A Game of Sorrows

TWO The Man in the Mirror

‘Alexander Seaton,’ said the man, and my name echoed in the room as if my own mother were calling me. He grasped me by the right hand and threw his left around my shoulder, encircling me in his grip and holding me fast. He stood back to appraise me. ‘I had begun to think I would never find you.’ His face was suffused with such affection and joy that my own initial shock and apprehension began to subside. The eyes that laughed in mine were the same grey-green as my own, the lashes as long and dark. He had the same straight nose, the same set to brow and chin that my father had called arrogant and my mother manly. His hair, I would have said, was a little longer than mine and darker, almost black, but all in all, I doubted whether more than a handful of people still living could have told us apart. I knew before he released me and spoke again who he was, for there could be no other explanation.

‘Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett,’ he said with a flourish. ‘Son of Phelim O’Neill FitzGarrett, and grandson of Maeve O’Neill of the O’Neills of Ulster, who has sent me here.’

‘My cousin,’ I said, sitting down at last on the bed.

The face smiled a mischievous smile. ‘None other.’ He pulled over the chair from my desk and turned it around to sit astride it. It was only then that I noticed, lurking in the unlit corner of the room, a stocky form, with eyes that moved as much as his body was still. He was wreathed in some sort of Highland garb, a yellowed linen shirt wrapped over faded red trews of a rough woollen cloth, the whole swathed in a long brown blanket edged with goats’ fleece. ‘That’s Eachan,’ my cousin said. ‘Pay him no heed. He’s a dour fellow but will do you no harm, unless you would wish to injure me, and then he would kill you as soon as look at you.’

‘“The ill-favoured Highlander”,’ I murmured.

My cousin glanced at me quizzically but said nothing.

‘When did you come here?’ I asked.

‘Into the town? We arrived last night. Half-starved and exhausted, the pair of us, by the time we got within the gates – which was when, incidentally, cousin, I learned of our resemblance to one another. The fellow on the watch mistook me for you and let me pass without question. Eachan gave him more trouble, until I intervened – under guise as yourself; the watchman seemed more at ease with that arrangement than any other, and I judged it best not to antagonise him. Aye, half-starved and exhausted we were, and our object nowhere to be found. This is not a hospitable place; I will be glad to be home.’

‘You are a long way from home,’ I said. ‘Carrickfergus.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘You know that much then.’

Still watching my cousin’s servant, I said, ‘My mother spoke of you sometimes, her brother’s child. I have often wondered about you. As a boy I used to wish …’ I stopped. It was pointless to remember that now. ‘It was a great sorrow to her that she did not see you grow to manhood. She is dead now. I think she grieved for her homeland until the day she died.’

‘Ah, did she? I think I have some memory of her yet, Grainne. Of her hair, the scent of her skin, her face sometimes. There has not been a day that our grandfather has not mourned her loss.’

He said nothing of our grandmother, Maeve: there was no need. My mother’s every letter to her had gone unacknowledged, unanswered, until at last she had written no more letters home. I had sometimes wondered how many kind words from the stern old Ulsterwoman of my childhood dreams would have been needed for her to leave my father and this cold and wind-blasted coast of Scotland to return to the land of her birth. I might have grown up all but a brother to the man seated across from me. But there had been no such words, she had never returned home from this place, and the man before me was a stranger.

He regarded me a few moments, as discomfited as I, I think, to learn of another who lived his life in his own exact image. ‘You have no brother or sister?’ he asked.

‘None,’ I said. ‘Nor mother or father either now. And you?’

‘I have a sister,’ he said, ‘Deirdre. Four years younger and twenty wiser than I. Our mother died when she was born, and our father left before she was five years old or I nine, in the train of Tyrone; he fled to the continent.’

‘Tyrone?’ I said, stupidly almost, as some image from my childhood stirred in my memory. A memory of my mother weeping, as I had never seen her do before nor indeed did I ever afterwards.

‘Aye, Tyrone,’ said Sean with some bitterness. ‘My father fled Ireland with the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, when they took fright at only they and God alone knew what. They left their people and their lands to be parcelled up amongst the English and the Scots as your king and his deputies saw fit, and Deirdre and I were left to be brought up by our grandparents, to inherit our grandfather’s wealth and our grandmother’s dreams.’

‘I think my mother was saddened that she had not known her brother better.’

