A Game of Sorrows (13 page)

‘It is good to be out of that damned town,’ he said.

I took a moment to get my breath. ‘Why have you stayed so long?’

‘It had claims on me. No more.’ And he went on again, more carefully now, as the road had grown worse, boggy in parts and narrow, twisting round the bases of ancient oaks or by crumbling stone bridges, and at times disappearing altogether. The sun was not yet high enough in the sky to glimmer through the turning leaves of yellow, red and gold that made a canopy over our heads and shrouded us in a strange half-light. The leaves already fallen softened the sound of the horses’ footfalls, making me all the more aware of the silence around us.

‘This is an eerie place.’

‘There are too many of these places hereabouts; I would have avoided it if I could, but the other routes are worse.’

‘For what?’

‘The woodkerne,’ he said. ‘Dispossessed natives who lived in the armed retinues of the old Irish lords. The native Irish must toe the English line to be awarded even the poorest land, but these kerne will not submit to the new order; they cite their pride and their lineage, which makes it a disgrace for them to turn their hands to a day’s work, and prefer to live in the forest, ambushing and attacking travellers and new settlers. Some are as poor as common vagabonds, but there are others, of your cousin Murchadh’s ilk, who are not.’

‘For all I dislike him, Murchadh O’Neill is a man of wealth and standing. He is no forest-dwelling bandit. He has kept his lands.’

‘Oh yes, he has kept them, and he will never be caught with the bands of riders and woodsmen who terrorise so many, and neither will Cormac, the first-born. They know how to play to the English rules. I told you that.’

I remembered what the poet had said of Murchadh, who had kept to the fold while the wolf devoured his brothers.

‘And the rest?’

‘Murchadh’s younger sons and his followers?’ His face was a picture of contempt. ‘They ravage the country up and down and gather tribute for their father.’

‘And Sean?’ I could not believe he would ride with such men.

His face was stony. ‘I am not privy to his counsels.’

‘Does Deirdre know what Murchadh and his sons are? Is that why she rejected Cormac?’

He looked straight ahead of him. ‘I am thirty-four years old. What do I know of what is in a young woman’s heart?’ He picked up his pace. ‘Come on, let us get out of this infernal woodland. I am determined that we should put up for the night before dark. There are places in this province where the ground itself cannot be trusted. Further north there is a lake, Loughareema, they call it the vanishing lake. The track skirts its edges, but on most days there is no water to be seen and you would think the land sound for miles around, but then, of a sudden, the water rises bubbling out of the ground and the place becomes an impassable lake. The people say it is the water spirits, come to claim the souls of those who have scorned them, and that the ghosts of those who drowned there haunt the place at night. It is not a Christian place.’

I looked around me and began to understand how a man of so firm a faith could still talk of spirits, ghosts, things of superstition. As we left the woods, the land became desolate, devoid of all signs of life save my companion and myself. The wind that had not found us in the glen blew harshly in this exposed land-scape, bringing a promise of winter from the north. Everything was dun, brown. Everything looked dead, the occasional wild cherry or hawthorn standing as old and dry as stones. In a place like this a man might lose his reason, forget his faith. As a child I had believed every word of the stories my mother told me, of kings and princesses, giants and gods and messengers of the spirit world, fairies, banshees, changeling children. When I had grown to manhood, I had let these beliefs slip into memories of child-hood, knowing they were the superstitions of the godless and the pagan, forgiving my mother what many around me could never have forgiven her, for conjuring tales of the spirit world, of her own country, to entertain her child. But now, in this place, so expressive of the ageless powers and harsh beauty of the earth and the elements, I began to see how it was that men and women of sound mind and good faith could hold these tales as truth. I spurred my own horse on, anxious as Andrew to reach the security of one of the new settlements soon.

We stopped at last outside an inn, a squat place of clay and thatch with only two windows and a smoke-hole in the roof, giving little promise of hospitality. A traveller would be desperate indeed before he consented to spend the night in such a place. As we slid wearily from our horses, a young woman appeared in the doorway. She was thin but strong-looking, brown from outside work. Her hazel eyes were lit with warmth at the sight of Andrew.

