Suddenly, before he could answer, the door to Julia MacQuillan’s cell opened again and Andrew came through it, leaning on a crutch for support. ‘Alexander,’ he said, his ravaged face breaking into a broad smile of relief. He came over and grasped my arm in affection, as of a long-remembered friend. ‘I thought never to see you again.’
‘Nor I you,’ I said, embracing him, then quickly releasing him as he winced at the pain of his bruised bones. ‘You were nearer death than life the last time I saw you.’
‘I rambled a great deal, they tell me.’
‘I could not make out a word of it.’
A look of relief passed over his face. ‘Then I am glad. The brothers have also told me I said nothing to offend. They have been mending me well.’ He grinned. ‘I will never be so pretty as I once was, but I believe my scars will lend me some distinction.’
‘A great deal,’ I said.
‘Truly, it is good to see you again, Alexander.’ Then he glanced at Stephen with less distrust than had been his wont. ‘But whatever the cause of dispute between you, you must have it out elsewhere. The Sister tolerates no disturbance. You will waken Deirdre with your rumpus.’
I felt the rage in me subside a little at the mention of my cousin. I turned to Stephen. ‘Later. We will have this out later, but I will be deceived no longer.’
The nun’s cell was tiny, and only a poor grey light seeped through its one small north-facing window. On a stool, dropping some liquid from a tiny phial into the barely parted lips of my cousin, was another friar, whom I took to be Gerard, the doctor-apothecary. The figure on the bed, covered by blankets pulled tight and a warm, clean, sheep’s fleece, was so thin and pale as to be like a wraith, almost without substance. I stood in the doorway a moment, unable to move, struck by a sudden terror that she was dead. I held my breath until at last I saw the cover at her chest rise and fall a little.
‘How long has she been here?’
‘Less than an hour. Michael brought her just before dawn. I thought I was dreaming. They brought her straight to the nun’s room, and Gerard has been attending to her ever since.’
‘How is she, Father?’ I asked in a low voice.
‘I cannot tell. She has no fever; there is no vomiting or effusion, and her blood beats slow in her veins. I think she has had a great shock, and her mind has closed her eyes and ears to the knowledge of it.’
‘You mean she does not want to wake up.’
‘Yes, I think that is exactly what it is: she does not want to wake up.’
We sat a long time watching her, Andrew and I, each of us bound to her as if she was the only link between us and everything around us. And if that link should break, we would each of us be set loose in a land where we had no place. I looked across the bed and saw in him anger, hurt, rage, tenderness. At one point he reached out a hand to touch her, just for a moment, and in that moment I saw the tale of a man who has loved too long. When at last she began to show some signs of stirring, he left the bedside and went to stand by the door.
‘Alexander,’ she said, as her eyes opened on the grey dawn. Some of the apprehension that had been building up for the last hour left me: the delusion was over. Her lips were cracked and dry, and speech came to her only with great difficulty. ‘You should not have gone, Alexander. I begged you not to go.’
‘Ssh,’ I said. ‘Rest now. Time enough to talk of this later.’
But she grabbed me fiercely by the wrist. ‘No. Sean is dead. You are in danger now. The curse has found us.’
‘No curse, Deirdre, but a killer, and I will not leave Ulster until I have found him out, and I will not leave you.’
As she sank backwards again, she caught sight at last of Andrew, standing behind me. She closed her eyes, turned her head away on the pillow and groaned. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh no.’
Andrew looked at her a moment, then something in him broke, and he left us.
I waited longer with her as she drifted back to sleep, shutting herself off from the world she had found herself in and the knowledge of its dreadful truths, and I almost wished I could join her. But I could not, and the time of my hiding from the truth was over. I left the doctor to his vigil and went in search of Stephen.
