A Game of Sorrows

NINETEEN The Dawning

I did not hear the bolt of my cell drawn back, nor the door open. It was only when I felt the breath on my torn cheek and the voice in my ear that I woke with a start.

‘Lie still and keep your mouth shut until I tell you to speak.’

The visitor had brought no light with him, and his back blocked much of the meagre grey light coming through the grille, but I knew by his voice that it was Cormac O’Neill. And coming to from a deep sleep though I was, I understood enough not to disobey his order. I waited, and when he saw that I understood, he continued.

‘Where is Boyd?’

I had had no notion that the new-anointed rebel leader had an awareness even of Andrew’s existence, and I sought to win some time by this. ‘Who?’

He slapped me across the cheek and set the wound his father had made to bleeding again.

‘Do not play games with me. Andrew Boyd. I know you left Carrickfergus with him, and that you were travelling with him to Coleraine. Where is he?’

‘What is it to you?’

He raised his hand again, but this time I got my arm up in front of my face in time to stop his fist coming down on the broken flesh.

Slowly, he removed my arm from the front of my face. ‘You will answer me, Seaton, or by God you will wish your mother had never met your father. Where is Boyd?’

‘I do not know.’ It was the truth, almost. I knew where the priest had told me they were taking him, but I did not know if he was there now, and I could not think Cormac O’Neill sought him out of concern for his welfare.

He sat back on his haunches, and told me to sit up. I did so, and in the fine gauze of light that told me it must be daytime, he scrutinised my face. ‘There is something in your eyes that was not in his, and in his heart that is not in yours. But you have the same arrogance, by God. The old woman’s blood runs strong.’ He looked at me a little longer, as if to be absolutely certain that I was not Sean. Then he stood up. ‘Enough of him. You are now the matter in question. I know why you say you are in Ireland, and Maeve confirms it, so my father says; it sounds enough like her to be true. But why did you ride to Coleraine, and what is Andrew Boyd in your scheme?’

‘I have no scheme. I went to Coleraine because Sean had some suspicion that Deirdre’s husband’s family might be behind the curse on ours.’

He smiled slightly. ‘“Ours,” you say. I see you claim them as your own now.’

‘I have no other,’ I replied.

‘And what did you find amongst the Blackstones?’

‘That they are people of few graces who want their hands on my grandfather’s business, but I do not think they would know how to go about treating with Finn O’Rahilly, or have any faith in his powers.’

‘Not the slightest. As Sean well knew, and your grandmother too. You went to Coleraine for something else. What was it?’

‘I swear to you, before God who knows all, I know of no other reason for me being sent there.’

He began to pace the small cell, thinking. Then an idea evidently came to him. ‘Who did you meet with?’

‘I told you, the Blackstones, Deirdre’s …’

‘No, not the Blackstones,’ he said impatiently. ‘Who else? Did you meet with no one on your journey?’

I cast my mind back to the journey of only three days ago. ‘We stopped at a poor Scots inn on the road to Broughshane, a widow and her children, friends of …’ And then I regretted that I had not thought more carefully. Friends of Andrew Boyd, in whom Cormac was so interested, and victims of the brutal roving of Cormac’s brothers.

Cormac nodded his head slowly. ‘I know the place. Why did Boyd take you there?’

‘Because we needed food and our horses rest. And to give the woman some trade.’ I looked him straight in the eye. ‘They are not far from destitute: armed bands roam the country there and passing travellers keep on their way for fear of their lives; her oldest son and best support was slain by lawless thugs when he would not pay their blackmail.’

‘I know all of this,’ said Cormac, ‘and do not think I take any pride in it. Those responsible were punished. I am sorry for the woman’s troubles.’

‘Your sorrow does not make her sleep any the easier at night,’ I said.

‘It should. It has been seen to. The woman has been reassured and recompense made.’

‘Such recompense as can be, for the loss of a son.’

‘Many women in this land have lost husbands, sons, brothers, seen their children die at their breast for want of nourishment. They have been forced from their homes and the lands of their people to poor and wild places with little hope of sustenance. What recompense can be made has been made, and more if they need it. I have said it, and my word is not doubted.’