Sean sighed. ‘It was not our grandmother’s way. She insisted that Phelim be brought up in the Irish fashion, fostered with her O’Neill kindred in Tyrone. Our grandfather was much against it, I have been told, but in the end he gave in to her, as he always has done. Our grandmother fell in love with an Englishman and she never forgave him for it.’

‘But our grandfather’s family have been settled in Ireland for many generations, have they not?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Sean. ‘And they have our Irish tongue and can ape our Irish ways when it suits them, and they have not, thank God, embraced the Protestant heresy that has infected these shores.’ Here he crossed himself and it sent a shiver to my soul to see my own image do so. ‘But for all that,’ he continued, ‘they are still the English, no more accepted by my grandmother and her like than she was accepted by them. She married for love, the one weakness, the one mistake of her life. To our grandfather’s wealthy family in Dublin, a marriage alliance with the O’Neills was potentially useful for business in the North, where Maeve’s family held sway, but in other ways it was beyond their powers of acceptance and they never did accept her. As for Maeve’s family, the O’Neills were well used to accommodations with the English for their own benefit, but for her to marry into a trading family was almost beyond disgrace. She soon gave up trying to find favour with her husband’s family and instead set herself to salvaging some with her own.’

‘And did she succeed?’ I asked, becoming interested, in spite of myself, in this woman who had been little more than a shadow in my life.

‘Oh yes, she did. And the fact that her son Phelim rose with the Earl of Tyrone against the English, and then went in to exile with him on the continent, has given her much honour with the native Irish of our land, but it is an empty honour.’

‘An empty honour? What do you mean?’

Sean’s face became grave. ‘Because the Irish have no honour in Ireland any more. Tyrone’s rising was the last hope for our people – for our language, our laws, our customs. Perhaps even our religion. The lands the earls left are being settled now by the English and the Scots. The native Irish are being pushed to the margins – untrusted and yet needed still for their labour. Those who had honour amongst their people must now till their scraps of land like beasts, and pay the English Crown for the privilege.’

‘I am sorry for that,’ I said, ‘but what has it to do with me?’ Sean got up and walked over to my bookshelves. He picked up an edition of Horace and leafed through it a few moments before putting it back on the shelf and turning to me. ‘Nothing, cousin, it has nothing to do with you. With your books and your pen and ink, and your drab Presbyterian garments in your cold northern town. Your mother went far to ensure that your life should be free of such concerns, and had it not been for the happenings of Deirdre’s wedding, I think she would have succeeded.’

And here, I saw from his face and from the increased tension of Eachan by the door, we had come to the point.

‘Tell me about Deirdre’s wedding,’ I said.

Sean stretched out his feet towards the fire which had also, I only now noticed, been lit. I wondered how long they had been here waiting for me, whilst I, unknowing, had whiled away the evening with William. I saw, hanging where my own cloak would normally have done, another mantle of the sort his servant wore, but of much finer stuff and trimmed with fur. Over the back of the chair, a jacket of a soft, dark brown leather, quilted and stitched with gilded thread, had been hung. My cousin was evidently a man of wealth. He said something to Eachan and then asked me if I kept glasses in my room.

‘The life of a college regent is not that of an Irish gentleman,’ I said; ‘but I do have beakers.’ I took down the two pewter beakers I kept with my own plate and knife on a shelf, and the unspeaking servant poured into them some amber liquid from a flask he had hidden somewhere in the folds of his clothes. ‘Are you having none yourself?’ I asked, as he stoppered the flask. He answered me in words I did not understand and returned to his place by the door.

Sean smiled. ‘Eachan could drink us both under the table and through the floor, if he had a mind to. But of late, he has not been of a mind to. He prefers to keep his wits about him. Do not be fooled by his sullen looks – he has wits enough for both of us, and at times has needed them.’ He downed the liquid in the beaker and formed a resolution. ‘Deirdre’s wedding. Where do I begin? You will think me biased in her favour, but I assure you I am not. My sister would have been a prize for any man in Ulster, and many sought her hand, but two months ago she turned her back on everything she had been brought up to, taught to value, and had herself married to the son of a wealthy London planter at Coleraine, on the north coast of our province. Her new husband’s father is a builder, a master mason, and in great credit with the English authorities there, for that he has built many of their properties and walled their town of Londonderry for them.’

‘Then our grandmother must have been well pleased at the match,’ I said.

