A Game of Sorrows

FOUR Deirdre

The next five days passed in great activity in the house beneath me, and in near-silence in my own chamber. I had brought with me no books of my own in that rushed departure from Aberdeen, and so my only reading was in Andrew Boyd’s bible. I sought assurance in its pages that I was in the right place, that I had not wandered from the right path, but all I found there were reminders that I should have been in another place, I should have been making my way to the Baltic, searching for ministers of the Word, rather than hiding in a tower house in a town I did not know, in a land still awash with priests and poets.

The near-endless hours of darkness from early evening until sleep would finally take me were spent in trying to write to Sarah something she could understand, believe, forgive, but the words came slow and awkwardly, and lifted dead and cold from the page. I closed my eyes and tried to see her. In the silence I tried to hear her voice. Sometimes I would catch a fleeting glimpse of her smile and then it was gone, leaving me with nothing but a searing emptiness, as if the essence of her had been clawed out of me. Each day ended with the burning of the letter in the flame of the candle by which it had been written.

My daylight hours were spent in watching. Musket loops and arrow slits on the walls gave perfect views down the high street of the town. It was broad and long, flanked by the great stone sentinels that were the other tower houses of wealthy aldermen and burgesses. The governor might have his palace, but the old families of Carrickfergus had each their stronghold. Only from the open parapets, from which I had been forbidden, might I have seen the castle, or the church or Irish Gate behind us, but all the life of the marketplace, courthouse, jail and any travellers who entered the burgh from the North or Sea Gate, or from the Scots Quarter outside the town walls, could be seen by a watcher at one of my windows.

In the evening, Sean would come and spend a half-hour with me and elaborate for me on what I had seen. Mourners had been called and were gathering. I had learned from my mother not to believe the tales of the Irish peddled by those who had no interest but to denigrate them, and so it was no great surprise to me to see the mourners from the West who brought their magnificent horses to rest at the gateway to my grandparents’ tower house; they bore themselves with a sense of their own dignity that would not have shamed an earl. With them came their retainers, their humbler mounts heavy-laden. Sean knew them all, went to greet them all, and in the evening would regale me with tales of every tragedy, scandal or feud they had ever laid claim to. Between mouthfuls of food and drink, he could reel off levels and generations of cousinage more complex than any mathematics I had ever stumbled over, and the next day would express genuine astonishment that I could not remember my exact relationship by blood or marriage to every soul who had the previous day passed beneath the portals of the house.

Late in the afternoon of the day before the funeral, a party arrived from the direction of the Irish Gate, five well-mounted and richly clothed riders and their followers. Of the leading group, four were men, attired much as Sean had been when he had come to fetch me from Aberdeen, and in their midst, as if cordoned off from the lesser beings inhabiting the world outside, was one woman. I could not see her face and her head was covered by the hood of her furred cloak, but the tendrils of pale gold that escaped from it were those of a young woman. I had been so entranced by the sound and sight of the new arrivals, I had not heard the footsteps come up behind me. I spoke without realising I spoke or knowing I would be heard. ‘Deirdre.’

‘You should stay back from there. You might be seen.’

It was Andrew Boyd. He had often passed me in this attitude before, without remark. I ignored his warning. ‘I have been watching my cousin arrive; she travels with a larger retinue than I had expected.’

He came towards the opening and I stepped aside to afford him a better view. His eyes can scarcely have lighted on the party below us when he turned away again. ‘It is not Deirdre,’ he said, without looking at me. ‘It is Roisin O’Neill.’ He went past me into our chamber and closed the door behind him.

I continued to watch. Of the four men, the leading rider was perhaps about fifty years of age: the others were around my own age, and enough alike each other and the older man to be his sons. Their arrival before my grandmother’s house had not gone unnoticed in the marketplace and the high street; of the many arrivals over the preceding three days, none had occasioned as much interest as this. Traders left off their business and turned to watch, wary. Two English soldiers who had been flirting with a girl at a vegetable cart gave off their attentions when they saw the party come to a halt, and soon left at a brisk jog in the direction of the castle.

If the riders noticed any of the interest they had occasioned, they showed no sign of it. The stillness of their waiting contrasted with the noise and busyness I could hear rising from the floors beneath me. Doors banged, orders were shouted, and feet flew up and down stairs. At last the entrance door to the tower was opened and my grandmother emerged. Sean was a step behind, and while she went towards the main rider, he went directly to Roisin’s horse and took the bridle from the servant who held it. The older man dismounted and his three sons did likewise. My grandmother gave him a long greeting, which I could not hear, and received an equally long response. When it was over, and acknowledged, the two embraced warmly. It was only now that Sean helped Roisin dismount from her horse. He was stiff, formal, and did not look directly at her as he spoke.

