A Game of Sorrows

ELEVEN Coleraine

By the time I caught Andrew he had reached a forest, where woodcutters felled and sawed relentlessly. I tried to talk to him, but he made it clear he would not hear what I had to say, as if our conversation of earlier had not taken place at all. ‘The planters are stripping these woods to the bone to build their towns at Derry and Coleraine, and making a nice profit on the side with illegal exports.’

I looked around me. ‘There is enough wood in these forests to build ten towns.’

‘But not to satisfy the greed of those who live in them. They can hardly find the time to build their houses, so busy are they sending this wood to France and Spain for making barrels and building ships.’

‘But the king is at war with …’

‘I know that and they know that. But the king is in London – he’d be as well on the moon, for all the heed his Irish Society’s agents here pay to the good of their nation.’

We came to the river Bann at last, and kept close to its banks from then on. The light was beginning to fade and the day had grown much colder, a wind from the north bringing with it the smell of the sea. A mile or so after we had left the salmon leap behind us, I began to discern a large mass, like a stunted hill leaching out from the riverside up ahead in the gloom.

Andrew stayed his mount for a moment, and held out his hand towards the mass. ‘There it is: the city of dreams; the Promised Land.’

As we approached closer to the gates of Coleraine, any optimism I had felt seeped out of me. I had expected stone walls, towers, magnificent gatehouses: a shining citadel of this new-made civilisation. What was before me, across the broad, water-filled ditch that served as a moat for the enclosure, was a fortification of earthworks, perhaps fifteen feet high, jutting out at angles into the ditch and towards the surrounding countryside, for the walls and flankers of the London Companies’ new town at Coleraine were, like an ancient compound of savages, made entirely of earth. To our right they reached massively northeastwards. To our left they came to an abrupt end at the Bann, with only a flimsy wooden palisade stretching down into the fast-flowing waters.

Andrew had come to a halt across the moat from a timber gatehouse. He shouted our names and our business, and I heard myself for the first time announced as Sean FitzGarrett. I did not need to ask Andrew why in this place, this great enterprise of the new English occupiers of Old Irish land, he had omitted the ‘O’Neill’ from my cousin’s name. Now the time had come to play my part, and for every moment until we left this place I must think myself Sean FitzGarrett, Catholic gentleman, grandson of a wealthy Anglo-Irish merchant and of his noble native Irish wife. The bearing of a Calvinist scholar, the son of a poor Scottish craftsman, must be left at the gates. The watchman let down the timber drawbridge and we crossed, the sound of the horses’ hoofs jarring hard and clear on the wood after their two days travelling overland.

Andrew asked the gatekeeper for directions to Matthew Blackstone’s house. The man laughed and said we knew little enough about the town if we could not find it for ourselves. ‘There are two decent houses in Coleraine: there is Sir Thomas Philips’ house, within the walls of the old abbey, down towards the river; Matthew Blackstone’s is the other.’

‘And in which street is that to be found?’ Andrew had no patience for the gatekeeper’s humour.

The man smiled, a row of rotten and missing teeth coming into view behind his grey lips. ‘The only street with a decent house on it.’ He turned to his companion, and both roared with laughter as they went to pull up the drawbridge behind us.

It was almost dark, and Andrew had asked the watchmen for a torch, but they had laughed again and replied scornfully that they’d as well set fire to the town themselves as give a lighted torch to a stranger with an Irishman in tow, however grand he might carry himself. When we were far enough out of earshot of the gatekeepers, I asked Andrew what he was smirking about, for that was the only way to describe the look on his face when the watchman had thrown his last insult.

‘Do I smirk? Indeed I might.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he took you for an Irishman without question. You are as much Sean FitzGarrett to look at as I am Andrew Boyd. You sit your horse with the same look of entitlement on your face, the same arrogance in your bearing. Pride. A good pride, I think. But how our kirk ministers in Aberdeen have tolerated it in you, I do not know.’

