A Game of Sorrows

SIXTEEN A Woman Grieving

Carrickfergus

She was tired of walls: walls surrounded by walls, the damp cold of rooms that would never get warm. But here in her garden it was different. The slight breeze off the sea brought air that was fresh, not foetid. It was a clean cold that the rugs the servants had brought her, fussed around her with, kept from her bones. The wood of the bench was warm in the last of the autumn sunshine. A few blooms still clung to the stems of old roses that cloaked the western and northern walls, sending to her a faint scent of apricot and lemon. She closed her eyes and felt the hint of warmth on her cheek, and let herself think of Connemara, of fifty autumns past, and riding for miles along the endless sands with her mare, Emer, dancing in the spray.

The cook’s child was gathering the last of the apples from the orchard. She remembered Grainne, on such an afternoon, running barefoot along the coast path at Whitehead, her small chubby fingers stained with the juice of the blackberries they’d been gathering, the startled delight on her childish face when a rabbit shot out of the bushes in front of them. When she had been young.

She called to the cook’s child to bring her an apple, and the boy ran to her quickly with the best from his basket. She drew from her girdle the small jewelled knife she kept there and cut the fruit carefully, giving him a piece before dismissing him.

Murchadh had gone, at last. She was mistress in her own house once more. She should have mastered her grief quicker, held her tongue sooner. His rage, on learning of Grainne’s Scottish son, had surpassed what even she had expected. It had taken some work on her part to convince him that she had no love for the boy, not a trace: he was not Sean. Perhaps Deirdre had been right, perhaps Alexander Seaton had not killed his cousin. Indeed, in her quieter moments she herself knew there could be little reason for him to have done so, but that he lived while Sean lay cold and dead, that she could not forgive. When Murchadh had been calmed, eventually, and begun to think, as Maeve had, it had not been a great work of persuasion to show him how the Scotsman might be of use to them, might salvage some of Sean’s legacy and lay it at Murchadh’s feet. What happened to the boy after that was of little interest to her. She suspected Murchadh had it in mind that he should not long survive his cousin. So be it: she had no further use for him, and greater concerns.

Word had come last night from the North, the word they had waited so long for, and Murchadh’s dark mood had dissipated entirely on the hearing of it. He had thrown his arm around her and lifted her into the air, before shouting for drink, the best that was to be had from her cellars.

‘By God,’ he said, as he set her down, ‘we have had little enough to celebrate these last days, but we have it now!’ He appraised her, as if he had never seen her properly before, and shook his head in a kind of wonder. ‘I’ll own it to you now, Maeve: I thought you played too risky a hand, but you have known this game a long time and I should not have doubted you.’

She would not tell him how she had doubted also, that only a sort of desperation, a sudden madness had suggested to her the course she had taken. Deirdre had thought by her marriage to spurn her, but in so doing she had gifted her that unforeseen chance, the glimpse of a man’s venality, and when Maeve had seen it she had taken it. ‘It was the only way we would ever get the arms. We could not wait for Spanish help for ever.’

‘And now we will do it without the Spaniards, because you did not flinch. Through all your losses, you have never flinched.’ He laid a gloved hand over her cold, ringed fingers. ‘I know your grief. Sean should have been with us, at our head. But his name will not be forgotten: in three days we will start our march; we will blast the English from Ulster with guns of their own making. They have “civilised” us more than they know. And the name of Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett will be written into the legends of Ireland. Three days yet, Maeve, that is all.’

It was a wonder to her that fifty years of life had not been enough to teach her kinsman how much might be lost in three days. ‘Nothing must be permitted to go wrong, Murchadh. Deirdre …’

‘You cannot be sure she knows.’

‘She knows; she all but taunted me with it on the night I sent Seaton north.’

‘Do not fear for her. Cormac has her safe; no one will be allowed near Deirdre.’

‘Should the words of her loosened tongue reach the wrong ears, everything would be imperilled.’

‘The preparations of your apothecary have dulled her mind and her tongue, and should they fail, Cormac has his instructions.’

‘Murchadh, I have known your son all his life. He is the best of Ireland. Like Phelim, like Sean. But my granddaughter is his great weakness. Should the time come for her silence, we cannot rely on Cormac.’

He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I have other sons, Maeve, and they will not have a lover’s qualms.’

And so Murchadh had left, and she was alone again, and waiting. The clouds had gathered and obscured the sun. The wind off the sea had grown stronger and the garden was cold now. She got up wearily from the bench and began to walk back towards the house, the apple lying uneaten where she had left it, the white of its flesh already brown and rotting.