‘My husband too, for other reasons. But they will not. Andrew is a better man than either of them.’
‘Yes.’
She sat down on the bed, smoothing out the linen with her hand.
‘He is a better man than my grandmother would ever acknowledge.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘Will he have me now, do you think?’
‘I cannot answer for him, Deirdre, but I know he loves you.’
‘Oh, he always loved me,’ she said. ‘I knew that. I always knew it. And I him, but other things mattered more, then.’
I waited, but she appeared to think no further explanation necessary. After a while, she became aware of my silence.
‘I often thought of your mother, you know, when I was growing up.’ Her face brightened. ‘They tell me I look like her.’
I smiled. ‘You do.’
‘I used to think of her, picture her, lying with her dead love at the bottom of the sea, her hair entangled in seaweeds and a smile of perfect peace on her face. I envied her her freedom.’
‘Her life was not as you thought,’ I said.
She stood by the small table at the end of Andrew’s bed, and started to examine the pieces on the chessboard there. She fingered the white queen awhile, picked her up, looked at her and set her down again somewhere else on the board, without giving much consideration to where she had positioned her. She turned her attention then to the black pieces, picked up a knight, put him down in his place again, and then moved the other. She carried on in this way, touching the pieces, considering them as objects, and then moving them in a way that had some logic in it that was clear to her, but unfathomable to me.
‘Did Sean ever try to get you to play Fidchell?’ she said, after some time, when it looked impossible that the white queen should survive a move longer.
‘No, I have never heard of it.’
‘A pity,’ she said, ‘but perhaps not. It was a game of the ancients. No one really knows how to play it now. But Sean wanted to know and Maeve had a board and set made for him, from as much information as could be gleaned from the old stories. It was beautiful, the board a pale wood inlaid with markings of gold, the pieces a white stone carved by the finest craftsmen. We knew very little of the rules, only some idea that the king should claim and keep his throne, and that to win at Fidchell, you had to play very well. Sean studied all the stories, and made up his own rules. He tried to teach them to me, but I could never understand it, and I always lost.’
The white queen was now impossibly compromised and had nowhere to go. Deirdre had entirely abandoned any attempt at protecting either king. She studied the board a moment and then knocked the pieces over, one by one. ‘I was never any good at games. I should have remembered that.’ She held up one of the white knights. ‘I should have married Cormac, as she wanted me to – God knows, many a woman would dream of such a man, but I would not enmesh myself further with the O’Neills. And then he was too good for me and he would not see it. And now I have brought death to him years before it should have come.’
‘Cormac’s death is not your fault, Deirdre. You cannot blame yourself for all that has happened.’
‘Can I not? I have made many mistakes, believed that many things could be that I have learned could never have been. I didn’t even understand my own brother.’
‘He loved you dearly.’
‘And I him, but I did not understand him. I could scarcely believe it when I realised that he would fall in with Maeve’s plans, with Murchadh’s, that he would marry Roisin and throw it all at my grandmother’s feet; everything my grandfather had worked for, his wealth and our name, to be squandered in a cause that was long lost.’ She looked away. ‘I could not believe he would not listen to me. So I determined to set myself at the furthest extreme from their world that I knew. I had tried to get away from Maeve before; I went once, you know, to our grandfather’s people in the Pale, but they would not have me. So I married the son of a wealthy English planter.’ She laughed. ‘What an insult to Cormac, to Andrew too, to have married such a man. I would have done anything to stop Maeve, but it made no difference, and still Sean would not listen to me. And now my grandfather is dead, and Sean is dead, and Cormac is dead. The poet, too, is dead.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I was never any good at games. And you have been brought here, where I know you do not wish to be, because of me.’
‘I came here because Sean asked me to come. I came to help lift the curse.’
‘The curse cannot be lifted. He tried to tell me that, and I only laughed at him. But now I know it and it is too late.’