It was my turn to smile now. ‘Often they have not,’ I said. The street leading into the town from the southern gate was straight and broad, and utterly deserted down one side. On the other, a mixed row of squat, shoddily built houses, mainly timber-framed and plastered, with thatched roofs, faced out onto the emptiness of the untenanted plots across from them. At the end of the row of about a dozen such houses, the street was bisected by another, just as broad and straight, but this one utterly devoid of habitation. There were some rigs of land on either side, some showing signs of cultivation, of pig- and hen-keeping, others dead and sterile. In time, the street came to its end in a broad open square that must have served as the marketplace. There were no signs of any activity whatsoever. Of the houses on the square, none could remotely have been imagined to belong to the family of Deirdre’s husband.

A smell of smoke wafted up to us from brick kilns near the river, and as we drew closer mingled with that of fresh-sawn wood and baking clay. A group of thatched cottages had been fenced off within a large wooden enclosure, the builders’ yard forming its own village within the town. An exhausted-looking man, his face red with brick dust, came to the gate when Andrew hammered on it. A look of momentary curiosity crossed his face at the sight of us, but passed when Andrew spoke. Oh, yes, he knew Matthew Blackstone. It was clear from his tone that the overseer of the brickworks had no great opinion of the master mason, but he was civil enough in pointing us in the direction of Blackstone’s house.

As we went back through the market square, a small herd of black Irish cattle was being driven to a pen in the northwest corner of the marketplace, a herd of sheep bleating and calling to each other close behind them.

‘It is not safe for them to leave the beasts out in the fields at night,’ Andrew told me, ‘nor anyone to guard them, so they bring them in here.’

I looked around me wondering what kind of place was this I had come to, what desolate half-built, half-empty world where too-familiar dangers lay a few yards across crumbling earthen ramparts.

The Blackstones’ house, we had been told, lay off the other side of the marketplace, towards St Patrick’s church. In common with some of the better houses in the market square, many on this street had pent walkways, like little wooden cloisters, along their front.

‘Piazze, they call them,’ said Andrew, his face showing his distaste at what he saw as a Romish affectation.

‘I suppose it must be pleasant enough, in the summer evenings, to walk there, or for the women to sit out with their work.’

‘And look out on the dust and the mud and the empty streets and wish they were somewhere else?’

‘Well, we will find out soon enough I think.’

He followed my line of vision to what was, by far, the grandest house we had yet seen in Coleraine.

‘This is it, sure enough. Are you ready?’

I took a deep breath and lied. ‘Yes, I am ready.’

He lifted the brass knocker on the door and banged loudly, three times.

Footsteps came hurrying along a corridor and as they did so, Andrew took two paces backwards and stood deferentially behind me, an amused smile on his lips. A girl’s voice called out, tremulously, ‘Who is there?’

I looked to Andrew and he kept his mouth resolutely shut. ‘Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett, brother of Deirdre FitzGarrett, wife to the son of this house. Also my …’ I stopped short at ‘servant’, ‘… my steward, Andrew Boyd.’

One door slowly opened, followed by the other. In the meagre light of the candle she held in her hand I could see warm hazel eyes in the face of a young woman of about twenty.

Her dress was of a coarser brown stuff, the apron less assiduously bleached and pressed, but for a moment my heart misgave me and I thought I saw Sarah standing there. All words stopped themselves in my mouth as my heart pounded.

‘Sir?’ she said, and the spell was broken.

I recovered myself quickly enough. ‘Is your master at home? There is business I would discuss with him.’

‘He is not yet returned from his day’s business. He is expected back in the next hour.’ She stepped forward a little and made to close the door. I turned helplessly to Andrew, who pushed past me to stand right in front of her.

‘Fetch your mistress, girl. We have not travelled all the way from Carrickfergus to stand like hawkers in the street.’

