A Game of Sorrows

TWENTY-SEVEN ‘Now these are the judgements’

I thought he was bringing me home. There were no carvings, jewelled staffs or candlesticks here: no distraction from the worship of the Lord; no kaleidoscope of colours in the glass, enticing thoughts of understanding that were beyond the capacity of man. Here were just bare walls and floors, plain windows and simple benches, and the sound that rose out of the near-darkness around me was a call to God.

But my arrival, as Andrew staggered through the door with me in his arms, disrupted that moment of pure worship. Words faltered and stopped as the notes fell away. Women’s voices exclaimed in shock, the men quickly turned to organisation, and a way was cleared for us to the preacher’s dais. One man went for the sergeant, another for the doctor. A cloth was pulled from the altar and strips torn for my throat. An old woman bent towards me to do the work while the strong arms of the preacher bore me up beneath the shoulders. The old woman drew back slightly, just a moment.

‘He has the look of the debauch, the merchant Richard FitzGarrett’s grandson, but he is dead.’

‘It is the other grandson. A Scot, and one of our faith.’

‘Then what is this in his hand?’ asked the precentor, forcing open my fingers to reveal the crucifix gripped between them. I looked in confusion at my own palm, bloodied, where I had put my hand up at the last second to grab at the knife and had clutched instead at the crucifix, causing Margaret’s knife to slip from the place where it should have entered my neck. I tried but failed to speak, and the women hushed me.

‘There will be time for that later,’ said Andrew, and then to the precentor, ‘Believe that he is no Papist. Now I must go and find the girl before she brings harm on herself.’ He paused a moment to look at me, but where I could make no words heard, he could not find the right ones. He left me to the ministrations of the Presbyterians of Carrickfergus in their meeting house, and went out into the night to hunt for Margaret.

It was morning before they moved me from the meeting house. One of the congregation, not knowing of my relations with my grandmother, had sent word to let her know I lay gravely injured in their care, but that I could be brought to her home when the doctor had finished with me. The messenger returned in a very short time, with the comforting words from Maeve that if they would do her some service, they might tell her when I was dead. But he also brought with him a note, secretly penned by Deirdre, telling them precisely when to bring me to the back entrance of my grandmother’s house, what they were to say, and who they were and were not to speak to when they got there.

And so it was that a little before ten the next morning, I found myself once more in the backyard of the FitzGarrett town house, seeking secret entry as I had done only two weeks ago, newly arrived from Scotland. I had been borne on a litter and helped to walk the last few yards. At precisely ten, one of my escort knocked hard three times on the door, and it was opened at once by Deirdre. She brought me quickly inside and shut the door, putting her finger to her lips in warning. Then she started up the back stairs, indicating that I should follow her. But I was weak from loss of blood and unsteady on my feet, and after the first two steps swayed to the side and slumped down the wall. I tried to stand up again but the effort was beyond me: I could only crawl. She struggled as best she could to help me, but it was almost fifteen minutes before we reached the safety of Andrew’s chamber.

Deirdre encouraged me to lie back so that she might examine my bandages. ‘I cannot trust any of the women, and the arrival of the doctor would attract too much curiosity. I will have to change them myself.’

And so she did, lifting the wrappings as gently as she could from my neck, but it was still an agony when she came to the last, where the dried blood had fused the fabric to my skin and the gaping flesh below. I clamped my mouth tight shut to stifle the pain. She cleaned the wound, dried and dressed it. ‘You were fortunate, thank God. A little to the left and you would have bled to death before Andrew had ever got you out of the church. But if her aim had been better …’

‘Her aim was true enough,’ I said. ‘I was saved by a …’ I could not call it a trinket, as once disparagingly I had done. ‘I was saved by this.’ I held towards her the crucifix that had caused Margaret’s knife, at the last moment, to slip.

She lifted it to her lips and kissed it. ‘Your faith is stronger than the curse. Promise me you will keep this.’

I promised her. I would have promised her anything in that moment.

‘I cannot stay long: I have sent the servants on errands in the town and at the quayside. They will be back soon. Maeve is at mass in the priest’s room with Macha; Eachan is guarding them.’

‘And Andrew?’

Her words came slow, as if she feared invoking some misfortune by uttering them. ‘He has not yet returned.’

The effort of the last half-hour had been almost more than she was equal to, and I saw that she had little more strength than I had myself. I did not attempt to keep her longer, and I think I was asleep before she had left the room.

Images of the poet, of his circle and the ancient cross at Kilcrue came to my dreaming mind and I tried to push them away. Finn O’Rahilly was talking to me, but in Irish, and I did not want to hear it. I tossed and turned through many hours in my efforts to throw him off, until a cold hand was placed on my forehead, water began to run down my face, and I woke up.

It was not my grandmother’s priest, but Andrew who stood above me now, a dripping cloth in his hand; he pressed it to my dry and cracked lips.

‘Did you find her?’

His face was grey; he looked as if he had not slept in two days.

‘I found her.’

‘Where was she?’

‘On the road to Glenoe.’

