He regarded me a few moments, as discomfited as I, I think, to learn of another who lived his life in his own exact image. ‘You have no brother or sister?’ he asked.
‘None,’ I said. ‘Nor mother or father either now. And you?’
‘I have a sister,’ he said, ‘Deirdre. Four years younger and twenty wiser than I. Our mother died when she was born, and our father left before she was five years old or I nine, in the train of Tyrone; he fled to the continent.’
‘Tyrone?’ I said, stupidly almost, as some image from my childhood stirred in my memory. A memory of my mother weeping, as I had never seen her do before nor indeed did I ever afterwards.
‘Aye, Tyrone,’ said Sean with some bitterness. ‘My father fled Ireland with the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, when they took fright at only they and God alone knew what. They left their people and their lands to be parcelled up amongst the English and the Scots as your king and his deputies saw fit, and Deirdre and I were left to be brought up by our grandparents, to inherit our grandfather’s wealth and our grandmother’s dreams.’
‘I think my mother was saddened that she had not known her brother better.’
Sean sighed. ‘It was not our grandmother’s way. She insisted that Phelim be brought up in the Irish fashion, fostered with her O’Neill kindred in Tyrone. Our grandfather was much against it, I have been told, but in the end he gave in to her, as he always has done. Our grandmother fell in love with an Englishman and she never forgave him for it.’
‘But our grandfather’s family have been settled in Ireland for many generations, have they not?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Sean. ‘And they have our Irish tongue and can ape our Irish ways when it suits them, and they have not, thank God, embraced the Protestant heresy that has infected these shores.’ Here he crossed himself and it sent a shiver to my soul to see my own image do so. ‘But for all that,’ he continued, ‘they are still the English, no more accepted by my grandmother and her like than she was accepted by them. She married for love, the one weakness, the one mistake of her life. To our grandfather’s wealthy family in Dublin, a marriage alliance with the O’Neills was potentially useful for business in the North, where Maeve’s family held sway, but in other ways it was beyond their powers of acceptance and they never did accept her. As for Maeve’s family, the O’Neills were well used to accommodations with the English for their own benefit, but for her to marry into a trading family was almost beyond disgrace. She soon gave up trying to find favour with her husband’s family and instead set herself to salvaging some with her own.’
‘And did she succeed?’ I asked, becoming interested, in spite of myself, in this woman who had been little more than a shadow in my life.
‘Oh yes, she did. And the fact that her son Phelim rose with the Earl of Tyrone against the English, and then went in to exile with him on the continent, has given her much honour with the native Irish of our land, but it is an empty honour.’
‘An empty honour? What do you mean?’
Sean’s face became grave. ‘Because the Irish have no honour in Ireland any more. Tyrone’s rising was the last hope for our people – for our language, our laws, our customs. Perhaps even our religion. The lands the earls left are being settled now by the English and the Scots. The native Irish are being pushed to the margins – untrusted and yet needed still for their labour. Those who had honour amongst their people must now till their scraps of land like beasts, and pay the English Crown for the privilege.’
‘I am sorry for that,’ I said, ‘but what has it to do with me?’ Sean got up and walked over to my bookshelves. He picked up an edition of Horace and leafed through it a few moments before putting it back on the shelf and turning to me. ‘Nothing, cousin, it has nothing to do with you. With your books and your pen and ink, and your drab Presbyterian garments in your cold northern town. Your mother went far to ensure that your life should be free of such concerns, and had it not been for the happenings of Deirdre’s wedding, I think she would have succeeded.’
And here, I saw from his face and from the increased tension of Eachan by the door, we had come to the point.
‘Tell me about Deirdre’s wedding,’ I said.
Sean stretched out his feet towards the fire which had also, I only now noticed, been lit. I wondered how long they had been here waiting for me, whilst I, unknowing, had whiled away the evening with William. I saw, hanging where my own cloak would normally have done, another mantle of the sort his servant wore, but of much finer stuff and trimmed with fur. Over the back of the chair, a jacket of a soft, dark brown leather, quilted and stitched with gilded thread, had been hung. My cousin was evidently a man of wealth. He said something to Eachan and then asked me if I kept glasses in my room.
‘The life of a college regent is not that of an Irish gentleman,’ I said; ‘but I do have beakers.’ I took down the two pewter beakers I kept with my own plate and knife on a shelf, and the unspeaking servant poured into them some amber liquid from a flask he had hidden somewhere in the folds of his clothes. ‘Are you having none yourself?’ I asked, as he stoppered the flask. He answered me in words I did not understand and returned to his place by the door.
Sean smiled. ‘Eachan could drink us both under the table and through the floor, if he had a mind to. But of late, he has not been of a mind to. He prefers to keep his wits about him. Do not be fooled by his sullen looks – he has wits enough for both of us, and at times has needed them.’ He downed the liquid in the beaker and formed a resolution. ‘Deirdre’s wedding. Where do I begin? You will think me biased in her favour, but I assure you I am not. My sister would have been a prize for any man in Ulster, and many sought her hand, but two months ago she turned her back on everything she had been brought up to, taught to value, and had herself married to the son of a wealthy London planter at Coleraine, on the north coast of our province. Her new husband’s father is a builder, a master mason, and in great credit with the English authorities there, for that he has built many of their properties and walled their town of Londonderry for them.’
‘Then our grandmother must have been well pleased at the match,’ I said.
‘Pleased?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Maeve was about as pleased as you would be by a visit from the Holy Father, I suspect. No. She was not pleased. She was almost unrestrained in her fury that her granddaughter had chosen the same path in marriage as your mother and indeed she herself had done.’
‘What do you mean?’
Sean regarded me for a moment. ‘She taught you so little then, that you do not understand even that?’ He held out his beaker without even looking at the servant, who again silently filled it. He drank a little, then spoke again. ‘My sister married outside the blood of the Irish, the Pure Irish. She married an Englishman, a newly settled planter, worse still than your mother having left Ulster to marry a Scot, and worse than our grandmother’s crime in having married into the Old English.’
‘And our grandmother could not prevent it?’
He shook his head. ‘For the one and only occasion in my lifetime, our grandfather overruled her. He said he would not lose Deirdre as he had Grainne, he would not demand that they sacrifice their love to her pride. There were such storms in the whole of Carrickfergus over it that I was surprised to see ships still put to sea. But in the end there was something, I think, that may have made her come to believe it was in her interests to let the match go ahead in any case.’
‘What was it?’
He shook his head. ‘I cannot be sure … Anyway, it does not matter; that is a tale for another time.’