‘Pleased?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Maeve was about as pleased as you would be by a visit from the Holy Father, I suspect. No. She was not pleased. She was almost unrestrained in her fury that her granddaughter had chosen the same path in marriage as your mother and indeed she herself had done.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sean regarded me for a moment. ‘She taught you so little then, that you do not understand even that?’ He held out his beaker without even looking at the servant, who again silently filled it. He drank a little, then spoke again. ‘My sister married outside the blood of the Irish, the Pure Irish. She married an Englishman, a newly settled planter, worse still than your mother having left Ulster to marry a Scot, and worse than our grandmother’s crime in having married into the Old English.’

‘And our grandmother could not prevent it?’

He shook his head. ‘For the one and only occasion in my lifetime, our grandfather overruled her. He said he would not lose Deirdre as he had Grainne, he would not demand that they sacrifice their love to her pride. There were such storms in the whole of Carrickfergus over it that I was surprised to see ships still put to sea. But in the end there was something, I think, that may have made her come to believe it was in her interests to let the match go ahead in any case.’

‘What was it?’

He shook his head. ‘I cannot be sure … Anyway, it does not matter; that is a tale for another time.’

I looked at the candle, which had spluttered low in the sconce. I took another from the shelf and lit it, for it was clear that Sean’s tale was not over. He told me then of my cousin Deirdre’s wedding, of the English solemnity of the service and the imagined propriety of the celebrations afterwards.

‘It was not to my taste, cousin, I’ll tell you that. Such long faces and at so cheerless a feast I have rarely seen. The Blackstones could scarcely content themselves between showing their shame at their son’s marriage to a common Irishwoman as they see her – for these people understand nothing of lineage – and their fear of opening their purses for the sake of it. Had I not taken precautions on my journey north to the “festivities” I would surely have died of thirst. My grandmother was in a triumph at the utter Protestant misery of it.’

‘And what of Deirdre?’ I asked, feeling something already, some care and kinship for this girl I had never seen, nor known existed until less than half an hour ago.

‘Deirdre sat still and determined throughout it all. She held herself with such a grace – it is something that the women of her husband’s family could never muster. I fear this marriage will bring her much grief.’

‘But if her husband loves her?’

‘Her husband? Perhaps, who can tell? He has little enough to him. I do not know why she married him – I had thought her eyes were turned elsewhere. Perhaps it was to spite our grandmother.’ He mused a moment on this and then brought himself back to the point. ‘Anyhow, the dreary feast eventually approached its end and it was time for the one thing they had not been able to prevent: the poet’s blessing. Now, Alexander, I know that this is not a land of poets, but ours is, or was. I am not talking here of men who compose pretty sonnets.’

‘I know that.’ My mother had spoken often of the poets, learned men who spent years in their training and were greatly honoured. Like the castes of genealogists, doctors, lawmen, their knowledge passed down their families for generations in the service and under the patronage of the powerful. Their word could legitimise, glorify a leader and his line or cast his name for ever into the ashes.

‘This man’s name is Finn O’Rahilly, the last of a long line of poets who served the O’Dohertys of Inishowen. He claims to remember our parents, your mother and my father, but he can have been little more than a scrap of a thing in the days when they travelled in those parts. He was still hardly more than a child when Sir Cahir O’Doherty’s rebellion was crushed, but he found refuge in Donegal and had some schooling amongst the last of the poets there. Finn O’Rahilly lives in the hills above the north coast, making some sort of living as a hireling poet for those who would keep to the old customs. My grandmother sought him out herself, and hired him to declaim at Deirdre’s wedding, much against my sister’s own wishes and those of the Blackstones.’ He paused, remembering. ‘And such a declamation was never heard at any wedding in my lifetime.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He gave no blessing, but a curse. He damned Maeve for her own marriage outside the blood of the pure Irish, and your mother and my sister for theirs; he taunted her with the loss of her children; he told her our grandfather would soon be dead, and myself also, and that Deirdre’s marriage would be barren. There would be no great rising of the O’Neills from the line of our grandmother, for her line would end before her own eyes. He …’

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘You begin to lose me. What “great rising” are you talking of?’

He looked at his servant, who shrugged his shoulders, and then he looked at me.

‘You know that the land of Ireland is under the control of the English Crown?’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘that the king has striven to bring peace and civility to that …’

But this time it was he who stopped me, waving his hand as if to dismiss an importunate dog. ‘Spare me that, for the love of all that’s holy. To be preached civility by brutes without culture, with no notion of hospitality and with the manners of the sty, is too much in my homeland. I will not hear it in the mouth of my own cousin.’

