A Game of Sorrows

TWENTY The Brothers of Bonamargy

It was almost dawn when I woke, Roisin still entwined in my arms, the lingering scent of rose oil from her hair drifting into my senses. The fire had gone out and the room was cold. The dark mass of guilt had found me, as I had known it would. I felt it weigh me down like a rock on my stomach. I looked down at her as she moved slightly and murmured in her sleep. Oh God, that Sarah would never know of this. I lifted Fintan’s cloak from where it had slipped to the floor and covered the girl’s bare shoulders with it, and prayed for forgiveness. Suddenly the cell door crashed open. I sat up quickly, trying to shield Roisin with my back, and was only a little relieved when I saw Father Stephen Mac Cuarta stride into the room.

He took in the scene in less than a second. ‘So, it is like that then. Like the rest of the O’Neills: weak in the flesh.’

I struggled to say something, but he put up a hand to stay me. ‘Save it for your prayers. There is no time.’ He quickly gathered the clothes I had put on the night before that were now strewn around me. ‘Quick, put these on. Time is scarce.’

Roisin was stirring now, but he crouched down near her and laid a hand on her head. ‘Sshh, sleep on, child. When they come, tell them you woke and he was gone, that you know no more.’ Taking a moment to understand what he said, she looked from him to me, then nodded her head. She lay slowly back down on the pallet, pulling the robe to her, and watched quietly as I dressed. Stephen strode around the room impatiently as I fumbled with the belt to my tunic and the trousers.

‘Come on, come on, man! Did your mother always dress you?’

‘I am not used to this clothing,’ I said, eventually triumphing over my leg wear and casting around the room for my boots, which, I was thankful, they had not made me exchange for a pair of priest’s sandals.

‘Here they are,’ said Stephen, thrusting them towards me. ‘Now be quick!’

‘But where …?’ I began.

‘For the love of God, will you move?’

A moment later I was ready and Stephen made for the door. I looked at him and then at Roisin, and understanding, he relented a little. ‘One minute,’ he said, raising a finger, ‘and not one second more.’

I nodded and, muttering something under his breath, he went out.

I went over to Roisin, crouched down, took her hands. ‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘that I am not of your world. May you find someone who is worthy of you.’

She smiled. ‘Perhaps I did. I will not forget you.’

I bent down and kissed her, one last time, then left, without looking back.

‘Thank the Lord for that,’ said Stephen, in some exasperation. ‘Now can we go?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but go where? What is happening? Where are the guards?’

‘The guards are all drunker than lords, and will have heads like balls of lead when they come to in the morning. The apothecary at Bonamargy has many talents.’

‘You drugged them?’ I said in disbelief.

He smiled grimly, and with a relish that almost disturbed me. ‘Every last one of the devils, from Murchadh himself down to the boy who empties his piss pot.’

‘But how? You were drunk yourselves.’

‘Were we indeed?’ He allowed himself a low laugh. ‘You think those fools strutting about the stage in Coleraine the other night are the only men in Ireland who can act? No, my young friend, we were not drunk. But I think you would do well to take a lesson from your friend Andrew Boyd, and inspect very carefully any drink handed to you by an Irishman.’

‘How so? I was not drugged to sleep.’

‘Not to sleep, no, indeed not to sleep, but there was more stuff in the goblet you had by you in yonder room than any vintner ever put there.’

‘What stuff?’

‘How should I know? A man of my calling has no need for such arts, and indeed does better to stay away from them, but there were the dregs of something that was not of the grape in that.’

So I had indeed been drugged, given some aphrodisiac, at the instance of Murchadh, no doubt. His daughter would not even have known about it. This should perhaps have assuaged in me something of my guilt, but it could not, for I had wanted her last night, as I knew I had the very first time I had laid eyes on her.

Passing the main chamber, a quick glance confirmed Stephen’s story: it was like some enchantment in a child’s fairytale, as men, women and boys lay in attitudes of satisfaction and great contentment in utterly drunken slumber. We stepped with caution over the guards at one end of the corridor and then, with more apprehension, over those at the entrance to Dun-a-Mallaght itself.