Little more than five minutes later we were seated on an uncomfortable carved oak bench in front of a not very welcoming fire, and the still less welcoming lady of the house with her two daughters. ‘You will understand, sir,’ the matron was saying, ‘that with my husband and sons away from home, we must take the greatest of care in allowing strangers across our threshold. This country is not … that is, not all of your countrymen are … that is to say …’ The woman was becoming ever more flustered, her round cheeks growing redder, her fingers twisting a linen handkerchief in her lap. I found myself, unaccountably, enjoying her discomfort, as if Sean’s very spirit had inhabited my being and was sitting in the room, laughing.

‘As the brother of your son’s wife, I am hardly a stranger, Mistress. It is scarcely two months since I sought to dance with your two lovely daughters here at my sister’s wedding.’ I inclined my head towards the two rather plain, pale-eyed girls sitting across from their mother; one looked at the floor, the other directly at me with something like contempt in her eye.

‘Of course, of course. But your servant …’

‘He is my steward,’ I said.

‘And a more fitting companion, I might say, than he who accompanied you the last time you travelled here.’ I pictured Eachan in the company of this humourless dame and her daughters and stifled a smile. ‘Nevertheless, there are proclamations out against Scots hawkers. Your “steward”,’ and here she favoured Andrew with a look of some distaste, which was not, I noted, echoed by her daughters, ‘might well have been one such lawless vagabond.’

I resisted the urge to laugh. Although he did not open his mouth, I could see Andrew’s entire body bridle with rage; to be compared to a shiftless vagabond was an affront almost beyond endurance to him. Had the insult issued from a man, the offender would now be flat on his back, nursing a broken jaw.

Although uninvited to do so, I removed my cloak. The heat from the fire was now reaching to every corner of the parlour that evidently served also for dining. Across the narrow entrance hall was the kitchen, whence aromas of roasting meat and boiling vegetables snaked their way to my nostrils. I was ravenous: it had been a hard enough day’s riding, but we had not been offered as much as a beaker of water since we had entered Deirdre’s husband’s home. It was evident that the mistress had no intention that we should be encouraged to linger. Her daughters, by the glances they cast in Andrew’s direction from time to time, were of a different opinion. Inhabited by Sean’s mischief, I gave them my most becoming smile. They avoided my eye entirely.

A fine clock ticked on the mantelshelf. The matron looked periodically and with increasing agitation at this clock. ‘My husband should be home soon. Mary, should not your father be home soon?’

‘Very soon, Mother,’ said the older and paler of the two girls. ‘Do not agitate yourself. The Merchant Taylors’ proportion is vast, and it may be that he has had to wait on the other side for the ferry.’

Her sister, of the more direct look, now opened her mouth for the first time since our arrival. ‘You told the girl you had business to discuss with my father. What nature of business is that?’

‘It is …’ I stopped, looking to Andrew.

‘It is business between men,’ he said.

She appeared to be little chastened by the rebuke, for a retort was ready at her lips. ‘My sister-in-law does not scruple to talk of the business of men.’ Turning from Andrew to me, her every word dripping contempt, she added, ‘I thought it was the way of you Irish.’

I let Sean choose my words. ‘Women whose place it is to know of business know of business; the others keep to the hearth.’

As the clock ticked resolutely over the crackling of the fire, it came as a relief to all in the now overheated parlour to hear the front door thrown open, and a hearty voice announce his homecoming. I stood up, as did Andrew, and Matthew Blackstone’s wife went quickly out to the hall. I heard urgent female whispers and then a loud laugh as hands clapped together. In a moment the master of the house strode into the room. Edward Blackstone’s father was as tall as his sons, but broader in shoulder and neck. He was sandy-haired and ruddy of face. Nodding to Andrew, he came directly over to me.

‘I offer you my hand and my prayers on the death of your grandfather, FitzGarrett. He was a fine man, and knew his business. A great loss to you all, but a long life well lived is not to be mourned. And how fares your sister? And my sons? She was much affected by her grandfather’s death, I think.’

