A Game of Sorrows (8 page)

‘And he you. You would never have had a greater friend than Richard FitzGarrett. He was everything a man, a grandfather, should have been, and more than that. He was a better father to me than my own.’ Sean had been only ten years old when his father, Phelim, had left Ireland for exile with the earls, and had scarcely known him before that, for my uncle had always been in the train of the Earl of Tyrone, always on his business, in his wars. Had it not been for the troubles of the time, Sean would have been fostered out within the O’Neill kindred as Phelim had been before him, but he had been born in the middle of Tyrone’s great rebellion, the Nine Years’ War that had devastated the country and meant the end for many of her great Gaelic families. It had been judged safest for Sean to remain with his grandparents, at the very heart of the English administration at Carrickfergus.

‘I was fortunate. Others were not so.’

‘But you were only a child.’

‘And do you think that would have mattered to them? The Flight of the Earls was so sudden, so rushed, so unplanned, that one of Tyrone’s own sons was left behind. He was six years old. That boy rotted his life away a prisoner of the English. He died in the Tower of London at the age of twenty-one. It was my grandfather’s name and his usefulness to the English that helped them gloss over the fact that I was Phelim O’Neill’s son.’ And so he had been brought up by Richard FitzGarrett and by Maeve, and had had, from birth as he told me, ‘a foot in both camps’.

‘And now our grandfather’s duties fall to you.’

‘What?’ said Sean, startled out of some memory. ‘Yes. Yes, that is what they tell me.’

‘And are you ready for it?’ The man I had come to know over the last few days and nights was not one I could see easily bound to a desk, tallying his accounts, or at the harbour checking grain and hides, negotiating with other merchants and traders or overseeing the distribution of stock. He was a man who would be happier on horseback, with a hawk on his arm, with men at his command whom he might lead, and with whom he might joke, sing, drink.

‘I am as ready now as I will ever be, but that is saying little. Andrew Boyd will deal with all of that nature that needs to be dealt with. The tradesmen and merchants here and in other towns respect him. I will keep out of all that for a while.’ He gave a wicked smile. ‘The traders do not like me – I have been too much amongst their daughters, and I am a little too Irish for the tastes of the new settlers along the coast and in the North. Besides, Maeve has need of me. There is the funeral to arrange and there will be many people coming here over the next few days.’ He regarded me uneasily. ‘I am sorry Alexander; I wish you could stand by me as I welcome them to our house, but Maeve is determined that none shall know of you until she has brought you to Finn O’Rahilly and had the curse lifted. I have spent much of the night in trying to persuade her otherwise, but once she is set upon a thing there is none can shake her from it.’

‘And what about Deirdre?’ I said.

‘Deirdre? Three letters from her arrived for me while I was away: each speaks of a greater degree of frustration and misery. She had thought to free herself from our grandmother, to become a woman of means and position in the new Ulster, rather than be a brood mare in Maeve’s dynastic plans. Instead she finds herself incarcerated in a miserable tradesmen’s house in Coleraine, with women of little conversation and less wit, expected to play the housewife and dutiful daughter-in-law. She who grew up hearing daily that she was of the blood of Irish princes now has that blood-line cast before her as if it were no better than that of a dog. I don’t know how she stomachs it, but she will not give my grandmother the satisfaction of knowing it.’

‘Does her husband do nothing?’

‘Her husband has very little about him. I think – no, I know it: this Blackstone marriage has been the biggest mistake of her life. She might have waited here and run our grandfather’s business, and married where her heart pleased her better, had she only had some patience.’

‘And where does her heart please her better?’ I asked.

He hesitated a moment. ‘That … that I cannot say. But she does not love her husband, that I know, so she could scarcely have placed it worse. She wanted to come back from Coleraine when our grandfather’s health worsened, but Maeve, fearing – as indeed she well might – that the Blackstones had nothing in mind but to wrest my dying grandfather’s business from him, would not permit it.’

‘Surely she will be allowed to come now?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Sean. ‘Maeve is one for the proprieties. Deirdre has already been sent for, and her husband, too, on sufferance. The rest of the Blackstone crew have been politely informed that they need not trouble themselves with such a journey at this time of the year.’