‘Who told you, Deirdre?’ I reached out to take her hands in my own. ‘Who told you?’
‘He told me himself, of course,’ she said, her eyes shining with a strange brilliance.
At that moment there was a thud against the door and an oath that surprised me, for I had rarely known Andrew lose control of his tongue.
‘Alexander? Alexander!’ he shouted. ‘Alexander, are you there? Where is Deirdre? Let me in before I break the door down.’
I got up and put all my strength against the side of the chest, which had moved more easily in one direction than it would in the other. Another thud threatened injury only to the attacker. ‘Andrew, for the love of God!’
Eventually, I had the thing shifted and managed to unbolt the door. He almost fell through it.
‘Why did you not answer me?’
‘I did,’ I croaked, pointing at my own neck. ‘You were making too much noise yourself to hear me.’
He saw past me then to Deirdre, and that she was safe, and without ceremony took her tight into his arms.
‘You came back for me.’
‘I will not leave you, Deirdre. You will stay with me now, and I will not leave you.’
To my astonishment, Sir James Shaw was through the door behind him.
‘The men from Coleraine have all been taken to the castle. Their hired thugs will be released before long, I am sure – the constable has not the room nor the inclination to hold them – but Matthew Blackstone and his son will be in the Tower before the month is out. They will be shown no mercy for their treachery in selling arms to rebels against the king.’
‘What about his wife and daughters?’ I asked.
‘He is no fool – he would not have told them what he was about, and they will fare the better for it. Unless it be found that they colluded in his business, they will be left in peace.’
‘To fend for themselves,’ I said. ‘And what about Deirdre?’
He looked from me to Andrew and and back to me. ‘Your cousin cannot be assured of safety here. She has too many ties to too many people who have been involved in plotting against the king. Your grandmother will not lift a finger to help her.’ He spoke now to Deirdre herself. ‘I think you must leave Ireland, and as soon as possible.’
A shout from one of his men below called him away, and a moment later only his words remained where he had been.
‘Leave Ireland?’ she said, as if the thought had never before occurred to her. ‘But where could I go?’
The words were out of my mouth before I knew I had thought them. ‘To Scotland, with me.’
She shook her head. ‘I will not leave Andrew again. He is all there is left, he and my brother’s child.’
‘I am coming too,’ he said. ‘There is a boat leaving for Ayr tomorrow, at five o’clock in the evening. I have this afternoon purchased passage for all three of us. Alexander can return home and you and I, Deirdre – we can begin life anew, away from here.’
She smiled. ‘Is it possible? Is it really possible?’
‘It is possible. There is nothing for us here any more. I am sickened of this country. I have money for land and for trade. We can buy our way into some town…’
‘I have friends in Aberdeen who can help you,’ I said, picturing already the friendship that I knew would form between Andrew and William Cargill, the bond of sisterhood between Deirdre and Sarah, th
e healing there would be.
‘Truly, you can help us?’ said Andrew.
‘I have a friend who is a lawyer, well thought of in Aberdeen. The town and the countryside around are full of those looking for someone with money to invest. Even a small amount of capital is welcomed. And your experience in my grandfather’s business would help you to similar work soon enough, if you needed it. I am sure of it.’
‘It is so far away,’ said Deirdre.
‘A world away,’ I said. ‘From rebellions, and kindreds, and feuding, and poets and curses. A world away from our grandmother and from here.’
‘Where we might start again, where we might live our lives as others live them.’
‘Yes,’ said Andrew gently. ‘As others live them.’
‘But the child,’ she said.
We looked, uncomprehending, at each other, and then at her. I think Andrew was in some fears that she carried Edward Blackstone’s child, or even Cormac’s.
‘Sean’s child,’ she said.
‘We cannot take Sean’s child. It is yet to be born, and we must leave for Scotland tomorrow. I do not know how much longer you will be safe here. And besides,’ he took her hand tenderly, ‘it is Macha’s child, too, and she will never leave Ireland.’