‘They all arrived safe. My sister has been a great comfort to my grandmother.’

‘Aye? Good girl. Though the old woman has never struck me as much affected by sentiment.’

‘Matthew!’ interjected his wife.

‘I give that as a compliment, woman. Your sex is too much prone to weeping and wailing at the merest thing. Although I think I am right in saying that the women of the Irish do their mourning loud?’

I remembered the hellish noises I had heard in Carrickfergus on the night of my grandfather’s death, and again on the night before his funeral. ‘Yes, they honour the dead in venting their grief.’ I almost thought I saw Andrew smirk again as I said this.

‘Well, well, so your grandfather is buried, and you come away so soon on business?’

Andrew had coached me on the road, and I knew what to say. ‘With no disrespect to yourself, we know there are merchants in Coleraine who would not scruple to wrest my grandfather’s trade from his dead hands, and with the pirates constantly operating along the north coast it seemed as well to re-establish my family’s name and control as soon as was possible.’

‘You do right. And any way I can help you in, so will I do.’ He turned then to his wife, and asked why our places had not yet been set at the dinner table.

‘I had not thought – I had not presumed to. I do not know where the gentleman and his servant are staying, or if they have yet eaten.’

I had been in the humblest cottage, the most austere manse, the sparsest garret, but rarely in my life had I been offered such poor hospitality as in this rich planter’s house in Coleraine.

The blood was running into Matthew Blackstone’s face. ‘Do you tell me you have not asked? Elizabeth, make two more places ready at the table.’

‘But surely,’ said his wife, less able to read her husband’s humour than I was, ‘the servant will eat in the kitchen?’

‘What, are you so dainty, madam?’ Blackstone exploded. He held up two huge, grimy, calloused hands. ‘These hands by their labour have built your fortune and put the lace and pearls at your neck. None of your niceness here. FitzGarrett’s steward will dine at my table.’ He looked at Andrew, whose jaw muscles were twitching, the rest of him motionless, as he stared straight ahead. ‘I daresay you have much knowledge of your master’s business?’

‘Aye, sir, I do,’ replied Andrew, continuing to stare straight ahead.

‘More than I have myself,’ I said.

‘It is often the way,’ said Blackstone. ‘But you should not persist in such ignorance. Only a man you can trust with your life should be trusted with all your business.’

Further enquiries established that we had arranged no lodgings for ourselves in Coleraine: at this, the master of the house was well pleased, and the expected invitation was not slow in being issued. We were given a room at the top of the house. ‘The garret room has no great comforts, but you Irish do not bother yourselves overmuch about comfort, and I daresay you have slept in worse.’

‘Much worse,’ I assured him.

By the time we had washed and changed and descended once more to the parlour, complete darkness had fallen, and more candles had been lit around the room where our host and his family were waiting for us. A brief grace was said, and before I had settled my quandary about whether to cross myself or no, Blackstone was decanting a ruby liquid into the crystal glass in front of me and urging my health. I held it up to him, the light dancing in and out of its many red faces. ‘Slainte,’ I said, before helping myself to a thick slab from the haunch of venison in the middle of the table, and ladling onions, leeks and some crimson jelly onto my plate. Andrew followed my lead, and as the master of the house ate heartily, the ladies ate but meagrely and cast sly glances at my hands, a little surprised, evidently, that I could handle a fork. I wondered just what kind of account Sean had given of himself at his sister’s wedding, and what price I was to pay for it. The lady of the house cast a parsimonious eye on my plate; I smiled at her, and served myself another piece of meat.

‘You will find things well ordered here,’ said Blackstone. ‘Your sister has looked to your grandfather’s interests; there are not many who will have cheated her. She has a better mind to business than many a man.’

‘She would do better to set her mind to a more womanly calling,’ said the mother. ‘She thinks herself above the duties of my son’s wife. She has so little notion of embroidery, or spinning, or the making of preserves …’

‘She was brought up in a houseful of servants, to better things. She has Latin and Greek, and mathematics. She will converse with you in French as easily as in English.’