Day was breaking as I emerged at last from my earthen prison. I stretched out my arms and breathed deep the fresh air of early morning.

‘No time for that,’ said Stephen, turning eastwards, where the sun had just begun to rise over the sea.

‘What of Deirdre? I will not leave her.’

‘She is there already, and a damned sight less trouble than you she was, too, let me tell you.’

‘Where is she?’

‘For the love of all things holy! Bonamargy, where else? Now come on, or I’ll leave you to Murchadh’s dogs.’

I had had enough of dogs and took my warning, following him in a steady trot towards his friary, which I could already see emerging out of the morning grey.

In a matter of a few minutes we had left Murchadh’s subterranean fortress well behind us, and had come within the precincts of the small friary, near the mouth of the river. My own college, my own haven, the Marischal College in Aberdeen, had once been a place of friars, a cloistered ornament to a debased way of life, put to better use in the service of God following the reformation of religion in my country. Despite the darkness and depravities of the place I had just left, I was apprehensive at entering this place that declared itself dedicated, in its misguided way, to the service of God.

‘Don’t look so pious, Presbyterian,’ said Stephen, ‘it sits not well on the countenance of one who spent last night as you did.’

Bereft of anything to say in my defence, I cast my eyes to the ground and braced myself for yet more of the rituals of their superstitions. We were welcomed by an old friar at the gatehouse, who greeted Stephen with a blessing and a prayer of thanks for his safe return ‘from that evil place’, and cast a suspicious glance in my direction. He did not question Stephen, though. I was beginning to realise that few people questioned Stephen Mac Cuarta, and those who did rarely received answers it did not suit him to give.

‘How many are you here?’ I asked, as a means out of the silence.

‘Six. Only six of us friars. And a nun: Julia. You’ll not see her if she’s not in the humour for it, and she’s rarely in the humour.’

‘A very small community.’

‘Aye, and has been scarcely that sometimes.’

The church was long and low, with a cloister walk that continued down its east range, beside the domestic quarters we were headed towards. ‘The chapterhouse and refectory,’ explained Stephen. ‘The dormitory is above. Julia has her own cell, separate from us of course, and the kitchens are in there.’ He indicated a small limestone building with thatched roof, tacked on to the end of the eastern range. I had always imagined that friaries, or monasteries, must have been hives of activity, communities at work and prayer, every skill represented and followed behind their cloistered walls. But it was evidently not thus at Bonamargy. The authorities vacillated between banishment and toleration of the Catholic churchmen, and only the protection of the Earl of Antrim stood between this small knot of men with their spiritual sister and eviction. The place had a desolate air of emptiness and silence, as if its time was well past and it was just waiting for those within its walls to acknowledge that truth and die.

‘We have not been a constant community here,’ said Stephen, reading my face as I surveyed the place. ‘But it makes a base for us here, we who have returned from the continent, for our mission, our work.’

Their work. Stephen would have had me believe that he was returned to Ireland for the capture of souls, the solace and encouragement of the remaining faithful on his island. He did not know I had heard any of what had passed at Dun-a-Mallaght, that I knew what his work was. I knew from his own lips that Stephen Mac Cuarta was a man who would say mass at dawn and kill a man at noon, a soldier for Ireland and a soldier for God being all one in his eyes. I had not the opportunity to say anything, for we had entered the friary building by a door in the east range, and Michael was waiting there to meet us.

‘God be praised! You got away, then?’

‘Only just.’ Stephen afforded me a grudging sideways glance.

Michael raised his eyebrows in curiosity, but did not pursue the matter, as Stephen was bustling past him through a long vaulted room, evidently the refectory, to some place beyond.

I spoke to Michael as we followed after him. ‘Will they not think to follow us here?’

Michael’s face was set, grim. ‘Even Murchadh will not think you will have been stupid enough to come to so close and obvious a place.’

‘Then they will not come after us?’

‘Oh, they’ll come after you all right, eventually. And first we will deny all knowledge of you and your escape, and then, after Ciaran has tortured me a little, I will break and tell him Stephen organised a boat that took you across to Rathlin, from where you will flee back to Scotland, taking Deirdre with you.’

