A Game of Sorrows

TWENTY-EIGHT The Curse’s Circle

‘Do not even consider walking through that door. I will have it bolted from the outside if you do not give me your word that you will stay in here.’

It was the following morning, and Andrew had found me standing at the end of my bed and with intent to go further. A night’s rest in sheets rather than straw had restored enough of my strength that I could walk a few steps unsupported without fear of falling. The pain from my wound was sharper, more insistent now though. Deirdre had done what she could, but it was clear some sort of infection was setting in. Remembering one of Jaffray’s methods, when all other means were lacking, I had asked him last night for a little whisky to clean the wound, but he had thought I was in jest, and had in a similar vein admonished me that I had been too much amongst my cousin’s associates and that abstinence from vice would do for me what drink and other things could not. I had had neither the energy nor the wit to explain to him properly, and I was paying for it now. I tugged at the bandages.

‘I think it has become infected.’

He lifted the dressing carefully, and this time it was he who winced when he saw what lay beneath. ‘I will send for the doctor.’

‘What about my grandmother? She will know I am here.’

‘Word of Margaret’s death and her guilt in Sean’s murder is all around the town. Your grandmother was up much of the night, busied in commending that girl’s soul to all the punishments of the damned. She is not yet ready to acknowledge your innocence, but she will. You are safe here now.’

The doctor arrived within the hour, and did little more than raise his eyebrows when told the cause of my wound. ‘It is in the blood, it would seem. I treated your cousin, and your uncle before him, for woundings of this nature on more than one occasion. You will be left with a scar that will more than match that on your forehead. Do not tell me that a young girl gave you that too?’

It took me a moment to understand what he was talking about.

‘No, not a young girl. A powerfully-built man with a rock in his hand and an intention to embed it in my skull gifted me that,’ I said, rubbing at the deep gouge in my temple carved out by the provost of Banff, over two years ago.

‘Do you O’Neills never consider the peaceful resolution of disputes?’ he asked, as he steadied his hand to thread the needle that would soon be drawing together the skin at the gash in my neck.

I attempted a smile. ‘I did not know I was an O’Neill, then.’

Later, as darkness was drawing in, Andrew came again to see me, bringing with him a bowl of broth and some bread, ‘and the eager wishes of Deirdre and Macha to see you. Your grandmother will not hear of it. Macha she will not let out of her sight, and she holds Deirdre in scarcely less contempt than she does you.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘She blames her for the death of Cormac.’

‘But that is ridiculous. How could she …?’

‘However ridiculous, Deirdre has joined her in the certainty of her own guilt. I have tried to reason with her but she will have none of it. She says if she had but done what Maeve wanted her to do in the first place, none of this would have happened.’

‘She cannot believe that is true.’

‘More than that, she cries out about the curse, that it is her fault, that she has brought it down upon us.’

‘Andrew, that is madness.’

‘I know it is madness, but she is beyond telling. I begin to fear it might truly send her mad. She says that her only consolation is that she has seen Maeve MacQuillan, and must surely join Sean and Cormac soon.’

‘And my grandmother?’

‘She stokes the fire of her delusions, goads her on, with accusation after accusation.’

She was engulfed in a storm, this cousin, this girl whom I had sworn to Sean and to Cormac that I would protect, and I did not know how to get her to safety; it seemed that here there was no way out for her, no possibility of shelter.

‘What can we do, Andrew?’

‘We? There is nothing we can do until we know for certain that she will allow it to be done.’

A loud banging on the outer door beneath us interrupted our conversation. Andrew ran to look out over the machicolation and I attempted to hobble after him.

‘It is the Blackstones; I must alert them at the castle,’ he said, before rushing down the stairs.

I saw that he was right. Deirdre’s husband Edward was there, and his father Matthew with him. They had in attendance a rabble of men – not the hunting party that had pursued us to Dunluce, but an ill-mounted assortment of what I thought must be brickmakers, builders, tenants, all men in Matthew Blackstone’s pay with little option but to do his bidding. The genial Englishman at whose table Andrew and I had dined a few nights ago was gone, his place taken by an enraged, blustering bull of a man. His own son looked to be in fear of him.

‘Let us in, you conniving whore, or I will break these doors down.’

A servant’s voice replied. ‘You will gain no entrance here. Go back where you came from, if you value your liberty.’