‘Much good may such learning do in the face of slothfulness.’

‘But it is the nature of the people, Mother, they have such little inclination to industry.’

Her father brought his glass down slowly, and deliberately. ‘I will not have you insult the guests of this house, Elizabeth. Guard your tongue better.’

‘I take no insult,’ I said. ‘Our people have no compulsion to labour when labour is not required. There are higher things.’

‘Perhaps. But you will find me a common man, FitzGarrett, and I have brought my family up to be so too, although their mother would often enough have them forget it. There are many fine things in this house, and will be many finer still in the house I am building on my estate, not ten miles from here, but they have all been won by the grace of God and the labour of these hands he gave me. I have little time for your higher things. There is much work on the plantations, and opportunities too, for men of calibre.’ He appraised Andrew a moment. ‘Are you content, sir, to remain in FitzGarrett’s employ?’

Andrew looked at me, directly, as if it was I who had put the question. ‘I will stay in the employ of the FitzGarretts as long as I am needed, but then I have a mind to invest in a mill, and the linen trade on the Braid.’

‘And I wish you good fortune in it. You may have started life the son of a steward – I myself am the son of a brickmaker – but you could finish it a man of land and means, if you took the right turn. The son of a brickmaker I am, but I have built half the walls of Londonderry, many of the houses within those walls, castles on two plantations and bawns on many more. I will have me a title and see my wife “ladied” before the Lord calls me to that better place. All by the grace and gifts of God and the work of these hands.’

‘If the king does not take it from us,’ said the sly-eyed sister quietly.

‘Hush, girl,’ said her mother.

‘Why should the king wish to take it from you, when you do his work so well?’ I asked.

Matthew Blackstone drained his glass and filled another. ‘Because he thinks we do not do it well or fast enough. The London Companies cannot work the lands they have been granted without granting leases to many of your people. And truth to say, the Irish will pay higher rents than anyone else to get access to the land that they once thought theirs. But this does not conduce to the king’s plans of civilising this province, of spreading the true faith, and the tongue and customs of the English. What is more, it is an arrangement potent of great danger.’ He looked hard at me. ‘I will not dally with pretty words, sir. There are many of the Irish who have not accommodated themselves so well as your grandfather or some of your grandmother’s people have been willing to do, to the king’s arrangements for the tenanting of his land.’

‘The place is alive with savages,’ said his wife.

‘With men who had their land taken from them,’ I said.

‘It was forfeit by the treachery of O’Neill and O’Donnell.’

I began to respond in defence of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, as I knew Sean would have done, but was interrupted by the younger girl. ‘We have heard such politics often enough at this table from your sister, sir. It is a wonder, if she had such leanings towards the way of the savages, that she does not …’

‘Elizabeth!’ said her father sharply. ‘I will not have that talk at this table. You will hold your tongue, or you will oblige us by going to your chamber.’ Blackstone did not notice the resentment that burned in his daughter’s eyes as he settled again to his former conversation. ‘The king and his agents are not sufficiently pleased with the speed and manner of our plantation. There are those in London – and some of the disaffected English who were here before us – who have been urging him to revoke our grants.’

‘Matthew! No, it cannot be.’ His wife’s face had gone the waxy yellow of old linen. ‘We could lose everything.’

‘Not everything, but much.’

I contemplated the matron opposite me and wondered how she might enjoy life as a brickmaker’s wife.

‘But it will not come to that,’ her husband reassured her. ‘Our detractors will overreach themselves, and the king must know that should he throw us from this land, after all the time, money and labour we have invested here, not a soul in their right mind would be willing to take our place.’

‘But we could return to London,’ said the slower girl, who had been less forward with her opinions than her sister. ‘If we were forced to leave here, we could go back to London, to the old house there. What would it matter not to have an estate, a grand house, if we could have company, and some semblance of a life, instead of withering in this half-empty town on the edge of a wasteland where wolves and savages roam?’