I believed him, and, in spite of all the circumstances of our meeting, I began to warm a little to Cormac O’Neill.

‘What happened when you were at this woman’s place?’

I shrugged. ‘She and her daughter served us some broth, the young boy saw to the horses, she and Andrew talked a little of family, we paid her and left. Our stop was brief, for Andrew was anxious to get on.’

Interest flickered in his eyes. ‘Get on for where? Did you aim at Coleraine in the one day?’

I shook my head. ‘We stopped the night at a bawn beyond Ballymena.’

‘Armstrong’s Bawn,’ he said, quietly, almost to himself. ‘And who did you meet with at Armstrong’s Bawn?’

‘No one.’ I hoped the meagre light might cover the lie on my face. I was to be disappointed.

‘You simply rested and took meat and drink. All you sought was bed and bread. Is this what I am to believe?’

‘Yes,’ I said, with some defiance.

‘And your bread, tell me, was it well baked? Good bread blessed by the baker?’

I said nothing.

‘You met with Stephen Mac Cuarta of the Franciscan order at Bonamargy, did you not?’

‘What of it? It was by chance.’ I was not sure now that I believed that myself.

‘I think not.’

So I told Cormac about the priest’s drugging of Andrew and Andrew’s distrust of him in return, about how the priest had come to me in the night because he had known nothing of me before he had set eyes on me that day, and this seemed to make him more inclined to believe my pleas of ignorance on our part.

‘And what did the priest tell you?’

I kept my recollections to Stephen’s reminiscences about Phelim, and my mother, and left out anything he had had to say about Sean or his secret marriage with Macha. I could not tell how far Cormac believed me. ‘While Boyd was drugged, and before he knew you were awake, did the priest search your belongings, take anything?’

‘No.’

‘And you had been given nothing, no note, to pass on to him?’

Again I said no.

‘Perhaps, then, you were the message yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I suspect we will find out before another night has passed. But tell me, where have you left Boyd?’

He read the cause of my hesitation.

‘I mean him no harm,’ he said. ‘I have no cause to love him, and some to fear him, but I give you my solemn word that I mean him no harm. I must – I must have some talk with him though. And I must have him brought here. I ask you again, where is he?’

I could not entirely believe that he meant Andrew no harm, or that Cormac O’Neill, anointed leader of a planned Irish rebellion in Ulster, feared the taciturn Scot who had been the companion of my troubles. ‘I cannot tell you that,’ I said, already bracing myself for another blow. None came, only words, low and earnest.

‘I ask you for the sake of your cousin Deirdre, although I would I did not have to. You have seen she suffers already, you know what she has suffered. The strands of her mind and her reason threaten to unravel, as your grandmother’s already have done. Grant her this one thing.’ He turned his face slightly away from me. ‘Grant it to me also.’ And then I understood what it was that Cormac O’Neill had to fear from Andrew Boyd.

I made my decision. ‘On our flight from Coleraine, we were met and aided by Brother Michael, Father Stephen’s young acolyte. Andrew was injured in a fall near Dunluce, and mauled by a hound from the Coleraine wolf-hunt. In the morning he was taken to Bonamargy to have his wounds attended to there.’

‘Will he live?’ he asked hesitantly.

‘If it is God’s will. I pray that it may be. He knew not where he was or who he was when last I saw him.’

‘Better he is in God’s hands than the friars’. And how did you find your way to Kilcrue?’

‘Stephen Mac Cuarta brought me there.’

He nodded. ‘Father Stephen. He has a habit of appearing, has he not? And the poet told you nothing?’

‘Nothing I could make any sense of,’ I said.

‘Perhaps that will be for the best.’ He was pensive a few moments and then strode towards the door. ‘Have no fear for your friend on my account, you have my word on that.’ He looked towards the grille and the signs of life beginning to stir in the main chamber after the night’s debauches. ‘Now I must go.’

I halted him at the door. ‘I want to see Deirdre’

He took care over his response. ‘It would do no good. I think the sight of you again would prove too much for her. She has been in a fever of dreams and hallucinations all through the night, and nothing the women can do will calm her.’

‘This since she saw me?’