‘But who will protect him?’ She looked frightened now, her eyes darting from one to the other of us.
‘Macha is stronger than you think. And Eachan …’
‘My brother had Eachan, and now he is dead. Besides, Eachan can do nothing against my grandmother. We must get the child away from her. We must protect it from her. She will poison his life as she did my father’s, Sean’s, mine. She will fill his head with nothing but dreams of the O’Neills, of the old Ireland, of leading rebellion. She will live out her last days through him.’
There was nothing I could say against this. I knew she was right.
‘We cannot take him from his mother, Deirdre, and his mother will never leave here; I am not sure that her dreams are so different from Maeve’s anyhow. She loved Sean for what he was, but for all he planned to do also.’
‘Then she should not have him either.’
‘Deirdre …’
‘She should not, she should not.’ She was beating her hands against Andrew’s chest as she wept.
Deirdre’s outburst had exhausted her, and we laid her down on Andrew’s bed to sleep. He went below, and returned with the news that Maeve believed Deirdre to have gone to the castle with Sir James, where she assumed I would be also. She was too taken up with the imminent birth of her great-grandchild to give much thought to either of us. Macha was now in what had been my grandfather’s room, awaiting her childbed, with Eachan in constant attendance, swearing death on almost any who came near her. Still traversing a dark valley of grief for Sean, his devotion was channelled now to the protection of his dead master’s wife and child. Once born, there would have been no hope of spiriting the child away from its mother, even had Andrew or myself had the slightest desire to do so. Neither of us did. We agreed that Deirdre must be persuaded to come away without him.
I lay down on the bed across from my cousin and watched her sleep, counting with every breath the moments passing until we could leave this place on tomorrow’s tide. She had spoken of my mother, but the life she was fleeing to would not be as my mother’s had been; my father had been a good man, a decent man, but he had not had the vision, or indeed the means, of Andrew Boyd. Deirdre would not have the endless work to do that had been my mother’s lot, would not grow to resent her husband‘s lack of learning, his satisfaction with his position in the world, as my mother had done. It would be a different life, a different future for them. Andrew, again condemned to a pallet of straw while I slept on feathers, laid himself down on the floor of his own room and was soon asleep.
These two, at least, would escape Finn O’Rahilly’s curse. But would I, who had not been encompassed by it? A fear was growing within me that it had already reached out, beyond these shores, to the place I had come from, the place I wished to return to, and begun to poison everything there for me. It had brought me here, that curse, entangled me in the lives of those it damned, and I could not escape untarnished. It had drawn back veils I had not known were there and shown almost everyone I had come to know in Ulster to be something other than I had supposed them to be. And yet I was still no closer to discovering who had hired the lips of Finn O’Rahilly to unleash those words in the first place. I fell asleep with the image of the poet in my mind.
I would have slept until dawn, had not the sounds of a living nightmare pierced my consciousness somewhere in the darkest hours of the night. It was a woman screaming, a scream of such terror and agony as I had never heard from a human throat before. I fumbled for flint and lit the candle as I tried to get out of bed. Deirdre’s place was empty: she was nowhere in the room. Andrew was already on his feet.
‘In God’s name, Alexander, what is that?’
‘I don’t know. She is gone.’
He looked now at the empty bed, grabbed the candle from me and was out of the door within seconds. I had not the strength to follow him at speed and could only fumble my way along the darkened corridor until a crack of light showed me the door to the stairs. The screaming continued, but through it, Cormac O’Neill’s voice came to me again, as he had tried to warn me of pursuing the curse, ‘… may think on his words if you must, but you will call down upon yourself whatever griefs follow.’ And those griefs were calling in my ears, ringing in them now. When I had asked him, Finn O’Rahilly had told me that no one else had come to see him about the blessing that became a curse – no one but Deirdre and my grandmother – and he had not lied. And only tonight, Deirdre herself had told me she would do anything, anything, to put an end to Maeve’s endless dreaming of a triumphant resurgence of the O’Neills in an Ireland that could be no more. Having no faith in the powers of poets herself, she had believed she could play upon the superstitions of her grandmother, warn, manipulate a woman who had spent a lifetime manipulating others. She had instigated the cursing of her own family and it was too late now, as the poet had told her it would be, to undo what had followed. I redoubled my efforts and ran the remaining distance to the room whence Macha’s screams, as she brought my cousin’s child into the world, reverberated through the house and into the night.
