A Game of Sorrows (6 page)

I got up from the bed and turning away from him, went to the window and looked out on to the night sky. The stars shone as bright then as they had done an hour ago, but something in the world beneath them had changed. The lack, the emptiness I had felt my whole life was calling to me, and I wanted to deny it. I turned back to face him. ‘I have had to make my own way, without my family’s blood. I am not so callous that I care nothing for their troubles, but my life is turning now, and in a direction I have long prayed it might take. God has shown me His grace, and I cannot flout it to calm an old woman’s superstitious mind.’

Sean eyed me levelly. ‘I do not ask you to, cousin. I ask you as a man to help me protect our family against a very real, human agency that means it harm. Whoever paid the poet to lay this curse aims to fray our grandmother’s mind, my sister’s too, perhaps, and to remove me altogether. That attempt at my murder failed once – it may not do so a second time. Our grandfather is old and ill; I have Eachan and a few other good men that I trust, but of family there is none, none but you and I. We have lost a day already – there is a boat making for Leith and I must be on it. I had thought to have another day to persuade you, but the captain tells me the weather is to turn, and that we must leave on tonight’s tide. We have less than an hour, for he goes whether we are aboard or no. I can tarry here no longer. I ask you again, Alexander, will you come?’

There was little to be heard save the sound of the oars and the soft lapping of the water against the sides of our boat as we made slowly towards the shore a little to the north of Carrickfergus. It was a frosty night, the sky not quite black but a dark blue. The meagre light of the new moon, assisted by its retinue of stars, gave us all the guidance that was needed to complete the last few miles of our long journey. Eachan read the constellations like a man born to the sea, and besides, he knew the coastline between here and Olderfleet, where our ship from Scotland had landed, so well that he had little need even for recourse to the sky to steer him.

From across the boat, Sean watched me. ‘Well, Alexander, are you ready?’

For a moment I could think of no answer. Within a few hours of our ship docking at Leith, almost all I knew with any sense of familiarity had been behind me. We had pushed relentlessly onward, to the south and west, giving little respite to the hired horses Sean had left stabled in Edinburgh. It was then that I first witnessed for myself the remarkable endurance of the Irish of physical hardship, an endurance the sheltered life of the philosopher had never required of me. The endless cold and rain and the harshness of the terrain as we pressed further into Galloway had little impact on my companions, who slept on open ground, amongst moss and fern, with an ease that only sheer exhaustion allowed to me. And with every mile we travelled I had felt more of an alien in a strange land. There had come a point at which I’d realised that the Scots tongue was no longer spoken around us, in the inns, the farmsteads and the hovels we stopped at for water, food, and, very occasionally, rest. All about me spoke in the same Gaelic tongue now familiar to my ears in the voices of Sean and Eachan. King James had gone far to bring this part of his Scottish kingdom under his heel, but his son would have to go further still, I thought, for there was greater kinship and nationhood between my cousin and his servant and the people we met on our journey than there was between those same people and me.

When at last we had crossed Scotland, from one coast to the other, I no longer had any feeling that I was still in my own country. And what greeted us on that southwest seaboard were not the dramatic cliffs, the crashing oceans I had imagined, but a gentle shore and a calm sea, beyond which, only a few miles away, past the great rock of the Ailsa Craig, I could just discern the recumbent form of my mother’s homeland: Ireland.

We left the horses at Ballantrae, at the inn from which Sean had hired them, and although we had ridden for the best parts of two nights, he would allow little rest before we were on the move again, boarding the boat which would take us to the home I had never seen. It was a fair crossing, and we had reached Olderfleet, in Larne, shortly after dusk. The same purse, Sean assured me, that had oiled our way past the customs there would see us safely through the gates of Carrickfergus. We had passed the cliffs and the daunting promontories of Whitehead and made our way down the side of Belfast Lough towards the old English garrison town and the castle that had guarded it for four hundred years. Nothing of what Sean had told me of the country I was now about to set my foot on, of its history and its present situation, had prepared me for this sight; nothing of what Eachan had told me, of the myths and legends of his people, had done anything to ease my apprehension of what I might now encounter.