He shook his head. ‘Since the night Sean died. She is almost catatonic when she wakes and like a woman possessed when she sleeps. The friars are with her now: they will be leaving soon for Bonamargy, to seek some compounds from their apothecary that might afford some relief to her mind and spirit.’ He glanced towards the grille again. ‘I will have food and drink brought to you.’

I was indeed hungry, and parched with thirst; nevertheless, my stomach revolted at the thought of food, for the place I was in was filthy, and the smells reaching me through the bars of the grille were noxious in the extreme: smoke, congealed fat, stale wine and human sweat, blood and, I suspected, other excretions, that had found little outlet save than to my miserable dungeon. I looked down at my hands, cracked and caked in grime, and wondered what I had come to. I sat down again in the corner furthest from the grille and any sharp eyes in the hall, and pulled the old priest’s robe as tightly as I could around myself, in a desperate yet futile attempt to stave off the cold that now permeated every part of me.

Some time later the bolt to my prison was again drawn up, and a curt ‘On your feet, Seaton,’ growled by Padraig.

I did as I was bid, smarting a little at the extra light that now flooded into the room. Padraig had stood back to make room for the woman carrying a tray of food and drink into my cell. She had to stoop a little as she came through the door, but when she lifted her head again I saw that it was Roisin. Some surprise, or recognition, must have shown on my face, for she coloured a little when she noticed it. I mumbled some apology for the condition she found me in.

She kept her eyes lowered and spoke in softly lilting but perfect English. ‘Your condition is not of your own making, and necessitates no apology. A visitor should be better treated in our country.’

Her brother responded to her, low and clear, in the Gaelic, and I understood that his every word was intended for me. ‘If that visitor has come to our home only to betray us, he is deserving of no hospitality. Your heart is too soft, Roisin, and you no judge of men. Sean …’

But he got no further; his sister had spun round, her eyes blazing. ‘Do not presume to talk to me of Sean. Never!’

He spread his hands out in supplication towards her. ‘Roisin, I …’

‘I know it, Padraig; I know it. But just leave me now.’

Before doing so, he took the time to address me. ‘Do not think to try anything, Seaton: you would be dead before you could ever lay a finger on her.’

I was left alone with Roisin and more conscious now than ever of the disarray of my appearance. She had laid down the food and drink on the floor, and it took all my strength not to drop to my knees in front of her and tear at the food with my filthy hands, but she had also brought a bowl of cold stream water and a cleaning cloth. I plunged my hands instead into the icy water with the intention of washing them. She drew in a slight breath and said, ‘No!’ I stopped and looked at her, no idea what the matter was.

‘Not your hands, not yet,’ she said.

I was still dumbfounded as she took a cloth and dipped it into the water. She came closer to me and slowly lifted the rag towards my face. She was tall, taller than I had realised, and her eyes as she looked up into my face came near to the level of my own. Her mouth parted slightly, and she said, ‘It is for your wound; first we must clean your wound.’

I stood still, afraid to move, but struggling to control my breathing as she slowly brought the cold wet cloth to my cheek and gently began to dab at the wound her father and brother had made there. I flinched as the movement of the cloth under her fingers caught the edge of the tear and stung me deep. She paused a moment and then returned, more gently and more closely, to her work.

When at last she had finished, I found my voice. ‘I am sorry that …’

I stopped, not knowing how to continue.

She looked at me directly. ‘That what?’

‘That I am not Sean.’

Again her lips parted slightly, and then she closed her mouth and her eyes. When she opened them I could see tears hovering on her lashes. ‘Sean did not want me anyway.’ And then she was gone, leaving me wishing I had never spoken at all.

My ears had accustomed themselves to the rhythms of movement of Dun-a-Mallaght, and I realised it must be evening time when Stephen and Michael finally returned from the friary.

‘So, Murchadh, we have brought the medicine for the girl.’

‘You were long enough about it. She could have been to the Devil in this time.’

‘The preparation had to be made up. The simples were ready, but the decoctions take time; there is little room for error in their preparation.’

Stephen was permitted to go, with Cormac and Padraig in attendance, to administer the medicines to my cousin. Roisin, I assumed, was already with her. As they left, I saw the priest glance towards my grille and Michael, following his eyes, do the same.

