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.’
‘And he you. You would never have had a greater friend than Richard FitzGarrett. He was everything a man, a grandfather, should have been, and more than that. He was a better father to me than my own.’ Sean had been only ten years old when his father, Phelim, had left Ireland for exile with the earls, and had scarcely known him before that, for my uncle had always been in the train of the Earl of Tyrone, always on his business, in his wars. Had it not been for the troubles of the time, Sean would have been fostered out within the O’Neill kindred as Phelim had been before him, but he had been born in the middle of Tyrone’s great rebellion, the Nine Years’ War that had devastated the country and meant the end for many of her great Gaelic families. It had been judged safest for Sean to remain with his grandparents, at the very heart of the English administration at Carrickfergus.