‘Liberty? I will have no liberty; your man Boyd has seen to that with his creeping about, setting spies amongst my own men, when the greatest culprit, the greatest traitor to the king, was reared within these walls by that bog-nurtured old bitch you take your coin from.’ He turned to his men. ‘Break it down.’ And the rabble set to with a pole they had brought with them, which they began to ram with increasing force against the door.

I left my position at the window and made my way to the stairway down to the balcony above my grandmother’s great hall. I reached the bottom just as two doors burst open – the one on the ground floor, having finally succumbed with a sickening crack and splintering of wood to the Englishmen’s blows; and the other, the small door that I knew led to my cousin Deirdre’s chamber. She appeared, pale and insubstantial, like a ghost of herself, in the doorway. I held up a hand to stop her, and taking advantage of the noise and confusion below, crossed the balcony as quickly as I could to where she stood. I did not know if she had thoughts of going down to her husband, but I could not see – in her father-in-law’s frame of mind – that any good would come of that. I took her by the arm, and began to lead her back towards the safe hiding place of Andrew Boyd’s chamber.

We had not covered half the distance, at my halting pace, before the intruders had made their way into the house and up to the hall where my grandmother, attended only by her steward, was waiting for them. There was no sign of Eachan; he would be with Macha, protecting Sean’s unborn child. I pulled Deirdre with me behind the pillar from where I had watched my grandfather’s wake. Gone were the groaning tables, the musicians, the servants and mourners. Gone too were Sean, Cormac – Murchadh also by now, perhaps. There was only a defiant old woman, with her steward, standing in her empty hall, the glories of the past hung in faded colours all around her.

She was the first to speak, her voice careful, soft. ‘So, Englishman, you come uninvited to my house. You must forgive my want of hospitality: I had not looked for visitors at this hour.’

‘Your hospitality be damned. I will have what I am owed.’

‘You are owed nothing. Murchadh O’Neill and his son paid you every penny that was agreed for what arms you supplied to them. And you will see not a penny more from my husband’s coffers.’

‘I do not talk of money, woman.’

She raised an eyebrow, mocking even now. ‘But I have heard you speak of little else. I had not known you to concern yourself with other matters.’

This was too much for him, and the rage he had been trying to master exploded out of him. ‘My son, you murderous bitch. My son!’

Although the steward had moved forward a little, to stand in front of my grandmother, she herself had not so much as blinked.

‘I see your son beside you there,’ she said. ‘Will one lumbering oaf not do you as well as another?’

Edward Blackstone restrained his father. ‘My brother Henry was murdered by Andrew Boyd and by your own grandson, the Scot, who masqueraded in our house in the guise of your other and took my mother’s hospitality.’

This time a look of astonishment. ‘Your mother’s hospitality? I congratulate him most heartily on finding it; I had not thought him so resourceful. As to the question of your brother’s dispatch, I am sorry to say that neither my grandson nor Andrew Boyd can claim the credit in that. Another more honourable has cleared their names of that deed.’

Matthew Blackstone had again to be restrained, while all courage and intent seemed to be draining from his son. The younger man’s shoulders sank, and his voice dropped.

‘Where is Deirdre? Where is my wife?’

This time the old woman actually laughed. ‘A fine specimen of a man, who does not even know where his wife is. Little wonder she went so easily to a servant’s bed.’

I glanced at my cousin, but she seemed to be observing the exchange as a conversation between strangers.

‘I want you to tell me where my wife is. I must know she is safe.’

‘Oh, she is safe enough,’ said my grandmother, unconcernedly. ‘I have little use for her now, and she has turned her back on those she should have served. You may take her as you wish.’

The steward glanced swiftly up to our watching place, and then towards the door to the machicolation. I put my arm more firmly around my cousin and began to move her away from the balustrade and towards the door. I heard Blackstone order his people to search the house, and the steward protest to no avail. I had only just pulled the door shut behind us when I heard the footsteps of two or three men, having taken the stairs, start to clatter on to the balcony. I tried to hurry Deirdre, but she was in little haste herself and my weakness made our progress slow. I turned halfway up the steps and saw, to my horror, the doorknob turn. I thought it was over for us both, but at that very moment a furious shouting came from out in the yard and the lower floors of the house as the castle guard stormed through the already broken door and demanded the submission of Matthew Blackstone and all who were with him. I recovered my wits quickly, and almost dragged Deirdre up the remaining steps and along the corridor to the tiny room where I thought we might be safe awhile.

