A Game of Sorrows (7 page)

It was clear she was in earnest, and I knew I could not listen to this from her. ‘It is as well that you understand now, Grandmother’ – for I did not know how else to address her – ‘that I have no belief in your superstitions. I am here because my cousin asked me to help him in whatever danger threatens him and this family. I have come for the sake of my mother’s love for this place and people, but this is not what I was born to, and when I have done what I have to do, I will return to my own country and people, for they are not here.’

Her only response was in her eyes, whose contempt said I would do whatever she required of me, and that whatever I thought I had been born to was no concern of hers, or mine.

Eventually she said, ‘You sit and eat also. Sean, I will take you now to your grandfather.’ My cousin got up, draining his glass in one. ‘And then we must talk, for Roisin’s father has become anxious, and the girl herself is getting restless.’

Sean glanced at me. ‘Another time, Grandmother. Another time.’ He followed her up the wooden stairway to the gallery above, there to disappear from view.

Although I had not eaten for many hours, my appetite had gone completely, and the wine, fine though it no doubt was, tasted sour in my mouth. I put my glass down and looked around me. The furnishing in the room was solid work, of good quality, not shabby but well worn. Chairs, tables, cabinets, settles, had all been here a long time. But how long? Had they been here thirty years? Had my mother known them? I could not tell. But the hangings on the walls, those had been there more than one lifetime, I was sure of it. I looked more closely and saw what I knew my mother must have seen as a young girl, standing where I now stood, and again in her mind’s eye many years later as she told those stories to me. As I looked on them I began to recall the tales again, of Lugh and Balor, of Niamh and Oisin and of Cuchulainn. Images of feastings, battles, shape-changing heroes and tragic lovers were in my mind and before my eyes. It might have been a matter of minutes, or it might have been an hour, before Sean’s voice interrupted my reverie.

‘Alexander, will you come now?’

He stood behind the carved wooden balustrade and waited for me. As I drew nearer it seemed to me that his face had aged ten years. Beneath his eyes were shadows that had not been there before, and his mouth was drawn tight in an effort to keep his composure.

‘Is he still living?’

He nodded, once. ‘But it cannot be long now. I think he will be gone before morning. Come.’ I followed him to a small arched doorway set back in one corner.

The room we passed into was very dimly lit. Despite the early frost that had taken hold outside, it was almost overwhelmingly warm, like a place that had known no true air or light for days. Maeve was there, and in a corner, only just illuminated by the meagre light, was a dark-hooded figure, mumbling in Latin as a set of beads moved though his hands. I did not care. My only interest was in the figure lying propped against the pillows in the centre of the heavily canopied bed. That he was very ill was clear even from where I stood, but so too was a light in his eyes that could not be mistaken, a light I had last seen ten years ago, before my mother had left this world. Maeve started to speak but I ignored her and went to him.

‘Grandfather,’ I said.

He reached out a hand and I took it in mine. Two hands, the fingers the same length, the same shape, but separated by fifty years of time and life. What would I have given to have had the hand of my four-year-old self in the firm grip of that man in his prime? To have been embraced by those arms when they were still strong, to have known him a lifetime?

By some great effort he spoke. I bent closer. ‘Alexander. My Grainne’s child. My boy, my boy. That I lived to see this day.’ He gripped my hand more tightly but the effort of speech was too much and he sank back into the pillows, exhausted. Maeve left the room, but the mumbling priest did not, and I understood that he would remain until my grandfather passed from this world into the next. Sean came over to the bed and sat down on the other side. He gently stroked the old man’s forehead and took his other hand in his. Our grandfather smiled one last time and closed his eyes, to begin a sleep from which we two who were with him knew he would not wake. I would have waited until he made that final crossing, but I did not, for I had not been that four-year-old boy, that strapping youth, that young man sharing hopes; I leaned over and kissed his forehead and then got up and left, leaving him with the one who had.

