A Game of Sorrows (45 page)

‘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 think, 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.’

‘Please, Deirdre,’ I said.

She continued to smile, at me now. ‘No, Alexander, it is too late. It was always too late.’

Andrew took a step towards her as she spoke, but she shrank back, drawing the child closer to herself.

‘It is too late,’ she repeated.

‘But we will go, as we planned. We will go with Alexander, make a new life for ourselves, and take the child. You will allow that, will you not, Maeve? We can take Macha with us even.’

My grandmother nodded in desperate acquiescence but still Deirdre shook her head. ‘No, you are lying to me too, Andrew. I heard you both last night. You will not let me take him. But I have to. No one else will protect him from her. I am taking him to his father.’

She moved closer to the edge of the balcony and what happened next was done so quickly I hardly knew where it began. She lifted the baby high in the air, Maeve screamed and Eachan, come to himself, started to run. But Andrew was closest and lunged for the child, only wrenching it from her arms as she hurled herself backwards over the balcony rail.

She seemed to fall for ever, her arms outstretched, her hair flowing behind her, a look of supreme peace on her face. Falling into the arms of those who had gone before her, she broke her neck on the hard stone floor below. There was silence, utter silence for a moment, and then the child started to cry. Andrew held him tight and tried to soothe him, but as his grip strengthened, his teeth gritted and his eyes became a film of tears, I feared he would crush the breath out of the tiny bundle in his arms. I made my way over to him and gently took it from him, handing him to my grandmother who, ashen-faced, went quietly with him towards Macha’s bedroom. And then I held Andrew as he succumbed to his overwhelming grief.

I had all but pleaded with him, but he would not come with me. We had parted at Ayr. I think he took something of me with him, and I something of him with me, and yet it was a lack I felt, an absence.

‘You could make the new life we talked of. You could have that new beginning.’

‘It was a dream, Alexander, of another time. It is gone now.’

‘I know it cannot be how it was to have been…’

‘No, she is dead.’

‘Yes, she is dead. And she can no more be in Dumfriesshire than she could in Aberdeen. There is nothing for you to the south that you would not find in the north.’

‘I have family there, in the borders. My father’s family.’

‘Whom you never knew and who will scarce remember him even.’

He looked sharply at me, a fragment of an old antagonism in his face. ‘Do you think it only for you that kin matters?’

‘No, Andrew, but I know you. And I know what I would be bringing you to if you came with me. You have my friendship, and will have it always, wherever we might be. But you will also have it of those who are my friends, for my sake and in a very little time for your own. I know the life you could make there.’

‘I am going, Alexander, where I will not see one story play itself out in my mind while I am forced to live another. If I came with you, every day I would be haunted by the life she and I might have had there, together. Everywhere I turned, there would be signs of what could have been. I will go where she never was, in her dreams or mine, and I might keep my mind that way.’

‘But Andrew …’

‘No, Alexander! Good God, man, do you not see it? Every time I look at your face I can see them all again, all the O’Neills and what they made her, what they took from me. I never had a friend in my life before, and I love you dearly, but for the love of God and for your own sake and mine, understand this: I cannot bear to look upon your face.’

And so we had struck out, one for the south, the other for the north. And I do not think he looked back once, as I did, at the dark blue shape across the water, the island of Ireland, receding with every step I took, into its own sky, its own sea, to its own world where we would play our parts no longer, Eirinn cloaking herself in memory once more, from the eyes of unworthy men. I did not know if I would ever look on her again.

And as I walked on, I left also my grandmother and her great-grandson, my two living blood relatives in this world. Macha was there too, and Eachan of course, and would be until his last breath left him. But it was in the old woman and the newborn child that the fate of those I had left behind in Ulster, and the names that had gone before them, would rest: I knew that.

Maeve was free, still free, saved from certain trial and execution for treachery by Murchadh O’Neill, in one final act of pride. When at last taken with his two younger sons; when, after much bloodshed and courage, Dun-a-Mallaght had finally fallen, Murchadh had scorned the idea that a woman, even such a woman as Maeve O’Neill, had intrigued with the English to bring arms into Ireland for a rebellion against those Englishmen’s own king. He, Murchadh, and no other, had led and directed all. And by that his name had salvaged some honour, at the point of death, that he had never managed to attain to through his life. But no poets were left now to sing the praises of Murchadh, to glorify his family and his deeds. And as our boat had left Ulster for Scotland and passed beneath the walls of Carrickfergus, the severed head of Murchadh O’Neill, along with those of his three sons, looked out from the stakes on which they had been impaled, over me and across the sea that might have brought them aid. Already, the gulls had begun to peck at their eyes, and in a few days, or weeks perhaps, they would be eaten or rotted, and only their skulls, and some story of a rising that had never been, left to remember them.