He sat down and put his head in his hands. They were grazed, and burnt on the palms, as if he had been working, struggling desperately at something. They were like the burns from a rope. He spoke blankly. ‘It was dawn before I came upon her. I had searched through the town, places where people might know her, but no one had seen her. And then I thought that, despite the night and the darkness, she might have tried to get home. I was lucky at the first gate. A young girl, distracted and wild-looking, had left the town not long after seven. They had warned her of the darkness and the dangers, but she told them she had more to fear from the light. They let her go; they had been given no instruction to prevent a Scots girl passing out of the town on her way homewards. But she did not go home – I don’t think she had ever intended to go home. She just wanted to be with her brother. So she did it herself.’

I did not ask him how he had found her at last, if she had already been dead before he had managed to cut her down, whether he had carried her home, what he could have said to her mother. Neither of us would have been the better for talking of those things, but there was one thing I could not help but ask him.

‘Did she … did she give any explanation? Was there any message? A letter?’

He understood what I meant. ‘There was a message: coins in a leather pouch suspended from her neck, and a portion of scripture, along with a note. Ten words: “Tell the O’Neills: we do not want their blood-money.”’

‘Blood-money?’

‘When her brother David was murdered, at first it was treated like any other such killing by the kerne. But when I heard of it, I lost my control and let rage get the better of my judgement. Even then, I had some suspicion of what Sean was, what Murchadh planned for him, though I did not know for certain and I did not know then that neither Sean nor Cormac rode with the kerne. I took my rage and poured out my disgust to Sean. He swore he had not known of it. He took my report to Cormac, who dealt with those responsible – his own brothers among them. Then Sean took money to her mother, in compensation.’

‘Sean?’

‘I never knew that until we were at Ballygally and she told me so herself. Say what I might, she would not dissociate him in her mind from those who had murdered her brother. And then I began to wonder if it had been Margaret who paid Finn O’Rahilly to lay the curse on your family.’

‘It never occurred to me,’ I said. ‘Not for one moment. But how did she pay for it, if she refused Sean’s money?’

‘She did not – pay for it, I mean. She laughed when I suggested it. She said she knew nothing of the poet or his curse, that she had better things to do than traipse through bogs looking for half-mad Irish seers. I believed her; I still believe her. But once my mind had started running down that path, it would not stop. Do you recall, Alexander, when we arrived at Ballygally and found Margaret there? Do you remember we learned she had gone to Carrickfergus in search of work on the very day we visited her mother’s cottage, the very day of your grandfather’s funeral?’

I remembered. So she had been there the night Sean had been murdered. ‘And yet it might have been little more than coincidence.’

He nodded. ‘Perhaps. That is what I told myself. I might have believed it, too, had it not been for her bible.’

‘Her bible?’

‘Not long after I had brought Macha in to town, the Blackstones arrived at the safe house, searching for me.’ He looked up at me, evidently uncomfortable. ‘It has been me, all along, that they have pursued, not you.’

‘I know; the constable told me,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

‘I managed to get away, through the back yards, to the Presbyterian meeting house where I knew I would be given shelter for as long as I needed it, as long as it took to clear my name of having killed Henry Blackstone.’

‘It is cleared already.’

‘How so?’

‘Cormac O’Neill cleared both our names of the charge.’

‘Cormac? I do not understand.’

‘His love for Deirdre is stronger than his concern for himself, or any petty jealousies he might have of you. He cleared our names that there might be someone left whom he could trust to care for her, as he could do no longer. Whatever you might think, he is an honourable man.’

Andrew was silent a few moments, not shame-faced but regretful. ‘He was an honourable man. He is no more; Cormac O’Neill was executed in the castle yard an hour before dawn.’

I had known it could not end for him any other way: he had chosen his path and that was what had lain at the end of it, and yet I wished it might have been different. A man who should have been a prince: at least he had had the dignity in death of not being made a public spectacle for the crowd.

‘And what has this to do with Margaret?’

‘Margaret? Yes. The Blackstones. I took shelter from them in the Presbyterian meeting house. Whenever the weather is too severe for me to walk out to Templecorran, and the Scots congregation there, I worship with our English brethren in the town. On my first night there, there was divine service. I felt sorely in need of hearing the Word, after our days surrounded by the trappings and practices of idolatry.’

‘Which saved your life,’ I sought to remind him, but he had stayed firmer than had I, and was quick in his riposte.

‘No, Alexander. Never that, only God, always God. The priests and the nun and all their places were but the instruments of God’s Grace to us: they were not the cause of it.’

I should have been ashamed that my own faith had been so easily swayed, but I could not be, and so said nothing in my defence.

‘Anyhow, I attended the service, and was glad to see Margaret there too, and to learn that she and you had found safe quarters in the castle. I had nothing with me – not so much as a change of clothes, and certainly no bible – and so we shared Margaret’s. Despite their poverty, she and her brothers were taught to read and write, and she has always prized her bible above all things. I wish I could have loved her.’

‘That might have come,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I will love only once.’ He breathed deep. ‘The psalms were strong that night, assured of God’s power in the face of all that might assault his people. They recalled the struggle of Israel with the Philistines, and gave much hope to the congregation, I think, for the days of danger to come. We shared her bible, Margaret and I, as the reader took us through the passages on which the minister was to preach. We followed him line for line as he intoned them for all the congregation. But as we turned the pages, I noticed that one was torn. It was in the Book of Exodus. Chapter 21 had been torn out.’

