A Game of Sorrows

EIGHT The Franciscan

It took almost two minutes of hammering before any reply came from within the strange fortress. An anxious voice called out gruffly, and in plain English, that we should state our names and our business.

‘Mr Alexander Seaton, a Scot, making his way to Coleraine, and Andrew Boyd, Scot, his servant.’ A shutter was opened then closed again, and a moment later a lighted torch appeared at the top of the wall above us.

‘Let them in.’

The doors swung open and I followed Andrew under the archway and into the courtyard beyond. What greeted us as the bolt was brought to behind us was not a fortress or castle but a farmstead, and the gatekeepers looked to be cottagers or craftsmen, not soldiers. The stockier of the two came to take my horse.

‘Welcome, friends. You are late abroad. You should not travel in these parts after dark. The woodkerne are about.’

‘Are you much troubled by them?’

‘We keep watch night and day.’ The man jerked a thumb eastwards. ‘There, it is safe enough, but they roam almost at will from the northwest. You are fortunate to have reached here in safety.’

More torches had been lit about the enclosure as curious inhabitants came out to view the foolhardy visitors. A long stone-built house was set at the far end of the homestead, and three squat, thatched timber-framed cottages ran up the west wall of the place. Two women, an old man and half a dozen children had straggled out of the buildings and were watching us from a distance. When the women saw that we posed no threat and were welcomed, they went back into their dwellings, leaving their children, under the eye of the grandfather, to come and look at us more closely.

There was a bakehouse on the eastern wall and to the right of the entrance doors on the outer wall was a small clay cabin that passed for the guardhouse. Next to it were the stables, in the loft of which Andrew and I were to spend the night.

The place was filled with animals. Goats were tethered near the cottages, and some sheep were penned in a far corner. Between the cottages and their well was the hen house, its inhabitants at rest for the night. A few small, black, Irish cattle lowed in another corner. A couple of friendly dogs came bounding up to us, and to my surprise, Andrew knelt down on the ground to greet them: it was the first time I had seen him show affection to anything. As I bent towards them, something caught my attention, a slight movement at the edge of my vision. A man had moved out of the shadow of the bakehouse door; his eyes were fixed on me as if they were looking at a dead man.

Andrew straightened himself at last and asked if we might have some refreshment after we had seen to the horses.

The older gatekeeper nodded. ‘After you have finished in the stables, go to Stephen and he will see you all right with food and drink – will you not, Stephen?’

The expression on the face of the man who had been staring at me changed swiftly, and the grimace broke into a broad smile. ‘Oh, I will that, don’t you worry. You gentlemen just come over here when you are ready, and I will have fine warm pasties and ale waiting for you.’ Nodding cheerily to us, he returned to his bakehouse where a faint golden light still glowed. I shivered now, conscious of the approaching coldness of the night.

Once we were safely in the stables, I quizzed Andrew. ‘What is this place?’

‘Armstrong’s Bawn. It’s a Scotsman’s estate but the lands were formerly in the O’Neill kindred – they raised cattle and lived here for much of the year. When the lands were seized by the Crown those amongst them who could not be trusted were executed, imprisoned, banished. And so they have a great grievance, and they show it by attacking and despoiling the settlements while they can. Like many others, Armstrong is obliged to defend his land, his tenants and their livestock, and because they have not yet built suitable houses themselves, they come and live here, within the safety of the walls.’

One of the gatekeepers had come in while we had been talking. ‘It would be madness for us to live outside the bawn by night. I have been here three years and have never yet been inclined to build my own house further afield. Though God knows, there will be little enough safety here if they put their minds to it. Their leaders play their hand so close and clever. If once they should rise against us, they will tear us limb from limb and feed us to their dogs. This is a barbarous country you have come to, Mr Seaton, and godless too.’

Later, as we crossed the yard, I spoke quietly to Andrew. ‘Have you been here before?’

‘No. That is why I chose this place. I am too well known in the inns and villages on the road. There would have been too many questions about you, and always the chance that someone might have taken you for Sean. It will be safer for you here.’

His words brought home to me what I had tried to ignore: out on the road, away from all the safeguards of my grandmother’s tower house and of the town, it was not Sean’s life that was in danger from this curse but mine. There had been a time when I would not have cared about that, but now I did, for now I had a life, the promise of a life with Sarah and Zander, that I wanted to hold on to. ‘There is no chance that Sean would ever have been here?’

Andrew laughed. ‘Do you see a tavern somewhere, or a whorehouse? Besides, your cousin has no need to seek shelter from the woodkerne.’ The meaning of this was plain enough and I asked no more about it.