I was taken by Eachan to the top of the house, up a narrow, almost hidden set of steps from the balcony, to a kind of attic behind the vaulted ceiling. We passed from the top of the steps through a walkway, jutting out from the parapets and open to the elements – the machicolation – from which overhang any enemy approaching to the tower house could be watched in safety and, if necessary, dealt with. I was hurried along the walkway to a small door in the other corner of the parapet. Eachan knocked on the door and spoke in a low voice to the person on the other side.

The man who opened the door was older than me, older than Sean too, thirty-five, perhaps. His straight blond hair came halfway down his neck. He glanced at me only for a moment, green eyes in a strong-boned face assessing me before he turned to Eachan and said, ‘By God: he is like Sean after all.’

Eachan said nothing, merely nodding before he left us alone in the tiny chamber. There were two beds in it, and some plain furnishings – a chest, a stool and small table with a chessboard on it, wooden candlesticks with cheap-smelling tallow candles – but after the travels and discomforts of the nights on my journey from Aberdeen, its cleanliness and simplicity were things of luxury to me.

The other indicated one of the beds. ‘You can sleep there. I will not disturb you, but if you want anything, food, drink, the latrine – you are to ask only me. You are not to wander the house yourself.’

‘Am I a prisoner?’

He seemed to consider a moment. ‘No, but aside from your grandparents, Sean, Eachan and myself, no one knows that you are here, or even of your existence. The mistress would have it kept that way.’

He turned his back, our conversation over. I didn’t even know his name. He carried himself with some authority, and I wondered if he was Deirdre’s husband.

‘Who are you? What is your place in this household?’

‘My name is Andrew Boyd. My father was your grandfather’s steward. I work in your grandfather’s merchant business and travel for him throughout the province. I have the status of a servant in this house.’

He did not have the bearing of a servant, or of one who would remain a servant long.

‘I am Alexander Seaton,’ I said. ‘But you will know that already.’

He looked up from taking off his boots and shook his head, the trace of a smile for the first time showing on his lips. ‘Until an hour ago, I knew nothing of your existence. In the last hour I have learned that my master’s dead daughter did not drown within days of leaving her home, but went to Scotland and there bore a son, who was the living image of Sean, and of his father Phelim before him, an O’Neill to the marrow of his bones. I have learned that Sean was not away in the south, on what we are constrained to call “his business”, but in the far reaches of Scotland, to fetch you here because your grandmother believes you can lift the poet’s curse by which she and her kind set such store. You are to remain here until she is ready to present you.’

‘You set no store by such curses then? You are not of my grandmother’s kind?’

He stopped in his work. ‘You don’t know much about this place you have come to, do you?’

‘Sean has told me much about this country and its different peoples, but I am not so well versed in it all that I can place someone on a moment’s acquaintance.’

He sighed, as if tired already of my intrusion. ‘I was born in Galloway, but my father brought us here in the Nineties, after the third harvest failure in a row. He found employment with the FitzGarretts. I was brought up not to masses and incense and bells, but to the word of God, given freely to all men. I have no time for curses and incantations and give no credence to them.’ He turned back to his boots. ‘But I would ask you one thing. And you may think it is a thing a servant has no place to ask of one whose family he serves, but there are some matters that go beyond worldly standing.’

‘Whatever you think of the family my mother came from, I am a craftsman’s son. My father earned his living by the work of his own hands, and after she left here to come to Scotland, my mother knew no servant but herself.’

‘Oh?’ He appraised me again. ‘What I ask is this: that you would not set up your crucifix nor work at your beads when I am in this room.’

Before I could prevent myself, I laughed out loud. ‘You think me a Papist? You are as like to find John Knox still living and playing at his beads as you are to see me set foot in a mass house. Have no fear, there will be no Latin mumbled here.’