‘It would be a shameful thing to go back now, Mary. We have moved beyond those people and that company. And there is nothing to be bought in the streets of London that your father cannot have sent to us here.’

‘But to what purpose, Mother? To what purpose?’ And in those words I saw played out before me the tableau of her life in this place. Few friends, little entertainment, and even less chance of finding a husband. Of what her life in London had been, I knew nothing, but it must surely have been something better than this.

Once the women had retired, we moved towards the hearth and Matthew Blackstone took out his pipe. Within a few moments, the smell of burning peats in the fire was joined and mingled with an unmistakable aroma of Virginia leaf that took me back to another place and another hearth. How Jaffray would have relished drawing Andrew out of himself, and intriguing on the mission before us. I had not been in Banff for many months, but I could have wished myself back there now, with the doctor and Charles Thom and Ishbel, and the cares of that small town. My host’s voice broke into my reverie.

‘Your sister gave us to understand that you had no great interest in matters of business.’

‘I am more at home out on my grandfather’s estates in Down, or with my grandmother’s people in Tyrone. The charms of the marketplace hold little attraction for me. But I cannot shirk my responsibilities for ever – they are finding me out. Without Andrew, I would be lost.’

‘Well then, after you have spoken to your agents in town tomorrow, you must come with me to the port. A ship from Bristol has been trying to dock these three days, but the seas have been so bad of late, and I fear there will not be many more before the year’s end. My work at Monavagher is held up for want of nails and bolts, and I have two good carpenters wasting their time and losing their stomachs on that barque while wood lies idle in Londonderry city, waiting on them to turn it into house frames. But if it should happily dock tomorrow, you may pick up some bargains at the customs house, and no little experience either. Or perhaps you already have some interest in its cargo?’

Before I could form a reply, Andrew was there with his own. ‘My old master had ordered a consignment of good Madeira wines for Sir James Shaw of Ballygally. It was sent by this ship, since the vessel it should have travelled on met with misadventure on the way out to Spain.’

‘Piracy or tempest?’ asked the old man.

‘Piracy. Basques.’

‘Ach.’ Blackstone spat. ‘A plague upon the seven seas, they are.’

We spoke an hour or so longer, although in truth most of the conversation was between Andrew and the older man. Their topics did not stray far from business – trade, investment, expansion, the scarcity of coin – and I soon stopped attempting to follow them. The role of Sean came easy to me on this point. My mind drifted to other matters. It had been three weeks now since I had left Aberdeen, three weeks since I had set sight on a face that wanted something from me that I also wanted to give. What would they think had befallen me, or that I had done? William Cargill, Sarah, Dr Dun, would they comprehend my hastily scribbled notes, or would they believe that I had left the town after my denied debauches of the previous night, fled of my own accord with the ‘ill-favoured Highlander’ whom I had denied having known? Or would they think that I had been taken in the darkness, against my will? I looked into the cooling embers of the fire and wondered if they thought I was dead.

‘That is the case, is it not, Sean? Sean?’ Andrew was looking at me meaningfully. It took me a moment to come to myself, or rather to that other that I was supposed to be.

‘I am sorry. I got lost in your talk, I was dreaming.’

Blackstone looked at me curiously. ‘You are a people much given to dreaming, and wandering in realms of the mind that are best left alone. This business of the poet for instance …’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my grandmother has been greatly distressed by it; my sister also. But I am not inclined to wring my hands over O’Rahilly’s words. He has betrayed his learning and his heritage in what he has done. He has sold his honour somewhere.’

‘That may well be so. You honour heritage and learning more highly than do I, FitzGarrett, or than your steward here does either, I suspect, but I know a charlatan when I see one, and you are right: that fellow is a charlatan. As are all of his kind if you seek my opinion, but we shall not quibble on that. Your sister had been much against engaging him, but your grandmother would hear of nothing else, and so brought the trouble down on her own head, and much embarrassment upon ours.’