‘Margaret,’ he said.

Flustered, she straightened her apron and tried to tidy the hair from her eyes, and then her glance fell on me, and her face froze for a moment in a shock of disbelief. Andrew had not noticed, busy as he was greeting the older woman standing behind her.

‘Jenny, it is good to see you.’

‘And you, my boy,’ she said, reaching up to embrace him. ‘It is too long since you have stopped at our place.’ She looked old and weary, but her joy at Andrew’s arrival took years from her face.

‘I am kept busy these days.’ He gestured towards me. ‘This is Alexander Seaton, new arrived from Scotland. I am taking him up to the north coast.’ I noted the care he took not to lie to her, and I warmed to him the more for it.

She turned her smile on me. ‘And yourself, Andrew?’

‘I have some people to see near Ballymena, before I make up my mind. My old master is dead now, and there is little to keep me in Carrickfergus. It is the right time for me to move on.’ She nodded, a little pleased, it seemed, and ushered us inside, calling to her young son to bring more peats for the fire as she did so.

‘How do you fare now, Jenny?’

‘Oh, we … we fare as you see.’

Inside the dwelling, it was hard to see anything. The small windows in the thick walls afforded very little light, and the woman had pulled the door shut behind her, to keep what warmth there was in the place. My eyes smarted in the smoke that pervaded the building, only some of it finding its escape by way of the hole in the roof. Gradually, I became accustomed to the shadows and the grey, and saw around me a picture of abject poverty. The floor was of beaten earth, with rushes at the far end and two recesses in the wall, covered in some rough-looking blankets. There was a table with a wooden bench at the end nearer the door, a couple of flimsy stools and a well-worn rocking chair. A cumbersome chest, stacked with simple earthenware bowls, beakers and dishes, completed the house’s furnishing. Suspended from a beam running the length of the roof was a pulley with pieces of dried meat, a few shrivelled onions and some battered copper pans hanging from it. It was like no inn I had ever set foot in before, but Andrew had warned me it would be so. ‘The people here live more roughly than you will ever have been used to; they have none of the luxuries of your grandmother’s house in Carrickfergus. There are many places called “inns” where you would be lucky to find a pallet on the floor, or a blanket to cover you. Jenny is a Scot, a distant cousin of my father’s, long settled here. She is a good woman, but poor. Do not be put off by the meanness of her home: we will find a warm welcome and hearty food to sustain us on the rest of our day’s journey.’

The warning had not been enough – some misgivings must have shown on my face, for the girl Margaret saw them, and went to the defence of her home. ‘We can fare no otherwise,’ she said pointedly, directing her comment, it was evident, at me.

I struggled for a response, but her mother, shocked, was there before me. ‘Margaret! Mr Seaton knows nothing of our troubles. Andrew has brought him here as a friend to our hospitality. We will not be found wanting.’

The girl bit her lip, and I thought her eyes threatened tears, but she mastered them. ‘Yes, Mother. I am sorry.’

Andrew gave me an annoyed glance, and then took the girl aside to talk to her, while her mother prepared our meal and talked to me of Scotland. Margaret said little else for the remainder of our stay as she moved quietly around us, serving us coarse oat bread and mutton broth, the bubbling fat in which the barley swam pervading the place with its smell of old, dead animal. She did not look at, or speak to me again, and I was glad when the meal was over and we were able to leave, but not before I realised that always, when his gaze was turned elsewhere, her eyes were on Andrew. I saw a longing in them that had not been born today, or yesterday. I wondered how long this girl had been in love with my sombre companion, and why he had not noticed it.

After we had left, into the welcome fresh air and pale sunlight of the afternoon, I asked him about her.

‘Oh? What’s your interest?’

‘I am just curious,’ I sought to reassure him. He did not look convinced. ‘She seems – in the wrong place.’

‘We are all in the wrong place, here. But Margaret, yes: she’s better than her surroundings. She deserves better. They all do, and might have had it one day too, had it not been for the woodkerne.’

His voice had hardened and I was not sure I wanted to know what he was about to tell me, but I could not go back now.

‘Tell me what they did.’