We were now at the walls of the town itself; they stretched away in the darkness to the Norman mass of the castle, not hewn, grown almost from the rock as our sea fortresses were, but set imperiously upon it, not overlooking the sea but jutting aggressively into it. Above the castle walls towered the keep – grim, square, unyielding. For so many years the only foothold of the English beyond the Pale in the North, and now presiding, as my cousin had told me, over a different kind of occupation of his homeland.

Summoning a reply in the Irish tongue they had earnestly been teaching me since we had boarded ship in Aberdeen, a lifetime ago now, I said,

‘I am ready.’

Eachan brought the row boat to a halt at a gate in the town wall and hailed the watchman, who had evidently been sleeping. They exchanged a few words in Eachan’s peculiar English, coins were transferred, and then an Irish voice was heard. A moment later the gate swung open and a small, stocky fellow descended the stone steps towards the boat. He nodded to my cousin’s servant and inclined his head more deferentially to Sean, but studiously averted his gaze from me. He steadied the boat as we three disembarked with what little baggage we had, and then took it to tie up at the shore as we went up the steps and through the wall, past the watchman, who kept his back turned to us, and into the town of Carrickfergus itself.

Within the walls it was even darker than it had been outside them, and I would surely have stumbled or lost my way had I not kept my hand on my cousin’s shoulder until my eyes became accustomed to the greater darkness and my feet to the feel of solid ground beneath them once more. Despite the darkness though, the smell of beasts, waste, trade and humanity that now assailed me told me I was once again in a town. We weaved at first in between some curious and noxious forms raised from the ground to a height not much greater than my own; only later would I discover that these windowless mounds of clay and thatch were the habitations not of pigs but of people. A few yards beyond these miserable dwellings loomed much larger, more solid shapes, but we did not turn our steps towards them, instead keeping amongst the hovels and within easy reach of the sea wall. There had been no speech between the three of us after we had left the boat, and I understood that there would be none until we had reached safe to our destination. We followed the line of the walls southwestwards until suddenly Sean broke off to the right and headed in towards what I took to be the centre of the town. Within moments we had scaled a wall and traversed a garden, and were standing at a broad oak door to a tower at least four storeys in height, and Eachan was growling something in a low voice to an unseen person at the other side of the door. A key was turned and several bolts pulled and then the door stood open. Eachan took a step inside and, having seen to it that the doorman had found other duties to attend to, pulled me swiftly in after him. Behind me, Sean pulled the door to and locked it again. He turned to face me.

‘Well, Alexander; I have brought you home.’

We were standing in darkness in what appeared to be a large vaulted storeroom.

‘There is no time,’ said Eachan, before I had any chance to speak or even to begin to look properly about me.

Sean nodded curtly and spoke to me again. ‘Come on, follow me.’

And so I did, up a narrow, winding flight of stone steps, past the door to the floor above, which I surmised from the lingering smells to house the kitchens, and upwards to the second floor. Emerging from the dim light of the turret stairway through a door on the second landing, my eyes smarted as they were greeted by a blaze of light. We had come into a hall, almost square, overlooked on three sides by a wooden gallery. Above the gallery, arching from stone corbels, oak beams supported a high vaulted ceiling. In the sconces by each of the long, narrow slit window embrasures burned huge candles, and a large fire roared in the open hearth at the far end of the room. The stone walls were hung with no paintings, but fine tapestries depicting battles, feasts, trysts, strange creatures, great beauties and heroes. The legends, the tales I had been brought up with by my mother, those same tales with which Eachan had beguiled the long night hours of our journey, rendered here in fabulous colour. And waiting for us in the centre of the room, as if she had emerged from one of the scenes hung on the wall, was the woman I knew must be my grandmother.