When at length they returned, Cormac’s face was ashen, and even in the dim and flickering yellow light, I could see the darkened circles beneath his eyes.

‘How fares the girl?’ asked our host and jailer.

‘She is a little more settled, but she is still fevered, and easily frightened. It is not good having too many in the room with her,’ answered Stephen

‘She cannot be left alone.’

‘No, but Roisin is all that is needed – she has knowledge enough already, and as for the rest, I have shown her what to do. Have your men stand guard outside her door by all means, but it is not seemly that they should be in her chamber, and they disturb the balance of her mind.’

Murchadh looked to Cormac, who readily assented, and went to clear the guards out of Deirdre’s room. The glance between Michael and Stephen made me uneasy.

‘And now,’ said Stephen, ‘that goodly business attended to, my young friend and I should no longer trespass on your hospitality, and indeed the offices at the friary require our attention …’ His face was breaking into a grin, his eyes dancing.

‘But surely you would not think to leave us so soon,’ said his host.

‘Well,’ said Stephen, rubbing his hands and inclining his head in the direction of the spit, where a hog had been several hours turning, ‘it is a cold night for all that, and Michael and I haven’t had a morsel since the morning; we will have long missed our poor supper at the friary by now.’

Michael attempted a jovial smile in agreement, but he was not so practised in deception as was the older brother, and the nervous grin of a boy was all he could offer. This seemed to please Murchadh even more.

‘Then indeed you will stay. Let it never be said that Murchadh O’Neill sent servants of our Holy Mother Church out into a cold night, with dry throats and empty bellies.’

Music had started up again, and all around, men were bringing out dice and dealing cards. The pig on the spit surrendered at last to the appetites of Murchadh’s followers, and the noise of people forgetting their troubles and their coming trials grew to such a pitch that I wondered that Deirdre or any human creature could sleep through it.

I watched the priests eat and drink, Michael initially with some hesitation and then with less caution; Stephen heartily. Michael was very soon drunk, and found himself assailed by the charms of a pretty young serving girl. The harper had been called for, and a poet also – no Finn O’Rahilly this, but an aged and revered fellow who had known better days for his patrons and caste – who having lamented the passing of the great days of the O’Neills, and looked forward to their resurrection under Cormac, was applauded and dismissed. A pipe was taken up, and then another. They were joined by a flute, the sound strange and discordant at first to my ears, and then the bodhran came, soon followed by the bones. If ever there was heathen music, music of another age, I was hearing it now. The speed of the playing increased, the dexterity of the players incredible. It was not possible that a man should be clear in his mind with such music. I felt my foot beat on the hard earth, my body move in time to the building rhythm and power of the sound that filled every part of my cell and seeped into my every sinew. I poured the last draught of wine from the jug Roisin had left me, but that did nothing to clear my thoughts or form in me any good resolve. I should have known that it couldn’t.

If I was set on a dangerous path, few in the chamber were far behind me. Those who were not at dice or cards flew in pairs and sixes and eights around those who were. Murchadh himself made the lustiest dancer of all, young girls throughout the hall trying to hide their terror in affectation of delight. Only one person in the place seemed cut off from the exhilaration, the incipient danger, the sense of approaching abandon: Cormac sat alone on his dais, brooding, with the look of one who watches but does not see what he watches. As his father caught a young girl and buried his face in her torn bodice, Cormac drained his cup and, his face set in resolve, left his place and strode towards a doorway at the other side of the chamber, and a corridor I could not see.

It was a few moments later that I saw Roisin: she was standing, hesitantly, with her back to the door Cormac had disappeared through. Her pallor and stillness called to me through the orgy of movement, of reddened faces and sweating bodies that separated us, and it seemed through the smoke and the movement, the daemonic bacchanal of the music, that she looked directly at me. I felt the heat of the place pass through me, and shut my eyes against the knowledge of what I wanted, of what I was. But I did not step back; I did not lay myself down on the cold, bare earth as I should have done. I opened my eyes and continued to look on her.