He nodded, evidently satisfied, and with little interest in learning any more about me, lay down, fully clothed, and closed his eyes. I lay down also, exhausted, and thinking to make sense of how I had come to be where I was now, and of what I must be in the eyes of those I had come to and those I had left behind. The hastily scrawled notes I had left to Sarah, to William Cargill and to Principal Dun can have done little enough to explain my sudden night-time disappearance from Aberdeen. Regardless of what words I had scribbled down, my abandonment of my friends and my responsibilities so soon after Sean’s escapades could be seen only in one way: the graceless dereliction of duty and friendship by a thankless man. I had never spoken to Sarah of the aching loss I had carried all my life for the world my mother had come from, and the certainty of her hurt and anger, Dr Dun’s disappointment and the utter bewilderment of William Cargill kept me awake for some time, until at last fatigue overcame the restless wanderings of my troubled mind.

At some hour of the night I was aware of the door being opened and Andrew being called quietly from his bed. I knew it meant my grandfather was dead. I huddled myself more deeply in the blankets and willed myself not to think of it until daylight. Eventually I slept again, trying to remember the feel of my grandfather’s hand in mine. I may have dreamt, but any dreams I had were lost in the violence of my waking. It was still night, and I thought for a moment that I was still on my journey with Eachan and Sean, sleeping out with little shelter as we had done on more than one night, for I became gradually aware of water dropping on me, on my face and hands. I felt for my cloak, to pull it over my face, and as I did so, I realised someone was leaning over me; there was a pressure on my forehead, and as I struggled to consciousness, words in the Latin tongue snaked into my mind. Then the door of my room was thrown wide open and there was a flood of light. Someone shouted and the figure leaning over me was pushed away. I opened my eyes to see Andrew Boyd standing above me, his hand at the priest’s throat. My grandmother was also in the room, pale and shaken, with her grey hair loose down her back.

‘Leave him,’ she said, although I could not tell at first if it was to Boyd or the priest that she spoke. The two men stood back from one another and regarded each other with unconcealed contempt.

I sat up, remembering now where I was. ‘What is happening here?’

It was Andrew Boyd who spoke first. ‘They were trying to claim you. They had their water and the priest was at you with his oils. They were baptising you into the Church of Rome.’

I looked to my grandmother in disbelief, waiting for a denial. None came. ‘My husband is dead,’ she said. ‘God knows, I may follow him soon enough. Your mother was lost to us and damned herself when she abandoned her family and her faith to go with your father. I will not have her son, my grandson, lost in the same way.’

‘And you think your holy water and bells and oils can overcome my faith? Come to my chamber every night with your unction and incantations: you will not change my soul.’

Maeve came closer to me, and her eyes were fearful. ‘Child, I beg of you, let the Father do this. It will protect you against whatever dangers we face, and give you merit in the judgement to come.’

I took her old, veined and bony hand. It was frozen. ‘You must understand,’ I said. ‘I give no credence to such merit, and neither does my God. Only my faith and not some token like this can save me. Only the life I live can show my faith, not these trinkets.’

If I had hoped to reach her, I failed. She let her hand slip from my grasp. ‘Then you will go down the same path to Hell that your mother walked before you. Do not say I did not try to prevent it.’ She left the room, taking the dark-hooded figure with her.

Andrew Boyd bolted the door behind them. He sat down on his bed, his head in his hands.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He looked up, surprised, vulnerable for a moment, a man who had dropped his guard.

‘I am not often given to fearfulness, but this has been a hard night. And this will be a different house with your grandfather gone. But you were right, none of their ceremonies could have imperilled you.’

‘All the same, I am grateful.’

‘Aye, well …’ Not finding the words that suited him, he was silent.

As we both lay down again in the darkness, I thought of this strange new companion, and wondered what it was of him that he was so reluctant other men should see. There were many things about this house that I wanted to ask him, but they would keep for the daylight. We would each take what respite remained to us in the hours of the night.

Andrew went early to his duties and it was Sean who brought me my breakfast a little before dawn. He unlocked the door and came in bearing a tray of beer and warm bannocks. He sat down and let out a great sigh.

‘You know our grandfather is dead?’ he said. Even in saying the words, something in him seemed to crumple.

I put out a hand to him. ‘I am sorry. So sorry.’

‘He was the best thing in my life, Alexander. The one true thing.’

‘I would like to have known him better.’