‘They …’ He swallowed and started again. ‘Jenny had another son, Margaret’s older brother, David. He was murdered six months ago, in the prime of his life. The kerne wanted Jenny to pay tribute, but she could not, and David told them so. They cut his throat and hung him from a tree. It was Margaret who found him. She had to cut him down herself, for such was the fear of reprisals by the woodkerne that none would help her.’

My mind went back to the glen we had passed through earlier, to what he had said of Murchadh’s sons. ‘Who were they?’ I asked quietly.

He did not look at me. ‘I cannot be sure. Anyhow, now they are near to destitute. Margaret is leaving in search of work, that she might earn some money to support her mother and young brother. I have written her a testimonial.’

‘She’s a pretty enough girl; perhaps she will find a husband.’

He raised a quizzical eyebrow at me, a smile at the corner of his mouth.

‘Are you looking for a wife, Alexander?’

I shook my head. ‘I thought perhaps you might … she looked often after you.’

This was not a surprise to him. ‘Aye, but I would not make her happy. I do not think I am the stuff husbands are made of.’

‘I thought that, once. But now I know I was wrong.’

He pulled up his horse and regarded me with puzzled amusement.

‘I did not know you were married. Indeed, your grandmother was congratulating herself last night that you were not.’

I did not dwell on why that might have been. ‘I am not. But if God grants that I set foot in Scotland again, it is the first thing I will make certain of.’

He laughed. ‘Then shall we tell the ladies of Ayr and Stranraer to prepare themselves?’

‘I mean home, to Aberdeen. There is someone there I should have married two years ago. But I did not have the courage, and now I am afraid that when I return to Aberdeen I will find I am too late.’

‘I hope you are not, Alexander. If you truly love her, I hope you are not.’

We walked our horses on. I should have left it, but I could not. ‘Andrew, I know what it is to love, and to think you can never love again, but …’

I could not see his face, but I could see the muscles in his jaw working, the tendons on his hands tense at the reins. ‘I have thought of it,’ he said at length. ‘But I am resolved that I should think of it no longer.’

‘That is a hard road for a man to take.’

‘I have the option of no other.’

I felt surrounded by desolation as we made our way in the last glows of the fading autumn light across the plateau. The gentle curves of Slemish rose a little to the north of us, and we cast shadows on the occasional granite rock that jutted oddly from the earth or lay recumbent on it. Every few miles a solitary hawthorn would be standing, windblown and gnarled, in a landscape scattered with the stumps of other trees.

Andrew spoke again as we passed one such. ‘None will touch the hawthorn. To the Irish it is a special tree, protected by the spirits. It is believed that great misfortune will befall anyone who dares to cut down the fairy tree.’

‘Surely the new planters do not give credence to such superstition.’

‘They learn to,’ he said.

We passed through Broughshane as the shadows of the night lengthened and took the last of the day. Andrew had a destination in mind and was determined to reach it before we might lay our heads in rest. Thoughts of the woodkerne were beginning to play on my mind, and I could feel the first stirrings of night-fear, when at last he stopped.

Before me rose a strange fortress, the stone walls over twenty feet high, with rounded flanking towers at each corner topped by conical slated roofs. Narrow windows were cut at intervals into the upper storeys of the towers, and the front was breached only by a huge set of oak doors. The night-fears tied themselves into a knot of apprehension in my stomach as my companion dismounted and began to hammer on the door.

It took almost two minutes of hammering before any reply came from within the strange fortress. An anxious voice called out gruffly, and in plain English, that we should state our names and our business.

‘Mr Alexander Seaton, a Scot, making his way to Coleraine, and Andrew Boyd, Scot, his servant.’ A shutter was opened then closed again, and a moment later a lighted torch appeared at the top of the wall above us.

‘Let them in.’

The doors swung open and I followed Andrew under the archway and into the courtyard beyond. What greeted us as the bolt was brought to behind us was not a fortress or castle but a farmstead, and the gatekeepers looked to be cottagers or craftsmen, not soldiers. The stockier of the two came to take my horse.

‘Welcome, friends. You are late abroad. You should not travel in these parts after dark. The woodkerne are about.’