This was a new guise to me, my cousin’s incarnation as a courtly gentleman. This was not the man who had brawled and debauched in the inns of Aberdeen; who had sung to me, with me, on our journey from Scotland and who, despite the shortness of our acquaintance and the sadness of the time, could make me smile simply at the sight of him. I wondered how many guises he had. Roisin stood before him, tall, slender and still. Her composure masked some great uncertainty that her eyes could not quite hide. I felt something in my stomach, a pull, a kind of shock, like a ghost of something: she was like Katharine, that was all; she reminded me of Katharine. The feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and I watched Maeve go to her and kiss her on both cheeks, before slipping her arm through the young girl’s and leading her into the house. I stayed where I was, pondering the arrival of this party, unannounced to me and so formally received. And I wondered about the girl, so beautiful and so sad, whose name I had first heard on the night of our arrival from Scotland, and why, in the long list of loves and conquests with which he’d regaled me for much of our journey, Sean had never mentioned her once.

That night there was to be a great feasting before my grandfather’s burial the next day. Each night since his death there had been a wailing and keening of women such as I thought could not have issued from anything human. ‘It is their way,’ Andrew Boyd had said. ‘Their excess in grief is matched only by the gluttony and drunkenness of their funeral feasts. You will never know anything more pagan given a Christian name. Their enjoyment of it would shame Lucifer himself.’ On this final evening there was a constant rumble of feet back and forth from the kitchens to where the mourners were to gather for the last night of waking over my grandfather.

I had returned to my chamber at around five, to begin my nightly letter to Sarah, as if putting my feelings into words now could somehow reclaim for us all the time that had been wasted. I hardly noticed the footsteps on the stairs, so many comings and goings had there been in the house that day, and I didn’t lift my head when the door opened, thinking it was only Andrew. Only when I heard the sharp intake of a woman’s breath, a surprised ‘Oh!’, did I look round and see, standing in the doorway, in front of Sean, a vision from my own dreams. She was like a spirit, a princess, a myth from the whispered bedtime tales I had gone to sleep to. She was like a story in herself, a fable. The hair that hung down her back in waves of red and gold was not the black of myself, or Sean, or our grandmother, but the face illumined by the arc of light thrown by Sean’s lantern was the face of my own mother. My heart was thumping and my breathing came hard to me. I looked down at my hands and realised they were clenched in determined fists. At last I stood up and went towards her; I felt barriers begin to break and crumble: the barriers erected by the cold heart of my grandmother; by the priests and the beads and the incense and the oils; by the Irish tongue I tripped and stumbled over; by the sea separating me from all I had ever cared about. For here was my family, the only blood relations who remained to me in this world, and I knew in that moment that what they wanted me to do for them, that would I do.

‘Did I not tell you then?’ Sean’s voice was warm and happy.

The girl continued to gaze at me, as if she could not believe what was in front of her eyes. ‘I could not have … I would not have …’ And then she smiled, a smile that reached out and held me, and sent warmth to every part of me. She took my face in her hands and was gazing up into my eyes with love that lighted the room. ‘Alexander. I could not have believed it. Alexander.’

I could find no words, and stood there as one struck dumb, until a mighty slap on the shoulder from Sean brought me to my senses.

‘Do not tell me you don’t know your cousin, man. All I have heard since the day she was born is how like your mother she is.’

‘Yes,’ I said, stuttering a little, ‘yes … she is.’

‘Then I am glad,’ the girl said, ‘for you will have to love me now.’

‘You must never doubt that,’ I said. And I knew it was the truth.

She searched my face as if seeking out the differences between myself and her brother. Each feature was studied, memorised.

‘It will take some of the pressure off me, I don’t mind telling you,’ said Sean. ‘He is not so handsome, of course, and his manners are utterly beyond redemption, but no doubt the ladies of Carrickfergus will not be altogether disappointed when they eventually lay eyes on him.’

Deirdre gave her brother a withering look. ‘Are there ladies left in Carrickfergus? I am glad to hear it. You have surely been occupied elsewhere this last while, Sean. What ladies there are will not be allowed within a hundred yards of you, Alexander, if their fathers have any say in it. He ruins the family name nigh on every week.’

Sean laughed. ‘Did I not tell you she was a shrew, Alexander?’

‘You said nothing of the kind, and I would not have believed you in any case. Deirdre, I am glad to see you at last.’

‘And I you. You cannot know the blessing it is to us that our grandfather lived to see you.’

‘I would have liked to have longer.’

‘You must not grieve over what has passed and cannot be changed. The sight of you will have healed a wound he carried with him thirty years.’

We were all three silent a moment, before Sean spoke. ‘And yet we should not be sad, we three. He would not wish us sad. We are his legacy, and let it not be one of sadness; this is a joyful moment.’ He looked around him. ‘I suppose it would be too much to hope that Boyd keeps a drink in this room?’

‘I have never seen it if he does.’

‘All that Protestant discipline of his. It cannot be good for a man.’

‘You think your Catholic indiscipline keeps you in better health?’ Deirdre’s tone was severe, but her eyes were laughing.

‘I will go to my grave having known what it was to live.’

