A Game of Sorrows Page 5

  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.’

  It was clear she was in earnest, and I knew I could not listen to this from her. ‘It is as well that you understand now, Grandmother’ – for I did not know how else to address her – ‘that I
have no belief in your superstitions. I am here because my cousin asked me to help him in whatever danger threatens him and this family. I have come for the sake of my mother’s love for this place and people, but this is not what I was born to, and when I have done what I have to do, I will return to my own country and people, for they are not here.’

  Her only response was in her eyes, whose contempt said I would do whatever she required of me, and that whatever I thought I had been born to was no concern of hers, or mine.

  Eventually she said, ‘You sit and eat also. Sean, I will take you now to your grandfather.’ My cousin got up, draining his glass in one. ‘And then we must talk, for Roisin’s father has become anxious, and the girl herself is getting restless.’

  Sean glanced at me. ‘Another time, Grandmother. Another time.’ He followed her up the wooden stairway to the gallery above, there to disappear from view.

  Although I had not eaten for many hours, my appetite had gone completely, and the wine, fine though it no doubt was, tasted sour in my mouth. I put my glass down and looked around me. The furnishing in the room was solid work, of good quality, not shabby but well worn. Chairs, tables, cabinets, settles, had all been here a long time. But how long? Had they been here thirty years? Had my mother known them? I could not tell. But the hangings on the walls, those had been there more than one lifetime, I was sure of it. I looked more closely and saw what I knew my mother must have seen as a young girl, standing where I now stood, and again in her mind’s eye many years later as she told those stories to me. As I looked on them I began to recall the tales again, of Lugh and Balor, of Niamh and Oisin and of Cuchulainn. Images of feastings, battles, shape-changing heroes and tragic lovers were in my mind and before my eyes. It might have been a matter of minutes, or it might have been an hour, before Sean’s voice interrupted my reverie.

  ‘Alexander, will you come now?’

  He stood behind the carved wooden balustrade and waited for me. As I drew nearer it seemed to me that his face had aged ten years. Beneath his eyes were shadows that had not been there before, and his mouth was drawn tight in an effort to keep his composure.

  ‘Is he still living?’

  He nodded, once. ‘But it cannot be long now. I think he will be gone before morning. Come.’ I followed him to a small arched doorway set back in one corner.

  The room we passed into was very dimly lit. Despite the early frost that had taken hold outside, it was almost overwhelmingly warm, like a place that had known no true air or light for days. Maeve was there, and in a corner, only just illuminated by the meagre light, was a dark-hooded figure, mumbling in Latin as a set of beads moved though his hands. I did not care. My only interest was in the figure lying propped against the pillows in the centre of the heavily canopied bed. That he was very ill was clear even from where I stood, but so too was a light in his eyes that could not be mistaken, a light I had last seen ten years ago, before my mother had left this world. Maeve started to speak but I ignored her and went to him.

  ‘Grandfather,’ I said.

  He reached out a hand and I took it in mine. Two hands, the fingers the same length, the same shape, but separated by fifty years of time and life. What would I have given to have had the hand of my four-year-old self in the firm grip of that man in his prime? To have been embraced by those arms when they were still strong, to have known him a lifetime?

  By some great effort he spoke. I bent closer. ‘Alexander. My Grainne’s child. My boy, my boy. That I lived to see this day.’ He gripped my hand more tightly but the effort of speech was too much and he sank back into the pillows, exhausted. Maeve left the room, but the mumbling priest did not, and I understood that he would remain until my grandfather passed from this world into the next. Sean came over to the bed and sat down on the other side. He gently stroked the old man’s forehead and took his other hand in his. Our grandfather smiled one last time and closed his eyes, to begin a sleep from which we two who were with him knew he would not wake. I would have waited until he made that final crossing, but I did not, for I had not been that four-year-old boy, that strapping youth, that young man sharing hopes; I leaned over and kissed his forehead and then got up and left, leaving him with the one who had.

  I was taken by Eachan to the top of the house, up a narrow, almost hidden set of steps from the balcony, to a kind of attic behind the vaulted ceiling. We passed from the top of the steps through a walkway, jutting out from the parapets and open to the elements – the machicolation – from which overhang any enemy approaching to the tower house could be watched in safety and, if necessary, dealt with. I was hurried along the walkway to a small door in the other corner of the parapet. Eachan knocked on the door and spoke in a low voice to the person on the other side.

  The man who opened the door was older than me, older than Sean too, thirty-five, perhaps. His straight blond hair came halfway down his neck. He glanced at me only for a moment, green eyes in a strong-boned face assessing me before he turned to Eachan and said, ‘By God: he is like Sean after all.’