Once I had her inside, I bolted the door and pulled Andrew’s heavy chest across it before slumping down on the floor to try to catch my breath. Deirdre said nothing for a moment, looking in some astonishment at me.

‘Where is he, Alexander?’

‘He went to alert the men at the castle. I think he will be here soon; he is probably already in the house.’

‘My father-in-law wants to kill him.’

‘I know that.’

‘My husband too, for other reasons. But they will not. Andrew is a better man than either of them.’

‘Yes.’

She sat down on the bed, smoothing out the linen with her hand.

‘He is a better man than my grandmother would ever acknowledge.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Will he have me now, do you think?’

‘I cannot answer for him, Deirdre, but I know he loves you.’

‘Oh, he always loved me,’ she said. ‘I knew that. I always knew it. And I him, but other things mattered more, then.’

I waited, but she appeared to think no further explanation necessary. After a while, she became aware of my silence.

‘I often thought of your mother, you know, when I was growing up.’ Her face brightened. ‘They tell me I look like her.’

I smiled. ‘You do.’

‘I used to think of her, picture her, lying with her dead love at the bottom of the sea, her hair entangled in seaweeds and a smile of perfect peace on her face. I envied her her freedom.’

‘Her life was not as you thought,’ I said.

She stood by the small table at the end of Andrew’s bed, and started to examine the pieces on the chessboard there. She fingered the white queen awhile, picked her up, looked at her and set her down again somewhere else on the board, without giving much consideration to where she had positioned her. She turned her attention then to the black pieces, picked up a knight, put him down in his place again, and then moved the other. She carried on in this way, touching the pieces, considering them as objects, and then moving them in a way that had some logic in it that was clear to her, but unfathomable to me.

‘Did Sean ever try to get you to play Fidchell?’ she said, after some time, when it looked impossible that the white queen should survive a move longer.

‘No, I have never heard of it.’

‘A pity,’ she said, ‘but perhaps not. It was a game of the ancients. No one really knows how to play it now. But Sean wanted to know and Maeve had a board and set made for him, from as much information as could be gleaned from the old stories. It was beautiful, the board a pale wood inlaid with markings of gold, the pieces a white stone carved by the finest craftsmen. We knew very little of the rules, only some idea that the king should claim and keep his throne, and that to win at Fidchell, you had to play very well. Sean studied all the stories, and made up his own rules. He tried to teach them to me, but I could never understand it, and I always lost.’

The white queen was now impossibly compromised and had nowhere to go. Deirdre had entirely abandoned any attempt at protecting either king. She studied the board a moment and then knocked the pieces over, one by one. ‘I was never any good at games. I should have remembered that.’ She held up one of the white knights. ‘I should have married Cormac, as she wanted me to – God knows, many a woman would dream of such a man, but I would not enmesh myself further with the O’Neills. And then he was too good for me and he would not see it. And now I have brought death to him years before it should have come.’

‘Cormac’s death is not your fault, Deirdre. You cannot blame yourself for all that has happened.’

‘Can I not? I have made many mistakes, believed that many things could be that I have learned could never have been. I didn’t even understand my own brother.’

‘He loved you dearly.’

‘And I him, but I did not understand him. I could scarcely believe it when I realised that he would fall in with Maeve’s plans, with Murchadh’s, that he would marry Roisin and throw it all at my grandmother’s feet; everything my grandfather had worked for, his wealth and our name, to be squandered in a cause that was long lost.’ She looked away. ‘I could not believe he would not listen to me. So I determined to set myself at the furthest extreme from their world that I knew. I had tried to get away from Maeve before; I went once, you know, to our grandfather’s people in the Pale, but they would not have me. So I married the son of a wealthy English planter.’ She laughed. ‘What an insult to Cormac, to Andrew too, to have married such a man. I would have done anything to stop Maeve, but it made no difference, and still Sean would not listen to me. And now my grandfather is dead, and Sean is dead, and Cormac is dead. The poet, too, is dead.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I was never any good at games. And you have been brought here, where I know you do not wish to be, because of me.’

‘I came here because Sean asked me to come. I came to help lift the curse.’

‘The curse cannot be lifted. He tried to tell me that, and I only laughed at him. But now I know it and it is too late.’

‘Who told you, Deirdre?’ I reached out to take her hands in my own. ‘Who told you?’

