I looked at the candle, which had spluttered low in the sconce. I took another from the shelf and lit it, for it was clear that Sean’s tale was not over. He told me then of my cousin Deirdre’s wedding, of the English solemnity of the service and the imagined propriety of the celebrations afterwards.
‘It was not to my taste, cousin, I’ll tell you that. Such long faces and at so cheerless a feast I have rarely seen. The Blackstones could scarcely content themselves between showing their shame at their son’s marriage to a common Irishwoman as they see her – for these people understand nothing of lineage – and their fear of opening their purses for the sake of it. Had I not taken precautions on my journey north to the “festivities” I would surely have died of thirst. My grandmother was in a triumph at the utter Protestant misery of it.’
‘And what of Deirdre?’ I asked, feeling something already, some care and kinship for this girl I had never seen, nor known existed until less than half an hour ago.
‘Deirdre sat still and determined throughout it all. She held herself with such a grace – it is something that the women of her husband’s family could never muster. I fear this marriage will bring her much grief.’
‘But if her husband loves her?’
‘Her husband? Perhaps, who can tell? He has little enough to him. I do not know why she married him – I had thought her eyes were turned elsewhere. Perhaps it was to spite our grandmother.’ He mused a moment on this and then brought himself back to the point. ‘Anyhow, the dreary feast eventually approached its end and it was time for the one thing they had not been able to prevent: the poet’s blessing. Now, Alexander, I know that this is not a land of poets, but ours is, or was. I am not talking here of men who compose pretty sonnets.’
‘I know that.’ My mother had spoken often of the poets, learned men who spent years in their training and were greatly honoured. Like the castes of genealogists, doctors, lawmen, their knowledge passed down their families for generations in the service and under the patronage of the powerful. Their word could legitimise, glorify a leader and his line or cast his name for ever into the ashes.
‘This man’s name is Finn O’Rahilly, the last of a long line of poets who served the O’Dohertys of Inishowen. He claims to remember our parents, your mother and my father, but he can have been little more than a scrap of a thing in the days when they travelled in those parts. He was still hardly more than a child when Sir Cahir O’Doherty’s rebellion was crushed, but he found refuge in Donegal and had some schooling amongst the last of the poets there. Finn O’Rahilly lives in the hills above the north coast, making some sort of living as a hireling poet for those who would keep to the old customs. My grandmother sought him out herself, and hired him to declaim at Deirdre’s wedding, much against my sister’s own wishes and those of the Blackstones.’ He paused, remembering. ‘And such a declamation was never heard at any wedding in my lifetime.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He gave no blessing, but a curse. He damned Maeve for her own marriage outside the blood of the pure Irish, and your mother and my sister for theirs; he taunted her with the loss of her children; he told her our grandfather would soon be dead, and myself also, and that Deirdre’s marriage would be barren. There would be no great rising of the O’Neills from the line of our grandmother, for her line would end before her own eyes. He …’
‘Stop!’ I said. ‘You begin to lose me. What “great rising” are you talking of?’
He looked at his servant, who shrugged his shoulders, and then he looked at me.
‘You know that the land of Ireland is under the control of the English Crown?’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘that the king has striven to bring peace and civility to that …’
But this time it was he who stopped me, waving his hand as if to dismiss an importunate dog. ‘Spare me that, for the love of all that’s holy. To be preached civility by brutes without culture, with no notion of hospitality and with the manners of the sty, is too much in my homeland. I will not hear it in the mouth of my own cousin.’
‘I only meant …’
‘What? You have no notion of the slaughters and barbarity perpetrated on our people in the name of civility. The burning of crops, the starvation, the massacres of women and children that sent men half-mad with grief.’ He turned away as if he did not trust himself to master his passions.
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
He took a moment to compose himself. ‘The tale I have to tell you is one that requires subtlety, but I have little of that. Hear me out, and I shall tell you in fewer words and less time than is needful, for time is short tonight.’
I nodded my acquiescence and he continued. ‘The last of Ireland to submit to the English was Ulster. The Old English – our grandfather’s race – have held the garrison at Carrickfergus for centuries past, and there are many Scots and some English settled in Antrim and Down, but as to the rest, it was, until twenty years ago, the preserve of the Gaelic Irish, much of it under the control of the O’Neills, our grandmother’s family.’
‘Yes, my mother told me something of that.’ In truth, my mother had told me very little of her heritage and even less of my grandmother, despite all that my youthful curiosity would have had from her. In time I had learned not to ask her about that other family, and to keep my thoughts of them to myself.
‘While the rest of Ireland fell under the heel of the English, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, stood out against them. For nine years he rallied others to his cause, and fought in the name of Gaelic Ireland and Holy Mother Church. After nine years of warfare that brought Ulster to its knees, they submitted at last to the English Crown, and all might have been well enough, but then they had some intelligence of conspiracy against them, and fled for the continent, in the hope of rallying support. They never saw Ireland again, and their lands and the lands of all their kindred were claimed in escheat by the king, and parcelled out amongst English planters, old soldiers, Scotsmen – Protestants all. Such is the breed that my sister has married into. They work daily at the degradation of the people, the native Irish, reduced to the worst land, our laws and customs disregarded and our religion trampled upon. In truth, Tyrone himself is much to blame, for he traded the rights of the kindred to increase his own, and now they have been abandoned. Anyway,’ he said, as if he had been wandering from the subject, ‘our grandmother will hear nothing against Tyrone, and has spent every hour of her life since the day my father fled with him in praying that the O’Neills will rise once more and drive the English from Ireland. And at my sister’s wedding, the poet cursed her, and Deirdre, and myself, before all the company, and told her that her dreams could never be.’
He finished his drink and relaxed himself, as if the telling of his tale was done.
I got up and poured some water from the pitcher by the window into the basin below. A struggle was rising within me, for these were not the dreams I had planned to dream tonight, although often enough they had filled the lonely nights of my childhood. For the sake of kinship and hospitality alone, I could not dismiss my cousin now, and besides, I could see there was something yet in his tale to be told. But despite the better self that counselled tolerance, the bitterness of years got the better of me. ‘And it is for this that you have crossed the Irish Sea? To tell me of the demented ramblings of a mercenary poet and the deluded dreams of a bitter and superstitious old woman? What does she want me to do that you cannot? Should I go to him and declaim to him in Latin that he is wrong? Proclaim to him in Greek the honour of the O’Neills – of which I know little and care less, let me tell you? No, cousin, you have had a wasted journey.’