The complete silence that followed the rendition spoke every hope and fear of the men who might soon be marching with their guns and their cries through those glens, whose blood might soon run into the rivers of Ulster. And then, slowly, Stephen began to clap, and Michael, and Murchadh himself, until the whole chamber shook with the noise of it, and I thought the reverberations would bring the earthen roof crashing down upon us. Murchadh threw coins of gold to the singer and the harper, and caught his daughter in a tight embrace, before turning her and showing her, with pride, to his men. ‘May the women of Ulster carry the hope of Ireland in their wombs!’
Released at last by her father, Roisin had begun to move away a little, but her father stopped her and said something for only her to hear. At first he had been laughing, and she affected a smile, but then she shook her head and his laughter stopped. He took her by the shoulders and held her firm and spoke to her insistently. She mouthed something to him, three or four times, slowly, with real distress in her eyes, but he just spoke at her all the harder. All around this dumb show, the fever and pace of music never let up, but they might have been in a glass box for all that reached them. I looked over to where Father Stephen stood, and saw he had dropped his mask of joviality and begun to move closer towards them, but the crowd got in his way. He assumed again the mantle of every man’s friend, but now and then he cast a glance of unease in the direction of Roisin and her father until the young woman nodded in submission to Murchadh and disappeared through the door from which she had emerged.
It was not very much later that the door of my cell opened, and two of Murchadh’s men came in. Only one of them spoke, and he in a gruff and thick Irish tongue, but I understood that I was to leave this place and go with them. Again my hands were tied. The corridor I was led down was just as dank and narrow as the place I had come from, but better lit. I counted three doorways as we passed, and then, at the end, we stopped outside a fourth. My leading captor opened it and I soon found myself in another hollowed-out earthen room, with wooden supports to the roof and a beaten floor, but this one had torches burning on the walls to either side, and a small fire in the middle. Towards the rear of the room were rushes laid on the floor, such as I knew the Irish preferred to sleep on. There was a pail of clean water by the door, and a clean robe hanging from a wooden peg beside it. A tray bearing oat bread, cheese and wine had been set down over by the rush bedding. I looked to my two guards for explanation but was given none. They untied my hands and left without a word to me, only pausing to indicate the water and the robe and taking care, though, to bolt the door behind them.
I stood alone in the silence, letting my eyes grow used to the greater light. Though the music reached even here, there was no grille in wall or door. I had found myself in a place of luxury in comparison with my late holding-place, but I felt a great loneliness, more cut off now than ever from any human contact. I was sickened of this place and these people. I longed for the cold, sharp certainties of my life – the grey stone college, my students, the sermon. I longed also for the warm promise of Sarah. I saw how these people took what they wanted, and I cursed the two years I had let waste. Two years when I had scarcely touched her. I longed for the clean cool sheets of my college bed, a world away from a pallet of straw upon the bare earth.
Slowly, I removed my priest’s robe, the coarse woollen garment that I had begun to become accustomed to. I took the rag that was there and began to wash myself, finding something purifying in the cold, clean water. The garment hanging by the door was of a much finer stuff than that I had discarded, a short blue tunic of the finest linen, bound at the waist by a cord of white silk. The trousers – for that was what those garments were, so favoured by the Irish rather than our hose, gave me a little greater difficulty, but soon I was fully attired again, arrayed fit to be a companion for Cormac O’Neill himself, and with my beard grown, and my hair long and lanky, none would have taken me for any other than the high-born Irishman I might have been. Of the low-born Scottish craftsman’s son who was a teacher of philosophy in a reformed northern university, there was not the least remnant.
I sat cross-legged on the ground by the fire and began to eat, and drink. The wine was good, warmed and spiced, and much better than the vinegar I had earlier been given. When I had had my fill I let warmth and calmness course through me, and the music pass over me. I did not sleep, but lay as in a dream. I tried to push away the image that part of me was reaching out for. I tried to picture Sarah in my mind, but Sarah would not come to me here. Her place was somewhere warm, comfortable, familiar, not somewhere dark, strange, cold. Not here. Struggle though I did to bring her face before my eyes, I could not find her here. Her hair was not the pale, almost white blonde that came into my vision. I tried to pray, but prayer would not come, so I took more of the deep red wine that had been set out for me and willed myself to sleep.
The fire had sunk to embers and the candles burned far down when I heard Roisin softly enter the room. She hesitated, seeing me, as she thought, sleeping, and knelt quietly down by the round hearth and laid another turf of peat upon it. She was watching me, I knew, and I opened my eyes fully, that she might not be deceived. She swallowed, looked away, then back again. I sat up and held my hand out towards her. She took it and let me draw her closer, and laid her head in my lap. As I stroked the silken hair away from her face I felt the slight moisture of the tears on her cheek. My hand moved over her brow, down the side of her face. There was an anger in me that I could scarcely master: anger at Sean, whom I had loved, and she had loved, and who had not loved her; anger at her father, who had sent her here to me, who saw only Maeve O’Neill’s grandson, and cared not which one it was, nor if his daughter did either; anger at myself for the weakness that was in me, the lack of constancy, the sin I knew I would succumb to.
‘Why have they sent you?’ I asked eventually.
She did not lift her head, ‘It is only my father; Cormac does not know that I am here.’
‘This is some policy of your father’s alone?’
She raised her head and I brought her up closer, in to my chest. ‘I think so, I think he is no readier to accept that Cormac should lead this rebellion than he was that Sean should.’
‘Do you think your father killed Sean? Had him killed?’
‘He would not have dared. Sean was his best hope of acceptance by the Irish outside our own kin. If I had married Sean, and produced a child, then my father could have taken the fosterage: he would have been untouchable.’
‘But now with Cormac …?’
‘Cormac is his own man. He has always been his own man. Since his youngest boyhood he has burned with shame at my father’s pandering to the English while others who would not succumb to their blandishments were abandoned to their fates. My father will never control Cormac; he will be as an old stallion put out to grass, not fit for the race or the hunt or the siring any more. My father will not accept living like that; there will be a reckoning between him and Cormac, whether before or after the rising, I do not know.’
‘But none of that explains why you are here.’
‘I am here because it is the time of my fertility. The women keep an eye on these matters, and they tell my father.’
‘And he has sent you here …’
She looked away. ‘Any child born of this night he would pass off as Sean’s: it would have a right to the patrimony. Or even as your own – by the brehon laws, it would be as if I had married Sean himself.’
‘Have you … were you ever with Sean?’