‘“Now these are the judgements which thou shalt set before them.”’

He handed me a thin, crumpled piece of paper. Had I not been able to read it, I would have known instantly by the feel of it that it was a page from a bible.

‘This was the scripture you found in her pouch?’

He nodded.

I smoothed out the paper, and my eye was drawn instantly to the words scored under in ink: ‘“if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbour, to slay him with guile; thou shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die.”’

Andrew continued where the passage had also been marked. ‘“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”’

‘Brother for brother,’ I said.

He looked up. ‘It does not say that in the scriptures.’

‘No, but it might well have done. She killed Sean near the altar because she thought he was one of those who had murdered her brother, and she sought to murder me because I had told her I knew what it was to lose a brother, for Sean had been mine.’

He sat down, his face drained of what little colour it had. ‘When did you tell her this, Alexander?’

‘Yesterday, in the castle kitchens. I knew she had some great hostility towards me; I wanted to build some bridge of trust, of fellowship between us, and I believed that would do it.’

He rubbed his eyes and looked to the heavens. ‘I have been a fool, such a fool.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The very first time Margaret saw you, in her mother’s cottage – you remember?’

‘I remember.’

‘She thought for a moment you were Sean. She could not believe that I had brought him to their home. I assured her you were not, and tried to tell her he had had nothing to do with the murder of her brother. I thought I had convinced her, for she left that subject but told me I must be mistaken in you, that no two men could look so much alike who were not brothers. I laughed at her, Alexander, I was almost going to tell you, but I forgot about it soon after we left their place. And then when I heard what Stephen had told you of your mother, and Sean, and that you were his brother, I did not think of Margaret’s words but of what it meant for you. Even when I saw the torn passage in her bible, I did not realise what she was going to do.’

‘You could not have been expected to.’

‘But I should have done.’

‘Andrew, whatever else has happened between us, last night you saved my life.’

‘A moment later, and I would have been too late. I had been so certain that Murchadh had had Sean killed that I did not think to look elsewhere. I only followed Margaret last night because I was worried about her, her manner had become strange. I saw her enter the church, and thought perhaps she wished a moment’s quiet prayer. When I saw a man moving through the graveyard towards the door, I became anxious, and then when you stepped beneath the portal and I saw in the light from the door that it was you, doors began to unlock in my mind. It did not make sense that you should have an assignation, you who were so much like Sean, and she who hated him so much. Even as you walked through the door, your very walk was his. It was a moment before it came to me, a sight of something I had not seen – of Sean going through that same door on the night of his death. And then I knew. I ran through the churchyard, not caring whose bones I stood upon, and only just got to the door in time to see her lift her arm. I am sorry, Alexander. I could have stopped it if I had not been so slow.’

He was genuinely distraught that he had not prevented the attack.

‘Why did you stop her?’ I managed to say at last.

‘Alexander …’

‘Would it not have been better,’ I paused to gather my strength a little. ‘Would it not have been better to have let her kill me?’

He shook his head slowly, his face the image of incomprehension. ‘After all we had been through, even had I not been a Christian, why would I have let her kill you when I could do anything to stop it?’

‘Because you have doubted me for some time now, have you not?’

He looked away and then back at me. ‘Perhaps. Yes, I have doubted you. Since Ardclinnis; before that, even. Since they took you alone to Dun-a-Mallaght. I think that was why Sean brought you to Ireland.’

‘I think so too, but I was never for a moment tempted to take his place. This is not my world, and these are not my people.’

‘Are you certain of that?’

I had thought long and hard on this for the last few days. ‘Had I been born, raised here; had I been brought up in their faith, then yes, perhaps it would be different. But I was not; a man cannot live in two worlds; he must choose. You told me so yourself.’

‘And you have chosen?’

‘Yes, I have chosen. And I would leave here this very day, if I had the strength, but I have not yet the strength, and there is one thing I must know before I go.’

He looked at me expectantly, as if it was from him that I waited for my answer.

‘The curse,’ I said. ‘Pretext or no for bringing me over here, it was real enough, its intent real enough, and much of the harm predicted in it has come to pass. It was not Margaret who was behind it, nor Cormac. Finn O’Rahilly is dead, but his patron I believe is still alive, and I cannot leave Deirdre and Macha here until I have found that person out. I owe as much to Sean, and to the love that I bear them both, and to my nephew yet unborn.’

He laid a hand on my arm. ‘And I will be with you in that quest, Alexander. And when we have discovered who it is, and we have dealt with them, I will be here and look after those you love, long after you have returned to that other life you have chosen. But I must go to the sheriff, and tell them of Margaret, and bring these evidences to them, and then see what further orders they might have for me at the castle. Rest now, and gather your strength and your thoughts, for what it remains for us to do. Finn O’Rahilly can tell us nothing more than you already learned from him. When you are better recovered, we must plunder your mind for the answers he can no longer give.’

Andrew left me then, and left the FitzGarrett house, a servant no more.