Edward Blackstone restrained his father. ‘My brother Henry was murdered by Andrew Boyd and by your own grandson, the Scot, who masqueraded in our house in the guise of your other and took my mother’s hospitality.’
This time a look of astonishment. ‘Your mother’s hospitality? I congratulate him most heartily on finding it; I had not thought him so resourceful. As to the question of your brother’s dispatch, I am sorry to say that neither my grandson nor Andrew Boyd can claim the credit in that. Another more honourable has cleared their names of that deed.’
Matthew Blackstone had again to be restrained, while all courage and intent seemed to be draining from his son. The younger man’s shoulders sank, and his voice dropped.
‘Where is Deirdre? Where is my wife?’
This time the old woman actually laughed. ‘A fine specimen of a man, who does not even know where his wife is. Little wonder she went so easily to a servant’s bed.’
I glanced at my cousin, but she seemed to be observing the exchange as a conversation between strangers.
‘I want you to tell me where my wife is. I must know she is safe.’
‘Oh, she is safe enough,’ said my grandmother, unconcernedly. ‘I have little use for her now, and she has turned her back on those she should have served. You may take her as you wish.’
The steward glanced swiftly up to our watching place, and then towards the door to the machicolation. I put my arm more firmly around my cousin and began to move her away from the balustrade and towards the door. I heard Blackstone order his people to search the house, and the steward protest to no avail. I had only just pulled the door shut behind us when I heard the footsteps of two or three men, having taken the stairs, start to clatter on to the balcony. I tried to hurry Deirdre, but she was in little haste herself and my weakness made our progress slow. I turned halfway up the steps and saw, to my horror, the doorknob turn. I thought it was over for us both, but at that very moment a furious shouting came from out in the yard and the lower floors of the house as the castle guard stormed through the already broken door and demanded the submission of Matthew Blackstone and all who were with him. I recovered my wits quickly, and almost dragged Deirdre up the remaining steps and along the corridor to the tiny room where I thought we might be safe awhile.
Once I had her inside, I bolted the door and pulled Andrew’s heavy chest across it before slumping down on the floor to try to catch my breath. Deirdre said nothing for a moment, looking in some astonishment at me.
‘Where is he, Alexander?’
‘He went to alert the men at the castle. I think he will be here soon; he is probably already in the house.’
‘My father-in-law wants to kill him.’
‘I know that.’
‘My husband too, for other reasons. But they will not. Andrew is a better man than either of them.’
‘Yes.’
She sat down on the bed, smoothing out the linen with her hand.
‘He is a better man than my grandmother would ever acknowledge.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘Will he have me now, do you think?’
‘I cannot answer for him, Deirdre, but I know he loves you.’
‘Oh, he always loved me,’ she said. ‘I knew that. I always knew it. And I him, but other things mattered more, then.’
I waited, but she appeared to think no further explanation necessary. After a while, she became aware of my silence.
‘I often thought of your mother, you know, when I was growing up.’ Her face brightened. ‘They tell me I look like her.’
I smiled. ‘You do.’
‘I used to think of her, picture her, lying with her dead love at the bottom of the sea, her hair entangled in seaweeds and a smile of perfect peace on her face. I envied her her freedom.’
‘Her life was not as you thought,’ I said.
She stood by the small table at the end of Andrew’s bed, and started to examine the pieces on the chessboard there. She fingered the white queen awhile, picked her up, looked at her and set her down again somewhere else on the board, without giving much consideration to where she had positioned her. She turned her attention then to the black pieces, picked up a knight, put him down in his place again, and then moved the other. She carried on in this way, touching the pieces, considering them as objects, and then moving them in a way that had some logic in it that was clear to her, but unfathomable to me.
‘Did Sean ever try to get you to play Fidchell?’ she said, after some time, when it looked impossible that the white queen should survive a move longer.
‘No, I have never heard of it.’
‘A pity,’ she said, ‘but perhaps not. It was a game of the ancients. No one really knows how to play it now. But Sean wanted to know and Maeve had a board and set made for him, from as much information as could be gleaned from the old stories. It was beautiful, the board a pale wood inlaid with markings of gold, the pieces a white stone carved by the finest craftsmen. We knew very little of the rules, only some idea that the king should claim and keep his throne, and that to win at Fidchell, you had to play very well. Sean studied all the stories, and made up his own rules. He tried to teach them to me, but I could never understand it, and I always lost.’
The white queen was now impossibly compromised and had nowhere to go. Deirdre had entirely abandoned any attempt at protecting either king. She studied the board a moment and then knocked the pieces over, one by one. ‘I was never any good at games. I should have remembered that.’ She held up one of the white knights. ‘I should have married Cormac, as she wanted me to – God knows, many a woman would dream of such a man, but I would not enmesh myself further with the O’Neills. And then he was too good for me and he would not see it. And now I have brought death to him years before it should have come.’
‘Cormac’s death is not your fault, Deirdre. You cannot blame yourself for all that has happened.’
‘Can I not? I have made many mistakes, believed that many things could be that I have learned could never have been. I didn’t even understand my own brother.’
‘He loved you dearly.’
‘And I him, but I did not understand him. I could scarcely believe it when I realised that he would fall in with Maeve’s plans, with Murchadh’s, that he would marry Roisin and throw it all at my grandmother’s feet; everything my grandfather had worked for, his wealth and our name, to be squandered in a cause that was long lost.’ She looked away. ‘I could not believe he would not listen to me. So I determined to set myself at the furthest extreme from their world that I knew. I had tried to get away from Maeve before; I went once, you know, to our grandfather’s people in the Pale, but they would not have me. So I married the son of a wealthy English planter.’ She laughed. ‘What an insult to Cormac, to Andrew too, to have married such a man. I would have done anything to stop Maeve, but it made no difference, and still Sean would not listen to me. And now my grandfather is dead, and Sean is dead, and Cormac is dead. The poet, too, is dead.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I was never any good at games. And you have been brought here, where I know you do not wish to be, because of me.’
‘I came here because Sean asked me to come. I came to help lift the curse.’
‘The curse cannot be lifted. He tried to tell me that, and I only laughed at him. But now I know it and it is too late.’
‘Who told you, Deirdre?’ I reached out to take her hands in my own. ‘Who told you?’
‘He told me himself, of course,’ she said, her eyes shining with a strange brilliance.
At that moment there was a thud against the door and an oath that surprised me, for I had rarely known Andrew lose control of his tongue.
‘Alexander? Alexander!’ he shouted. ‘Alexander, are you there? Where is Deirdre? Let me in before I break the door down.’