A Game of Sorrows (5 page)

‘I know,’ I said, ‘that the king has striven to bring peace and civility to that …’

But this time it was he who stopped me, waving his hand as if to dismiss an importunate dog. ‘Spare me that, for the love of all that’s holy. To be preached civility by brutes without culture, with no notion of hospitality and with the manners of the sty, is too much in my homeland. I will not hear it in the mouth of my own cousin.’

‘I only meant …’

‘What? You have no notion of the slaughters and barbarity perpetrated on our people in the name of civility. The burning of crops, the starvation, the massacres of women and children that sent men half-mad with grief.’ He turned away as if he did not trust himself to master his passions.

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

He took a moment to compose himself. ‘The tale I have to tell you is one that requires subtlety, but I have little of that. Hear me out, and I shall tell you in fewer words and less time than is needful, for time is short tonight.’

I nodded my acquiescence and he continued. ‘The last of Ireland to submit to the English was Ulster. The Old English – our grandfather’s race – have held the garrison at Carrickfergus for centuries past, and there are many Scots and some English settled in Antrim and Down, but as to the rest, it was, until twenty years ago, the preserve of the Gaelic Irish, much of it under the control of the O’Neills, our grandmother’s family.’

‘Yes, my mother told me something of that.’ In truth, my mother had told me very little of her heritage and even less of my grandmother, despite all that my youthful curiosity would have had from her. In time I had learned not to ask her about that other family, and to keep my thoughts of them to myself.

‘While the rest of Ireland fell under the heel of the English, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, stood out against them. For nine years he rallied others to his cause, and fought in the name of Gaelic Ireland and Holy Mother Church. After nine years of warfare that brought Ulster to its knees, they submitted at last to the English Crown, and all might have been well enough, but then they had some intelligence of conspiracy against them, and fled for the continent, in the hope of rallying support. They never saw Ireland again, and their lands and the lands of all their kindred were claimed in escheat by the king, and parcelled out amongst English planters, old soldiers, Scotsmen – Protestants all. Such is the breed that my sister has married into. They work daily at the degradation of the people, the native Irish, reduced to the worst land, our laws and customs disregarded and our religion trampled upon. In truth, Tyrone himself is much to blame, for he traded the rights of the kindred to increase his own, and now they have been abandoned. Anyway,’ he said, as if he had been wandering from the subject, ‘our grandmother will hear nothing against Tyrone, and has spent every hour of her life since the day my father fled with him in praying that the O’Neills will rise once more and drive the English from Ireland. And at my sister’s wedding, the poet cursed her, and Deirdre, and myself, before all the company, and told her that her dreams could never be.’

He finished his drink and relaxed himself, as if the telling of his tale was done.

I got up and poured some water from the pitcher by the window into the basin below. A struggle was rising within me, for these were not the dreams I had planned to dream tonight, although often enough they had filled the lonely nights of my childhood. For the sake of kinship and hospitality alone, I could not dismiss my cousin now, and besides, I could see there was something yet in his tale to be told. But despite the better self that counselled tolerance, the bitterness of years got the better of me. ‘And it is for this that you have crossed the Irish Sea? To tell me of the demented ramblings of a mercenary poet and the deluded dreams of a bitter and superstitious old woman? What does she want me to do that you cannot? Should I go to him and declaim to him in Latin that he is wrong? Proclaim to him in Greek the honour of the O’Neills – of which I know little and care less, let me tell you? No, cousin, you have had a wasted journey.’

He took a step towards me and I registered Eachan’s hand going to the dagger at his belt. ‘You care nothing for your mother’s people?’

‘They cared nothing for her. She died to them the moment she set sail with my father. And what do you think she found here? Poets ready to sing her praises and her beauty? Followers to do her bidding? A cold place and a cold welcome she found, and it never thawed. She died dreaming of a homeland that had long forgotten her. Do not play my mother’s people on me. I have had long to reflect on my mother’s people.’

Sean reached out to my arm. ‘But I told you, our grandfather…’

‘Our grandfather is a man, is he not? You say he grieved for his daughter? Why did he not come and find her, bring her home? You cannot lay everything at our grandmother’s door.’