  Eachan said nothing, merely nodding before he left us alone in the tiny chamber. There were two beds in it, and some plain furnishings – a chest, a stool and small table with a chessboard on it, wooden candlesticks with cheap-smelling tallow candles – but after the travels and discomforts of the nights on my journey from Aberdeen, its cleanliness and simplicity were things of luxury to me.

  The other indicated one of the beds. ‘You can sleep there. I will not disturb you, but if you want anything, food, drink, the latrine – you are to ask only me. You are not to wander the house yourself.’

  ‘Am I a prisoner?’

  He seemed to consider a moment. ‘No, but aside from your grandparents, Sean, Eachan and myself, no one knows that you are here, or even of your existence. The mistress would have it kept that way.’

  He turned his back, our conversation over. I didn’t even know his name. He carried himself with some authority, and I wondered if he was Deirdre’s husband.

  ‘Who are you? What is your place in this household?’

  ‘My name is Andrew Boyd. My father was your grandfather’s steward. I work in your grandfather’s merchant business and travel for him throughout the province. I have the status of a servant in this house.’

  He did not have the bearing of a servant, or of one who would remain a servant long.

  ‘I am Alexander Seaton,’ I said. ‘But you will know that already.’

  He looked up from taking off his boots and shook his head, the trace of a smile for the first time showing on his lips. ‘Until an hour ago, I knew nothing of your existence. In the last hour I have learned that my master’s dead daughter did not drown within days of leaving her home, but went to Scotland and there bore a son, who was the living image of Sean, and of his father Phelim before him, an O’Neill to the marrow of his bones. I have learned that Sean was not away in the south, on what we are constrained to call “his business”, but in the far reaches of Scotland, to fetch you here because your grandmother believes you can lift the poet’s curse by which she and her kind set such store. You are to remain here until she is ready to present you.’

  ‘You set no store by such curses then? You are not of my grandmother’s kind?’

  He stopped in his work. ‘You don’t know much about this place you have come to, do you?’

  ‘Sean has told me much about this country and its different peoples, but I am not so well versed in it all that I can place someone on a moment’s acquaintance.’

  He sighed, as if tired already of my intrusion. ‘I was born in Galloway, but my father brought us here in the Nineties, after the third harvest failure in a row. He found employment with the FitzGarretts. I was brought up not to masses and incense and bells, but to the word of God, given freely to all men. I have no time for curses and incantations and give no credence to them.’ He turned back to his boots. ‘But I would ask you one thing. And you may think it is a thing a servant has no place to ask of one whose fa
mily he serves, but there are some matters that go beyond worldly standing.’

  ‘Whatever you think of the family my mother came from, I am a craftsman’s son. My father earned his living by the work of his own hands, and after she left here to come to Scotland, my mother knew no servant but herself.’

  ‘Oh?’ He appraised me again. ‘What I ask is this: that you would not set up your crucifix nor work at your beads when I am in this room.’

  Before I could prevent myself, I laughed out loud. ‘You think me a Papist? You are as like to find John Knox still living and playing at his beads as you are to see me set foot in a mass house. Have no fear, there will be no Latin mumbled here.’

  He nodded, evidently satisfied, and with little interest in learning any more about me, lay down, fully clothed, and closed his eyes. I lay down also, exhausted, and thinking to make sense of how I had come to be where I was now, and of what I must be in the eyes of those I had come to and those I had left behind. The hastily scrawled notes I had left to Sarah, to William Cargill and to Principal Dun can have done little enough to explain my sudden night-time disappearance from Aberdeen. Regardless of what words I had scribbled down, my abandonment of my friends and my responsibilities so soon after Sean’s escapades could be seen only in one way: the graceless dereliction of duty and friendship by a thankless man. I had never spoken to Sarah of the aching loss I had carried all my life for the world my mother had come from, and the certainty of her hurt and anger, Dr Dun’s disappointment and the utter bewilderment of William Cargill kept me awake for some time, until at last fatigue overcame the restless wanderings of my troubled mind.

  At some hour of the night I was aware of the door being opened and Andrew being called quietly from his bed. I knew it meant my grandfather was dead. I huddled myself more deeply in the blankets and willed myself not to think of it until daylight. Eventually I slept again, trying to remember the feel of my grandfather’s hand in mine. I may have dreamt, but any dreams I had were lost in the violence of my waking. It was still night, and I thought for a moment that I was still on my journey with Eachan and Sean, sleeping out with little shelter as we had done on more than one night, for I became gradually aware of water dropping on me, on my face and hands. I felt for my cloak, to pull it over my face, and as I did so, I realised someone was leaning over me; there was a pressure on my forehead, and as I struggled to consciousness, words in the Latin tongue snaked into my mind. Then the door of my room was thrown wide open and there was a flood of light. Someone shouted and the figure leaning over me was pushed away. I opened my eyes to see Andrew Boyd standing above me, his hand at the priest’s throat. My grandmother was also in the room, pale and shaken, with her grey hair loose down her back.