A Game of Sorrows

by Shona MacLean

  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 tre
spass 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:

  O! the Erne shall run red

  With redundance of blood,

  The earth shall rock beneath our tread,

  And flames wrap hill and wood,

  And gun-peal, and slogan cry,

  Wake many a glen serene.

  Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  My own Rosaleen!

  The Judgement Hour must first be nigh,

  Ere you can fade, ere you can die,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  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.