It was as if a cold breeze had travelled through the room.

‘Please do not speak of it, Sean. You must take greater care.’

His face became tender. ‘I take care where I must, little sister. You should not give so much credence to poets and their curses.’

‘And what of men and their muskets?’ she asked.

‘You know about that?’

‘The whole of the North knows about that, Sean. By the time the rumours of it reached Coleraine the tale was of twenty men with muskets, and that only some bewitchment, some pact with the fairy folk, kept you and your horse from death at the foot of the cliff.’

‘And do not tell me you believed any of this, you who laughed in the face of tales that sent me to my childhood bed in terror?’

‘Sean, I could sit here a month and still not have told Alexander of every escapade you have been in. There is no tale of you I could hear that I could discount at first hearing, other than that you had settled to a life of business and piety. But I took the precaution of speaking to our grandfather’s agent. He is the only man in Coleraine whose word I trust. He told me the truth of it. You must be careful. Murchadh …’

He glanced at me. ‘Not now, Deirdre. Let us talk of pleasanter things. It will not be long until the wake begins. Time enough for sombre thoughts.’

‘But the curse …’

‘Ach, the curse. Do not trouble your head about that. After the funeral, I am to take Alexander to O’Rahilly and …’

Her face paled at the mention of O’Rahilly’s name. ‘You cannot be thinking of that. You cannot place Alexander in that danger.’ She gripped my hand again. ‘You must not go. Please, you must not go.’

Before I could answer, the door to the room opened and Andrew Boyd walked in. He stopped short when he saw that I was not alone. Sean stepped back and Deirdre stood up. Boyd muttered something that sounded like, ‘I am sorry,’ and left as suddenly as he had come.

Sean looked to Deirdre. ‘Come on, your husband will be wondering where you are.’

‘I am his wife, not his lapdog.’

Her brother grinned. ‘I do not think Blackstone knew what he was about when he married himself an Irishwoman. But it is time for us to get ready, all the same. Alexander, Maeve has some plan for you for this evening. We will talk later.’

Deirdre kissed me on the cheek. ‘And you and I also will talk, and talk, for there is a lifetime of you that I must get to know.’ And then they were gone, and something of the light inside went with them.

It was not long afterwards that my grandmother entered the room. We had not spoken since the night of the strange, aborted baptism. There were no preliminaries.

‘Your grandfather will be buried tomorrow.’

‘I know that,’ I said.

‘No doubt. You should be there, by Sean’s side, at his funeral. It is your place, but it is not yet the time to make you known.’

‘I will do him honour here, in prayer, in scripture reading. I would like to have known him better, but I will pray to take example from what I have learned about him in life.’

Maeve’s mouth contorted slightly. ‘How Grainne must have suffered with such people,’ she said. ‘But you are in my house tonight, and there are none of your ministers here. It is my desire, and he would have expected it also, that you watch over your grandfather’s body tonight.’

‘You wish me to sit in the chapel with his remains?’ I asked.

She looked at me as if I were lacking in something. ‘His remains rest in this house. I wish you to be at the wake.’

‘How can that be if I am not to be made known? Is the house not full of people?’

‘There is a place in the gallery that you can watch from. Andrew Boyd will show you where. You must take great care not to be seen.’ Her voice was low and soft, as my mother’s had been, but there was no warmth in it for me. I still gave little credence to her worries, but I assured her I would be cautious. Her business finished, she made to leave, but paused a moment when I spoke again.

‘Tell me, who is Roisin O’Neill?’

She appraised me, interested.

‘Roisin O’Neill is the only daughter of my cousin Murchadh. Through the duplicity of others, Murchadh fell out of favour with the Earl of Tyrone in his youth, and had made his peace with the Crown before the end of Tyrone’s rebellion. The earl never forgave him, and Murchadh was not with him when he and the others, my own son Phelim amongst them, left for Spain, to seek help for our plundered land. But there was a blessing in it, for the English trust Murchadh, and he has managed to hold to some of his lands where others have had them wrenched from them.’ My grandmother seemed pleased with this, what must have been a well-rehearsed justification of her cousin’s prosperity where so many others had been driven to poverty and dishonour.

‘And Roisin?’

She looked at me, surprised that I had more to ask. ‘Unlike Deirdre, she knows her duty, and her worth. She is a true Irishwoman. Roisin will be Sean’s wife. After a decent period of mourning for my husband has passed, they will be married, and Sean will at last begin to take his place amongst our people.’

I thought of the scene I had witnessed outside the house earlier that same day, and my heart sank for my cousin and the beautiful woman who would be his unloved and unhappy wife. I thought my grandmother was finished with me, and I prepared to take up my pen again. But she was not finished.

‘And you?’ she said.

‘Me?’

‘Yes. Are you yet married?’

‘No,’ I said flatly, ‘I am not married.’

The trace of a smile appeared for a moment on her lips.

‘Good,’ she said, turning to make her way back down the corridor. ‘That is good.’