Andrew was there already, slumped out of breath beside the door, the candle still in his hand and a look of sheer relief on his face.
‘It is only Macha, Alexander, only Macha. The child will be born soon. All is well.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Where is Deirdre?’
‘She is in there with her.’
‘I must get in.’
But the powerful arm of Eachan barred the door. ‘No one gets in but the women and the doctor. Cross that door and it will be the last step you take.’
‘Eachan, you do not understand.’
‘It is you who does not understand: I will …’
But he was stopped by a silence, and then a cry, a different cry from a woman’s agonies, the cry of a human child entering into the world. We held our breath a moment, we three men, and then Andrew broke into the broadest of smiles and I thought I saw a tear in the old Irishman’s eye. I took my chance and was through the door before he knew I had passed him.
I only had a moment to take in the scene. The room was ablaze with light – candles lit all around the walls, along the mantelpiece and in the hands of two servant girls on either side of the bed. A doctor was washing his hands in a bowl and congratulating my grandmother. The old woman paid him little attention, lost in an unwonted moment of tenderness, lovingly stroking Macha’s brow; and the midwife, having cleaned and swaddled the child, was handing him not to his mother but to my cousin Deirdre.
I took a step forward, opened my mouth to shout, and the last thing I felt before I went down was the huge fist of Eachan slam into the side of my face. There was nothing but blackness and startling lights in my head, and for a moment I th
ink, for several moments, I succumbed to them. Eventually I forced myself up. By the time I had done so, the room had changed. It was still ablaze with light and fire, but almost all the people had gone save the midwife, a servant and the distraught girl on the bed crying out in Irish for her child. There was no Andrew, no Eachan, no Maeve and no Deirdre. And there was no child.
Lunging from one piece of furniture to the next, I reached the corridor. I could see them now, across the balcony, at the head of the stairs that led down to the great hall. Eachan was in a stupor almost, his hands at his sides, tears rolling down his face, repeating over and over again some Gaelic imprecation. Maeve was frozen, like an effigy of herself, dawning comprehension robbing her of the power of speech. Andrew was standing perhaps three feet from Deirdre, very still, but his eyes moving and his mind, I knew, calculating. In the hall below, hurriedly but quietly, servants were laying down cushions, mattresses, pillows: anything that would soften a fall. And there, by the head of the stairs itself, was Deirdre. Beautiful, her eyes shining, her hair tumbled loose over her shoulders, in the pale blue gown she had lain down to sleep in, holding close to her cheek and murmuring soft words of comfort into the ear of her brother’s child.
‘Give me the child, Deirdre,’ said my grandmother at last.
Deirdre only smiled, and continued to whisper into the baby’s ear, and to kiss its soft cheek.
‘Give me the child,’ my grandmother repeated.
‘No. I will not do that, grandmother. You would destroy him, as you destroyed my father, my brother. You will not destroy this child. I will keep him safe.’
The old woman was getting desperate. ‘I will not. I will send them away, tomorrow. The child and his mother. I will send them away, and Eachan with them to protect them. And money. I will give them money. I will never see them again.’
Deirdre shook her head, smiling at the child and not looking at her grandmother. ‘No, you lie. You have always lied. Ever since I was a child. Before that even. You told my grandfather his daughter was dead, but look, there is her son Alexander, here in this house, too late.’
A Game of Sorrows Page 35