‘He told me himself, of course,’ she said, her eyes shining with a strange brilliance.

At that moment there was a thud against the door and an oath that surprised me, for I had rarely known Andrew lose control of his tongue.

‘Alexander? Alexander!’ he shouted. ‘Alexander, are you there? Where is Deirdre? Let me in before I break the door down.’

I got up and put all my strength against the side of the chest, which had moved more easily in one direction than it would in the other. Another thud threatened injury only to the attacker. ‘Andrew, for the love of God!’

Eventually, I had the thing shifted and managed to unbolt the door. He almost fell through it.

‘Why did you not answer me?’

‘I did,’ I croaked, pointing at my own neck. ‘You were making too much noise yourself to hear me.’

He saw past me then to Deirdre, and that she was safe, and without ceremony took her tight into his arms.

‘You came back for me.’

‘I will not leave you, Deirdre. You will stay with me now, and I will not leave you.’

To my astonishment, Sir James Shaw was through the door behind him.

‘The men from Coleraine have all been taken to the castle. Their hired thugs will be released before long, I am sure – the constable has not the room nor the inclination to hold them – but Matthew Blackstone and his son will be in the Tower before the month is out. They will be shown no mercy for their treachery in selling arms to rebels against the king.’

‘What about his wife and daughters?’ I asked.

‘He is no fool – he would not have told them what he was about, and they will fare the better for it. Unless it be found that they colluded in his business, they will be left in peace.’

‘To fend for themselves,’ I said. ‘And what about Deirdre?’

He looked from me to Andrew and and back to me. ‘Your cousin cannot be assured of safety here. She has too many ties to too many people who have been involved in plotting against the king. Your grandmother will not lift a finger to help her.’ He spoke now to Deirdre herself. ‘I think you must leave Ireland, and as soon as possible.’

A shout from one of his men below called him away, and a moment later only his words remained where he had been.

‘Leave Ireland?’ she said, as if the thought had never before occurred to her. ‘But where could I go?’

The words were out of my mouth before I knew I had thought them. ‘To Scotland, with me.’

She shook her head. ‘I will not leave Andrew again. He is all there is left, he and my brother’s child.’

‘I am coming too,’ he said. ‘There is a boat leaving for Ayr tomorrow, at five o’clock in the evening. I have this afternoon purchased passage for all three of us. Alexander can return home and you and I, Deirdre – we can begin life anew, away from here.’

She smiled. ‘Is it possible? Is it really possible?’

‘It is possible. There is nothing for us here any more. I am sickened of this country. I have money for land and for trade. We can buy our way into some town …’

‘I have friends in Aberdeen who can help you,’ I said, picturing already the friendship that I knew would form between Andrew and William Cargill, the bond of sisterhood between Deirdre and Sarah, the healing there would be.

‘Truly, you can help us?’ said Andrew.

‘I have a friend who is a lawyer, well thought of in Aberdeen. The town and the countryside around are full of those looking for someone with money to invest. Even a small amount of capital is welcomed. And your experience in my grandfather’s business would help you to similar work soon enough, if you needed it. I am sure of it.’

‘It is so far away,’ said Deirdre.

‘A world away,’ I said. ‘From rebellions, and kindreds, and feuding, and poets and curses. A world away from our grandmother and from here.’

‘Where we might start again, where we might live our lives as others live them.’

‘Yes,’ said Andrew gently. ‘As others live them.’

‘But the child,’ she said.

We looked, uncomprehending, at each other, and then at her. I think Andrew was in some fears that she carried Edward Blackstone’s child, or even Cormac’s.

‘Sean’s child,’ she said.

‘We cannot take Sean’s child. It is yet to be born, and we must leave for Scotland tomorrow. I do not know how much longer you will be safe here. And besides,’ he took her hand tenderly, ‘it is Macha’s child, too, and she will never leave Ireland.’

‘But who will protect him?’ She looked frightened now, her eyes darting from one to the other of us.

‘Macha is stronger than you think. And Eachan …’

‘My brother had Eachan, and now he is dead. Besides, Eachan can do nothing against my grandmother. We must get the child away from her. We must protect it from her. She will poison his life as she did my father’s, Sean’s, mine. She will fill his head with nothing but dreams of the O’Neills, of the old Ireland, of leading rebellion. She will live out her last days through him.’

There was nothing I could say against this. I knew she was right.