She was standing in a shaft of light. Her pale blonde hair fell loose down her back and over her deep blue velvet gown. At her neck she wore a single white pearl, pearls hung also in diamond-encrusted drops at her ears. Everything about her was clean, pure. A harper was called to the space by her; a certain Diarmuid was called for, and the hall fell silent as the harper began to pluck at his strings and the young man opened his mouth in a lament I knew well, for my mother had often sung it to me, a song of longing and promise for her homeland: Roisin Dubh, Dark Rosaleen. A lover promised help would come from across the sea to his abandoned virgin bride; help from the Pope, wine from Spain; that the woe and pain and sadness of the dark Rosaleen would soon be over, every step homewards of the unresting lover was taken that his love would be lifted again to her sovereign throne. The singer’s voice was fine, the object of his performance filled with grace, but she was no Roisin Dubh, no Dark Rosaleen, for that, I knew, was Ireland herself. The final verse had always frightened me:

The complete silence that followed the rendition spoke every hope and fear of the men who might soon be marching with their guns and their cries through those glens, whose blood might soon run into the rivers of Ulster. And then, slowly, Stephen began to clap, and Michael, and Murchadh himself, until the whole chamber shook with the noise of it, and I thought the reverberations would bring the earthen roof crashing down upon us. Murchadh threw coins of gold to the singer and the harper, and caught his daughter in a tight embrace, before turning her and showing her, with pride, to his men. ‘May the women of Ulster carry the hope of Ireland in their wombs!’

Released at last by her father, Roisin had begun to move away a little, but her father stopped her and said something for only her to hear. At first he had been laughing, and she affected a smile, but then she shook her head and his laughter stopped. He took her by the shoulders and held her firm and spoke to her insistently. She mouthed something to him, three or four times, slowly, with real distress in her eyes, but he just spoke at her all the harder. All around this dumb show, the fever and pace of music never let up, but they might have been in a glass box for all that reached them. I looked over to where Father Stephen stood, and saw he had dropped his mask of joviality and begun to move closer towards them, but the crowd got in his way. He assumed again the mantle of every man’s friend, but now and then he cast a glance of unease in the direction of Roisin and her father until the young woman nodded in submission to Murchadh and disappeared through the door from which she had emerged.

It was not very much later that the door of my cell opened, and two of Murchadh’s men came in. Only one of them spoke, and he in a gruff and thick Irish tongue, but I understood that I was to leave this place and go with them. Again my hands were tied. The corridor I was led down was just as dank and narrow as the place I had come from, but better lit. I counted three doorways as we passed, and then, at the end, we stopped outside a fourth. My leading captor opened it and I soon found myself in another hollowed-out earthen room, with wooden supports to the roof and a beaten floor, but this one had torches burning on the walls to either side, and a small fire in the middle. Towards the rear of the room were rushes laid on the floor, such as I knew the Irish preferred to sleep on. There was a pail of clean water by the door, and a clean robe hanging from a wooden peg beside it. A tray bearing oat bread, cheese and wine had been set down over by the rush bedding. I looked to my two guards for explanation but was given none. They untied my hands and left without a word to me, only pausing to indicate the water and the robe and taking care, though, to bolt the door behind them.

I stood alone in the silence, letting my eyes grow used to the greater light. Though the music reached even here, there was no grille in wall or door. I had found myself in a place of luxury in comparison with my late holding-place, but I felt a great loneliness, more cut off now than ever from any human contact. I was sickened of this place and these people. I longed for the cold, sharp certainties of my life – the grey stone college, my students, the sermon. I longed also for the warm promise of Sarah. I saw how these people took what they wanted, and I cursed the two years I had let waste. Two years when I had scarcely touched her. I longed for the clean cool sheets of my college bed, a world away from a pallet of straw upon the bare earth.

Slowly, I removed my priest’s robe, the coarse woollen garment that I had begun to become accustomed to. I took the rag that was there and began to wash myself, finding something purifying in the cold, clean water. The garment hanging by the door was of a much finer stuff than that I had discarded, a short blue tunic of the finest linen, bound at the waist by a cord of white silk. The trousers – for that was what those garments were, so favoured by the Irish rather than our hose, gave me a little greater difficulty, but soon I was fully attired again, arrayed fit to be a companion for Cormac O’Neill himself, and with my beard grown, and my hair long and lanky, none would have taken me for any other than the high-born Irishman I might have been. Of the low-born Scottish craftsman’s son who was a teacher of philosophy in a reformed northern university, there was not the least remnant.