I found him, eventually, in the church. The nave was dark, much darker than I had expected, but I found my way to the east end where a finely carved wooden screen led to the chancel. Through the screen doors a transforming light flooded from the east in a myriad of colours. I walked towards it in a kind of wonder, feeling a tinge of unfamiliar regret that such beauties of man’s creation had been destroyed in my homeland. So entranced was I for a moment by the jewels of colour sent out by the great east window that I did not at first notice him. I had been looking straight ahead of me, and upwards. There was enough of my vision to tell me that there was no one in any of the wooden stalls to either side of the aisle. But then my eye was taken by the altar, and what lay beneath it spread out on the floor.
His head was at the edge of the step and his arms flung out to either side of him. He was not moving, but as I drew closer I could hear a low sort of groaning coming from his throat. I started to bend down towards him, but hardly had I stretched out my hand to his shoulder than I found myself flat on my back, my head only just having missed the edge of the stone step, and the old Franciscan pinning me down with one hand while he held a knife to my throat with the other. We stared at one another for what seemed an eternity but what in truth must have been less than two seconds, until something odd came on to Stephen Mac Cuarta’s face, and he started to laugh as if he would never stop. He released his hold on me and sat back, wiping tears from his eyes with the hand that less than a moment before had been on the verge of slitting my throat. He laughed and wheezed and took a deep breath to steady himself, and then wiped away some more tears.
‘Alexander Seaton, is it? O’Neill, more like. They never taught you to creep about like that in your heretic seminary, I’ll tell you that. That is in your blood, and let no one tell you otherwise. Phelim himself could not have got closer. By God, you were near enough to getting yourself filleted; I took you for one of Murchadh’s crew.’
‘I thought you were injured,’ I said, still shaken, ‘or dead.’
‘No,’ he said, recovering his composure at last, ‘not dead, but praying.’
‘A heartfelt prayer, by the look of it.’
‘Oh, yes: it is all that. I pray God’s forgiveness for the injustice I have done you, that others who loved you have done you also. And that perhaps, if God so grants it, you would forgive me too.’
I rubbed my arm where he had twisted it behind my back. ‘You must tell me first what it is that I am to forgive. The truth, with no more deception.’
He looked away a moment, searching for words he did not wish to speak. Eventually he was ready. ‘You must understand that the lies, the deceit I have practised upon you, were at the instance of those who had a greater call on my loyalty, aye and on my love, than yourself. Promises made nearly thirty years ago, but as fresh to me as if I had made them this very morning, and it grieves me to break them now, but I see I must. First, though, I’ll get my old bones off this floor, if you don’t mind.’ He got up from his crouching position, and indeed, for the first time it seemed to me that he felt something of his age as he stretched and straightened himself. He took up a seat in one of the wondrously carved oak stalls of the chancel and waited until I had settled myself properly on the step by the altar.
‘Now,’ he said, assuming some of his accustomed heartiness. ‘Where to begin? Here, now? Or then.’
‘I think you had better begin with “then”.’
‘Aye, perhaps so.’ He leaned forward a little in his stall, beginning to move his hands outwards, then taking them back in, folding them in his lap. He did not know what to do with them; he did not know how to start.
‘My mother,’ I said, at last.
He bit his bottom lip, and began. ‘Your mother, yes: Grainne. You were how old w
hen she died?’
‘I was seventeen.’
‘Seventeen. So she would have been not yet forty. Her beauty would not yet have been quite gone.’
‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘It had not. Only at the end.’
‘And not even then, in the eyes of God. She had all your grandmother’s beauty, but more grace, and none of her coldness.’
I would have liked to acknowledge this too, but my mind had gone often in the last week to the bitterness towards my father that she had tried so hard and failed to hide from him or from me. I had hidden the knowledge of it away some-where beyond memory, but it had found its way back somehow, unlocked by the sight of my grandmother. I said nothing to the priest of any of this, and if he noticed my abstraction, he did not comment on it.
