A Game of Sorrows

by Shona MacLean

  My voice was almost dead in my throat. ‘Betrayed in what?’ I asked at last.

  He looked up at me from his empty glass and studied my face a long moment. ‘In everything his life should have been. In everything that was before him to do. In everything that mattered.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Your grandmother’s priest sent word to Bonamargy. He fears she will go out of her mind for grief. The Blackstones were declaring they would leave for the North in the morning – not a moment to lose in moving on your grandfather’s business. Deirdre was in a hysteria, and refused to go with them. Cormac O’Neill and his brothers took her, in their protection, to one of their father’s strongholds. Eachan was fit to kill any who tried to come near to Sean’s body. The house is in a turmoil of despair.’

  But there was something more. I asked the question slowly, afraid of the answer I knew would come. ‘Why did the Blackstone women cry out that I was a murderer?’

  He was hesitant to begin and poured himself a third glass from the flask and me a second. ‘Your grandmother, as I told you, has been driven from her senses by the curse of Finn O’Rahilly and all that has followed. She has never been a kind or loving woman. Quick to suspect and slow to trust, swift to accuse and never forgiving. She was murmuring that she had brought it all upon her own head, and telling, to any who would listen, the story of Diarmuid and the boar.’ He paused a moment, a sad smile on his face. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did Sean never tell you the tale of Diarmuid and the boar?’

  ‘Never,’ I replied.

  He nodded, as if he had expected such a response. ‘And I’ll wager your mother never did either?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘she didn’t.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you. Diarmuid was a warrior, of the Fianna of Finn McCool, the god-king. Diarmuid had a half-brother, the offspring of an illicit union of his mother and his father’s steward. When the child was born, the husband took it and dashed it against the rocks. But Diarmuid’s foster-father took pity on the bastard child, and through magic, brought it back to life in the shape of a boar. This creature dedicated the rest of its life to the pursuit and killing of its half-brother. There came the time when Diarmuid was tricked into joining the Fianna in a boar hunt. At the climax of the hunt, the boar fatally gored Diarmuid, just as he was driving his spear into its heart. At the moment of death, the beast transformed at last into its human form, and Diarmuid saw that it was his brother.’

  ‘A fine fable,’ I said, when I realised it had come to its end and its moral had not presented itself. ‘But what is it to my grandmother? Why are you telling it to me?’

  He looked me steadily in the eye. ‘That you might think on it, as I have been.’

  ‘I am not in the humour for riddles,’ I said.

  There was a long silence before he spoke again. ‘Alexander, the reason that you were pursued from Coleraine, that you are pursued still, is that your grandmother has put it out, has called down judgement from the heavens, that it was you who murdered your cousin.’

  I felt the glass drop from my hand and saw the golden liquid seep into the rushes on the floor.

  SIXTEEN

  A Woman Grieving

  Carrickfergus

  She was tired of walls: walls surrounded by walls, the damp cold of rooms that would never get warm. But here in her garden it was different. The slight breeze off the sea brought air that was fresh, not foetid. It was a clean cold that the rugs the servants had brought her, fussed around her with, kept from her bones. The wood of the bench was warm in the last of the autumn sunshine. A few blooms still clung to the stems of old roses that cloaked the western and northern walls, sending to her a faint scent of apricot and lemon. She closed her eyes and felt the hint of warmth on her cheek, and let herself think of Connemara, of fifty autumns past, and riding for miles along the endless sands with her mare, Emer, dancing in the spray.

  The cook’s child was gathering the last of the apples from the orchard. She remembered Grainne, on such an afternoon, running barefoot along the coast path at Whitehead, her small chubby fingers stained with the juice of the blackberries they’d been gathering, the startled delight on her childish face when a rabbit shot out of the bushes in front of them. When she had been young.

  She called to the cook’s child to bring her an apple, and the boy ran to her quickly with the best from his basket. She drew from her girdle the small jewelled knife she kept there and cut the fruit carefully, giving him a piece before dismissing him.