I had thought I was prepared to see her, to meet with her. On the days and nights of our journey from the northeastern corner of Scotland to this coast of Ireland I had schooled myself as to how I would carry myself, what I would say, but all that deserted me now: what I was looking at, had she lived beyond the age of thirty-eight, was an image of my mother. Maeve O’Neill must have been almost seventy years old, but there was no stoop, no concession to age in her manner of holding herself. She was dressed in what I thought must be the fashion of another age – a linen shift with long, wide sleeves, covered by a tunic of red velvet, and belted with a girdle of gold. She wore a headdress of many folds of white linen, and her thin neck and bony wrists were bedecked in more chains of gold and beads of coloured glass than I thought seemly. But for all the strange clothing, the extra thirty years of life she had lived that had been denied her daughter, there could be no doubting that this was my grandmother. My throat was dry and I did not trust my tongue to move in my mouth.

Sean did not go to her, but addressed her from where we stood. ‘And so, Maeve, I have done what you asked of me. I have brought Grainne’s son to you. And now I must go to my grandfather.’

He made for the gallery steps but Maeve’s voice stopped him. ‘Sean! Stay a moment. There are things we must talk of first.’ There was nothing pleading or wheedling in her voice: it was a simple order from one who was accustomed to give them.

‘All that can wait. I must go to him.’ He had his foot on the stairs and had not even turned to look at her.

‘Sean,’ she said, more insistent this time. ‘Your grandfather does not know.’

He stopped where he was and turned slowly to look at her.

‘He does not know?’ The colour was draining from his face.

‘Do not tell me I have travelled all these weeks, these hundreds of miles, dragged my cousin in the night practically from his own bed, and he does not know?’

‘Come and sit,’ she said. ‘Eat something.’

‘Eat?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Woman, do I understand you right? That you have not yet told him, even now, that he has another grandson, that his daughter lived?’

Her eyes were hard. ‘Do not think to judge me,’ she said. ‘I will not be judged. To have told your grandfather before you returned, before I could know that you were not both lying dead on the sea bed, would have been to kill him. And besides, the priest is with him. Sit and eat, calm yourself. And then you will come with me, and we will tell him.’

Sean’s anger did not subside, but he did not argue with her further, and did as he was bid. She put her hand to his face a moment. ‘You have been away from us too long.’

‘Where is Deirdre?’ he asked.

She let her hand drop. ‘She is where she has chosen to be. Kept like an English housewife in some hovel in Coleraine.’

I could see by the widening of his nostrils that he was struggling to keep his temper. ‘And have you even told her?’

‘She will be told, when the time comes.’

‘She should have been here,’ he said, slamming down his hand.

My grandmother’s face became as fixed as granite. ‘Time enough when he has gone: she would bring him no comfort, and I will not have her husband’s people under my roof a moment longer than I must.’

And now, at last, she spoke to me. Her eyes, like green stone, had hardly left my face since we had entered the room. ‘Alexander Seaton.’ She nodded slowly. ‘This is why Grainne left; this is what was meant to be.’

‘I do not understand you.’

She held out her hand towards me, beckoning. I walked towards her. She was not tall, but something in her presence gave an impression of stature. Beneath the white linen headdress some wisps of hair were visible at the sides and at her forehead – a dark slate-grey, no longer black, but far from the white of most women of her years.

I came to a halt two paces from her – there was no intimation that I should approach any closer than that. She searched my face. Her mouth smiled though her eyes did not. ‘You are no Scot. Your mother ran as far as she could from her own people, but she could never have got far enough. She carried them in every part of her being and she gave birth to them in you. It was meant to be.’

I looked to Sean for some explanation but he, ill at ease, said nothing.

‘Are you saying Andrew Seaton was not my father?’

She shook her head impatiently. ‘Andrew Seaton was the name of the man she abandoned her home and name for, and he was your father, no doubt, for she fancied herself in love, for a time, as I had warned her it would be. But I should not have been angry with her, for she could no more help her leaving than I could prevent it. I should have seen it. It was meant to be that she left this place and gave birth to a son far away from here where he would not be known, that you might return one day to break your family’s curse.’