I could not help but smile with him. In spite of her coldness, there was something almost admirable in my grandmother’s monstrous pride, for I knew already that I did not like these Blackstone upstarts. ‘And she will be told of me then?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but Maeve will only tell Deirdre face-to-face, alone – even her husband, Edward, is not to know.’

‘This is more secrecy than I am used to.’

Sean laughed. ‘Then you have not been long enough in Ireland. But in truth, what you must understand is this: Maeve fears you will be killed if your existence is known before the curse can be lifted. Whoever has made this threat to our family has made it clear that I am to be disposed of. How then do you think they would react upon learning of you?’ He looked at me, now very serious. ‘When I first saw your face, Alexander, I saw in it the answer to questions that have haunted me my whole life, but I saw too answers to what besets this family now. Maeve and I differ on many things and always have done, but on this I agree with her: there are risks we cannot take with you. You hazarded a great deal to come here, I know that.’ I had told him about Sarah, about the second chance for happiness God had given me in bringing her into my life. I had told him also of the trip to Poland, that would have fulfilled so many youthful ambitions. I had told him about the tatters my name would now be in. ‘But, God willing, you will win back all you think you have lost. The funeral is to be in five days’ time, and then I am to take you to Finn O’Rahilly. After that this secrecy will end, and this place will be a prison to you no more.’

We talked on until long after the food and drink were gone. He reminisced about his childhood, our grandfather, and made much of what our grandfather would have made of me. There was regret, sadness, humour and bravado, a kaleidoscope in one man about to shoulder responsibilities he had long avoided. I was reminded of my last night with Archie, my bosom companion from boyhood to manhood. Archie who had hunted, fought, drunk, laughed, loved to the full, who had coloured my life where there might only have been shade. Archie, who was now dead. I had not thought to feel such a bond with another man again: I had not thought ever to know the bond of blood that can bind like no other, and yet I felt it now, with Sean.

As he was about to finally leave, he surprised me by asking suddenly, ‘How do you find Andrew Boyd?’

‘He has been – courteous to me, more courteous than I would be were the roles reversed, I think.’

Sean nodded. ‘Perhaps so. But his is a cold courtesy, full of resentments.’

‘You do not like him?’

‘It is not a question of liking,’ he said. ‘Born in another time, another place, things might have been otherwise, but there is nothing in him for me or in me for him. We are just different.’

The next five days passed in great activity in the house beneath me, and in near-silence in my own chamber. I had brought with me no books of my own in that rushed departure from Aberdeen, and so my only reading was in Andrew Boyd’s bible. I sought assurance in its pages that I was in the right place, that I had not wandered from the right path, but all I found there were reminders that I should have been in another place, I should have been making my way to the Baltic, searching for ministers of the Word, rather than hiding in a tower house in a town I did not know, in a land still awash with priests and poets.

The near-endless hours of darkness from early evening until sleep would finally take me were spent in trying to write to Sarah something she could understand, believe, forgive, but the words came slow and awkwardly, and lifted dead and cold from the page. I closed my eyes and tried to see her. In the silence I tried to hear her voice. Sometimes I would catch a fleeting glimpse of her smile and then it was gone, leaving me with nothing but a searing emptiness, as if the essence of her had been clawed out of me. Each day ended with the burning of the letter in the flame of the candle by which it had been written.

My daylight hours were spent in watching. Musket loops and arrow slits on the walls gave perfect views down the high street of the town. It was broad and long, flanked by the great stone sentinels that were the other tower houses of wealthy aldermen and burgesses. The governor might have his palace, but the old families of Carrickfergus had each their stronghold. Only from the open parapets, from which I had been forbidden, might I have seen the castle, or the church or Irish Gate behind us, but all the life of the marketplace, courthouse, jail and any travellers who entered the burgh from the North or Sea Gate, or from the Scots Quarter outside the town walls, could be seen by a watcher at one of my windows.