‘I only meant …’

‘What? You have no notion of the slaughters and barbarity perpetrated on our people in the name of civility. The burning of crops, the starvation, the massacres of women and children that sent men half-mad with grief.’ He turned away as if he did not trust himself to master his passions.

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

He took a moment to compose himself. ‘The tale I have to tell you is one that requires subtlety, but I have little of that. Hear me out, and I shall tell you in fewer words and less time than is needful, for time is short tonight.’

I nodded my acquiescence and he continued. ‘The last of Ireland to submit to the English was Ulster. The Old English – our grandfather’s race – have held the garrison at Carrickfergus for centuries past, and there are many Scots and some English settled in Antrim and Down, but as to the rest, it was, until twenty years ago, the preserve of the Gaelic Irish, much of it under the control of the O’Neills, our grandmother’s family.’

‘Yes, my mother told me something of that.’ In truth, my mother had told me very little of her heritage and even less of my grandmother, despite all that my youthful curiosity would have had from her. In time I had learned not to ask her about that other family, and to keep my thoughts of them to myself.

‘While the rest of Ireland fell under the heel of the English, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, stood out against them. For nine years he rallied others to his cause, and fought in the name of Gaelic Ireland and Holy Mother Church. After nine years of warfare that brought Ulster to its knees, they submitted at last to the English Crown, and all might have been well enough, but then they had some intelligence of conspiracy against them, and fled for the continent, in the hope of rallying support. They never saw Ireland again, and their lands and the lands of all their kindred were claimed in escheat by the king, and parcelled out amongst English planters, old soldiers, Scotsmen – Protestants all. Such is the breed that my sister has married into. They work daily at the degradation of the people, the native Irish, reduced to the worst land, our laws and customs disregarded and our religion trampled upon. In truth, Tyrone himself is much to blame, for he traded the rights of the kindred to increase his own, and now they have been abandoned. Anyway,’ he said, as if he had been wandering from the subject, ‘our grandmother will hear nothing against Tyrone, and has spent every hour of her life since the day my father fled with him in praying that the O’Neills will rise once more and drive the English from Ireland. And at my sister’s wedding, the poet cursed her, and Deirdre, and myself, before all the company, and told her that her dreams could never be.’

He finished his drink and relaxed himself, as if the telling of his tale was done.

I got up and poured some water from the pitcher by the window into the basin below. A struggle was rising within me, for these were not the dreams I had planned to dream tonight, although often enough they had filled the lonely nights of my childhood. For the sake of kinship and hospitality alone, I could not dismiss my cousin now, and besides, I could see there was something yet in his tale to be told. But despite the better self that counselled tolerance, the bitterness of years got the better of me. ‘And it is for this that you have crossed the Irish Sea? To tell me of the demented ramblings of a mercenary poet and the deluded dreams of a bitter and superstitious old woman? What does she want me to do that you cannot? Should I go to him and declaim to him in Latin that he is wrong? Proclaim to him in Greek the honour of the O’Neills – of which I know little and care less, let me tell you? No, cousin, you have had a wasted journey.’

He took a step towards me and I registered Eachan’s hand going to the dagger at his belt. ‘You care nothing for your mother’s people?’

‘They cared nothing for her. She died to them the moment she set sail with my father. And what do you think she found here? Poets ready to sing her praises and her beauty? Followers to do her bidding? A cold place and a cold welcome she found, and it never thawed. She died dreaming of a homeland that had long forgotten her. Do not play my mother’s people on me. I have had long to reflect on my mother’s people.’

Sean reached out to my arm. ‘But I told you, our grandfather …’

‘Our grandfather is a man, is he not? You say he grieved for his daughter? Why did he not come and find her, bring her home? You cannot lay everything at our grandmother’s door.’

My words shocked even myself. I had not known there was such bitterness in me. Sean let his hand drop and shook his head slowly. ‘How little you understand. I had been foolish, perhaps, to believe that Maeve’s reputation would have reached even to here, but no, you do not know her.’

‘I do not know her,’ I said, ‘and I am astonished to find that she knew if I lived or died.’

