Interest flickered in his eyes. ‘Get on for where? Did you aim at Coleraine in the one day?’
I shook my head. ‘We stopped the night at a bawn beyond Ballymena.’
‘Armstrong’s Bawn,’ he said, quietly, almost to himself. ‘And who did you meet with at Armstrong’s Bawn?’
‘No one.’ I hoped the meagre light might cover the lie on my face. I was to be disappointed.
‘You simply rested and took meat and drink. All you sought was bed and bread. Is this what I am to believe?’
‘Yes,’ I said, with some defiance.
‘And your bread, tell me, was it well baked? Good bread blessed by the baker?’
I said nothing.
‘You met with Stephen Mac Cuarta of the Franciscan order at Bonamargy, did you not?’
‘What of it? It was by chance.’ I was not sure now that I believed that myself.
‘I think not.’
So I told Cormac about the priest’s drugging of Andrew and Andrew’s distrust of him in return, about how the priest had come to me in the night because he had known nothing of me before he had set eyes on me that day, and this seemed to make him more inclined to believe my pleas of ignorance on our part.
‘And what did the priest tell you?’
I kept my recollections to Stephen’s reminiscences about Phelim, and my mother, and left out anything he had had to say about Sean or his secret marriage with Macha. I could not tell how far Cormac believed me. ‘While Boyd was drugged, and before he knew you were awake, did the priest search your belongings, take anything?’
‘No.’
‘And you had been given nothing, no note, to pass on to him?’
Again I said no.
‘Perhaps, then, you were the message yourself.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I suspect we will find out before another night has passed. But tell me, where have you left Boyd?’
He read the cause of my hesitation.
‘I mean him no harm,’ he said. ‘I have no cause to love him, and some to fear him, but I give you my solemn word that I mean him no harm. I must – I must have some talk with him though. And I must have him brought here. I ask you again, where is he?’
I could not entirely believe that he meant Andrew no harm, or that Cormac O’Neill, anointed leader of a planned Irish rebellion in Ulster, feared the taciturn Scot who had been the companion of my troubles. ‘I cannot tell you that,’ I said, already bracing myself for another blow. None came, only words, low and earnest.
‘I ask you for the sake of your cousin Deirdre, although I would I did not have to. You have seen she suffers already, you know what she has suffered. The strands of her mind and her reason threaten to unravel, as your grandmother’s already have done. Grant her this one thing.’ He turned his face slightly away from me. ‘Grant it to me also.’ And then I understood what it was that Cormac O’Neill had to fear from Andrew Boyd.
I made my decision. ‘On our flight from Coleraine, we were met and aided by Brother Michael, Father Stephen’s young acolyte. Andrew was injured in a fall near Dunluce, and mauled by a hound from the Coleraine wolf-hunt. In the morning he was taken to Bonamargy to have his wounds attended to there.’
‘Will he live?’ he asked hesitantly.
‘If it is God’s will. I pray that it may be. He knew not where he was or who he was when last I saw him.’
‘Better he is in God’s hands than the friars’. And how did you find your way to Kilcrue?’
‘Stephen Mac Cuarta brought me there.’
He nodded. ‘Father Stephen. He has a habit of appearing, has he not? And the poet told you nothing?’
‘Nothing I could make any sense of,’ I said.
‘Perhaps that will be for the best.’ He was pensive a few moments and then strode towards the door. ‘Have no fear for your friend on my account, you have my word on that.’ He looked towards the grille and the signs of life beginning to stir in the main chamber after the night’s debauches. ‘Now I must go.’
I halted him at the door. ‘I want to see Deirdre’
He took care over his response. ‘It would do no good. I think the sight of you again would prove too much for her. She has been in a fever of dreams and hallucinations all through the night, and nothing the women can do will calm her.’
‘This since she saw me?’
He shook his head. ‘Since the night Sean died. She is almost catatonic when she wakes and like a woman possessed when she sleeps. The friars are with her now: they will be leaving soon for Bonamargy, to seek some compounds from their apothecary that might afford some relief to her mind and spirit.’ He glanced towards the grille again. ‘I will have food and drink brought to you.’
I was indeed hungry, and parched with thirst; nevertheless, my stomach revolted at the thought of food, for the place I was in was filthy, and the smells reaching me through the bars of the grille were noxious in the extreme: smoke, congealed fat, stale wine and human sweat, blood and, I suspected, other excretions, that had found little outlet save than to my miserable dungeon. I looked down at my hands, cracked and caked in grime, and wondered what I had come to. I sat down again in the corner furthest from the grille and any sharp eyes in the hall, and pulled the old priest’s robe as tightly as I could around myself, in a desperate yet futile attempt to stave off the cold that now permeated every part of me.
Some time later the bolt to my prison was again drawn up, and a curt ‘On your feet, Seaton,’ growled by Padraig.
I did as I was bid, smarting a little at the extra light that now flooded into the room. Padraig had stood back to make room for the woman carrying a tray of food and drink into my cell. She had to stoop a little as she came through the door, but when she lifted her head again I saw that it was Roisin. Some surprise, or recognition, must have shown on my face, for she coloured a little when she noticed it. I mumbled some apology for the condition she found me in.
She kept her eyes lowered and spoke in softly lilting but perfect English. ‘Your condition is not of your own making, and necessitates no apology. A visitor should be better treated in our country.’
Her brother responded to her, low and clear, in the Gaelic, and I understood that his every word was intended for me. ‘If that visitor has come to our home only to betray us, he is deserving of no hospitality. Your heart is too soft, Roisin, and you no judge of men. Sean …’
But he got no further; his sister had spun round, her eyes blazing. ‘Do not presume to talk to me of Sean. Never!’
He spread his hands out in supplication towards her. ‘Roisin, I …’
‘I know it, Padraig; I know it. But just leave me now.’
Before doing so, he took the time to address me. ‘Do not think to try anything, Seaton: you would be dead before you could ever lay a finger on her.’
I was left alone with Roisin and more conscious now than ever of the disarray of my appearance. She had laid down the food and drink on the floor, and it took all my strength not to drop to my knees in front of her and tear at the food with my filthy hands, but she had also brought a bowl of cold stream water and a cleaning cloth. I plunged my hands instead into the icy water with the intention of washing them. She drew in a slight breath and said, ‘No!’ I stopped and looked at her, no idea what the matter was.
‘Not your hands, not yet,’ she said.
I was still dumbfounded as she took a cloth and dipped it into the water. She came closer to me and slowly lifted the rag towards my face. She was tall, taller than I had realised, and her eyes as she looked up into my face came near to the level of my own. Her mouth parted slightly, and she said, ‘It is for your wound; first we must clean your wound.’
I stood still, afraid to move, but struggling to control my breathing as she slowly brought the cold wet cloth to my cheek and gently began to dab at the wound her father and brother had made there. I flinched as the movement of the cloth under her fingers caught the edge of the tear and stung me deep. She paused a moment and then returned, more gently and more closely, to her work.