‘We cannot take him from his mother, Deirdre, and his mother will never leave here; I am not sure that her dreams are so different from Maeve’s anyhow. She loved Sean for what he was, but for all he planned to do also.’

‘Then she should not have him either.’

‘Deirdre …’

‘She should not, she should not.’ She was beating her hands against Andrew’s chest as she wept.

Deirdre’s outburst had exhausted her, and we laid her down on Andrew’s bed to sleep. He went below, and returned with the news that Maeve believed Deirdre to have gone to the castle with Sir James, where she assumed I would be also. She was too taken up with the imminent birth of her great-grandchild to give much thought to either of us. Macha was now in what had been my grandfather’s room, awaiting her childbed, with Eachan in constant attendance, swearing death on almost any who came near her. Still traversing a dark valley of grief for Sean, his devotion was channelled now to the protection of his dead master’s wife and child. Once born, there would have been no hope of spiriting the child away from its mother, even had Andrew or myself had the slightest desire to do so. Neither of us did. We agreed that Deirdre must be persuaded to come away without him.

I lay down on the bed across from my cousin and watched her sleep, counting with every breath the moments passing until we could leave this place on tomorrow’s tide. She had spoken of my mother, but the life she was fleeing to would not be as my mother’s had been; my father had been a good man, a decent man, but he had not had the vision, or indeed the means, of Andrew Boyd. Deirdre would not have the endless work to do that had been my mother’s lot, would not grow to resent her husband‘s lack of learning, his satisfaction with his position in the world, as my mother had done. It would be a different life, a different future for them. Andrew, again condemned to a pallet of straw while I slept on feathers, laid himself down on the floor of his own room and was soon asleep.

These two, at least, would escape Finn O’Rahilly’s curse. But would I, who had not been encompassed by it? A fear was growing within me that it had already reached out, beyond these shores, to the place I had come from, the place I wished to return to, and begun to poison everything there for me. It had brought me here, that curse, entangled me in the lives of those it damned, and I could not escape untarnished. It had drawn back veils I had not known were there and shown almost everyone I had come to know in Ulster to be something other than I had supposed them to be. And yet I was still no closer to discovering who had hired the lips of Finn O’Rahilly to unleash those words in the first place. I fell asleep with the image of the poet in my mind.

I would have slept until dawn, had not the sounds of a living nightmare pierced my consciousness somewhere in the darkest hours of the night. It was a woman screaming, a scream of such terror and agony as I had never heard from a human throat before. I fumbled for flint and lit the candle as I tried to get out of bed. Deirdre’s place was empty: she was nowhere in the room. Andrew was already on his feet.

‘In God’s name, Alexander, what is that?’

‘I don’t know. She is gone.’

He looked now at the empty bed, grabbed the candle from me and was out of the door within seconds. I had not the strength to follow him at speed and could only fumble my way along the darkened corridor until a crack of light showed me the door to the stairs. The screaming continued, but through it, Cormac O’Neill’s voice came to me again, as he had tried to warn me of pursuing the curse, ‘… may think on his words if you must, but you will call down upon yourself whatever griefs follow.’ And those griefs were calling in my ears, ringing in them now. When I had asked him, Finn O’Rahilly had told me that no one else had come to see him about the blessing that became a curse – no one but Deirdre and my grandmother – and he had not lied. And only tonight, Deirdre herself had told me she would do anything, anything, to put an end to Maeve’s endless dreaming of a triumphant resurgence of the O’Neills in an Ireland that could be no more. Having no faith in the powers of poets herself, she had believed she could play upon the superstitions of her grandmother, warn, manipulate a woman who had spent a lifetime manipulating others. She had instigated the cursing of her own family and it was too late now, as the poet had told her it would be, to undo what had followed. I redoubled my efforts and ran the remaining distance to the room whence Macha’s screams, as she brought my cousin’s child into the world, reverberated through the house and into the night.

Andrew was there already, slumped out of breath beside the door, the candle still in his hand and a look of sheer relief on his face.

‘It is only Macha, Alexander, only Macha. The child will be born soon. All is well.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Where is Deirdre?’

‘She is in there with her.’

‘I must get in.’

But the powerful arm of Eachan barred the door. ‘No one gets in but the women and the doctor. Cross that door and it will be the last step you take.’

‘Eachan, you do not understand.’

