‘Deirdre.’ It was on the tip of my tongue to say it, but I managed, at the last, to keep my mouth shut.
The baker did not seem to have noticed, and continued. ‘I thought you might have heard something of it on your travels. A funeral always makes for an interesting gathering, and we get so little news here.’ He had been careful to speak to both of us, but he turned his full attention now to me. ‘And so you have come from Scotland, Mr Seaton. Whereabouts in Scotland might that be?’
‘The North, the town of Aberdeen.’ I hesitated. ‘Do you know it?’
I was relieved to know that he did not. ‘But I have heard that they are not so well affected there, to the Reformation of religion. Would that be right, sir?’
‘All that was long ago, before my birth,’ I replied. ‘But now the controversies are over the forms of worship. They will be settled soon.’
‘Pray God they are.’
I did not think it would be profitable to spend my evening explaining to an Ulster baker the disputes over the liturgy that inflamed the pens of the divines of Aberdeen.
‘And what is your business here in Ireland, sir? Have you come for the plantation?’
Andrew spoke for me while I struggled for an answer. ‘My master has a mind to buy into land from the Irish Society and to ship willing settlers from his home to this province. I am to be his agent here.’
The baker turned interested eyes on Andrew. ‘You know this country well, then?’
‘Very well.’ The two eyed each other steadily, until the baker returned to the business of feeding us. Venison pasties and a pigeon pie were produced, much finer fare than we could have expected in a roadside inn. There was little further conversation as we ate. The baker was busy about clearing up his work for the night and preparing for the morning. He hummed a tune I did not know, and some snatches of Irish escaped him, but for all the aura of casual contentment and busyness he sought to give off, I could not escape the feeling that he was calculating something all the time.
As we were finishing our food he came with another jug and two goblets. ‘Mead,’ he said, ‘from our own bees. A fine thing to warm and rest a traveller for the night.’
The warm, sweet liquid curled down my throat and the baker opened the conversation once more. ‘Where will you lodge, once you reach Coleraine? Have you acquaintance there already?’
Before Andrew could warn me otherwise, I had begun to speak. ‘We are to lodge with Matthew Blackstone, master mason in the town.’
‘Ah, Blackstone, is it? He has built half of Coleraine and Derry City too, so they say. A man of means and influence. Now tell me …’
But the baker did not get to finish his question, for Andrew had stood up and hauled me up unceremoniously with him. With a curt, ‘Thank you for the food and drink,’ he took me out into the darkness of the bawn, the baker’s murmured Irish ‘Good night’ dying at the door.
‘That fellow asks too many questions,’ said Andrew, after we had clambered in the pitch dark up a stepladder into the stable loft.
As he laid himself on the straw, I pulled Sean’s sheepskin mantle round me, and did what I could with a blanket on the straw beneath my head. My body yearned for sleep, but my mind had unfinished business and rebelled against it. I felt myself to be the plaything of the malicious Irish gods: Alexander Seaton who had no place in the stable loft of an Ulster bawn, removed from everything I understood, a life in Scotland so far away now that it seemed almost to be the life of another. The image of the family I had been brought to and told ‘This is yours’ was unravelling in my mind, the strange and ragged threads of it losing their colour and eluding my confused grasp. Sean, Deirdre, Murchadh, my grandmother, Roisin – they seemed little more to me than players who already knew the end to a tale I was only beginning to listen to.
It was deep in the windless night that I heard a creak of wood below me. My bones were too cold to allow me the sound sleep that Andrew was in, for he had scarcely moved since he had first lain down. I lay still and listened as the horses shifted in their stalls: another movement, a rustle of straw, a heavier creak on the stable steps. I was rigid, trying to control the unnatural heaving of my chest. Slowly, I moved my foot, and gave the back of Andrew’s leg as hard a kick as I could manage in the silence. There was no response. I tried again: nothing. Nothing but the creak of a closer rung and the unmistakable sound of another human being breathing heavily. Only the merest suggestions of shapes made themselves known to my eye in the blackness of the loft, but at last I caught some slow movement from the direction of the steps, and the light brushing of straw across the floor. The form of Andrew beside me was kicked, then more closely inspected, and made no response. I had no weapon and readied myself to grab the foot of the night-time visitor when he kicked me. But no foot shot out, and I had no time to understand the sudden dancing light that made its way towards my neck, until the prick of the blade’s edge had found my throat.
‘Who are you?’ This in Irish.
I thought as quickly as I could as the knife played against my skin. ‘I am not – I do not …’ I stumbled to find the words in the Gaelic, the fear numbing my tongue.
Again in Irish. ‘Who are you? You are no Scot. You are of the O’Neill. Who are you?’ The baker leaned over me, his eyes only inches from mine, and I had no doubts that should I make a wrong move, I would be dead. I took the only route open to me.
‘I am Alexander Seaton, a Scot, son of Grainne FitzGarrett, grandson of Maeve O’Neill of Carrickfergus.’
The man sat back on his haunches and let the knife fall softly to the floor. ‘Well, well, well, by God!’ he said at last. ‘Grainne’s son? So the old besom lied after all.’
I could make out the knife now, lying a hand’s span away from me, but I dared not move. The fellow seemed to have forgotten my presence for the moment, as he took in what I had said. ‘Grainne’s son,’ he repeated. ‘Well, well, well. The good Lord has his reasons indeed.’ He struck flint expertly against his knife and lit a small candle he had brought from the folds of his tunic. In the ensuing light I saw that he was smiling.
I sat up, pulling up the mantle against the cold. ‘Did you know my mother?’ I said it in English, for that was the tongue in which he now spoke to me.
‘Oh yes, I knew your mother, although she could scarce have told you who I was, just another of her brother’s companions that would have wooed her if he could. If she had glanced my way but once, she would almost have driven me from my vocation.’
‘Your vocation?’ I said stupidly.
He laughed. ‘Yes, boy, my vocation.’ A strong hand was held out towards me. ‘Father Stephen Mac Cuarta of the order of St Francis, late of the Irish College in Louvain, and now of Bonamargy Friary in the county of Antrim.’
‘But why …?’ My mind still sleepy. I struggled to make sense of his words.
‘A long story for another day,’ he said, with a resolution that brooked no argument. ‘But now, tell me why you are here, instead of being at your grandfather’s funeral.’
Questions. Too many questions, as Andrew had said.
‘What have you done to my companion?’ I knew Andrew was not dead, thank God, for I could see his chest rise and fall in the pale light of the candle’s flame.
He held up his hand in a gesture of appeasement. ‘A sleeping draught, a little decoction in the mead. He will wake at dawn after the best sleep of his life and bless the very straw he lay down on, and no harm to him.’
I looked down on Andrew’s sleeping face, at the vague smile that played about his lips. The priest was right: I had never seen him so contented.
Father Stephen drew closer to me and his face became serious. ‘Tell me then, what are you doing here? Did Sean bring you? You should know that I am a friend to your family and have been forty years at least. I left Ireland with your uncle in the train of Tyrone, and swore to him that when I returned I would watch over his children’s interests. You must believe me in that. You are the very image of Phelim and of his son. I mean you no harm.’