‘My sister told you this?’

‘She did not need to. We saw it all for ourselves when your grandmother accompanied her on a visit up here about a month before the marriage took place, to see to the arrangements.’

‘Of course,’ I said. Sean had told me none of this. Perhaps, in his roving the country with Eachan, he had not known.

Blackstone continued. ‘There were dark clouds over Coleraine on those days, let me tell you. My good wife and your grandmother saw eye to eye on precisely nothing. The girl herself was seldom consulted as to the matrimonial arrangements, and I not at all, thanks be to God. By the afternoon of the second day there was such a freezing in looks and words in this house that you would have thought us caught in the grip of winter. Your grandmother declared that she had no further interest in our “petty proceedings” and would happily cede the “shameful event” to my wife, but that she would have one thing, and without that thing there would be no marriage that she or her husband ever saw: she would have her poet. My wife was too much in a glow at her triumph to protest, and nothing your sister said had any moment with your grandmother.’

‘Did my grandmother go to O’Rahilly from here?’

‘She and Deirdre both. Your sister was determined that the poet should not be engaged to perform anything – what shall I say? – outrageous, or offensive to the sensibilities of others who were to be present at the marriage.’

‘Then she failed in her part,’ I said.

‘Indeed she did. That rogue managed to affront everyone at the table. But something went wrong on their way back here from seeing O’Rahilly. I cannot recall precisely, but your grandmother was much shaken by it.’

‘Something the poet had said?’ I asked, fearful that Blackstone was about to drift to another topic again.

‘Eh? No. Not that: it was later, on their journey back from engaging O’Rahilly. Some nonsense about a woman Deirdre had seen at a window, at Dunluce, or Dunseverick or some such place.’

Andrew looked up with interest. ‘Maeve MacQuillan?’

‘Aye, that was the name, I think. I paid it little heed – there is enough woman’s prattle about this house at the best of times, without adding your Irish superstitions to it.’ He sucked deeply on his pipe, but it had gone out and he did not light it again, instead heaving himself to his feet with a sigh. ‘Well, gentlemen, I must leave you, for these old bones grow weary at their work, and I must rouse them fresh and ready for the labours of the morning. Come down to the port after eleven, sir, and you may see the Carolina dock then. There is wine on the sideboard, and tobacco on the mantelshelf. Have what you will and then rest yourselves well. I bid you goodnight.’

We finished our wine in silence. Genial though our host was, we did not yet trust the inhabitants of the house. We had got candles from the girl and reached gladly to our chamber in the attic before the bell of St Patrick’s church tolled ten.

I lay on the truckle bedstead with its feather bed and bolster while Andrew made do with a coarser arrangement of blankets and pillows on the floor, having dismissed my offer of tossing a coin for the comfort with a curt, ‘I play the servant, you the master; the master does not sleep on the floor.’

The window of our garret was unshuttered, and in the frosty and cloudless night the moon cast an eerie illumination around the room, enlivening minds that should have rested.

‘What think you to our hosts?’ Andrew asked eventually.

‘That bitter wife and those stranded girls – such a powder keg of resentments. I am not much surprised that Blackstone spends his days in the outposts of the plantations. I would be in no hurry home to such a welcome. And it is a cramped house for a man of wealth.’

‘Do not be deceived. When his house at Monavagher is finished, it will be one of the grandest in the province. For all his pride in his workman’s hands, Matthew Blackstone does not intend that his family should go down in the world come the next generation.’

‘Unless the plantation falls out of favour with the king.’

Andrew drew in his breath for a moment, considering his answer. ‘I think he takes precautions to insure himself against it.’

‘What kind of precautions?’

‘Deirdre is his precaution. Deirdre and what she might bring with her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your grandfather was of the Old English. He was well respected and trusted by the English administration, and rich. His business had brought him a large estate in Down, to which my father drew many Scots settlers: the king will have no cause to escheat the lands of Richard FitzGarrett, unless they fall into the wrong hands.’

