in the towns like Coleraine. Londonderry and Carrickfergus, but out on the plantations, in the bawns. Like the one in which you yourselves spent the night.’

‘Armstrong’s Bawn?’

The constable nodded. ‘There were rumours that Franciscan agents were infiltrating the settlements, gathering intelligence in preparation for the planned attacks. Andrew was able to verify this for us.’

And so it had been no great work of coincidence that saw Andrew and me put up for the night in the very bawn where Stephen Mac Cuarta was gathering his information in the guise of an Irish baker. Andrew had indeed saved many lives, but how many Irish lives had he betrayed? Would he have betrayed me, had I answered Stephen differently that last night at Ardclinnis? I knew that answer already. One choice, one loyalty, as the constable had told me.

I had heard enough, and asked if I might rest awhile again in the kitchen storeroom before trying again at my grand-mother’s house to make my peace.

‘Rest here as long as you wish, but, after all that I have told you here, you cannot go to your grandmother’s house.’

I returned wearily to my sacking bed, seeking nothing more than blissful oblivion.

Sleep came, but the sought-for oblivion did not. I knew myself to be standing on the shore beneath the castle, looking across the water to Scotland, from where voices I knew I could not hear were calling to me: Sarah, Jaffray, my father, little Zander. I kept trying to step into the water, to go to them, but a hand held tight to my wrist, pulling me back. It was my grandmother. She pointed with her other hand to some shapeless thing in the water, some shapeless thing in a white shift, and with my mother’s flowing black hair. Deirdre and Roisin were on either side of the thing, trying to pull it up, while my grandmother intoned again and again in my ear: ‘Better for you she had drowned. Better for you she had drowned.’

I didn’t know when the note was pushed under the door; I didn’t know who had left it. No one in the kitchens knew: they all denied having seen anyone. I told them it was of no matter when they started to wonder about calling a guard, and went back to my resting place to look at it again.

Alexander, for the love of God and our friendship, meet me tonight, at seven, in the church of St Nicholas. Tell no one, if you value my life.

      
Andrew

It was not his usual careful hand, but something more hurried and scrabbled. A man in fear of his life does not take as much care over his letters as he does when setting a line of accounts. I went back out to the kitchen and threw the paper into the fire.

I had been so much in my own company, in hiding places, watching, listening, waiting, that I craved noise, hubbub, light. I felt a desire to walk the streets openly, to hear the laughter of others.

As I went down into the town, towards the marketplace, I could see lights blazing in the windows of the FitzGarrett tower house. I had promised Cormac I would look after Deirdre, but I knew with a certainty that my grandmother would not allow me entry to her house, and the constable had warned me away from there anyway. Who was there in that place now who would care for her? Maeve had barely looked at her once she had understood who Macha was and what her condition meant, and Eachan was not the man to treat my cousin’s fragile soul. ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows’ Cormac had called her. I was not sure I understood what he meant. Her husband might be in there even now – pleading with her, intriguing with Maeve. I had not the time to concern myself with the Blackstones tonight – wherever they might be in the town, they would be joining Cormac O’Neill in the castle prison soon enough.

Much of the air of apprehension that had cloaked Carrickfergus yesterday had lifted; word of Cormac’s capture, and the disarray of the rebels had begun to circulate in town and countryside and people were going about the usual business of their lives. The marketplace, the scene of so many entertainments for me as I had watched from my incarceration in my grandmother’s house, was cleared, business for the day being finished, and quiet. The life of the town now was behind doors and walls, in taverns and houses up winding lanes and darkened back streets, where families and companionship and friendship might be found. There was safety in these streets, up those lanes, where people simply lived and did not dedicate their lives to plot or policy, revenge and unattainable dreams. Between the uncertainties of the sea on one side and the unknowable expanse of Ulster stretching out in the darkness beyond the walls, there was the possibility of something I would have recognised as normality.