‘My mother,’ I said, at last.
He bit his bottom lip, and began. ‘Your mother, yes: Grainne. You were how old when she died?’
‘I was seventeen.’
‘Seventeen. So she would have been not yet forty. Her beauty would not yet have been quite gone.’
‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘It had not. Only at the end.’
‘And not even then, in the eyes of God. She had all your grandmother’s beauty, but more grace, and none of her coldness.’
I would have liked to acknowledge this too, but my mind had gone often in the last week to the bitterness towards my father that she had tried so hard and failed to hide from him or from me. I had hidden the knowledge of it away somewhere beyond memory, but it had found its way back somehow, unlocked by the sight of my grandmother. I said nothing to the priest of any of this, and if he noticed my abstraction, he did not comment on it.
‘She was the light of your grandfather’s world, and they were difficult times for him, for Tyrone was in open rebellion against the English, and your grandfather’s wealth was based on his trade with the English at the garrison in Carrickfergus and in their few outposts in the North. Many of the Irish with whom he did business lost their lands or their wealth, whichever side they were on, in one way or another. Worse for him was that Phelim had gone into rebellion with Tyrone. It could have been no other way: Maeve had suckled her son on tales of the greatness and pride of the O’Neills, and she had made her arrangements for his fosterage in a sept very close to Tyrone with the greatest care and forethought. But to Grainne, your grandmother paid very little heed. Grainne had a little too much of the FitzGarrett in her for Maeve’s liking – it was as if she had believed the call of her own blood to be so strong that it never occurred to her that her children might inherit something from their father. So, save for an understanding that one day she would be married to Murchadh – an ambition that your grandfather was implacably opposed to – Grainne was all but neglected by her mother, and consequently spent more and more time at her father’s side, learning to understand the business, the world that he lived in and that he had come from. You are following me?’
‘Nothing you have said so far has occasioned any great surprise. Go on.’
His face became uncomfortable again, as he searched for the right words, if there could have been such words, for what he was next to tell me. He did not look at me as he spoke, but at some point beyond my left shoulder, almost as if he was looking through the wall. ‘It was inevitable, then, that she should have found herself much in company with her father’s steward.’
‘Andrew’s father,’ I said, my breath almost catching in my throat.
‘No, not Boyd. Yes, he had arrived from Scotland by then, and was in your grandfather’s employ, but as his agent along the coast. There was another man – his name does not matter – older than Grainne by five years or so. This man had a liveliness to him that was like an infection, but he was wayward too. He and Grainne, beneath the eyes of your grandfather – who did not see it, thinking it a natural thing that everyone who set his eyes upon his daughter should love her – fell in love. She told me, time and again, that the man was not to blame, that he had done everything save leave Ireland to keep away from her, but strong and lively as he was, he was a lonely young man – and remember that he too was young, younger than you are now – and he loved her.
‘Maeve found out about the affair, and her fury was terrible. Grainne was dispatched to relatives in Donegal, and not brought back for a year; your grandfather was almost beside himself – he knew nothing of the relationship – but was persuaded at last that it was for the girl’s safety, that she might be too easy a target for English ire if left in Carrickfergus. By the time she returned, Maeve had almost managed to get rid of the young steward, dispatching him to Dublin, as your grandfather’s agent there. It was not long before false accusations were raised against him – anonymously, of course – and he was hanged at Dublin Castle for treason. When Grainne returned, to be followed shortly afterwards by the boy whom Maeve presented to everyone as the fruit of Phelim’s marriage, no one guessed that Sean was not his, but his sister’s child, for like you, he was the image of his uncle. When, three years later, a troop of Scots arrived in port, making their way home with their master from exile in France, Grainne found she could bear life in her mother’s house no longer, and left with them, abandoning her own child as she did so.’
I could not move. I wanted to speak, but the muscles in my face were frozen. Behind my forehead, behind my eyes, there was a rush, a roaring of words, of denial, of a young boy yelling that it was not so; it could not be so. I felt my arms begin to shiver and my lips tremble; the more I struggled to master myself, the more my limbs shook. Stephen, looking at me now rather than beyond me, rose from his stall and crossed over to the altar. He sat down by me and put a strong arm round my shoulder and pressed hard.
‘Now, son; it is all right; it is all right.’
‘But then … Sean was my brother.’ I could hold off no more, and felt myself crumple inwards, collapsing into myself in the onslaught of loss.
We were there a long time, I think; I was conscious only of a steady murmur of words in Latin from the priest and the softly changing colours of the light on the floor of the chancel as the sun played upon its window. In each colour, each gem of light before it changed, disappeared, merged into another, was an image of my lost brother, lost to me now and in all the years that had gone before, all the years of my life, when he had not been there, all the times my mother must have held me and thought of the other she could not hold. There was Sean smiling, always smiling, laughing, Sean picking me up as I fell, Sean outstripping me in races, in climbs, Sean gradually letting me go to Archie, who would have followed and adored him. Sean bidding me farewell that early morning five days ago as I left Carrickfergus, until we should meet again. The sun slowly passed behind a cloud, the light grew dim, the colours went, leaving only the bare stone behind them. I looked up at the priest and nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am all right.’
TWENTY-ONE
Defiled Sanctuary
Stephen sat a while with me, on the altar steps, and prayed. I had not the heart to join him, but took comfort in the rhythm of his murmured words until suddenly the sound of voices at the gate broke into the calm of the friary. He scrambled to his feet. ‘Murchadh,’ he said, and then, as to himself, ‘There is no time.’
He cast his eyes around him quickly, the closest I had seen him to a panic. He bit his bottom lip, calculating, calculating as ever. At last his eye lit on something. ‘The altar! Quick. Get you beneath it.’
I did not need two tellings and within a moment had laid myself under the sacrifice table of the church. Stephen had gone to a cupboard in the wall and brought out a heavy linen altar cloth, bordered in fine Flemish lace. He threw it hastily over the altar and I heard the sound of two large pewter candlesticks being moved to hold it down. ‘Now,’ he hissed, ‘pray for all you are worth. Pray to all the saints, and do not move from here if you value your life!’
And then he left me. The door of the chancel banged heavily shut behind him, and I was alone. The stone was cold and clean under my cheek. I tried not to think about the century of abominations committed on the altar above me, or the bones of the dead who lay buried in the church itself and were all I now had for company. I tried to think of my mother, but I could not bring a vision of her to life. All I could see was the single headstone, mottled already by creeping moss and the harsh blasts of salt and wind from the North Sea, that stood in St Mary’s kirkyard in Banff, where she had died but where, as I now realised, the woman who had been Grainne FitzGarrett had scarcely lived.