I returned his toast. ‘You do, and I will do it tonight. I was – and believe me if you will – going to ask for an hour alone with her tomorrow, although after tonight’s reception I was near enough resolved to put it off again.’
‘Aye,’ mused William, ‘if you approach her before this misunderstanding – though whence it proceeds I don’t know – is made clear, there is no telling what harsh words might rain upon your ears.’ He glanced at me. ‘Women have a pride and a stubbornness that is beyond all comprehension, you know.’ I knew. ‘Let me talk to her tonight, talk to Elizabeth first, in fact. It must be that there was some visitor in town who looked very like you, who caused this rumpus last night. If I can persuade Elizabeth of the logic of that – and God help me for a night’s sleep if I cannot – then she will smooth your way with Sarah.’
‘Do you not think this tale has been spread about as an act of malice,’ I asked, ‘by some indweller who wishes me ill?’
William shook his head again. ‘No. If it had just been the women at the marketplace, I might have thought so, but Davy had it from a crony of his who claims with his own eyes to have seen you hurled, indeed rolled, out of John Brown’s with curses at your back. There has been much muttering about the fall of man in general and the stool of repentance in particular from that corner today, let me assure you.’
My heart warmed more than ever to William, as I saw in my mind’s eye the day he had endured in his own house, all at the cause of my supposed misdemeanours. ‘And you will set me right, with the women, and with Davy then?’ I said.
‘Aye, I will,’ he answered. ‘And now let us eat, before I starve to death at my own table.’
We made a fine supper of the salmon, and of the apple tart. The bell of St Nicholas kirk struck eight, and I realised with some sadness that Sarah had not sent Zander through to bid me goodnight as she usually did. Something in feeling that little head pressed to my chest, the sleepy murmur of goodnight, gave me a strength that little else did. I would not dwell on it, for I would see him tomorrow, and not many tomorrows after that I would call him my son.
The house was quiet by the time I left, the women, children and servants all long asleep. The autumnal mildness of the day had given way to an early frost and the silent heavens were bejewelled with a thousand stars. I did not hold with the corruption of the proper science of astronomy peddled by the astrologers who cast the horoscopes of the foolish, but I felt a power, a sense of foreknowledge in the heavens of the destiny I set out towards. The next night I looked upon these heavens above this town, it would be with Sarah’s pledge in my heart and the prospect of peoples and nations over the sea before me. I was filled with gladness and the knowledge of the spirit working within me and powering me towards my destiny. It is what they call happiness.
The College gatekeeper grunted as I passed that at last he might get some sleep, that I was always the latest of the regents abroad. I would have felt greater guilt at his sleeplessness had I not had to waken him from his slumbers to let me in. There was little noise save that of my own feet on the stone flags and the gentle breaking of the waves onto the darkened shore beyond as I mounted the chilly steps to the chamber that would be mine for only one night more until I returned. I murmured a curse at myself as I saw from the light beneath the door that I had left a candle burning. The folly and thoughtlessness of it angered me. I pushed open the door and stopped. The light from the candle was not bright, but there could be little doubt as to what I saw. There ahead of me, no more than four feet away, was my own image, as in a looking glass. Yet there was not and never had been a looking glass in my chamber, and as I stood dumbfounded and still, the image that I looked upon came towards me and offered me its hand.
TWO
The Man in the Mirror
‘Alexander Seaton,’ said the man, and my name echoed in the room as if my own mother were calling me. He grasped me by the right hand and threw his left around my shoulder, encircling me in his grip and holding me fast. He stood back to appraise me. ‘I had begun to think I would never find you.’ His face was suffused with such affection and joy that my own initial shock and apprehension began to subside. The eyes that laughed in mine were the same grey-green as my own, the lashes as long and dark. He had the same straight nose, the same set to brow and chin that my father had called arrogant and my mother manly. His hair, I would have said, was a little longer than mine and darker, almost black, but all in all, I doubted whether more than a handful of people still living could have told us apart. I knew before he released me and spoke again who he was, for there could be no other explanation.
‘Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett,’ he said with a flourish. ‘Son of Phelim O’Neill FitzGarrett, and grandson of Maeve O’Neill of the O’Neills of Ulster, who has sent me here.’
‘My cousin,’ I said, sitting down at last on the bed.
The face smiled a mischievous smile. ‘None other.’ He pulled over the chair from my desk and turned it around to sit astride it. It was only then that I noticed, lurking in the unlit corner of the room, a stocky form, with eyes that moved as much as his body was still. He was wreathed in some sort of Highland garb, a yellowed linen shirt wrapped over faded red trews of a rough woollen cloth, the whole swathed in a long brown blanket edged with goats’ fleece. ‘That’s Eachan,’ my cousin said. ‘Pay him no heed. He’s a dour fellow but will do you no harm, unless you would wish to injure me, and then he would kill you as soon as look at you.’
‘“The ill-favoured Highlander”,’ I murmured.
My cousin glanced at me quizzically but said nothing.
‘When did you come here?’ I asked.
‘Into the town? We arrived last night. Half-starved and exhausted, the pair of us, by the time we got within the gates – which was when, incidentally, cousin, I learned of our resemblance to one another. The fellow on the watch mistook me for you and let me pass without question. Eachan gave him more trouble, until I intervened – under guise as yourself; the watchman seemed more at ease with that arrangement than any other, and I judged it best not to antagonise him. Aye, half-starved and exhausted we were, and our object nowhere to be found. This is not a hospitable place; I will be glad to be home.’
‘You are a long way from home,’ I said. ‘Carrickfergus.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘You know that much then.’
Still watching my cousin’s servant, I said, ‘My mother spoke of you sometimes, her brother’s child. I have often wondered about you. As a boy I used to wish …’ I stopped. It was pointless to remember that now. ‘It was a great sorrow to her that she did not see you grow to manhood. She is dead now. I think she grieved for her homeland until the day she died.’
‘Ah, did she? I think I have some memory of her yet, Grainne. Of her hair, the scent of her skin, her face sometimes. There has not been a day that our grandfather has not mourned her loss.’
He said nothing of our grandmother, Maeve: there was no need. My mother’s every letter to her had gone unacknowledged, unanswered, until at last she had written no more letters home. I had sometimes wondered how many kind words from the stern old Ulsterwoman of my childhood dreams would have been needed for her to leave my father and this cold and wind-blasted coast of Scotland to return to the land of her birth. I might have grown up all but a brother to the man seated across from me. But there had been no such words, she had never returned home from this place, and the man before me was a stranger.