‘Oh, she knew of you, all right,’ said Sean. ‘Of your birth, at least. But she told not one other living soul of your existence, not even our grandfather. Until five weeks ago, I never knew I had a cousin. Our land was in the midst of war when your mother left her family – a long war that all but destroyed Ulster and her people. Men, women and children starved to death on the roads, disease was rife and slaughter everywhere. Three weeks after your mother left Carrickfergus, Maeve told our grandfather his daughter was dead, drowned in a shipwreck off the western coast of Scotland. That is the manner of woman I am telling you of, and the man whose heart has been broken thirty years. He does not know yet that she lived, or that he has another grandson.’

As his words fell in the silence of the room, I felt a wave of desolation surge through me, a desolation for my mother and what might have been and for an old and disappointed man I had never met. Finally I was able to look up at my cousin.

‘So this is the truth of the woman I dreamed of as a child, when other boys had a grandmother’s love. A woman who could deny her daughter, torment her husband and deceive her whole family. A woman who gives credence to the rambling of half-wild poets. Her cruelty is matched only by her madness, I think, and yours in being of her embassy.’

He paced the room and turned to face me. ‘No, Alexander, I am not mad, and no more is she. It is not madness for one brought up as she was to believe in the word of the poets. To Maeve, it would be madness to ignore the terrible doom that has been pronounced upon her.’

‘It is godless superstition to believe in it,’ I said.

My cousin’s face was still and his voice deadly serious. ‘We are not a godless people and we look with horror upon your abandonment of the faith. That our grandmother is superstitious I will grant you, but I am not. I would have paid O’Rahilly’s malediction little heed, other than as a curiosity, were it not that some of what he foretold has begun to come true.’

The fellow at the door seemed to straighten his stance, seemed to stare ahead with even more determination.

A horrible dread filled me. ‘What has happened? Is our grandfather dead?’ I was gripped by a sudden fear at the prospect of the loss of a man who had been lost to me long ago.

‘No,’ said Sean, ‘but he is gravely ill. He is an old man who has seen near enough eighty summers. It would take no great seer’s gift to tell that he had not many years left on this earth.’ His words failed him a moment, and he looked away to some point in the distance that only he could see. He breathed deep and went on. ‘And yet he was strong, you know, strong.’ He flashed a sudden smile. ‘You and I, we get our eyes, our dark hair from our grandmother’s people, but our height and our strength, it is all his. Aye, he was strong, and he has seldom laid any store by the myths and legends, the beliefs of our grandmother and the words of the poets. But he loves Maeve yet, you know. He has told me that for all her difficult ways, all her angers and her dreams, he loves her as much now as he did the day he first saw her. To see her cursed because of him, to be reminded of the loss so long ago of his son and daughter and to have his hopes for Deirdre’s happiness dashed, were too much for him, I think. We will see him in his grave before many more dawns have broken.’ At this Eachan murmured something and crossed himself. To see it done did not trouble me now as it had done before.

I looked at Sean. ‘You have more to tell me, I think.’

‘Yes,’ he said wearily, ‘there is more. Three weeks after Deirdre’s wedding, somebody tried to murder me.’ He looked up and smiled, but the word had chilled me. I knew something of murder and of the chaos and the tragedies it could bring with it. ‘Now, do not mistake me, cousin. An attempt is made on my life nigh on every day of the week. Indeed, your fellow townsmen would have had me dispatched three times last night at least, were it not for Eachan here. Is that not right, Eachan?’

The man gave an uninterested grunt in response and continued to gaze over my head at some space beyond the flickering candle on the wall.

Sean laughed. ‘Eachan has little patience and less sympathy for me in my nightly scrapes in taverns and their courtyards. He has had to pull me from them too often.’

‘I had heard something of your adventures last night,’ I said. ‘But you were talking to me of murder.’

‘Pray God it will not come to that. But this attempt on my life was something different from what I have experienced before. It was not in some brawl over a woman, or for a gambling debt. It came in the dark and silence of the night, many miles from any witness or help. I was riding home alone, down the coast between Ballycastle and Cushendall. I had been visiting – friends. Dusk was coming on fast as I rounded Tor Head and I was thinking of pulling up somewhere for the night. The cliffs are treacherous; they are not to be negotiated in darkness. For some time I had had a sensation that I was not alone – but it is not unusual in such places to feel that way. All the reason a man might command begins to fracture in the face of what he knows of the darkness, of the spirits of the world beyond our control.’

My feelings must have registered in my face. ‘Do not scorn me for a fool, cousin,’ he said. ‘These forces may have retreated from this your land in the face of your ministers and the narrowness of your minds, but they have a home yet in ours, and they are not ready to be vanquished.’