Neither of us had noticed in the gloom, but the baker was waiting for us by the door. He thrust out a hand to greet us. ‘Gentlemen! Welcome, welcome. Come away into the warmth and take a seat. It is a bitter night, and you will be tired after your long riding.’ Andrew stepped back to let me pass ahead of him under the low doorway. As he did so, I caught for a moment a look of unease in his eyes that had been wholly absent until the baker had spoken.

The bakehouse was warm and welcoming, and only once seated on a straw pallet that passed for the baker’s bed did I realise how weary I was. The baker was pulling a pan with half a dozen pies on it out of the oven. The smell alone made me ravenous. While the pies cooled he poured us each a jug of ale. Andrew watched him all the while. The baker held his drink up. ‘Slainte!’

Andrew nodded. ‘And to you.’ He took a drink and set down his cup. ‘You are Irish, then.’

The baker looked at us, conspiratorially, his eyes dancing. ‘I am that, but you gents need have no fear, for I am as English and well-affected as the Irish come. I know the scriptures from back to front and could recite the oath of allegiance at the drop of your hat.’

Andrew was not altogether reassured. ‘Have you been here long?’

‘Ah, not long, sir. I travelled many years and learned my trade and only now am I ready to settle back in my homeland, in these new times. I offered my services here and they were taken. The master has trouble finding men and women enough to work the land, and a baker and brewer in the bawn frees others to go out and work in the fields and woods. I can see to the stores and buy what is needful at the markets, and the native Irish cannot cheat me as they would others, for I know all their ways.’

I could believe this; he must have been fifty, but he was of burly build and strong still, and the ready humour in his speech could not quite mask the busy intelligence of his eyes. This man was thinking, thinking all the time.

‘You have travelled far today?’

Andrew spoke before me, which was as well – my answers were ill-prepared. ‘We landed at Olderfleet this morning, and have been travelling ever since.’

‘You would not have gone by Carrickfergus, then?’

‘Why should we have gone by Carrickfergus? Our journey takes us north, to Coleraine.’

The man nodded. ‘Coleraine. Of course. But you met with no one from Carrickfergus on your way?’

‘No one.’ Andrew’s voice was becoming harder.

‘There was a party passed by here yesterday on the way from Coleraine to Carrickfergus. They were making for the funeral of some great merchant that was to be held there today.’

‘Deirdre.’ It was on the tip of my tongue to say it, but I managed, at the last, to keep my mouth shut.

The baker did not seem to have noticed, and continued. ‘I thought you might have heard something of it on your travels. A funeral always makes for an interesting gathering, and we get so little news here.’ He had been careful to speak to both of us, but he turned his full attention now to me. ‘And so you have come from Scotland, Mr Seaton. Whereabouts in Scotland might that be?’

‘The North, the town of Aberdeen.’ I hesitated. ‘Do you know it?’

I was relieved to know that he did not. ‘But I have heard that they are not so well affected there, to the Reformation of religion. Would that be right, sir?’

‘All that was long ago, before my birth,’ I replied. ‘But now the controversies are over the forms of worship. They will be settled soon.’

‘Pray God they are.’

I did not think it would be profitable to spend my evening explaining to an Ulster baker the disputes over the liturgy that inflamed the pens of the divines of Aberdeen.

‘And what is your business here in Ireland, sir? Have you come for the plantation?’

Andrew spoke for me while I struggled for an answer. ‘My master has a mind to buy into land from the Irish Society and to ship willing settlers from his home to this province. I am to be his agent here.’

The baker turned interested eyes on Andrew. ‘You know this country well, then?’

‘Very well.’ The two eyed each other steadily, until the baker returned to the business of feeding us. Venison pasties and a pigeon pie were produced, much finer fare than we could have expected in a roadside inn. There was little further conversation as we ate. The baker was busy about clearing up his work for the night and preparing for the morning. He hummed a tune I did not know, and some snatches of Irish escaped him, but for all the aura of casual contentment and busyness he sought to give off, I could not escape the feeling that he was calculating something all the time.

As we were finishing our food he came with another jug and two goblets. ‘Mead,’ he said, ‘from our own bees. A fine thing to warm and rest a traveller for the night.’

The warm, sweet liquid curled down my throat and the baker opened the conversation once more. ‘Where will you lodge, once you reach Coleraine? Have you acquaintance there already?’

Before Andrew could warn me otherwise, I had begun to speak. ‘We are to lodge with Matthew Blackstone, master mason in the town.’

