A Game of Sorrows Read online

  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.’

  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?’

  THREE

  A House of Tapestries

  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.