‘I think you delude yourself,’ I said.

‘Then may you always think so,’ he said, before continuing. ‘Just as I was turning off the bridle path to make for a steading I know of some way inland, a musket shot rang through the dusk. The shot missed me, though not by much. And it startled my horse. I had the Devil’s own job to keep the beast from careering over the cliff’s edge and breaking both our necks. By the time I had mastered and calmed him, there was no sign of musket nor marksman, no sign of life other than the screeching of the startled gulls and the scattering of the creatures of the night.’

‘Where had the shot come from?’

He laughed, a laugh with little humour in it. ‘I cannot say for certain, but I thought, and you will not understand the irony in this, for the present at least, but I thought it came from the burial place of Shane O’Neill – a great rebel and hero of our people. I did not tarry long to search. I am no coward, but a sword avails little against a musket ball out of the dark. I turned the beast’s head and we rode for our lives. At length we came to a road that led us back out to the coast at Cushendun. I spent the night in a hidden chamber beneath the church of Layd, near the cliffs above the bay. No one troubled me in the night, and in the morning I found my horse still tethered and unharmed where I had left it. I think my precautions may have been unnecessary.’

The Irishman at the door said something in a low voice, as if to himself. His words did not escape his master. Sean uttered something, laughing, to him and turned to me. ‘Eachan does not agree with me. He thinks me a danger to be let out on my own, and it took little effort on his part to persuade our grandmother of the same. Much to the chagrin of many a maiden, I have not spent a night without him since.’

My cousin sought to make light of the situation, but I thought I could judge enough of him already to know that he was not a man easily frightened. That he was here, many hundreds of miles from his home, and with his guard dog at his back, bespoke how seriously those around him took the threat.

‘And what explanation do you have for all this?’ I asked.

‘Very little, and that not poetical. Not that our family has been cursed for the honour of Ireland, that is for sure. Someone wishes very real harm to our family, and there is only me to protect them. I do not like being so far away from them at this time of trouble.’ He took a deep breath and looked directly at me. ‘Maeve sent me here because you are the only one of her line, of our blood, not encompassed by the curse of Finn O’Rahilly. He pronounced a special fate for each of us in his prediction of the end of the O’Neills, but you he did not mention. Alexander Seaton, the son of Grainne FitzGarrett and grandson of Maeve O’Neill – he does not know of your existence. She believes that only you can break the curse, that the very fact of your being saves her line.’

‘Then she must tell him so,’ I said flatly, for I was tired and I had little desire to hear more of this woman’s wishes.

‘Alexander,’ he said gently, ‘the woman has spent the last thirty years telling people her daughter died before ever she reached Scotland. Who would believe her now were she to say no, Grainne lived, bore a healthy son? No one. No one.’ He waited a moment, for me to understand. Through the darkness, the bell of St Nicholas kirk tolled the advancing night. ‘I am here to take you back to Ulster, to the land of your forefathers, to save the name of your mother’s people and the mind of your grandmother, and to ease the passing of an old man with a broken heart. You cannot deny them, Alexander, you cannot deny your blood.’

I got up from the bed and turning away from him, went to the window and looked out on to the night sky. The stars shone as bright then as they had done an hour ago, but something in the world beneath them had changed. The lack, the emptiness I had felt my whole life was calling to me, and I wanted to deny it. I turned back to face him. ‘I have had to make my own way, without my family’s blood. I am not so callous that I care nothing for their troubles, but my life is turning now, and in a direction I have long prayed it might take. God has shown me His grace, and I cannot flout it to calm an old woman’s superstitious mind.’

Sean eyed me levelly. ‘I do not ask you to, cousin. I ask you as a man to help me protect our family against a very real, human agency that means it harm. Whoever paid the poet to lay this curse aims to fray our grandmother’s mind, my sister’s too, perhaps, and to remove me altogether. That attempt at my murder failed once – it may not do so a second time. Our grandfather is old and ill; I have Eachan and a few other good men that I trust, but of family there is none, none but you and I. We have lost a day already – there is a boat making for Leith and I must be on it. I had thought to have another day to persuade you, but the captain tells me the weather is to turn, and that we must leave on tonight’s tide. We have less than an hour, for he goes whether we are aboard or no. I can tarry here no longer. I ask you again, Alexander, will you come?’