I sat cross-legged on the ground by the fire and began to eat, and drink. The wine was good, warmed and spiced, and much better than the vinegar I had earlier been given. When I had had my fill I let warmth and calmness course through me, and the music pass over me. I did not sleep, but lay as in a dream. I tried to push away the image that part of me was reaching out for. I tried to picture Sarah in my mind, but Sarah would not come to me here. Her place was somewhere warm, comfortable, familiar, not somewhere dark, strange, cold. Not here. Struggle though I did to bring her face before my eyes, I could not find her here. Her hair was not the pale, almost white blonde that came into my vision. I tried to pray, but prayer would not come, so I took more of the deep red wine that had been set out for me and willed myself to sleep.

The fire had sunk to embers and the candles burned far down when I heard Roisin softly enter the room. She hesitated, seeing me, as she thought, sleeping, and knelt quietly down by the round hearth and laid another turf of peat upon it. She was watching me, I knew, and I opened my eyes fully, that she might not be deceived. She swallowed, looked away, then back again. I sat up and held my hand out towards her. She took it and let me draw her closer, and laid her head in my lap. As I stroked the silken hair away from her face I felt the slight moisture of the tears on her cheek. My hand moved over her brow, down the side of her face. There was an anger in me that I could scarcely master: anger at Sean, whom I had loved, and she had loved, and who had not loved her; anger at her father, who had sent her here to me, who saw only Maeve O’Neill’s grandson, and cared not which one it was, nor if his daughter did either; anger at myself for the weakness that was in me, the lack of constancy, the sin I knew I would succumb to.

‘Why have they sent you?’ I asked eventually.

She did not lift her head, ‘It is only my father; Cormac does not know that I am here.’

‘This is some policy of your father’s alone?’

She raised her head and I brought her up closer, in to my chest. ‘I think so, I think he is no readier to accept that Cormac should lead this rebellion than he was that Sean should.’

‘Do you think your father killed Sean? Had him killed?’

‘He would not have dared. Sean was his best hope of acceptance by the Irish outside our own kin. If I had married Sean, and produced a child, then my father could have taken the fosterage: he would have been untouchable.’

‘But now with Cormac …?’

‘Cormac is his own man. He has always been his own man. Since his youngest boyhood he has burned with shame at my father’s pandering to the English while others who would not succumb to their blandishments were abandoned to their fates. My father will never control Cormac; he will be as an old stallion put out to grass, not fit for the race or the hunt or the siring any more. My father will not accept living like that; there will be a reckoning between him and Cormac, whether before or after the rising, I do not know.’

‘But none of that explains why you are here.’

‘I am here because it is the time of my fertility. The women keep an eye on these matters, and they tell my father.’

‘And he has sent you here …’

She looked away. ‘Any child born of this night he would pass off as Sean’s: it would have a right to the patrimony. Or even as your own – by the brehon laws, it would be as if I had married Sean himself.’

‘Have you … were you ever with Sean?’

‘I have never been with any man.’

‘Will they know? If you have lain with me or not?’

She shook her head. ‘They will not force me to that indignity.’

‘Then before you leave – if you stay till morning – we could cut my wound once more – let some of the blood drop upon your dress …’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is what we could do.’

I spread out the rushes on the floor a little more, and took down the priest’s robe again, to be a cover over us – it was coarse, but warm. She laid herself down, her head on my chest, as I held her close in the near-darkness, and wished her goodnight. Her breathing was even, but I knew she was not asleep. A tear ran down her cheek and I felt the wetness of it on my bare chest, where my robe had begun to come loose. I brushed her cheek and kissed her head again. She moved slightly and looked up at me. I lowered my head and kissed her again, gently, on the mouth. She responded and I did it again, less gently this time, pushing the crucifix at my neck to the side, desire taking over my senses. I knew it was wrong, and I knew it was not me that she wanted, but I had not been with a woman in three years, and in the darkness of that God-forsaken place, I submitted to her heartbroken passion and to my every carnal desire.