A Game of Sorrows

TWENTY-NINE Parting

I had all but pleaded with him, but he would not come with me. We had parted at Ayr. I think he took something of me with him, and I something of him with me, and yet it was a lack I felt, an absence.

‘You could make the new life we talked of. You could have that new beginning.’

‘It was a dream, Alexander, of another time. It is gone now.’

‘I know it cannot be how it was to have been …’

‘No, she is dead.’

‘Yes, she is dead. And she can no more be in Dumfriesshire than she could in Aberdeen. There is nothing for you to the south that you would not find in the north.’

‘I have family there, in the borders. My father’s family.’

‘Whom you never knew and who will scarce remember him even.’

He looked sharply at me, a fragment of an old antagonism in his face. ‘Do you think it only for you that kin matters?’

‘No, Andrew, but I know you. And I know what I would be bringing you to if you came with me. You have my friendship, and will have it always, wherever we might be. But you will also have it of those who are my friends, for my sake and in a very little time for your own. I know the life you could make there.’

‘I am going, Alexander, where I will not see one story play itself out in my mind while I am forced to live another. If I came with you, every day I would be haunted by the life she and I might have had there, together. Everywhere I turned, there would be signs of what could have been. I will go where she never was, in her dreams or mine, and I might keep my mind that way.’

‘But Andrew …’

‘No, Alexander! Good God, man, do you not see it? Every time I look at your face I can see them all again, all the O’Neills and what they made her, what they took from me. I never had a friend in my life before, and I love you dearly, but for the love of God and for your own sake and mine, understand this: I cannot bear to look upon your face.’

And so we had struck out, one for the south, the other for the north. And I do not think he looked back once, as I did, at the dark blue shape across the water, the island of Ireland, receding with every step I took, into its own sky, its own sea, to its own world where we would play our parts no longer, Eirinn cloaking herself in memory once more, from the eyes of unworthy men. I did not know if I would ever look on her again.

And as I walked on, I left also my grandmother and her great-grandson, my two living blood relatives in this world. Macha was there too, and Eachan of course, and would be until his last breath left him. But it was in the old woman and the newborn child that the fate of those I had left behind in Ulster, and the names that had gone before them, would rest: I knew that.

Maeve was free, still free, saved from certain trial and execution for treachery by Murchadh O’Neill, in one final act of pride. When at last taken with his two younger sons; when, after much bloodshed and courage, Dun-a-Mallaght had finally fallen, Murchadh had scorned the idea that a woman, even such a woman as Maeve O’Neill, had intrigued with the English to bring arms into Ireland for a rebellion against those Englishmen’s own king. He, Murchadh, and no other, had led and directed all. And by that his name had salvaged some honour, at the point of death, that he had never managed to attain to through his life. But no poets were left now to sing the praises of Murchadh, to glorify his family and his deeds. And as our boat had left Ulster for Scotland and passed beneath the walls of Carrickfergus, the severed head of Murchadh O’Neill, along with those of his three sons, looked out from the stakes on which they had been impaled, over me and across the sea that might have brought them aid. Already, the gulls had begun to peck at their eyes, and in a few days, or weeks perhaps, they would be eaten or rotted, and only their skulls, and some story of a rising that had never been, left to remember them.

And Roisin, for Roisin had not been found, she had not been taken. Eachan said she would have gone to Bonamargy; that Julia MacQuillan would have taken her; that she would be got away to the continent like so many others of her standing before her, that she would become a nun. My grandmother thought the Earl of Antrim would have found her and got her away to safety with his MacDonnell kin in Scotland. Macha prayed that the girl who had also loved Sean and should have been his wife might find welcome and rest somewhere in the west, with some of her own people.

It was a respite that Deirdre had never found, for she had not known who or what her own people were. But she was at rest now, Deirdre of the Sorrows. She lay with her brother in a grave on the Knocagh Hill, high over Carrickfergus, looking out over Belfast Lough to a Scotland she would now never see. We had gone there and buried her two days after her death. No feasting, no great gathering of mourning guests. Just a small and quiet procession of those who had known her best and loved her. My grandmother, showing her age, and something else, perhaps, at last, had allowed herself to rest on my arm as we had mounted to the place where Sean already lay. The priest had intoned his words, and I did not try to shut them out as I might have done before. Andrew had taken a ring that had been his mother’s and placed it in the grave with her. At a small movement of Maeve’s hand, Macha had begun to sing a beautiful lament, words that lifted and filled the breeze and were carried like fallen leaves on the air and away from us.

And as the words went on, verse by verse, I realised that the lament was not only for Deirdre, or not even just for Sean, but for Murchadh’s sons, all three, for Father Stephen, for all those who had died in their dream of Ireland and what they might have been.

At last the song came to its end, and we men covered my cousin in the earth of her country, returned to it, part of it at last, the girl who had so feared it that she had laid a curse on her own family, on herself. Deirdre had thought to use the words of a poet she did not believe in to drive a fissure in the union of her brother and grandmother with Murchadh O’Neill and his plans. She had thought to spare her family the destruction and disgrace that she had known would follow. She had thought, with her grandfather’s inheritance safe in her hands, to guide them to a place in a new Ireland that she had not understood they could never accept. The understanding, at last, that she herself had no place in that new Ireland, and the knowledge of the curse she had unleashed, had driven her to madness. As I dropped the last sod of turf over my cousin’s body, I prayed, in the manner of my forefathers, that God might grant mercy, rest and peace unto her eternal soul.

She had asked them to leave her a few minutes, to give her a few moments alone, and they had done so. Alexander hung back behind the others, a little way off; it was solitude enough for her. The sight of him was like a knife through her heart, every time she looked at him, for there was Phelim, there was Sean, there was Grainne’s second son. Grainne: her place of pain. Her son had come to them at last, across the water, but he had come too late.

As the wind whipped over the bleak hillside, she reached her hand out to the stone, Sean’s stone, and traced with her fingers the words of the epitaph freshly carved out beneath an engraved sword:

And Maeve O’Neill swore to her God that she would take her great-grandson here often, and that she would not rest until her work at last was done.