‘She was the light of your grandfather’s world, and they were difficult times for him, for Tyrone was in open rebellion against the English, and your grandfather’s wealth was based on his trade with the English at the garrison in Carrickfergus and in their few outposts in the North. Many of the Irish with whom he did business lost their lands or their wealth, whichever side they were on, in one way or another. Worse for him was that Phelim had gone into rebellion with Tyrone. It could have been no other way: Maeve had suckled her son on tales of the greatness and pride of the O’Neills, and she had made her arrangements for his fosterage in a sept very close to Tyrone with the greatest care and forethought. But to Grainne, your grandmother paid very little heed. Grainne had a little too much of the FitzGarrett in her for Maeve’s liking – it was as if she had believed the call of her own blood to be so strong that it never occurred to her that her children might inherit something from their father. So, save for an understanding that one day she would be married to Murchadh – an ambition that your grandfather was implacably opposed to – Grainne was all but neglected by her mother, and consequently spent more and more time at her father’s side, learning to understand the business, the world that he lived in and that he had come from. You are following me?’
‘Nothing you have said so far has occasioned any great surprise. Go on.’
His face became uncomfortable again, as he searched for the right words, if there could have been such words, for what he was next to tell me. He did not look at me as he spoke, but at some point beyond my left shoulder, almost as if he was looking through the wall. ‘It was inevitable, then, that she should have found herself much in company with her father’s steward.’
‘Andrew’s father,’ I said, my breath almost catching in my throat.
‘No, not Boyd. Yes, he had arrived from Scotland by then, and was in your grandfather’s employ, but as his agent along the coast. There was another man – his name does not matter – older than Grainne by five years or so. This man had a live-liness to him that was like an infection, but he was wayward too. He and Grainne, beneath the eyes of your grandfather – who did not see it, thinking it a natural thing that everyone who set his eyes upon his daughter should love her – fell in love. She told me, time and again, that the man was not to blame, that he had done everything save leave Ireland to keep away from her, but strong and lively as he was, he was a lonely young man – and remember that he too was young, younger than you are now – and he loved her.
‘Maeve found out about the affair, and her fury was terrible. Grainne was dispatched to relatives in Donegal, and not brought back for a year; your grandfather was almost beside himself – he knew nothing of the relationship – but was persuaded at last that it was for the girl’s safety, that she might be too easy a target for English ire if left in Carrickfergus. By the time she returned, Maeve had almost managed to get rid of the young steward, dispatching him to Dublin, as your grandfather’s agent there. It was not long before false accusations were raised against him – anonymously, of course – and he was hanged at Dublin Castle for treason. When Grainne returned, to be followed shortly afterwards by the boy whom Maeve presented to everyone as the fruit of Phelim’s marriage, no one guessed that Sean was not his, but his sister’s child, for like you, he was the image of his uncle. When, three years later, a troop of Scots arrived in port, making their way home with their master from exile in France, Grainne found she could bear life in her mother’s house no longer, and left with them, abandoning her own child as she did so.’
I could not move. I wanted to speak, but the muscles in my face were frozen. Behind my forehead, behind my eyes, there was a rush, a roaring of words, of denial, of a young boy yelling that it was not so; it could not be so. I felt my arms begin to shiver and my lips tremble; the more I struggled to master myself, the more my limbs shook. Stephen, looking at me now rather than beyond me, rose from his stall and crossed over to the altar. He sat down by me and put a strong arm round my shoulder and pressed hard.
‘Now, son; it is all right; it is all right.’
‘But then … Sean was my brother.’ I could hold off no more, and felt myself crumple inwards, collapsing into myself in the onslaught of loss.