In the evening, Sean would come and spend a half-hour with me and elaborate for me on what I had seen. Mourners had been called and were gathering. I had learned from my mother not to believe the tales of the Irish peddled by those who had no interest but to denigrate them, and so it was no great surprise to me to see the mourners from the West who brought their magnificent horses to rest at the gateway to my grandparents’ tower house; they bore themselves with a sense of their own dignity that would not have shamed an earl. With them came their retainers, their humbler mounts heavy-laden. Sean knew them all, went to greet them all, and in the evening would regale me with tales of every tragedy, scandal or feud they had ever laid claim to. Between mouthfuls of food and drink, he could reel off levels and generations of cousinage more complex than any mathematics I had ever stumbled over, and the next day would express genuine astonishment that I could not remember my exact relationship by blood or marriage to every soul who had the previous day passed beneath the portals of the house.

Late in the afternoon of the day before the funeral, a party arrived from the direction of the Irish Gate, five well-mounted and richly clothed riders and their followers. Of the leading group, four were men, attired much as Sean had been when he had come to fetch me from Aberdeen, and in their midst, as if cordoned off from the lesser beings inhabiting the world outside, was one woman. I could not see her face and her head was covered by the hood of her furred cloak, but the tendrils of pale gold that escaped from it were those of a young woman. I had been so entranced by the sound and sight of the new arrivals, I had not heard the footsteps come up behind me. I spoke without realising I spoke or knowing I would be heard. ‘Deirdre.’

‘You should stay back from there. You might be seen.’

It was Andrew Boyd. He had often passed me in this attitude before, without remark. I ignored his warning. ‘I have been watching my cousin arrive; she travels with a larger retinue than I had expected.’

He came towards the opening and I stepped aside to afford him a better view. His eyes can scarcely have lighted on the party below us when he turned away again. ‘It is not Deirdre,’ he said, without looking at me. ‘It is Roisin O’Neill.’ He went past me into our chamber and closed the door behind him.

I continued to watch. Of the four men, the leading rider was perhaps about fifty years of age: the others were around my own age, and enough alike each other and the older man to be his sons. Their arrival before my grandmother’s house had not gone unnoticed in the marketplace and the high street; of the many arrivals over the preceding three days, none had occasioned as much interest as this. Traders left off their business and turned to watch, wary. Two English soldiers who had been flirting with a girl at a vegetable cart gave off their attentions when they saw the party come to a halt, and soon left at a brisk jog in the direction of the castle.

If the riders noticed any of the interest they had occasioned, they showed no sign of it. The stillness of their waiting contrasted with the noise and busyness I could hear rising from the floors beneath me. Doors banged, orders were shouted, and feet flew up and down stairs. At last the entrance door to the tower was opened and my grandmother emerged. Sean was a step behind, and while she went towards the main rider, he went directly to Roisin’s horse and took the bridle from the servant who held it. The older man dismounted and his three sons did likewise. My grandmother gave him a long greeting, which I could not hear, and received an equally long response. When it was over, and acknowledged, the two embraced warmly. It was only now that Sean helped Roisin dismount from her horse. He was stiff, formal, and did not look directly at her as he spoke.

This was a new guise to me, my cousin’s incarnation as a courtly gentleman. This was not the man who had brawled and debauched in the inns of Aberdeen; who had sung to me, with me, on our journey from Scotland and who, despite the shortness of our acquaintance and the sadness of the time, could make me smile simply at the sight of him. I wondered how many guises he had. Roisin stood before him, tall, slender and still. Her composure masked some great uncertainty that her eyes could not quite hide. I felt something in my stomach, a pull, a kind of shock, like a ghost of something: she was like Katharine, that was all; she reminded me of Katharine. The feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and I watched Maeve go to her and kiss her on both cheeks, before slipping her arm through the young girl’s and leading her into the house. I stayed where I was, pondering the arrival of this party, unannounced to me and so formally received. And I wondered about the girl, so beautiful and so sad, whose name I had first heard on the night of our arrival from Scotland, and why, in the long list of loves and conquests with which he’d regaled me for much of our journey, Sean had never mentioned her once.