‘You may wish such a thing indeed,’ said Murchadh. He called to his torturers to bring Michael in. The door was opened and there was the sound of a heavy weight being dragged across the floor. They left it lying before the altar, inches from my face. I looked upon the thing, and suppressed a retch; I shut my eyes and turned my head away for fear I would vomit. Michael had told them he had seen nothing; they had taken out his eyes.
They did not hold back the friars this time as they left their stalls and went to their stricken brother. They had had what they wanted from here and would move on. I heard Murchadh’s men tramp out of the desecrated church, but he could not resist one last cruelty before he left. ‘Learn to tell the truth, boy, or next time it will be your tongue.’
Stephen went after them while Brian and another friar cradled Michael gently and the old apothecary bent over him, murmuring to himself about what he would need, what he was to do. Cormac had been the last to leave. I heard his voice as he hesitated at the door.
‘Stephen, believe me, that should not have happened.’
‘You will have to rein in your father, boy, or the shambles of ’15 will be as nothing to the disaster he will preside over.’
‘I will do it; have no fear, I will win over him. But first I must find Deirdre.’
‘Cormac, leave Deirdre. If it is meant to be, it will be. Leave her for now: you have greater things to attend to.’
‘I cannot. I am sorry about the boy, Stephen. I will send messengers to you soon.’
The door swung shut, and they were gone.
I waited until the brothers had lifted their young companion and carried him out of the church to the chapterhouse, where the apothecary would seek to do what he could for him. I was too ashamed to look at them, to present myself as the cause for which that vibrant, good young man had been so mutilated. When I was sure they had gone, I dragged myself out from beneath the altar, but could not bring myself to stand up. I sat there, wretched, on the floor, and watched, uncaring, as the rays of light sent their colours to play about my feet. A wooden crucifix, the body of Christ carved out upon it in ivory, had been knocked from the altar during some of what had just passed. I took it in my hand and examined it. Our saviour, in his agonies, brutalised and tormented by those so unfit to look upon him. Some of Michael’s blood was smeared on it. The cruelty of man to his fellow man. I pressed the cold ivory to my forehead and prayed, hopelessly, like a child: O Lord, let this not be; dear God, I will do anything, just let this not be.
I was like that when Stephen found me. He knew my state of mind, I think, better than I did myself. ‘Come now, it is a hard thing, but it has happened, and cannot be undone.’ He took the cross from my hand and set it back in its place, then set about persuading me to my feet. I got up heavily, reluctantly, and stood before him, waiting. I had nothing to say.
He breathed deep. ‘They have struck out for Rathlin, and will be back before dusk when they discover I have lied to them.’
‘And what will they do here then?’
‘Nothing if they have yet any of the sense they were born with. This friary is under the protection of Randall MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim. Murchadh has gone too far already, in the sacrilege he has perpetrated here today; anything further would be more than MacDonnell could tolerate, and Cormac would lose the one great support he must have if his rising is to succeed. It is not necessary that MacDonnell openly joins with his cause, just that he does not openly condemn it.’
‘And when is this rebellion to be?’
‘It was not to have been until the spring, when the worst of the winter storms would have passed and help could have been sent from abroad. The death of Sean has changed things.’ He said this last to himself as much as to me. ‘But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. We have more pressing concerns today than the Irish rising. I must get you and Deirdre away from here before Murchadh and Cormac return.’
‘And Andrew Boyd also.’
He smiled. ‘I had forgotten. I have never in my life before known Gerard to lie: when he told Murchadh that Andrew was buried yonder in the churchyard, I think I believed him myself.’
TWENTY-TWO
Ardclinnis
It was not long before we were on the move again. The fishermen at the shore would have nothing to do with us, for they had seen Murchadh’s party leave for Rathlin, and had a good idea as to who they were after, and so we had to take the small boat belonging to the friary itself.
I was greatly relieved to see Andrew.
‘The old nun had hidden me under her bed. She was a thing to behold when the raiding party came to the door of her chamber. I have rarely seen such vitriol. She has no liking for Murchadh.’
‘Then she judges well, for the man is a vessel of evil.’ I told him what had happened to Michael.
‘Dear God,’ he said slowly, ‘this curse spreads, it contaminates everything.’
I did not question his superstition, I did not argue with him, for I knew it; I felt the contamination in every part of me, in everything I touched. No matter how far or how fast we ran from it, it came with us.
The friar, Brian, had helped me carry Deirdre in a litter from Julia’s cell down to the shore. He did not look at me, addressed not a word to me, and I knew the anger in his mind – for this, Michael was blinded. Deirdre was sleeping still, but not at peace. What her reaction to Andrew had signalled, I did not know. She must know of Cormac’s feelings for her, of Murchadh’s plans for her, and in their schemes there was but one place for Andrew Boyd, and that was the place they thought they had left him – under six feet of earth in an unmarked grave at Bonamargy. He had been insistent that he would take his turn in carrying the litter, but Stephen had been equally insistent that he should not. ‘You have more need of it yourself.’
The old nun had told Andrew, in a manner that brooked no argument, to forget such foolishness, but she had warned Stephen too that he had only the strength of a man. ‘A mortal man, and even you are mortal, Stephen Mac Cuarta. Your time is coming, but there are tasks required of you first.’
Stephen did not laugh off her words and her tone as I had expected him to, but looked at her suddenly, as if caught in a lie that even he had begun to believe. ‘That is the way of it, is it, Julia?’
‘For all men, eventually.’ She blessed him, and dismissed him with a kiss on either cheek. It was a parting of people who knew they would not meet again.
I looked at my companion at the other end of the litter.
‘They say she has the sight,’ he said. It was the only conversation that passed between us, and it discomfited me.
As I positioned myself at the oars, Stephen tried to assist me, but I began to think it was as if those who had taken Michael’s eyes had taken his strength, for a light had gone out of him, and his body was hunched. Yet his will was great, and the force of it overpowered the complaints of his limbs and drove him on. He raised a sail, the wind caught it from the west and began to blow us along the coast.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Ardclinnis.’
I had never heard the name. ‘Is it another gathering place for those in your rising?’
‘It is a refuge.’ We were a good few miles down the coast before it came to me who would be waiting for us at this new refuge; it was the one I had forgotten in all that had happened: Macha. If Murchadh had even begun to work out Finn O’Rahilly’s allusion to ‘the bastard child’, there would be no safety for Sean’s wife even within the walls of Bonamargy.
As we rowed, I cast many anxious glances behind me at the slowly receding Rathlin Island, looking for the boat carrying Cormac and Murchadh in their duped rage, a boat that I knew must surely come. We rounded Tor Head, and I remembered this was where Sean had been riding, alone, when the shot had been fired that nearly sent him over the cliffs. I remembered too the odd way he had said it: ‘I was riding home … I had been visiting – friends.’ This had been his call to me, this how he had brought me in, when his tale of the curse had left me unaffected, this reality of an assault, a threat made manifest on my mother’s family. And I knew now who those friends were – Murchadh and his crew – and what business Sean had been on. And if there had been such a shot, there can have been little doubt that it was one amongst Murchadh’s followers who had fired it.