Deirdre encouraged me to lie back so that she might examine my bandages. ‘I cannot trust any of the women, and the arrival of the doctor would attract too much curiosity. I will have to change them myself.’
And so she did, lifting the wrappings as gently as she could from my neck, but it was still an agony when she came to the last, where the dried blood had fused the fabric to my skin and the gaping flesh below. I clamped my mouth tight shut to stifle the pain. She cleaned the wound, dried and dressed it. ‘You were fortunate, thank God. A little to the left and you would have bled to death before Andrew had ever got you out of the church. But if her aim had been better …’
‘Her aim was true enough,’ I said. ‘I was saved by a …’ I could not call it a trinket, as once disparagingly I had done. ‘I was saved by this.’ I held towards her the crucifix that had caused Margaret’s knife, at the last moment, to slip.
She lifted it to her lips and kissed it. ‘Your faith is stronger than the curse. Promise me you will keep this.’
I promised her. I would have promised her anything in that moment.
‘I cannot stay long: I have sent the servants on errands in the town and at the quayside. They will be back soon. Maeve is at mass in the priest’s room with Macha; Eachan is guarding them.’
‘And Andrew?’
Her words came slow, as if she feared invoking some misfortune by uttering them. ‘He has not yet returned.’
The effort of the last half-hour had been almost more than she was equal to, and I saw that she had little more strength than I had myself. I did not attempt to keep her longer, and I think I was asleep before she had left the room.
Images of the poet, of his circle and the ancient cross at Kilcrue came to my dreaming mind and I tried to push them away. Finn O’Rahilly was talking to me, but in Irish, and I did not want to hear it. I tossed and turned through many hours in my efforts to throw him off, until a cold hand was placed on my forehead, water began to run down my face, and I woke up.
It was not my grandmother’s priest, but Andrew who stood above me now, a dripping cloth in his hand; he pressed it to my dry and cracked lips.
‘Did you find her?’
His face was grey; he looked as if he had not slept in two days.
‘I found her.’
‘Where was she?’
‘On the road to Glenoe.’
He sat down and put his head in his hands. They were grazed, and burnt on the palms, as if he had been working, struggling desperately at something. They were like the burns from a rope. He spoke blankly. ‘It was dawn before I came upon her. I had searched through the town, places where people might know her, but no one had seen her. And then I thought that, despite the night and the darkness, she might have tried to get home. I was lucky at the first gate. A young girl, distracted and wild-looking, had left the town not long after seven. They had warned her of the darkness and the dangers, but she told them she had more to fear from the light. They let her go; they had been given no instruction to prevent a Scots girl passing out of the town on her way homewards. But she did not go home – I don’t think she had ever intended to go home. She just wanted to be with her brother. So she did it herself.’
I did not ask him how he had found her at last, if she had already been dead before he had managed to cut her down, whether he had carried her home, what he could have said to her mother. Neither of us would have been the better for talking of those things, but there was one thing I could not help but ask him.
‘Did she … did she give any explanation? Was there any message? A letter?’
He understood what I meant. ‘There was a message: coins in a leather pouch suspended from her neck, and a portion of scripture, along with a note. Ten words: “Tell the O’Neills: we do not want their blood-money.”’
‘Blood-money?’
‘When her brother David was murdered, at first it was treated like any other such killing by the kerne. But when I heard of it, I lost my control and let rage get the better of my judgement. Even then, I had some suspicion of what Sean was, what Murchadh planned for him, though I did not know for certain and I did not know then that neither Sean nor Cormac rode with the kerne. I took my rage and poured out my disgust to Sean. He swore he had not known of it. He took my report to Cormac, who dealt with those responsible – his own brothers among them. Then Sean took money to her mother, in compensation.’
‘Sean?’
‘I never knew that until we were at Ballygally and she told me so herself. Say what I might, she would not dissociate him in her mind from those who had murdered her brother. And then I began to wonder if it had been Margaret who paid Finn O’Rahilly to lay the curse on your family.’
‘It never occurred to me,’ I said. ‘Not for one moment. But how did she pay for it, if she refused Sean’s money?’
‘She did not – pay for it, I mean. She laughed when I suggested it. She said she knew nothing of the poet or his curse, that she had better things to do than traipse through bogs looking for half-mad Irish seers. I believed her; I still believe her. But once my mind had started running down that path, it would not stop. Do you recall, Alexander, when we arrived at Ballygally and found Margaret there? Do you remember we learned she had gone to Carrickfergus in search of work on the very day we visited her mother’s cottage, the very day of your grandfather’s funeral?’
I remembered. So she had been there the night Sean had been murdered. ‘And yet it might have been little more than coincidence.’
He nodded. ‘Perhaps. That is what I told myself. I might have believed it, too, had it not been for her bible.’
‘Her bible?’
‘Not long after I had brought Macha in to town, the Blackstones arrived at the safe house, searching for me.’ He looked up at me, evidently uncomfortable. ‘It has been me, all along, that they have pursued, not you.’
‘I know; the constable told me,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘I managed to get away, through the back yards, to the Presbyterian meeting house where I knew I would be given shelter for as long as I needed it, as long as it took to clear my name of having killed Henry Blackstone.’
‘It is cleared already.’
‘How so?’
‘Cormac O’Neill cleared both our names of the charge.’
‘Cormac? I do not understand.’
‘His love for Deirdre is stronger than his concern for himself, or any petty jealousies he might have of you. He cleared our names that there might be someone left whom he could trust to care for her, as he could do no longer. Whatever you might think, he is an honourable man.’
Andrew was silent a few moments, not shame-faced but regretful. ‘He was an honourable man. He is no more; Cormac O’Neill was executed in the castle yard an hour before dawn.’
I had known it could not end for him any other way: he had chosen his path and that was what had lain at the end of it, and yet I wished it might have been different. A man who should have been a prince: at least he had had the dignity in death of not being made a public spectacle for the crowd.
‘And what has this to do with Margaret?’
‘Margaret? Yes. The Blackstones. I took shelter from them in the Presbyterian meeting house. Whenever the weather is too severe for me to walk out to Templecorran, and the Scots congregation there, I worship with our English brethren in the town. On my first night there, there was divine service. I felt sorely in need of hearing the Word, after our days surrounded by the trappings and practices of idolatry.’
‘Which saved your life,’ I sought to remind him, but he had stayed firmer than had I, and was quick in his riposte.