Read Online A Game of Sorrows by S. G. MacLean - Free Book Online Page B

Carrickfergus.
    ‘I was fortunate. Others were not so.’
    ‘But you were only a child.’
    ‘And do you think that would have mattered to them? The Flight of the Earls was so sudden, so rushed, so unplanned, that one of Tyrone’s own sons was left behind. He was six years old. That boy rotted his life away a prisoner of the English. He died in the Tower of London at the age of twenty-one. It was my grandfather’s name and his usefulness to the English that helped them gloss over the fact that I was Phelim O’Neill’s son.’ And so he had been brought up by Richard FitzGarrett and by Maeve, and had had, from birth as he told me, ‘a foot in both camps’.
    ‘And now our grandfather’s duties fall to you.’
    ‘What?’ said Sean, startled out of some memory. ‘Yes. Yes, that is what they tell me.’
    ‘And are you ready for it?’ The man I had come to know over the last few days and nights was not one I could see easily bound to a desk, tallying his accounts, or at the harbour checking grain and hides, negotiating with other merchants and traders or overseeing the distribution of stock. He was a man who would be happier on horseback, with a hawk on his arm, with men at his command whom he might lead, and with whom he might joke, sing, drink.
    ‘I am as ready now as I will ever be, but that is saying little. Andrew Boyd will deal with all of that nature that needs to be dealt with. The tradesmen and merchants here and in other towns respect him. I will keep out of all that for a while.’ He gave a wicked smile. ‘The traders do not like me – I have been too much amongst their daughters, and I am a little too Irish for the tastes of the new settlers along the coast and in the North. Besides, Maeve has need of me. There is the funeral to arrange and there will be many people coming here over the next few days.’ He regarded me uneasily. ‘I am sorry Alexander; I wish you could stand by me as I welcome them to our house, but Maeve is determined that none shall know of you until she has brought you to Finn O’Rahilly and had the curse lifted. I have spent much of the night in trying to persuade her otherwise, but once she is set upon a thing there is none can shake her from it.’
    ‘And what about Deirdre?’ I said.
    ‘Deirdre? Three letters from her arrived for me while I was away: each speaks of a greater degree of frustration and misery. She had thought to free herself from our grandmother, to become a woman of means and position in the new Ulster, rather than be a brood mare in Maeve’s dynastic plans. Instead she finds herself incarcerated in a miserable tradesmen’s house in Coleraine, with women of little conversation and less wit, expected to play the housewife and dutiful daughter-in-law. She who grew up hearing daily that she was of the blood of Irish princes now has that blood-line cast before her as if it were no better than that of a dog. I don’t know how she stomachs it, but she will not give my grandmother the satisfaction of knowing it.’
    ‘Does her husband do nothing?’
    ‘Her husband has very little about him. I think – no, I know it: this Blackstone marriage has been the biggest mistake of her life. She might have waited here and run our grandfather’s business, and married where her heart pleased her better, had she only had some patience.’
    ‘And where does her heart please her better?’ I asked.
    He hesitated a moment. ‘That … that I cannot say. But she does not love her husband, that I know, so she could scarcely have placed it worse. She wanted to come back from Coleraine when our grandfather’s health worsened, but Maeve, fearing – as indeed she well might – that the Blackstones had nothing in mind but to wrest my dying grandfather’s business from him, would not permit it.’
    ‘Surely she will be allowed to come now?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Sean. ‘Maeve is one for the proprieties. Deirdre has already been sent for, and her husband, too, on sufferance.