‘Sean’s,’ I said, things beginning to become clearer to me.

‘Blackstone knows rightly that Sean has no head for business, nor mind to it either. I suspect rumours of Sean’s sympathies have also come to his ears.’

‘His sympathies?’

Andrew drew in his breath, impatient almost. ‘A man who has been known to ride with the sons of Murchadh O’Neill, who is married secretly by a disguised Franciscan priest, treads a dangerous line. And should he cross that line, there will be plenty ready to swoop, and who better for the king to grant the estates to than the obedient English planter family of Sean FitzGarrett’s sister? Could the native Irish even complain? A just and satisfactory conclusion for all. Blackstone talked also tonight of the shortage of coin. When your grandfather’s debtors are called to account, there will be a great deal of coin available to whoever controls his estate.’

‘Do you think Deirdre knows any of this?’ I said quietly.

‘She is too proud to see herself a pawn in anybody’s game. The walls of this house and the lives of the women in it must be like a slow death to her.’

There was one more thing I needed to know before I could shut my mind on these matters for the night. ‘Who is Maeve MacQuillan?’ I said. ‘And why should the mention of her have upset my grandmother?’

He sighed and opened eyes that had not long since closed.

‘Long ago, before the power of the MacQuillans on this coast was usurped by the MacDonnells, the daughter of the MacQuillan chieftain was locked up by her father in a tower at Dunluce Castle, until she should come to her senses; she had refused to marry the man he had chosen for her. But the girl showed no intention of coming to her senses, and while her father paced the sands below and raged at her obstinacy, she spent her time in the tower in knitting herself a shroud. Eventually, the father relented and arranged the girl’s escape with her lover across the sea to Scotland, but their boat foundered and the pair drowned. When the father looked up at her window, he saw his daughter’s ghost look down on him; she held up her shroud and said, “See, Father, it is finished.” It is said by the superstitious that the ghost of Maeve MacQuillan still paces the room of that tower, and if anyone should chance to glance up at the window and see her there, holding her shroud, they will be dead within the year.’

‘And Deirdre saw this vision?’

He was quiet a long moment. ‘I asked the servant girl about it. She said that when your grandmother and Deirdre returned from their visit to O’Rahilly, the old woman was in a state of some distress, and little your cousin could say would pacify her. They had travelled by Dunluce on their journey back to Coleraine, and stopped there to dine. The castle is the seat of Randal MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim. Your grandmother is a distant cousin of MacDonnell’s wife, and finds a welcome in all such houses. The earl gave them a guide back to Coleraine. As they left the castle, Deirdre turned back to wave to MacDonnell’s wife, and your grandmother said she stopped cold. It was only once they were back through the gates of Coleraine and MacDonnell’s man returning to his master that she eventually broke and told the old woman what she had seen: Maeve MacQuillan at her window, holding up her shroud.’

I had no more time for superstition and tales of ghosts and their threats and promises than did Andrew, but I felt I would sleep better for the reading of the scriptures, as we had done together on occasion since my arrival in this country. Our choice had fallen on St Paul’s letter to the Romans, but the seventh chapter, where Andrew had last set his marker, gave little comfort to either of us, with its words on the law regarding married women.

‘Well, that is clear enough, I think,’ said Andrew, shutting his bible after only three verses. ‘Adultery or widowhood, the alternatives for a woman who has married where she does not love.’ His words were clipped and bitter.

I raised myself on my elbow to look at him properly. ‘Andrew,’ I began hesitantly, ‘you must believe me, for I know it for a certainty: there is a madness in men sometimes, in women too, that makes them reject what they love.’

‘Then they do not truly love.’ He turned his back on me and laid himself down to sleep.

When at last I also closed my eyes, it was with my cousin Deirdre’s face before me, her hand reaching out to me from a tower window, offering me her shroud.