My words shocked even myself. I had not known there was such bitterness in me. Sean let his hand drop and shook his head slowly. ‘How little you understand. I had been foolish, perhaps, to believe that Maeve’s reputation would have reached even to here, but no, you do not know her.’

‘I do not know her,’ I said, ‘and I am astonished to find that she knew if I lived or died.’

‘Oh, she knew of you, all right,’ said Sean. ‘Of your birth, at least. But she told not one other living soul of your existence, not even our grandfather. Until five weeks ago, I never knew I had a cousin. Our land was in the midst of war when your mother left her family – a long war that all but destroyed Ulster and her people. Men, women and children starved to death on the roads, disease was rife and slaughter everywhere. Three weeks after your mother left Carrickfergus, Maeve told our grandfather his daughter was dead, drowned in a shipwreck off the western coast of Scotland. That is the manner of woman I am telling you of, and the man whose heart has been broken thirty years. He does not know yet that she lived, or that he has another grandson.’

As his words fell in the silence of the room, I felt a wave of desolation surge through me, a desolation for my mother and what might have been and for an old and disappointed man I had never met. Finally I was able to look up at my cousin.

‘So this is the truth of the woman I dreamed of as a child, when other boys had a grandmother’s love. A woman who could deny her daughter, torment her husband and deceive her whole family. A woman who gives credence to the rambling of half-wild poets. Her cruelty is matched only by her madness, I think, and yours in being of her embassy.’

He paced the room and turned to face me. ‘No, Alexander, I am not mad, and no more is she. It is not madness for one brought up as she was to believe in the word of the poets. To Maeve, it would be madness to ignore the terrible doom that has been pronounced upon her.’

‘It is godless superstition to believe in it,’ I said.

My cousin’s face was still and his voice deadly serious. ‘We are not a godless people and we look with horror upon your abandonment of the faith. That our grandmother is superstitious I will grant you, but I am not. I would have paid O’Rahilly’s malediction little heed, other than as a curiosity, were it not that some of what he foretold has begun to come true.’

The fellow at the door seemed to straighten his stance, seemed to stare ahead with even more determination.

A horrible dread filled me. ‘What has happened? Is our grandfather dead?’ I was gripped by a sudden fear at the prospect of the loss of a man who had been lost to me long ago.

‘No,’ said Sean, ‘but he is gravely ill. He is an old man who has seen near enough eighty summers. It would take no great seer’s gift to tell that he had not many years left on this earth.’ His words failed him a moment, and he looked away to some point in the distance that only he could see. He breathed deep and went on. ‘And yet he was strong, you know, strong.’ He flashed a sudden smile. ‘You and I, we get our eyes, our dark hair from our grandmother’s people, but our height and our strength, it is all his. Aye, he was strong, and he has seldom laid any store by the myths and legends, the beliefs of our grandmother and the words of the poets. But he loves Maeve yet, you know. He has told me that for all her difficult ways, all her angers and her dreams, he loves her as much now as he did the day he first saw her. To see her cursed because of him, to be reminded of the loss so long ago of his son and daughter and to have his hopes for Deirdre’s happiness dashed, were too much for him, I think. We will see him in his grave before many more dawns have broken.’ At this Eachan murmured something and crossed himself. To see it done did not trouble me now as it had done before.

I looked at Sean. ‘You have more to tell me, I think.’

‘Yes,’ he said wearily, ‘there is more. Three weeks after Deirdre’s wedding, somebody tried to murder me.’ He looked up and smiled, but the word had chilled me. I knew something of murder and of the chaos and the tragedies it could bring with it. ‘Now, do not mistake me, cousin. An attempt is made on my life nigh on every day of the week. Indeed, your fellow townsmen would have had me dispatched three times last night at least, were it not for Eachan here. Is that not right, Eachan?’

The man gave an uninterested grunt in response and continued to gaze over my head at some space beyond the flickering candle on the wall.

Sean laughed. ‘Eachan has little patience and less sympathy for me in my nightly scrapes in taverns and their courtyards. He has had to pull me from them too often.’

