A wind had got up, and the coldness of it whistled through the branches and around the stones that encircled me. Finn O’Rahilly had risen to his feet.
‘Do you stay?’ he said.
‘I have no choice. I do not know this country in the light, never mind the darkness. I will trespass on your hospitality this one night. I have no greater wish to be here than you have to have me here. Tell me what I need to know, show me a corner where I might lie, and I will trouble you no more.’
He stared at me levelly with his startling blue eyes.
‘You have been sent to me that I might lift the curse on your family?’
‘That is what my grandmother wishes – although the worst of it has already come to pass. Yet it might comfort her and my still-living cousin to know the curse to be lifted, so mumble what words you must, that I may not lie to them when I tell them you have done what they begged for with their purses to do.’
He glanced for a moment at the pouch I had now set at my feet, then returned his gaze to me. ‘You think the worst has come to pass? How little you know this place, or the people whom you claim as yours.’
‘I claim no one,’ I said. ‘I have been claimed, but those who had a right to do so have almost all gone. When I am finished my business here with you, I too will be gone from this country.’
‘As if you had never been.’
‘As if I had never been.’
He seemed a little reassured by this thought and sat down again on the rock. He motioned towards another, and I sat down and waited. There was a great stillness about him, as if an hour, a day, passed here like this would be as nothing. It was clear he would give me no help: I must begin myself.
‘My grandmother and my cousin Deirdre came to you here, did they not?’
He nodded.
‘Who else came?’
‘No one.’
‘My grandmother wished you to give a blessing at Deirdre’s wedding, but Deirdre was against it.’
Again he nodded.
‘Why did she not want it?’
‘They did not argue of it before me. Your cousin may not like our ways, the ways of your grandmother, and of me, but she knows them well and respects them, although she does not fully understand their power. She would not dishonour your grandmother or me by arguing about it openly before me.’
‘And yet you know she did not want it?’
He smiled slowly. ‘I have spent long years in study of words and of people. You must know a person before you can know the words you must use for them. Ever since I was a child, I have watched people. I watched your uncle, Phelim, your mother too. And when she came here, I watched your cousin. I watched her eyes and the small movements of her face and her body. She did not want what your grandmother wanted. She thinks she can take the road of the new English, and find her place in Ireland. She is wrong. I tried to tell her she was wrong …’
‘And so my grandmother paid you to do her bidding – to do what?’
‘To tell the glories of her family through the generations, to extol her lineage above others, to assert its claims for supremacy in Ulster, to bless this new union that it might further those ends.’
‘And of the Blackstones? What were you to say of them?’
‘The English ones?’
‘The family of the groom,’ I said, flatly.
‘They were not to be mentioned at all.’
‘But the oration you made was something quite different.’
‘There are times when the duty of the poet is to point out the errors of his patron, to set him on the right path, to give warning to others that they might not …’
‘That may well be,’ I broke in, ‘but that is not what happened at Deirdre’s wedding. You were paid by someone to …’
He was on his feet. ‘Do not insult me.’
‘I do not insult you. You know the truth better than I. You have sold the dignity of your calling. My mother schooled me well enough in the understanding of the exalted place of the poets, the years of training required, the honour you were accorded in noble households. Where is your honour to be found now?’ I threw the pouch at him. ‘At the bottom of a greasy purse.’
‘Do not presume to cite me your mother on honour. A whore who abandoned Ireland at the first opportunity. What would she know of noble households, she who rolled in her servant’s bed?’
His last words dropped like stones onto the carpet of fallen leaves around us, and lay there heavy and still. A bolt of coldness ran through my body.
‘What are you saying?’
‘Ask those who remember. I can tell you no more.’
What was he saying? My father had never been a servant. He had been a craftsman, and a soldier. I had not been born until a year after she had returned with him to Banff.
‘Are you trying to say I am not my father’s son?’ I said.
‘Is your name truly Seaton? That was the name of the man they said she left with, so you are probably his son.’
Disgust with the poet swamped me; I was growing tired of puzzles and riddles, of things that claimed to be other than what they seemed. I wanted to root out the knowledge I had come for and leave. Remembering the words of the Franciscan, ‘Master your anger,’ I swallowed down the rising bile. ‘Who paid you to curse my family?’
‘I was honouring a patron, I was …’
‘Enough of honour. You were paid. Who did it, and to what end?’
He shook his head. ‘You think that I do not know that I am degenerate from my forefathers? Do you think I would be here in this desolate place, selling my talent and my worth, if I could have the place of my forefathers? We are persecuted by the English, who fear our power over the minds of the people, we are made destitute by the destitution and banishment of our lords, those who once feted us, we are abandoned by those who remain and do not give us succour for fear of falling out of favour with the English masters at whose knees they crawl. So I scrape what living I can with my words and my mind, for I have not been taught any other. But I have my honour and I will not betray my patron to you.’
‘You betrayed my grandmother.’
‘I spoke only the truth.’
‘For a murderer,’ I said. ‘My cousin is dead and you foretold it.’
‘He would have been dead soon enough anyway. Look about you. Look at this country. Listen to what is said. Watch. There will be death. But I tell you this: the person who had me curse your cousin will not be the person who murdered him.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I told you, I watch people, and I know love.’
I called from my memory the images of the night of my grandfather’s wake. I sought out the poet, as he ate, drank, as he stood to declaim our family’s fall. Who had he watched, where had his gaze landed? Faces, faces, faces, all around. But my mind had been taken up entirely with his words, and my memory would not tell me that he had looked on any of them.
His voice broke into my searching. ‘You must forget this now. You must learn the lesson of the Cursing Circle: it has no end.’
There was no more to be had from him and I got up in dejection, leaving the money pouch on the ground beside him. I could hear the steady crinkle and splash of a stream running nearby and sought it out, to slake my thirst. The nuts were just bursting from an overhanging hazel and I took them gratefully, with brambles from the bushes. I looked around me for somewhere I might find good shelter and lay my head for the night, but all was damp or jagged underfoot, and would afford me little comfort. I made my way back to the clearing, where Finn O’Rahilly still sat as I had left him, the pouch untouched at his feet.
‘My home is in the church,’ he said, indicating the ruin from which he had emerged. ‘You may spend the night there; there are clean rushes in the corner of the east wall; you will be dry and warm by the hearth. You would not be the first visitor to take rest here before returning to the world. There is a candle and flint in a niche above the bedding. I will not disturb you.’