SEVENTEEN
The Cursing Circle
They had said it often enough: she was going mad. Finn O’Rahilly and his curses, Deirdre and her vision of Maeve MacQuillan, grief over the husband she had deceived for so long. And now the loss of Sean, her hope, her future. But what madness could create in her heart this hatred of me?
My mind was fracturing, and my head and eyes ached as I struggled to keep hold of what I thought I had understood. All my life, I had not known my cousin, and then I had known him, and loved him. I could look in a glass and see his living image, but he was dead. I had played his part, I had been Sean FitzGarrett in the eyes of others, I had walked in his very boots, and all the while he had been dead. The grandfather I had never known had loved me. The grandmother I knew despised me. I had come here for Sean, abandoned all that I knew and all that knew me, for Sean, but there was no Sean now, only Alexander. The grief that many years ago had threatened to rip me apart when I had learned of the death of Archibald Hay had hunted me down across the Irish Sea, and found me once more. And if ever Alexander Seaton saw Scotland again, it would be from Dunluce, from the Hanging Hill. I would never look again on the face of the woman I loved, never know what it was to touch her. Oh, God help me. The man in the clothes of a priest, hung round with the trappings of idolatry, calling on his God.
Stephen reached a hand out to my shoulder. His voice was gentle, but urgent. ‘We must tarry here no longer, Alexander, if we are to be at Kilcrue before sunset.’ And so, within the half-hour, I found myself on the road again. I had passed the middle of the day in sleep, and was again walking towards the night. Favoured words of my counsellor and friend Mr Gilbert Grant, late schoolmaster of Banff, came to me: ‘Yet a little while is the light with you, walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.’ Blind at the end, these had been the last words to pass the old man’s lips.
Upwards, away from the sea we went. The ground became difficult underfoot, bog and heather, and in time we entered woods once more, ancient woods of oak, hazel and willow. As I thrust my staff into the ground with every new step forward, I struggled to remember why I was here now, why I had come to seek out Finn O’Rahilly. My cousin was dead, and there was little in me that cared now for the poet’s ramblings or his curses. And yet his voice came clearer to my mind, the words pulling at me. ‘All these things will come to pass. Your grandson will soon lie with his fathers, in the cold chambers of the dead.’ Sean was dead and the curse was no longer rambling, no longer a malevolent retelling of what everyone already knew: what O’Rahilly had predicted had begun to come to pass. I had to set aside my resentments and my griefs, and accomplish what I had come here to do. I must summon my determination and marshal my thoughts: what did I know, and what must I ask?
My grandmother had gone to O’Rahilly, to hire him to declaim at Deirdre’s wedding. Maeve had insisted upon it, and, in the face of her own granddaughter’s protests, her will had won out. The poet had accused and insulted Maeve, my mother, Deirdre, dishonoured Murchadh’s name, derided his aspirations, humiliated his daughter. He had exposed Sean’s secrets and foretold his death, and it had come to pass. And yet he did not know about me. Who had paid him, who had put him up to all this, and what was their end?
We came, at length, to a clearing in the wood, and at the edge of the clearing was the ruin of an ancient church. For the first time in many miles, I looked about me properly. What I had thought to be random boulders and stones were not – they were set, carefully, in a circle at the entrance to the overgrown burial yard of the church, and at their centre stood a stone, upright, thin, that came almost to my shoulder, inscribed on it a simple cross.
‘What is this place?’ I said. The birds were no longer in song or sight, and the air had grown cold and still.
‘Kilcrue,’ he said at last. ‘The Cursing Circle.’
I put down my staff and walked towards the centre, to where the stone stood. The burial ground was so near and overgrown. I had never liked burial grounds. The place reeked of the knowledge of death: a once holy place that was holy no more. Unwittingly, I put my hand to my neck and felt for the coarse wood and moulded metal of the cross that hung there.
‘Tell me about the Cursing Circle,’ I said.
‘There is little I can tell you.’ I noticed he took care to keep outside the ring of stones. I was in too far now to do the same.
‘Tell me why it is so called.’
He thought out his words with care. ‘It is said that these places were used in pagan rituals in ancient times.’
‘What sort of rituals?’
He caught a breath, and spoke again, slowly. ‘It is said that the stone, the cross, before it became a cross, was perhaps an altar …’
A sacrificial altar. I felt the blood freeze in my veins. ‘And the name?’ I insisted. ‘What is the meaning of the name?’
‘It is the place of cursing, where curses are laid by the poets. It is the home of Finn O’Rahilly.’
The snap of a twig underfoot from the direction of the ruined church took my attention and I turned towards it to see Finn O’Rahilly, more gaunt than I had remembered, standing at the entrance to the circle. He looked at me and then at Stephen. ‘What trick is this, old priest? What game is this you seek to play me in?’
‘No trick, no game,’ answered the Franciscan. ‘Simply the man I told you wished to come.’
The poet stepped back, steadying his hand on a jutting rock and never taking his eyes from me. ‘This man is dead.’
I advanced a step towards him. ‘No, not dead. Death has not found me yet. I know it is a matter you take some interest in. What do you know of my cousin’s death?’
He held his ground this time, but more colour drained from his face. ‘You have no cousin.’
‘My name is Alexander Seaton, and I am the cousin of Sean O’Neill FitzGarrett and of his sister Deirdre. I was called to Ulster by my grandmother Maeve O’Neill to tell you that your curse has no truth in it. I am the son of Grainne FitzGarrett and my grandmother’s line will end not with Sean, but with me.’
He sat down, breathing heavily, on one of the flat stones of the outer circle. His knuckles were white as his fingers gripped the staff in his hand. ‘I was not told this.’
‘What were you told?’
He opened his mouth to answer and then thought the better of it. The silence was heavy in the stillness of the circle. Stephen spoke to me in a low voice. ‘I have brought you here as I promised I would, but now I must go. I have business to attend to tonight that will not keep. I will return in the morning and bring you to Bonamargy. Use your time well. Master your anger and use your mind more than your tongue to draw out of him what you need. And remember the contents of your purse.’
I had not bargained for this. I did not greatly like the knowledge that I was in this priest’s power, or that I had left Andrew Boyd to the mercy of his companions.
‘Wait but half an hour and I will come with you; it cannot take longer to find out what this man knows. I have no desire to spend the night in this godless place.’
‘Have you no faith, then?’ he asked.
‘I have faith in my God,’ I said, ‘but there are forces at work here that come from a darkness I do not comprehend.’
‘Then you must pray for the strength to withstand them, and I will pray that also for you.’ He said no more, and reminding me again that he would return for me the next morning, he disappeared into the trees.