  Murchadh had gone, at last. She was mistress in her own house once more. She should have mastered her grief quicker, held her tongue sooner. His rage, on learning of Grainne’s Scottish son, had surpassed what even she had expected. It had taken some work on her part to convince him that she had no love for the boy, not a trace: he was not Sean. Perhaps Deirdre had been right, perhaps Alexander Seaton had not killed his cousin. Indeed, in her quieter moments she herself knew there could be little reason for him to have done so, but that he lived while Sean lay cold and dead, that she could not forgive. When Murchadh had been calmed, eventually, and begun to think, as Maeve had, it had not been a great work of persuasion to show him how the Scotsman might be of use to them, might salvage some of Sean’s legacy and lay it at Murchadh’s feet. What happened to the boy after that was of little interest to her. She suspected Murchadh had it in mind that he should not long survive his cousin. So be it: she had no further use for him, and greater concerns.

  Word had come last night from the North, the word they had waited so long for, and Murchadh’s dark mood had dissipated entirely on the hearing of it. He had thrown his arm around her and lifted her into the air, before shouting for drink, the best that was to be had from her cellars.

  ‘By God,’ he said, as he set her down, ‘we have had little enough to celebrate these last days, but we have it now!’ He appraised her, as if he had never seen her properly before, and shook his head in a kind of wonder. ‘I’ll own it to you now, Maeve: I thought you played too risky a hand, but you have known this game a long time and I should not have doubted you.’

  She would not tell him how she had doubted also, that only a sort of desperation, a sudden madness had suggested to her the course she had taken. Deirdre had thought by her marriage to spurn her, but in so doing she had gifted her that unforeseen chance, the glimpse of a man’s venality, and when Maeve had seen it she had taken it. ‘It was the only way we would ever get the arms. We could not wait for Spanish help for ever.’

  ‘And now we will do it without the Spaniards, because you did not flinch. Through all your losses, you have never flinched.’ He laid a gloved hand over her cold, ringed fingers. ‘I know your grief. Sean should have been with us, at our head. But his name will not be forgotten: in three days we will start our march; we will blast the English from Ulster with guns of their own making. They have “civilised” us more than they know. And the name of Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett will be written into the legends of Ireland. Three days yet, Maeve, that is all.’

  It was a wonder to her that fifty years of life had not been enough to teach her kinsman how much might be lost in three days. ‘Nothing must be permitted to go wrong, Murchadh. Deirdre …’

  ‘You cannot be sure she knows.’

  ‘She knows; she all but taunted me with it on the night I sent Seaton north.’

  ‘Do not fear for her. Cormac has her safe; no one will be allowed near Deirdre.’

  ‘Should the words of her loosened tongue reach the wrong ears, everything would be imperilled.’

  ‘The preparations of your apothecary have dulled her mind and her tongue, and should they fail, Cormac has his instructions.’

  ‘Murchadh, I have known your son all his life. He is the best of Ireland. Like Phelim, like Sean. But my granddaughter is his great weakness. Should the time come for her silence, we cannot rely on Cormac.’

  He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I have other sons, Maeve, and they will not have a lover’
s qualms.’

  And so Murchadh had left, and she was alone again, and waiting. The clouds had gathered and obscured the sun. The wind off the sea had grown stronger and the garden was cold now. She got up wearily from the bench and began to walk back towards the house, the apple lying uneaten where she had left it, the white of its flesh already brown and rotting.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Cursing Circle

  They had said it often enough: she was going mad. Finn O’Rahilly and his curses, Deirdre and her vision of Maeve MacQuillan, grief over the husband she had deceived for so long. And now the loss of Sean, her hope, her future. But what madness could create in her heart this hatred of me?

