‘Yes, I think I do.’
She was silent for a few moments and then spoke to me again. ‘Was Grainne happy?’
‘My mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. She was not happy.’
‘Then there isn’t much left to me, is there?’
‘There is your brother’s child. He will need you.’
A determination I had seldom seen on any human face came into her eyes. ‘And I will not fail him. Before God and all who will judge me, I will not fail him.’
I held her to me, feeling her life, her breathing against me, my cousin, my dead brother’s sister, my trust.
Darkness was drawing in on the castle as I descended the stairs. What little blue there had been in the afternoon sky retreated in the face of the advancing dark clouds sent from Scotland, a Presbyterian anger at this unsettled land. The tide, pale silver at its eastern edge, was at a low ebb, and quiet, as if it too was waiting, and little stirred across the broad bay of Ballygally.
I found Andrew in the kitchens, talking with Margaret. Again the light in her eyes, the smile on her lips, died at the sight of me. I wondered when I had become the object of such fear and mistrust. She went to attend to a sauce bubbling in a pot. Andrew saw her discomfort, and the cause of it, and affected a brightness all three of us knew him not to possess.
‘We are to have fine fare tonight, Alexander. Sir James’s table rivals that of your grandmother’s house.’
‘I hope we can stomach it, after so many days of existing in such simplicity.’
I had not meant my words to come out so harsh, and yet I had had enough of being mistaken in what I was. If I made the girl uncomfortable, it was no fault or concern of mine. Andrew read my mood and gave up on his attempt to lighten it.
He changed his tack. ‘How is Macha?’
‘She sleeps. Lady Isabella is very attentive to her.’
‘And Deirdre?’
I watched Margaret for some reaction, but there was none. So she did not know of Andrew’s feelings for my cousin. Perhaps it was better that way. Women did not always forget these things, and if she and Andrew were ever to be happy, it was a thing she would have to forget.
‘Deirdre is … calm. She is weary, still, but a little stronger in body.’
We ate late – Sir James did not intend to sleep that night and there was nothing, he insisted, better at keeping a man from sleep than a good dinner eaten late. We had eels in a pickle of vegetables, mopped up with fresh baked bread, and slabs of venison that would have fed twice our number for three days. ‘There is nothing like a fine piece of venison, and yet the Irish do not prize it. They reckon nothing worth the praise and eating unless it be slathered in that infernal cheese. I am settled here twenty years and more now, and I have never yet got a taste for it.’ He lifted another slab on to his own plate, and to mine, before dousing it in the sauce Margaret had been busy at in the kitchens. ‘But this,’ he said, inhaling at the ladle with evident pleasure, ‘this they do better than any. Do not be mistaken in thinking this sauce to be the muck of the French – a man would need a stomach of iron to survive a month in that country. Smell it.’ He proffered me the ladle and I breathed deep. It was as I had thought.
‘Whisky?’
‘I have it brought down from Bushmills. If something from your own glens can be got now and again, well and good, but there is little that will surpass this.’
James Shaw was a genial host, and free and blunt with his opinions – too free, perhaps, as his wife often cautioned him.
‘James! Your tongue will lose you your head one of these days.’
‘Ach, hush, woman. Only if I waggle it at someone with a mind to carry its tales to the wrong ears. And those are not our guests tonight, or I am no judge of my own table.’
And so we talked late into the night, of the state of Ireland, of Ulster, of the state of religion in Scotland and the perils it faced.
‘Mark me, the king will have cause to regret his dabblings with prayer books and kneelings. Why does he meddle in something that needs no meddling with? It is that wife of his, no doubt. The French.’ And he poured himself another glass of wine to swallow his disgust. ‘But I’ll tell you, he’ll never find a nation more loyal than Scotland, as long as he will leave to us our religion.’
And in such a vein it went on, and I began to understand why Lady Isabella feared for her husband’s head.
At intervals, Sir James sent for reports from the walls, and always the answer came back the same: nothing. There was nothing to be seen, from sea or land; nothing coming to the castle. A little after eleven the lady of the house excused herself, and an hour later, when the castle bell tolled midnight, he told us to go to our beds also. And we did, leaving this Scottish soldier, this Presbyterian adventurer, watching the sea, thinking to hold it back alone.
I saw that Andrew did not sleep easy. I would have asked him what troubled him, but I did not think he would tell me. Since we had left Ardclinnis, something between us had been broken. His bible had given him little comfort from the agitation of his mind. I myself had little trouble in surrendering my body and mind to a few hours of respite; I was too tired even to dream.
It had been better that I had dreamt, for I awoke to a chorus of shouts from the walls and through the castle; the O’Neills had come. Not by sea – they must have returned to Dun-a-Mallaght when they could not find us at Ardclinnis, and now, mounted, they had come overland. They were lined up to the west, torches in their hands, perhaps fifty of them. Swordsmen, musketmen, archers, whose arrow dipped in a flame could, well-landed, turn the castle and its yards to an inferno. Every man around the walls of Ballygally, at the windows and loopholes of the house itself, had his weapon trained on the party which had drawn itself up perhaps a hundred yards away, little more. Murchadh rode forward, his three sons at his side.
‘What do you want, O’Neill, that you disturb a Christian’s rest?’ called Sir James.
‘I have come here in peace, for Deirdre FitzGarrett, who is held against her will by Alexander Seaton, her cousin and treacherous murderer of her brother.’
Shaw laughed, a hearty bellow that corralled the place round and must have reached Murchadh with as much power as it had left his throat. ‘Against her will? She was released from imprisonment in your bestial lair only three days ago, and her cousin her greatest support. You will prise neither of them from my gates. You had better go tend to your cattle than disturb my sleep or theirs.’
‘Seaton is an accused murderer!’
‘Seaton is wickedly maligned by an old woman whose mind is so badly mangled by superstition and treachery that she hardly knows what she says.’
‘She knows what she says, and he will answer to it.’
‘As will he, but to the proper authorities, and in the proper place. Go back to your bogs; you have no business here.’
Cormac detached himself from his father and brothers, and rode closer in beneath the walls of Ballygally than any sane man should have done. Ten muskets now, that I could see, were trained on him.
‘Give me Deirdre, and do what you will with the Scotsman; I have no quarrel with him.’
‘And I no duty to you. An inch closer, and I’ll have your head blown from your body.’ Shaw meant it. He was standing now on his own walls, and had raised a musket himself.
Cormac ignored the threat. ‘Seaton,’ he shouted. ‘Seaton, can you hear me? You know I will do her no harm. You know she has need of me. Seaton!’
I took a step closer to the edge of the wall from which Andrew and I watched, but I felt his arm pull me back.