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with her grey hair loose down her back.
    ‘Leave him,’ she said, although I could not tell at first if it was to Boyd or the priest that she spoke. The two men stood back from one another and regarded each other with unconcealed contempt.
    I sat up, remembering now where I was. ‘What is happening here?’
    It was Andrew Boyd who spoke first. ‘They were trying to claim you. They had their water and the priest was at you with his oils. They were baptising you into the Church of Rome.’
    I looked to my grandmother in disbelief, waiting for a denial. None came. ‘My husband is dead,’ she said. ‘God knows, I may follow him soon enough. Your mother was lost to us and damned herself when she abandoned her family and her faith to go with your father. I will not have her son, my grandson, lost in the same way.’
    ‘And you think your holy water and bells and oils can overcome my faith? Come to my chamber every night with your unction and incantations: you will not change my soul.’
    Maeve came closer to me, and her eyes were fearful. ‘Child, I beg of you, let the Father do this. It will protect you against whatever dangers we face, and give you merit in the judgement to come.’
    I took her old, veined and bony hand. It was frozen. ‘You must understand,’ I said. ‘I give no credence to such merit, and neither does my God. Only my faith and not some token like this can save me. Only the life I live can show my faith, not these trinkets.’
    If I had hoped to reach her, I failed. She let her hand slip from my grasp. ‘Then you will go down the same path to Hell that your mother walked before you. Do not say I did not try to prevent it.’ She left the room, taking the dark-hooded figure with her.
    Andrew Boyd bolted the door behind them. He sat down on his bed, his head in his hands.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said.
    He looked up, surprised, vulnerable for a moment, a man who had dropped his guard.
    ‘I am not often given to fearfulness, but this has been a hard night. And this will be a different house with your grandfather gone. But you were right, none of their ceremonies could have imperilled you.’
    ‘All the same, I am grateful.’
    ‘Aye, well …’ Not finding the words that suited him, he was silent.
    As we both lay down again in the darkness, I thought of this strange new companion, and wondered what it was of him that he was so reluctant other men should see. There were many things about this house that I wanted to ask him, but they would keep for the daylight. We would each take what respite remained to us in the hours of the night.
    Andrew went early to his duties and it was Sean who brought me my breakfast a little before dawn. He unlocked the door and came in bearing a tray of beer and warm bannocks. He sat down and let out a great sigh.
    ‘You know our grandfather is dead?’ he said. Even in saying the words, something in him seemed to crumple.
    I put out a hand to him. ‘I am sorry. So sorry.’
    ‘He was the best thing in my life, Alexander. The one true thing.’
    ‘I would like to have known him better.’
    ‘And he you. You would never have had a greater friend than Richard FitzGarrett. He was everything a man, a grandfather, should have been, and more than that. He was a better father to me than my own.’ Sean had been only ten years old when his father, Phelim, had left Ireland for exile with the earls, and had scarcely known him before that, for my uncle had always been in the train of the Earl of Tyrone, always on his business, in his wars. Had it not been for the troubles of the time, Sean would have been fostered out within the O’Neill kindred as Phelim had been before him, but he had been born in the middle of Tyrone’s great rebellion, the Nine Years’ War that had devastated the country and meant the end for many of her great Gaelic families. It had been judged safest for Sean to remain with his grandparents, at the very heart of the English administration at