‘Torture?’ He spoke of it with such composure, such casual certainty.

He glanced at me sideways and smiled. ‘I have been trained to withstand it, to the necessary point.’

We could say nothing more, for we had now arrived in a small, vaulted chamber that I took to be a chapter room or sacristy. ‘The girl?’ Stephen had asked as soon as he was through the door.

‘Julia has her in her cell,’ said Michael. ‘Gerard is attending to her.’

‘And the Scotsman?’

I had seen no sign of Andrew since we had entered the precincts of the friary.

Michael pointed upwards. ‘In the dormitory.’

‘And the others?’

‘Out in the burial ground. Digging for all they are worth. Time presses on.’

I felt my heart drop within me, a nauseating hollow appear at the pit of my stomach. ‘For Andrew?’ I managed to say.

‘There is little enough time to do it before Murchadh and Cormac appear here. It must be done before then.’

I sank to the bench below me, desolate. He had been a man cheated by time, cheated by life, in life, and in his thirty-four years he had been a better man than all who had cheated him. I thought of what I had only started to glimpse through breaches in his defences he had allowed himself with me, and of the girl who was hovering at the edges of sanity in some small room above me. I put my head in my hands and let despair take me.

It was Stephen who noticed first. ‘What in the name …?’

An old friar who’d been sitting in the corner came over, knelt before me, took my hands from my face. ‘No, my child, you have it wrong. He is not dead. Your friend lives, and will live.’

‘Then why?’ I began.

‘Because we know Cormac seeks him, and knows he was brought here.’

Because I had told him. I cursed myself.

‘And when Cormac comes here and demands to know where Andrew Boyd is, he will be shown to that freshly dug ground, and asked to pray for a lost soul.’

I did not know whether to laugh at their ingenuity or recoil from their blasphemy, but relief swept over me like the tide over a rock.

‘Come on,’ said Stephen, less gruff now than he had been. ‘Let us go to your friend.’ He took me out into a passageway and up a stair to the dormitory above.

There were six beds, flimsy-looking wooden cots, set under six windows, three down each side of the room. The floor was completely bare, and the walls were without adornment, save for the wooden crucifix above each bed. Of Andrew there was no sign. Father Stephen was behind me, at the top of the stairs; I stepped back, fearing a trap.

‘What is the matter?’ he said, advancing towards me.

I stepped back again. ‘Where is Andrew?’

He looked to the one disturbed bed in the dormitory and saw that it was empty. ‘At the latrine, if nowhere else.’ He indicated a small door off to the left, at the end of the long chamber. ‘We are not altogether savages.’

I sat down on the bed he had declared to be Andrew’s, and watched the latrine door. I jumped when another door at the very end of the dormitory opened, and a black-clad figure moved through it.

‘Well, Stephen, so you are returned from your carousing.’

‘I am that, Julia,’ he said. ‘And not alone.’

She looked down upon me for the first time, and her face froze for a moment. She crossed herself. ‘Holy Mother of God.’

‘Be at ease, Julia: it is not Sean FitzGarrett.’

‘I know who it is and is not,’ she said. ‘I had not known Grainne had another child.’

I looked at her in incomprehension, and then to Stephen, awaiting his correction: it did not come. ‘Julia …’ he said, his voice full of warning.

‘I am not in the business of deceit, Stephen Mac Cuarta. And if you had not been either, this would be a different day and Sean FitzGarrett might yet walk among us.’ She looked then to me. ‘You may go in to Deirdre, but remember: she is not fit to be disturbed by the conversation of men.’ She gave Stephen a look that would have frozen iron, and swept through the dormitory and down the stairs.

‘What did she mean?’

‘Alexander,’ he began.

I rose to my feet and I could feel my voice rise in anger. ‘No more of your lies, your half-truths, your rationing of information, priest. What did she mean?’

‘You must understand,’ he said.

