The near-endless hours of darkness from early evening until sleep would finally take me were spent in trying to write to Sarah something she could understand, believe, forgive, but the words came slow and awkwardly, and lifted dead and cold from the page. I closed my eyes and tried to see her. In the silence I tried to hear her voice. Sometimes I would catch a fleeting glimpse of her smile and then it was gone, leaving me with nothing but a searing emptiness, as if the essence of her had been clawed out of me. Each day ended with the burning of the letter in the flame of the candle by which it had been written.
My daylight hours were spent in watching. Musket loops and arrow slits on the walls gave perfect views down the high street of the town. It was broad and long, flanked by the great stone sentinels that were the other tower houses of wealthy aldermen and burgesses. The governor might have his palace, but the old families of Carrickfergus had each their stronghold. Only from the open parapets, from which I had been forbidden, might I have seen the castle, or the church or Irish Gate behind us, but all the life of the marketplace, courthouse, jail and any travellers who entered the burgh from the North or Sea Gate, or from the Scots Quarter outside the town walls, could be seen by a watcher at one of my windows.
In the evening, Sean would come and spend a half-hour with me and elaborate for me on what I had seen. Mourners had been called and were gathering. I had learned from my mother not to believe the tales of the Irish peddled by those who had no interest but to denigrate them, and so it was no great surprise to me to see the mourners from the West who brought their magnificent horses to rest at the gateway to my grandparents’ tower house; they bore themselves with a sense of their own dignity that would not have shamed an earl. With them came their retainers, their humbler mounts heavy-laden. Sean knew them all, went to greet them all, and in the evening would regale me with tales of every tragedy, scandal or feud they had ever laid claim to. Between mouthfuls of food and drink, he could reel off levels and generations of cousinage more complex than any mathematics I had ever stumbled over, and the next day would express genuine astonishment that I could not remember my exact relationship by blood or marriage to every soul who had the previous day passed beneath the portals of the house.
Late in the afternoon of the day before the funeral, a party arrived from the direction of the Irish Gate, five well-mounted and richly clothed riders and their followers. Of the leading group, four were men, attired much as Sean had been when he had come to fetch me from Aberdeen, and in their midst, as if cordoned off from the lesser beings inhabiting the world outside, was one woman. I could not see her face and her head was covered by the hood of her furred cloak, but the tendrils of pale gold that escaped from it were those of a young woman. I had been so entranced by the sound and sight of the new arrivals, I had not heard the footsteps come up behind me. I spoke without realising I spoke or knowing I would be heard. ‘Deirdre.’
‘You should stay back from there. You might be seen.’
It was Andrew Boyd. He had often passed me in this attitude before, without remark. I ignored his warning. ‘I have been watching my cousin arrive; she travels with a larger retinue than I had expected.’
He came towards the opening and I stepped aside to afford him a better view. His eyes can scarcely have lighted on the party below us when he turned away again. ‘It is not Deirdre,’ he said, without looking at me. ‘It is Roisin O’Neill.’ He went past me into our chamber and closed the door behind him.
I continued to watch. Of the four men, the leading rider was perhaps about fifty years of age: the others were around my own age, and enough alike each other and the older man to be his sons. Their arrival before my grandmother’s house had not gone unnoticed in the marketplace and the high street; of the many arrivals over the preceding three days, none had occasioned as much interest as this. Traders left off their business and turned to watch, wary. Two English soldiers who had been flirting with a girl at a vegetable cart gave off their attentions when they saw the party come to a halt, and soon left at a brisk jog in the direction of the castle.
If the riders noticed any of the interest they had occasioned, they showed no sign of it. The stillness of their waiting contrasted with the noise and busyness I could hear rising from the floors beneath me. Doors banged, orders were shouted, and feet flew up and down stairs. At last the entrance door to the tower was opened and my grandmother emerged. Sean was a step behind, and while she went towards the main rider, he went directly to Roisin’s horse and took the bridle from the servant who held it. The older man dismounted and his three sons did likewise. My grandmother gave him a long greeting, which I could not hear, and received an equally long response. When it was over, and acknowledged, the two embraced warmly. It was only now that Sean helped Roisin dismount from her horse. He was stiff, formal, and did not look directly at her as he spoke.
This was a new guise to me, my cousin’s incarnation as a courtly gentleman. This was not the man who had brawled and debauched in the inns of Aberdeen; who had sung to me, with me, on our journey from Scotland and who, despite the shortness of our acquaintance and the sadness of the time, could make me smile simply at the sight of him. I wondered how many guises he had. Roisin stood before him, tall, slender and still. Her composure masked some great uncertainty that her eyes could not quite hide. I felt something in my stomach, a pull, a kind of shock, like a ghost of something: she was like Katharine, that was all; she reminded me of Katharine. The feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and I watched Maeve go to her and kiss her on both cheeks, before slipping her arm through the young girl’s and leading her into the house. I stayed where I was, pondering the arrival of this party, unannounced to me and so formally received. And I wondered about the girl, so beautiful and so sad, whose name I had first heard on the night of our arrival from Scotland, and why, in the long list of loves and conquests with which he’d regaled me for much of our journey, Sean had never mentioned her once.
That night there was to be a great feasting before my grandfather’s burial the next day. Each night since his death there had been a wailing and keening of women such as I thought could not have issued from anything human. ‘It is their way,’ Andrew Boyd had said. ‘Their excess in grief is matched only by the gluttony and drunkenness of their funeral feasts. You will never know anything more pagan given a Christian name. Their enjoyment of it would shame Lucifer himself.’ On this final evening there was a constant rumble of feet back and forth from the kitchens to where the mourners were to gather for the last night of waking over my grandfather.
I had returned to my chamber at around five, to begin my nightly letter to Sarah, as if putting my feelings into words now could somehow reclaim for us all the time that had been wasted. I hardly noticed the footsteps on the stairs, so many comings and goings had there been in the house that day, and I didn’t lift my head when the door opened, thinking it was only Andrew. Only when I heard the sharp intake of a woman’s breath, a surprised ‘Oh!’, did I look round and see, standing in the doorway, in front of Sean, a vision from my own dreams. She was like a spirit, a princess, a myth from the whispered bedtime tales I had gone to sleep to. She was like a story in herself, a fable. The hair that hung down her back in waves of red and gold was not the black of myself, or Sean, or our grandmother, but the face illumined by the arc of light thrown by Sean’s lantern was the face of my own mother. My heart was thumping and my breathing came hard to me. I looked down at my hands and realised they were clenched in determined fists. At last I stood up and went towards her; I felt barriers begin to break and crumble: the barriers erected by the cold heart of my grandmother; by the priests and the beads and the incense and the oils; by the Irish tongue I tripped and stumbled over; by the sea separating me from all I had ever cared about. For here was my family, the only blood relations who remained to me in this world, and I knew in that moment that what they wanted me to do for them, that would I do.