‘It is you who does not understand: I will …’

But he was stopped by a silence, and then a cry, a different cry from a woman’s agonies, the cry of a human child entering into the world. We held our breath a moment, we three men, and then Andrew broke into the broadest of smiles and I thought I saw a tear in the old Irishman’s eye. I took my chance and was through the door before he knew I had passed him.

I only had a moment to take in the scene. The room was ablaze with light – candles lit all around the walls, along the mantelpiece and in the hands of two servant girls on either side of the bed. A doctor was washing his hands in a bowl and congratulating my grandmother. The old woman paid him little attention, lost in an unwonted moment of tenderness, lovingly stroking Macha’s brow; and the midwife, having cleaned and swaddled the child, was handing him not to his mother but to my cousin Deirdre.

I took a step forward, opened my mouth to shout, and the last thing I felt before I went down was the huge fist of Eachan slam into the side of my face. There was nothing but blackness and startling lights in my head, and for a moment I think, for several moments, I succumbed to them. Eventually I forced myself up. By the time I had done so, the room had changed. It was still ablaze with light and fire, but almost all the people had gone save the midwife, a servant and the distraught girl on the bed crying out in Irish for her child. There was no Andrew, no Eachan, no Maeve and no Deirdre. And there was no child.

Lunging from one piece of furniture to the next, I reached the corridor. I could see them now, across the balcony, at the head of the stairs that led down to the great hall. Eachan was in a stupor almost, his hands at his sides, tears rolling down his face, repeating over and over again some Gaelic imprecation. Maeve was frozen, like an effigy of herself, dawning comprehension robbing her of the power of speech. Andrew was standing perhaps three feet from Deirdre, very still, but his eyes moving and his mind, I knew, calculating. In the hall below, hurriedly but quietly, servants were laying down cushions, mattresses, pillows: anything that would soften a fall. And there, by the head of the stairs itself, was Deirdre. Beautiful, her eyes shining, her hair tumbled loose over her shoulders, in the pale blue gown she had lain down to sleep in, holding close to her cheek and murmuring soft words of comfort into the ear of her brother’s child.

‘Give me the child, Deirdre,’ said my grandmother at last.

Deirdre only smiled, and continued to whisper into the baby’s ear, and to kiss its soft cheek.

‘Give me the child,’ my grandmother repeated.

‘No. I will not do that, grandmother. You would destroy him, as you destroyed my father, my brother. You will not destroy this child. I will keep him safe.’

The old woman was getting desperate. ‘I will not. I will send them away, tomorrow. The child and his mother. I will send them away, and Eachan with them to protect them. And money. I will give them money. I will never see them again.’

Deirdre shook her head, smiling at the child and not looking at her grandmother. ‘No, you lie. You have always lied. Ever since I was a child. Before that even. You told my grandfather his daughter was dead, but look, there is her son Alexander, here in this house, too late.’

‘Please, Deirdre,’ I said.

She continued to smile, at me now. ‘No, Alexander, it is too late. It was always too late.’

Andrew took a step towards her as she spoke, but she shrank back, drawing the child closer to herself.

‘It is too late,’ she repeated.

‘But we will go, as we planned. We will go with Alexander, make a new life for ourselves, and take the child. You will allow that, will you not, Maeve? We can take Macha with us even.’

My grandmother nodded in desperate acquiescence but still Deirdre shook her head. ‘No, you are lying to me too, Andrew. I heard you both last night. You will not let me take him. But I have to. No one else will protect him from her. I am taking him to his father.’

She moved closer to the edge of the balcony and what happened next was done so quickly I hardly knew where it began. She lifted the baby high in the air, Maeve screamed and Eachan, come to himself, started to run. But Andrew was closest and lunged for the child, only wrenching it from her arms as she hurled herself backwards over the balcony rail.

She seemed to fall for ever, her arms outstretched, her hair flowing behind her, a look of supreme peace on her face. Falling into the arms of those who had gone before her, she broke her neck on the hard stone floor below. There was silence, utter silence for a moment, and then the child started to cry. Andrew held him tight and tried to soothe him, but as his grip strengthened, his teeth gritted and his eyes became a film of tears, I feared he would crush the breath out of the tiny bundle in his arms. I made my way over to him and gently took it from him, handing him to my grandmother who, ashen-faced, went quietly with him towards Macha’s bedroom. And then I held Andrew as he succumbed to his overwhelming grief.