‘Understand?’ I shouted. ‘Understand? I have been hounded by dogs, dressed as a priest, bound in shackles and left in a stinking cell; my own grandmother noises it abroad that I have murdered my cousin; I have heard my mother called a whore by those who were not fit to look at her, and now there is talk of Grainne’s “other child”. And you tell me to understand? Well, tell me why, priest, for I want nothing more than to understand.’

Suddenly, before he could answer, the door to Julia MacQuillan’s cell opened again and Andrew came through it, leaning on a crutch for support. ‘Alexander,’ he said, his ravaged face breaking into a broad smile of relief. He came over and grasped my arm in affection, as of a long-remembered friend. ‘I thought never to see you again.’

‘Nor I you,’ I said, embracing him, then quickly releasing him as he winced at the pain of his bruised bones. ‘You were nearer death than life the last time I saw you.’

‘I rambled a great deal, they tell me.’

‘I could not make out a word of it.’

A look of relief passed over his face. ‘Then I am glad. The brothers have also told me I said nothing to offend. They have been mending me well.’ He grinned. ‘I will never be so pretty as I once was, but I believe my scars will lend me some distinction.’

‘A great deal,’ I said.

‘Truly, it is good to see you again, Alexander.’ Then he glanced at Stephen with less distrust than had been his wont. ‘But whatever the cause of dispute between you, you must have it out elsewhere. The Sister tolerates no disturbance. You will waken Deirdre with your rumpus.’

I felt the rage in me subside a little at the mention of my cousin. I turned to Stephen. ‘Later. We will have this out later, but I will be deceived no longer.’

The nun’s cell was tiny, and only a poor grey light seeped through its one small north-facing window. On a stool, dropping some liquid from a tiny phial into the barely parted lips of my cousin, was another friar, whom I took to be Gerard, the doctor-apothecary. The figure on the bed, covered by blankets pulled tight and a warm, clean, sheep’s fleece, was so thin and pale as to be like a wraith, almost without substance. I stood in the doorway a moment, unable to move, struck by a sudden terror that she was dead. I held my breath until at last I saw the cover at her chest rise and fall a little.

‘How long has she been here?’

‘Less than an hour. Michael brought her just before dawn. I thought I was dreaming. They brought her straight to the nun’s room, and Gerard has been attending to her ever since.’

‘How is she, Father?’ I asked in a low voice.

‘I cannot tell. She has no fever; there is no vomiting or effusion, and her blood beats slow in her veins. I think she has had a great shock, and her mind has closed her eyes and ears to the knowledge of it.’

‘You mean she does not want to wake up.’

‘Yes, I think that is exactly what it is: she does not want to wake up.’

We sat a long time watching her, Andrew and I, each of us bound to her as if she was the only link between us and everything around us. And if that link should break, we would each of us be set loose in a land where we had no place. I looked across the bed and saw in him anger, hurt, rage, tenderness. At one point he reached out a hand to touch her, just for a moment, and in that moment I saw the tale of a man who has loved too long. When at last she began to show some signs of stirring, he left the bedside and went to stand by the door.

‘Alexander,’ she said, as her eyes opened on the grey dawn. Some of the apprehension that had been building up for the last hour left me: the delusion was over. Her lips were cracked and dry, and speech came to her only with great difficulty. ‘You should not have gone, Alexander. I begged you not to go.’

‘Ssh,’ I said. ‘Rest now. Time enough to talk of this later.’

But she grabbed me fiercely by the wrist. ‘No. Sean is dead. You are in danger now. The curse has found us.’

‘No curse, Deirdre, but a killer, and I will not leave Ulster until I have found him out, and I will not leave you.’

As she sank backwards again, she caught sight at last of Andrew, standing behind me. She closed her eyes, turned her head away on the pillow and groaned. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh no.’

Andrew looked at her a moment, then something in him broke, and he left us.

I waited longer with her as she drifted back to sleep, shutting herself off from the world she had found herself in and the knowledge of its dreadful truths, and I almost wished I could join her. But I could not, and the time of my hiding from the truth was over. I left the doctor to his vigil and went in search of Stephen.

