Shona MacLean - A Game of Sorrows

The Irishman at the door said something in a low voice, as if to himself. His words did not escape his master. Sean uttered something, laughing, to him and turned to me. ‘Eachan does not agree with me. He thinks me a danger to be let out on my own, and it took little effort on his part to persuade our grandmother of the same. Much to the chagrin of many a maiden, I have not spent a night without him since.’

My cousin sought to make light of the situation, but I thought I could judge enough of him already to know that he was not a man easily frightened. That he was here, many hundreds of miles from his home, and with his guard dog at his back, bespoke how seriously those around him took the threat.

‘And what explanation do you have for all this?’ I asked.

‘Very little, and that not poetical. Not that our family has been cursed for the honour of Ireland, that is for sure. Someone wishes very real harm to our family, and there is only me to protect them. I do not like being so far away from them at this time of trouble.’ He took a deep breath and looked directly at me. ‘Maeve sent me here because you are the only one of her line, of our blood, not encompassed by the curse of Finn O’Rahilly. He pronounced a special fate for each of us in his prediction of the end of the O’Neills, but you he did not mention. Alexander Seaton, the son of Grainne FitzGarrett and grandson of Maeve O’Neill – he does not know of your existence. She believes that only you can break the curse, that the very fact of your being saves her line.’

‘Then she must tell him so,’ I said flatly, for I was tired and I had little desire to hear more of this woman’s wishes.

‘Alexander,’ he said gently, ‘the woman has spent the last thirty years telling people her daughter died before ever she reached Scotland. Who would believe her now were she to say no, Grainne lived, bore a healthy son? No one. No one.’ He waited a moment, for me to understand. Through the darkness, the bell of St Nicholas kirk tolled the advancing night. ‘I am here to take you back to Ulster, to the land of your forefathers, to save the name of your mother’s people and the mind of your grandmother, and to ease the passing of an old man with a broken heart. You cannot deny them, Alexander, you cannot deny your blood.’

I got up from the bed and turning away from him, went to the window and looked out on to the night sky. The stars shone as bright then as they had done an hour ago, but something in the world beneath them had changed. The lack, the emptiness I had felt my whole life was calling to me, and I wanted to deny it. I turned back to face him. ‘I have had to make my own way, without my family’s blood. I am not so callous that I care nothing for their troubles, but my life is turning now, and in a direction I have long prayed it might take. God has shown me His grace, and I cannot flout it to calm an old woman’s superstitious mind.’

Sean eyed me levelly. ‘I do not ask you to, cousin. I ask you as a man to help me protect our family against a very real, human agency that means it harm. Whoever paid the poet to lay this curse aims to fray our grandmother’s mind, my sister’s too, perhaps, and to remove me altogether. That attempt at my murder failed once – it may not do so a second time. Our grandfather is old and ill; I have Eachan and a few other good men that I trust, but of family there is none, none but you and I. We have lost a day already – there is a boat making for Leith and I must be on it. I had thought to have another day to persuade you, but the captain tells me the weather is to turn, and that we must leave on tonight’s tide. We have less than an hour, for he goes whether we are aboard or no. I can tarry here no longer. I ask you again, Alexander, will you come?’

There was little to be heard save the sound of the oars and the soft lapping of the water against the sides of our boat as we made slowly towards the shore a little to the north of Carrickfergus. It was a frosty night, the sky not quite black but a dark blue. The meagre light of the new moon, assisted by its retinue of stars, gave us all the guidance that was needed to complete the last few miles of our long journey. Eachan read the constellations like a man born to the sea, and besides, he knew the coastline between here and Olderfleet, where our ship from Scotland had landed, so well that he had little need even for recourse to the sky to steer him.

From across the boat, Sean watched me. ‘Well, Alexander, are you ready?’

For a moment I could think of no answer. Within a few hours of our ship docking at Leith, almost all I knew with any sense of familiarity had been behind me. We had pushed relentlessly onward, to the south and west, giving little respite to the hired horses Sean had left stabled in Edinburgh. It was then that I first witnessed for myself the remarkable endurance of the Irish of physical hardship, an endurance the sheltered life of the philosopher had never required of me. The endless cold and rain and the harshness of the terrain as we pressed further into Galloway had little impact on my companions, who slept on open ground, amongst moss and fern, with an ease that only sheer exhaustion allowed to me. And with every mile we travelled I had felt more of an alien in a strange land. There had come a point at which I’d realised that the Scots tongue was no longer spoken around us, in the inns, the farmsteads and the hovels we stopped at for water, food, and, very occasionally, rest. All about me spoke in the same Gaelic tongue now familiar to my ears in the voices of Sean and Eachan. King James had gone far to bring this part of his Scottish kingdom under his heel, but his son would have to go further still, I thought, for there was greater kinship and nationhood between my cousin and his servant and the people we met on our journey than there was between those same people and me.

When at last we had crossed Scotland, from one coast to the other, I no longer had any feeling that I was still in my own country. And what greeted us on that southwest seaboard were not the dramatic cliffs, the crashing oceans I had imagined, but a gentle shore and a calm sea, beyond which, only a few miles away, past the great rock of the Ailsa Craig, I could just discern the recumbent form of my mother’s homeland: Ireland.

We left the horses at Ballantrae, at the inn from which Sean had hired them, and although we had ridden for the best parts of two nights, he would allow little rest before we were on the move again, boarding the boat which would take us to the home I had never seen. It was a fair crossing, and we had reached Olderfleet, in Larne, shortly after dusk. The same purse, Sean assured me, that had oiled our way past the customs there would see us safely through the gates of Carrickfergus. We had passed the cliffs and the daunting promontories of Whitehead and made our way down the side of Belfast Lough towards the old English garrison town and the castle that had guarded it for four hundred years. Nothing of what Sean had told me of the country I was now about to set my foot on, of its history and its present situation, had prepared me for this sight; nothing of what Eachan had told me, of the myths and legends of his people, had done anything to ease my apprehension of what I might now encounter.

We were now at the walls of the town itself; they stretched away in the darkness to the Norman mass of the castle, not hewn, grown almost from the rock as our sea fortresses were, but set imperiously upon it, not overlooking the sea but jutting aggressively into it. Above the castle walls towered the keep – grim, square, unyielding. For so many years the only foothold of the English beyond the Pale in the North, and now presiding, as my cousin had told me, over a different kind of occupation of his homeland.