‘Ah, Blackstone, is it? He has built half of Coleraine and Derry City too, so they say. A man of means and influence. Now tell me …’

But the baker did not get to finish his question, for Andrew had stood up and hauled me up unceremoniously with him. With a curt, ‘Thank you for the food and drink,’ he took me out into the darkness of the bawn, the baker’s murmured Irish ‘Good night’ dying at the door.

‘That fellow asks too many questions,’ said Andrew, after we had clambered in the pitch dark up a stepladder into the stable loft.

As he laid himself on the straw, I pulled Sean’s sheepskin mantle round me, and did what I could with a blanket on the straw beneath my head. My body yearned for sleep, but my mind had unfinished business and rebelled against it. I felt myself to be the plaything of the malicious Irish gods: Alexander Seaton who had no place in the stable loft of an Ulster bawn, removed from everything I understood, a life in Scotland so far away now that it seemed almost to be the life of another. The image of the family I had been brought to and told ‘This is yours’ was unravelling in my mind, the strange and ragged threads of it losing their colour and eluding my confused grasp. Sean, Deirdre, Murchadh, my grandmother, Roisin – they seemed little more to me than players who already knew the end to a tale I was only beginning to listen to.

It was deep in the windless night that I heard a creak of wood below me. My bones were too cold to allow me the sound sleep that Andrew was in, for he had scarcely moved since he had first lain down. I lay still and listened as the horses shifted in their stalls: another movement, a rustle of straw, a heavier creak on the stable steps. I was rigid, trying to control the unnatural heaving of my chest. Slowly, I moved my foot, and gave the back of Andrew’s leg as hard a kick as I could manage in the silence. There was no response. I tried again: nothing. Nothing but the creak of a closer rung and the unmistakable sound of another human being breathing heavily. Only the merest suggestions of shapes made themselves known to my eye in the blackness of the loft, but at last I caught some slow movement from the direction of the steps, and the light brushing of straw across the floor. The form of Andrew beside me was kicked, then more closely inspected, and made no response. I had no weapon and readied myself to grab the foot of the night-time visitor when he kicked me. But no foot shot out, and I had no time to understand the sudden dancing light that made its way towards my neck, until the prick of the blade’s edge had found my throat.

‘Who are you?’ This in Irish.

I thought as quickly as I could as the knife played against my skin. ‘I am not – I do not …’ I stumbled to find the words in the Gaelic, the fear numbing my tongue.

Again in Irish. ‘Who are you? You are no Scot. You are of the O’Neill. Who are you?’ The baker leaned over me, his eyes only inches from mine, and I had no doubts that should I make a wrong move, I would be dead. I took the only route open to me.

‘I am Alexander Seaton, a Scot, son of Grainne FitzGarrett, grandson of Maeve O’Neill of Carrickfergus.’

The man sat back on his haunches and let the knife fall softly to the floor. ‘Well, well, well, by God!’ he said at last. ‘Grainne’s son? So the old besom lied after all.’

I could make out the knife now, lying a hand’s span away from me, but I dared not move. The fellow seemed to have forgotten my presence for the moment, as he took in what I had said. ‘Grainne’s son,’ he repeated. ‘Well, well, well. The good Lord has his reasons indeed.’ He struck flint expertly against his knife and lit a small candle he had brought from the folds of his tunic. In the ensuing light I saw that he was smiling.

I sat up, pulling up the mantle against the cold. ‘Did you know my mother?’ I said it in English, for that was the tongue in which he now spoke to me.

‘Oh yes, I knew your mother, although she could scarce have told you who I was, just another of her brother’s companions that would have wooed her if he could. If she had glanced my way but once, she would almost have driven me from my vocation.’

‘Your vocation?’ I said stupidly.

He laughed. ‘Yes, boy, my vocation.’ A strong hand was held out towards me. ‘Father Stephen Mac Cuarta of the order of St Francis, late of the Irish College in Louvain, and now of Bonamargy Friary in the county of Antrim.’

‘But why …?’ My mind still sleepy. I struggled to make sense of his words.

‘A long story for another day,’ he said, with a resolution that brooked no argument. ‘But now, tell me why you are here, instead of being at your grandfather’s funeral.’

Questions. Too many questions, as Andrew had said.

‘What have you done to my companion?’ I knew Andrew was not dead, thank God, for I could see his chest rise and fall in the pale light of the candle’s flame.

He held up his hand in a gesture of appeasement. ‘A sleeping draught, a little decoction in the mead. He will wake at dawn after the best sleep of his life and bless the very straw he lay down on, and no harm to him.’

I looked down on Andrew’s sleeping face, at the vague smile that played about his lips. The priest was right: I had never seen him so contented.