  My mind was fracturing, and my head and eyes ached as I struggled to keep hold of what I thought I had understood. All my life, I had not known my cousin, and then I had known him, and loved him. I could look in a glass and see his living image, but he was dead. I had played his part, I had been Sean FitzGarrett in the eyes of others, I had walked in his very boots, and all the while he had been dead. The grandfather I had never known had loved me. The grandmother I knew despised me. I had come here for Sean, abandoned all that I knew and all that knew me, for Sean, but there was no Sean now, only Alexander. The grief that many years ago had threatened to rip me apart when I had learned of the death of Archibald Hay had hunted me down across the Irish Sea, and found me once more. And if ever Alexander Seaton saw Scotland again, it would be from Dunluce, from the Hanging Hill. I would never look again on the face of the woman I loved, never know what it was to touch her. Oh, God help me. The man in the clothes of a priest, hung round with the trappings of idolatry, calling on his God.

  Stephen reached a hand out to my shoulder. His voice was gentle, but urgent. ‘We must tarry here no longer, Alexander, if we are to be at Kilcrue before sunset.’ And so, within the half-hour, I found myself on the road again. I had passed the middle of the day in sleep, and was again walking towards the night. Favoured words of my counsellor and friend Mr Gilbert Grant, late schoolmaster of Banff, came to me: ‘Yet a little while is the light with you, Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.’ Blind at the end, these had been the last words to pass the old man’s lips.

  Upwards, away from the sea we went. The ground became difficult underfoot, bog and heather, and in time we entered woods once more, ancient woods of oak, hazel and willow. As I thrust my staff into the ground with every new step forward, I struggled to remember why I was here now, why I had come to seek out Finn O’Rahilly. My cousin was dead, and there was little in me that cared now for the poet’s ramblings or his curses. And yet his voice came clearer to my mind, the words pulling at me. ‘All these things will come to pass. Your grandson will soon lie with his fathers, in the cold chambers of the dead.’ Sean was dead and the curse was no longer rambling, no longer a malevolent retelling of what everyone already knew: what O’Rahilly had predicted had begun to come to pass. I had to set aside my resentments and my griefs, and accomplish what I had come here to do. I must summon my determination and marshal my thoughts: what did I know, and what must I ask?

  My grandmother had gone to O’Rahilly, to hire him to declaim at Deirdre’s wedding. Maeve had insisted upon it, and, in the face of her own granddaughter’s protests, her will had won out. The poet had accused and insulted Maeve, my mother, Deirdre, dishonoured Murchadh’s name, derided his aspirations, humiliated his daughter. He had exposed Sean’s secrets and foretold his death, and it had come to pass. And yet he did not know about me. Who had paid him, who had put him up to all this, and what was their end?

  We came, at length, to a clearing in the wood, and at the edge of the clearing was the ruin of an ancient church. For the first time in many miles, I looked about me properly. What I had thought to be random boulders and stones were not – they were set, carefully, in a circle at the entrance to the overgrown burial yard of the church, and at their centre stood a stone, upright, thin, that came almost to my shoulder, inscribed on it a simple cross.

  ‘What is this place?’ I said. The birds were no longer in song or sight, and the air had grown cold and still.

  ‘Kilcrue,’ he said at last. ‘The Cursing Circle.’

  I put down my staff and walked towards the centre, to where the stone stood. The burial ground was so near and overgrown. I had never liked burial grounds. The place reeked of the knowledge of death: a once holy place that was holy no more. Unwittingly, I put my hand to my neck and felt for the coarse wood and moulded metal of the cross that hung there.

  ‘Tell me about the Cursing Circle,’ I said.

  ‘There is little I can tell you.’ I noticed he took care to keep outside the ring of stones. I was in too far now to do the same.

  ‘Tell me why it is so called.’

  He thought out his words with care. ‘It is said that these places were used in pagan rituals in ancient times.’

  ‘What sort of rituals?’

  He caught a breath, and spoke again, slowly. ‘It is said that the stone, the cross, before it became a cross, was perhaps an altar…’

  A sacrificial altar. I felt the blood freeze in my veins. ‘And the name?’ I insisted. ‘What is the meaning of the name?’