We were there a long time, I think; I was conscious only of a steady murmur of words in Latin from the priest and the softly changing colours of the light on the floor of the chancel as the sun played upon its window. In each colour, each gem of light before it changed, disappeared, merged into another, was an image of my lost brother, lost to me now and in all the years that had gone before, all the years of my life, when he had not been there, all the times my mother must have held me and thought of the other she could not hold. There was Sean smiling, always smiling, laughing, Sean picking me up as I fell, Sean outstripping me in races, in climbs, Sean gradually letting me go to Archie, who would have followed and adored him. Sean bidding me farewell that early morning five days ago as I left Carrickfergus, until we should meet again. The sun slowly passed behind a cloud, the light grew dim, the colours went, leaving only the bare stone behind them. I looked up at the priest and nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am all right.’
TWENTY-ONE
Defiled Sanctuary
Stephen sat a while with me, on the altar steps, and prayed. I had not the heart to join him, but took comfort in the rhythm of his murmured words until suddenly the sound of voices at the gate broke into the calm of the friary. He scrambled to his feet. ‘Murchadh,’ he said, and then, as to himself, ‘There is no time.’
He cast his eyes around him quickly, the closest I had seen him to a panic. He bit his bottom lip, calculating, calculating as ever. At last his eye lit on something. ‘The altar! Quick. Get you beneath it.’
I did not need two tellings and within a moment had laid myself under the sacrifice table of the church. Stephen had gone to a cupboard in the wall and brought out a heavy linen altar cloth, bordered in fine Flemish lace. He threw it hastily over the altar and I heard the sound of two large pewter candlesticks being moved to hold it down. ‘Now,’ he hissed, ‘pray for all you are worth. Pray to all the saints, and do not move from here if you value your life!’
And then he left me. The door of the chancel banged heavily shut behind him, and I was alone. The stone was cold and clean under my cheek. I tried not to think about the century of abominations committed on the altar above me, or the bones of the dead who lay buried in the church itself and were all I now had for company. I tried to think of my mother, but I could not bring a vision of her to life. All I could see was the single headstone, mottled already by creeping moss and the harsh blasts of salt and wind from the North Sea, that stood in St Mary’s kirkyard in Banff, where she had died but where, as I now realised, the woman who had been Grainne Fitz-Garrett had scarcely lived.
I had not much longer for reflection before the door from the east range opened again, and I heard the sound of sandalled feet scuttle quickly into the church and to the stalls. They settled themselves hastily and then voices rose in unison, no organ or music of any sort in accompaniment, in what I knew to be the ‘Salve mater’. A clear, young voice took the lead – Michael, I guessed – and was followed by other, older voices, the st
rong taking care not to overpower the weak, in a purity of sound that, as my friend the music master in Banff had often tried, in vain, to persuade me, could touch the soul. I stopped listening to the words, and sought some place of peace in the music.
But that peace was short-lived: before the friars had brought their devotion to its end, the noise of heavy boots coming down the stair from the dormitory found its way to the chancel, and was soon followed by that of curses unseemly in any house of God. I recognised the voices of Murchadh and his sons, and others I had heard at Dun-a-Mallaght. The door was kicked open with little ceremony, the holy voices fell away and the intruders clattered into the silence of the church.
‘And so, you skulk in here, Mac Cuarta. I wonder that you dare to show your face.’
Stephen must have risen from his stall. His voice was full, and there was no hesitation in it. ‘I skulk nowhere, Murchadh; this is the house of God.’
‘It is a den of vipers and thieves. Where is Seaton?’
‘I do not know.’
‘Do you lie in my face at the very altar, Mac Cuarta?’ Murchadh was consumed with rage. ‘You left my house in the night, and you took Seaton and the girl, Deirdre, with you. Now where are they?’
Again, I heard Stephen say, ‘I do not know.’ But this time it was no voice but the sickening, quick, drawing of a sword from its sheath that answered him.
‘I will fillet you from top to bottom and feed my dogs from your belly. Where is she?’ It was Cormac, all his habitual self-control gone.
Then I heard Ciaran’s voice. ‘Put your sword away, Cormac. You’ll get nothing from him: he’s too long in the saddle and the tooth to fear what we might do. But now, let me see …’
A Game of Sorrows Page 25