Father Stephen drew closer to me and his face became serious. ‘Tell me then, what are you doing here? Did Sean bring you? You should know that I am a friend to your family and have been forty years at least. I left Ireland with your uncle in the train of Tyrone, and swore to him that when I returned I would watch over his children’s interests. You must believe me in that. You are the very image of Phelim and of his son. I mean you no harm.’

The knife, whose blade sent small darts of light dancing and flitting on the timbers of the roof above me, assured me of that. If he had meant me harm, I would have been dead by now. I took the decision to trust him. ‘I was called to Ulster by my grandmother. She sent Sean to Scotland to find me. At my cousin Deirdre’s wedding, our family had been cursed by the poet who had been hired to honour them.’ He nodded at this, evidently familiar with this part of the tale at least. ‘The curse predicted a swift end to my grandmother’s line, but as no one but Maeve knew of my existence, I was not encompassed in it. An attempt was made on Sean’s life and my grandfather fell gravely ill. My grandmother believed that if she could reveal me to the poet then the curse would be lifted.’

‘And so you came to Ireland.’

‘With great reluctance, and after a deal of persuasion, yes, I came to Ireland.’

He looked directly at me, searching for something more. ‘And yet, on the day your grandfather is buried you are not in Carrickfergus, but journeying north, and not with Maeve, or Sean, or Deirdre even, but with a servant, and masquerading as what you are not. Something else has happened.’

And so I told him of the events of the wake, of Finn O’Rahilly and his renewed curse. His face grew more troubled as I went on, and darkened considerably when I repeated O’Rahilly’s words on the union with the Rose and the bastard child. He asked me to repeat what the poet had said of Murchadh O’Neill; the words seemed to afford him a certain grim satisfaction.

‘He will not have liked that. No, Murchadh will not have liked that. He thought that no one but the English noticed the care he has taken to worm his way into their favour. But go on.’

‘There is little more to tell,’ I said. ‘My grandmother is convinced of the power of this curse; I think my cousin Deirdre too is affected by it.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘That O’Rahilly has been paid to do this, and what threat comes to our family will be the deliberate policy of a human agency.’ To my surprise, the priest nodded. I was only just beginning to understand that one form of superstition does not of necessity encompass all others. ‘Maeve insisted I should travel to O’Rahilly and thus “break” the curse, but she would not permit Sean to travel with me, for fear of another attempt on his life. That is why Andrew Boyd is here instead.’

Father Stephen looked at the recumbent figure of my fellow Scot. ‘Do you trust him?’

The question had never till now entered my head. From my arrival in my grandmother’s house I had accepted Andrew’s place there as more valid and permanent than my own. ‘Yes,’ I said at last. ‘I trust him. A little more than he trusts you, I think.’

‘Then he will do well enough,’ he said. ‘But why do you go to Coleraine? O’Rahilly is not there.’

‘Sean suspects the Blackstones of some design to get hold of our grandfather’s business. I am to present myself there as him, and get what intelligence I can on the matter, which will be little enough, for I am no spy.’

The priest laughed heartily at this. ‘No, but Sean’s very walk proclaims him to be Sean O’Neill, of Ulster, and mindful of the censure of no one, and you walk with the same pride, which I think cannot sit well with your Calvinist countrymen. But you think, I would say, before you act, not afterwards. Am I right?’

‘Now I do. Yes.’

‘But tell me,’ he said, digressing. ‘You are truly from the northeast? You did not lie about that?’

‘No, I did not. I was brought up on the Moray Coast, and teach now in the Marischal College in Aberdeen.’

‘A dangerous work for you. And do you win minds for the faith? How does our Church fare in those parts? There are great hopes of your bishop and your university doctors. And the Jesuits are busy out in the country.’

I realised with a growing sense of apprehension that he did not understand. I glanced again at the knife: it was closer to me than it was to him – I could reach it first. ‘You have misunderstood,’ I said, edging my hand very slightly closer to the hilt. ‘I am an adherent of the Kirk of Scotland. I was never a Romanist in my life.’

He sat back, visibly deflated. ‘But your mother …’

‘My mother gave up her faith when she came to Scotland. I have never been brought up to anything other than the Kirk.’

He closed his eyes and, crossing himself, uttered a prayer in the Gaelic, my mother’s name passing his lips several times. The only phrase I could properly make out was the last one he said: ‘Dear God have mercy on her tortured soul.’

There was an uneasy silence between us for a moment. ‘It is late,’ said the priest eventually, getting heavily to his feet, ‘and you will need your rest and your wits about you for the days to come. Come to me in the morning for your breakfast; take your companion with you – you may tell him as much about me as you wish.’ And then he was gone, and his light with him, and I lay in the dark many long hours until the first stirrings of the dawn.