  ‘It is the place of cursing, where curses are laid by the poets. It is the home of Finn O’Rahilly.’

  The snap of a twig underfoot from the direction of the ruined church took my attention and I turned towards it to see Finn O’Rahilly, more gaunt than I had remembered, standing at the entrance to the circle. He looked at me and then at Stephen. ‘What trick is this, old priest? What game is this you seek to play me in?’

  ‘No trick, no game,’ answered the Franciscan. ‘Simply the man I told you wished to come.’

  The poet stepped back, steadying his hand on a jutting rock and never taking his eyes from me. ‘This man is dead.’

  I advanced a step towards him. ‘No, not dead. Death has not found me yet. I know it is a matter you take some interest in. What do you know of my cousin’s death?’

  He held his ground this time, but more colour drained from his face. ‘You have no cousin.’

  ‘My name is Alexander Seaton, and I am the cousin of Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett and of his sister Deirdre. I was called to Ulster by my grandmother Maeve O’Neill to tell you that your curse has no truth in it. I am the son of Grainne Fitz-Garrett and my grandmother’s line will end not with Sean, but with me.’

  He sat down, breathing heavily, on one of the flat stones of the outer circle. His knuckles were white as his fingers gripped the staff in his hand. ‘I was not told this.’

  ‘What were you told?’

  He opened his mouth to answer and then thought the better of it. The silence was heavy in the stillness of the circle. Stephen spoke to me in a low voice. ‘I have brought you here as I promised I would, but now I must go. I have business to attend to tonight that will not keep. I will return in the morning and bring you to Bonamargy. Use your time well. Master your anger and use your mind more than your tongue to draw out of him what you need. And remember the contents of your purse.’

  I had not bargained for this. I did not greatly like the knowledge that I was in this priest’s power, or that I had left Andrew Boyd to the mercy of his companions.

  ‘Wait but half an hour and I will come with you; it cannot take longer to find out what this man knows. I have no desire to spend the night in this godless place.’

  ‘Have you no faith, then?’ he asked.

  ‘I have faith in my God,’ I said, ‘but there are forces at work here that come from a darkness I do not comprehend.’

  ‘Then you must pray for the strength to withstand them, and I will pray that also for you.’ He said no more, and reminding me again that he would return for me the next morning, he disappeared into the trees.

  A wind had got up, and the coldness of it whistled through the branches and around the stones that encircled me. Finn O’Rahi
lly had risen to his feet.

  ‘Do you stay?’ he said.

  ‘I have no choice. I do not know this country in the light, never mind the darkness. I will trespass on your hospitality this one night. I have no greater wish to be here than you have to have me here. Tell me what I need to know, show me a corner where I might lie, and I will trouble you no more.’

  He stared at me levelly with his startling blue eyes.

  ‘You have been sent to me that I might lift the curse on your family?’

  ‘That is what my grandmother wishes – although the worst of it has already come to pass. Yet it might comfort her and my still-living cousin to know the curse to be lifted, so mumble what words you must, that I may not lie to them when I tell them you have done what they begged for with their purses to do.’

  He glanced for a moment at the pouch I had now set at my feet, then returned his gaze to me. ‘You think the worst has come to pass? How little you know this place, or the people whom you claim as yours.’

  ‘I claim no one,’ I said. ‘I have been claimed, but those who had a right to do so have almost all gone. When I am finished my business here with you, I too will be gone from this country.’

  ‘As if you had never been.’

  ‘As if I had never been.’

  He seemed a little reassured by this thought and sat down again on the rock. He motioned towards another, and I sat down and waited. There was a great stillness about him, as if an hour, a day, passed here like this would be as nothing. It was clear he would give me no help: I must begin myself.

  ‘My grandmother and my cousin Deirdre came to you here, did they not?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Who else came?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘My grandmother wished you to give a blessing at Deirdre’s wedding, but Deirdre was against it.’