I found him, eventually, in the church. The nave was dark, much darker than I had expected, but I found my way to the east end where a finely carved wooden screen led to the chancel. Through the screen doors a transforming light flooded from the east in a myriad of colours. I walked towards it in a kind of wonder, feeling a tinge of unfamiliar regret that such beauties of man’s creation had been destroyed in my homeland. So entranced was I for a moment by the jewels of colour sent out by the great east window that I did not at first notice him. I had been looking straight ahead of me, and upwards. There was enough of my vision to tell me that there was no one in any of the wooden stalls to either side of the aisle. But then my eye was taken by the altar, and what lay beneath it spread out on the floor.

His head was at the edge of the step and his arms flung out to either side of him. He was not moving, but as I drew closer I could hear a low sort of groaning coming from his throat. I started to bend down towards him, but hardly had I stretched out my hand to his shoulder than I found myself flat on my back, my head only just having missed the edge of the stone step, and the old Franciscan pinning me down with one hand while he held a knife to my throat with the other. We stared at one another for what seemed an eternity but what in truth must have been less than two seconds, until something odd came on to Stephen Mac Cuarta’s face, and he started to laugh as if he would never stop. He released his hold on me and sat back, wiping tears from his eyes with the hand that less than a moment before had been on the verge of slitting my throat. He laughed and wheezed and took a deep breath to steady himself, and then wiped away some more tears.

‘Alexander Seaton, is it? O’Neill, more like. They never taught you to creep about like that in your heretic seminary, I’ll tell you that. That is in your blood, and let no one tell you otherwise. Phelim himself could not have got closer. By God, you were near enough to getting yourself filleted; I took you for one of Murchadh’s crew.’

‘I thought you were injured,’ I said, still shaken, ‘or dead.’

‘No,’ he said, recovering his composure at last, ‘not dead, but praying.’

‘A heartfelt prayer, by the look of it.’

‘Oh, yes: it is all that. I pray God’s forgiveness for the injustice I have done you, that others who loved you have done you also. And that perhaps, if God so grants it, you would forgive me too.’

I rubbed my arm where he had twisted it behind my back. ‘You must tell me first what it is that I am to forgive. The truth, with no more deception.’

He looked away a moment, searching for words he did not wish to speak. Eventually he was ready. ‘You must understand that the lies, the deceit I have practised upon you, were at the instance of those who had a greater call on my loyalty, aye and on my love, than yourself. Promises made nearly thirty years ago, but as fresh to me as if I had made them this very morning, and it grieves me to break them now, but I see I must. First, though, I’ll get my old bones off this floor, if you don’t mind.’ He got up from his crouching position, and indeed, for the first time it seemed to me that he felt something of his age as he stretched and straightened himself. He took up a seat in one of the wondrously carved oak stalls of the chancel and waited until I had settled myself properly on the step by the altar.

‘Now,’ he said, assuming some of his accustomed heartiness. ‘Where to begin? Here, now? Or then.’

‘I think you had better begin with “then”.’

‘Aye, perhaps so.’ He leaned forward a little in his stall, beginning to move his hands outwards, then taking them back in, folding them in his lap. He did not know what to do with them; he did not know how to start.

‘My mother,’ I said, at last.

He bit his bottom lip, and began. ‘Your mother, yes: Grainne. You were how old when she died?’

‘I was seventeen.’

‘Seventeen. So she would have been not yet forty. Her beauty would not yet have been quite gone.’

‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘It had not. Only at the end.’

‘And not even then, in the eyes of God. She had all your grandmother’s beauty, but more grace, and none of her coldness.’

I would have liked to acknowledge this too, but my mind had gone often in the last week to the bitterness towards my father that she had tried so hard and failed to hide from him or from me. I had hidden the knowledge of it away somewhere beyond memory, but it had found its way back somehow, unlocked by the sight of my grandmother. I said nothing to the priest of any of this, and if he noticed my abstraction, he did not comment on it.