‘I had heard something of your adventures last night,’ I said. ‘But you were talking to me of murder.’

‘Pray God it will not come to that. But this attempt on my life was something different from what I have experienced before. It was not in some brawl over a woman, or for a gambling debt. It came in the dark and silence of the night, many miles from any witness or help. I was riding home alone, down the coast between Ballycastle and Cushendall. I had been visiting – friends. Dusk was coming on fast as I rounded Tor Head and I was thinking of pulling up somewhere for the night. The cliffs are treacherous; they are not to be negotiated in darkness. For some time I had had a sensation that I was not alone – but it is not unusual in such places to feel that way. All the reason a man might command begins to fracture in the face of what he knows of the darkness, of the spirits of the world beyond our control.’

My feelings must have registered in my face. ‘Do not scorn me for a fool, cousin,’ he said. ‘These forces may have retreated from this your land in the face of your ministers and the narrowness of your minds, but they have a home yet in ours, and they are not ready to be vanquished.’

‘I think you delude yourself,’ I said.

‘Then may you always think so,’ he said, before continuing. ‘Just as I was turning off the bridle path to make for a steading I know of some way inland, a musket shot rang through the dusk. The shot missed me, though not by much. And it startled my horse. I had the Devil’s own job to keep the beast from careering over the cliff’s edge and breaking both our necks. By the time I had mastered and calmed him, there was no sign of musket nor marksman, no sign of life other than the screeching of the startled gulls and the scattering of the creatures of the night.’

‘Where had the shot come from?’

He laughed, a laugh with little humour in it. ‘I cannot say for certain, but I thought, and you will not understand the irony in this, for the present at least, but I thought it came from the burial place of Shane O’Neill – a great rebel and hero of our people. I did not tarry long to search. I am no coward, but a sword avails little against a musket ball out of the dark. I turned the beast’s head and we rode for our lives. At length we came to a road that led us back out to the coast at Cushendun. I spent the night in a hidden chamber beneath the church of Layd, near the cliffs above the bay. No one troubled me in the night, and in the morning I found my horse still tethered and unharmed where I had left it. I think my precautions may have been unnecessary.’

The Irishman at the door said something in a low voice, as if to himself. His words did not escape his master. Sean uttered something, laughing, to him and turned to me. ‘Eachan does not agree with me. He thinks me a danger to be let out on my own, and it took little effort on his part to persuade our grandmother of the same. Much to the chagrin of many a maiden, I have not spent a night without him since.’

My cousin sought to make light of the situation, but I thought I could judge enough of him already to know that he was not a man easily frightened. That he was here, many hundreds of miles from his home, and with his guard dog at his back, bespoke how seriously those around him took the threat.

‘And what explanation do you have for all this?’ I asked.

‘Very little, and that not poetical. Not that our family has been cursed for the honour of Ireland, that is for sure. Someone wishes very real harm to our family, and there is only me to protect them. I do not like being so far away from them at this time of trouble.’ He took a deep breath and looked directly at me. ‘Maeve sent me here because you are the only one of her line, of our blood, not encompassed by the curse of Finn O’Rahilly. He pronounced a special fate for each of us in his prediction of the end of the O’Neills, but you he did not mention. Alexander Seaton, the son of Grainne FitzGarrett and grandson of Maeve O’Neill – he does not know of your existence. She believes that only you can break the curse, that the very fact of your being saves her line.’

‘Then she must tell him so,’ I said flatly, for I was tired and I had little desire to hear more of this woman’s wishes.

‘Alexander,’ he said gently, ‘the woman has spent the last thirty years telling people her daughter died before ever she reached Scotland. Who would believe her now were she to say no, Grainne lived, bore a healthy son? No one. No one.’ He waited a moment, for me to understand. Through the darkness, the bell of St Nicholas kirk tolled the advancing night. ‘I am here to take you back to Ulster, to the land of your forefathers, to save the name of your mother’s people and the mind of your grandmother, and to ease the passing of an old man with a broken heart. You cannot deny them, Alexander, you cannot deny your blood.’