‘She was the light of your grandfather’s world, and they were difficult times for him, for Tyrone was in open rebellion against the English, and your grandfather’s wealth was based on his trade with the English at the garrison in Carrickfergus and in their few outposts in the North. Many of the Irish with whom he did business lost their lands or their wealth, whichever side they were on, in one way or another. Worse for him was that Phelim had gone into rebellion with Tyrone. It could have been no other way: Maeve had suckled her son on tales of the greatness and pride of the O’Neills, and she had made her arrangements for his fosterage in a sept very close to Tyrone with the greatest care and forethought. But to Grainne, your grandmother paid very little heed. Grainne had a little too much of the FitzGarrett in her for Maeve’s liking – it was as if she had believed the call of her own blood to be so strong that it never occurred to her that her children might inherit something from their father. So, save for an understanding that one day she would be married to Murchadh – an ambition that your grandfather was implacably opposed to – Grainne was all but neglected by her mother, and consequently spent more and more time at her father’s side, learning to understand the business, the world that he lived in and that he had come from. You are following me?’

‘Nothing you have said so far has occasioned any great surprise. Go on.’

His face became uncomfortable again, as he searched for the right words, if there could have been such words, for what he was next to tell me. He did not look at me as he spoke, but at some point beyond my left shoulder, almost as if he was looking through the wall. ‘It was inevitable, then, that she should have found herself much in company with her father’s steward.’

‘Andrew’s father,’ I said, my breath almost catching in my throat.

‘No, not Boyd. Yes, he had arrived from Scotland by then, and was in your grandfather’s employ, but as his agent along the coast. There was another man – his name does not matter – older than Grainne by five years or so. This man had a liveliness to him that was like an infection, but he was wayward too. He and Grainne, beneath the eyes of your grandfather – who did not see it, thinking it a natural thing that everyone who set his eyes upon his daughter should love her – fell in love. She told me, time and again, that the man was not to blame, that he had done everything save leave Ireland to keep away from her, but strong and lively as he was, he was a lonely young man – and remember that he too was young, younger than you are now – and he loved her.

‘Maeve found out about the affair, and her fury was terrible. Grainne was dispatched to relatives in Donegal, and not brought back for a year; your grandfather was almost beside himself – he knew nothing of the relationship – but was persuaded at last that it was for the girl’s safety, that she might be too easy a target for English ire if left in Carrickfergus. By the time she returned, Maeve had almost managed to get rid of the young steward, dispatching him to Dublin, as your grandfather’s agent there. It was not long before false accusations were raised against him – anonymously, of course – and he was hanged at Dublin Castle for treason. When Grainne returned, to be followed shortly afterwards by the boy whom Maeve presented to everyone as the fruit of Phelim’s marriage, no one guessed that Sean was not his, but his sister’s child, for like you, he was the image of his uncle. When, three years later, a troop of Scots arrived in port, making their way home with their master from exile in France, Grainne found she could bear life in her mother’s house no longer, and left with them, abandoning her own child as she did so.’

I could not move. I wanted to speak, but the muscles in my face were frozen. Behind my forehead, behind my eyes, there was a rush, a roaring of words, of denial, of a young boy yelling that it was not so; it could not be so. I felt my arms begin to shiver and my lips tremble; the more I struggled to master myself, the more my limbs shook. Stephen, looking at me now rather than beyond me, rose from his stall and crossed over to the altar. He sat down by me and put a strong arm round my shoulder and pressed hard.

‘Now, son; it is all right; it is all right.’

‘But then … Sean was my brother.’ I could hold off no more, and felt myself crumple inwards, collapsing into myself in the onslaught of loss.

We were there a long time, I think; I was conscious only of a steady murmur of words in Latin from the priest and the softly changing colours of the light on the floor of the chancel as the sun played upon its window. In each colour, each gem of light before it changed, disappeared, merged into another, was an image of my lost brother, lost to me now and in all the years that had gone before, all the years of my life, when he had not been there, all the times my mother must have held me and thought of the other she could not hold. There was Sean smiling, always smiling, laughing, Sean picking me up as I fell, Sean outstripping me in races, in climbs, Sean gradually letting me go to Archie, who would have followed and adored him. Sean bidding me farewell that early morning five days ago as I left Carrickfergus, until we should meet again. The sun slowly passed behind a cloud, the light grew dim, the colours went, leaving only the bare stone behind them. I looked up at the priest and nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am all right.’