A Game of Sorrows Read Online Free Page B

around to sit astride it. It was only then that I noticed, lurking in the unlit corner of the room, a stocky form, with eyes that moved as much as his body was still. He was wreathed in some sort of Highland garb, a yellowed linen shirt wrapped over faded red trews of a rough woollen cloth, the whole swathed in a long brown blanket edged with goats’ fleece. ‘That’s Eachan,’ my cousin said. ‘Pay him no heed. He’s a dour fellow but will do you no harm, unless you would wish to injure me, and then he would kill you as soon as look at you.’
    ‘“The ill-favoured Highlander”,’ I murmured.
    My cousin glanced at me quizzically but said nothing.
    ‘When did you come here?’ I asked.
    ‘Into the town? We arrived last night. Half-starved and exhausted, the pair of us, by the time we got within the gates – which was when, incidentally, cousin, I learned of our resemblance to one another. The fellow on the watch mistook me for you and let me pass without question. Eachan gave him more trouble, until I intervened – under guise as yourself; the watchman seemed more at ease with that arrangement than any other, and I judged it best not to antagonise him. Aye, half-starved and exhausted we were, and our object nowhere to be found. This is not a hospitable place; I will be glad to be home.’
    ‘You are a long way from home,’ I said. ‘Carrickfergus.’
    His eyebrows rose. ‘You know that much then.’
    Still watching my cousin’s servant, I said, ‘My mother spoke of you sometimes, her brother’s child. I have often wondered about you. As a boy I used to wish …’ I stopped. It was pointless to remember that now. ‘It was a great sorrow to her that she did not see you grow to manhood. She is dead now. I think she grieved for her homeland until the day she died.’
    ‘Ah, did she? I think I have some memory of her yet, Grainne. Of her hair, the scent of her skin, her face sometimes. There has not been a day that our grandfather has not mourned her loss.’
    He said nothing of our grandmother, Maeve: there was no need. My mother’s every letter to her had gone unacknowledged, unanswered, until at last she had written no more letters home. I had sometimes wondered how many kind words from the stern old Ulsterwoman of my childhood dreams would have been needed for her to leave my father and this cold and wind-blasted coast of Scotland to return to the land of her birth. I might have grown up all but a brother to the man seated across from me. But there had been no such words, she had never returned home from this place, and the man before me was a stranger.
    He regarded me a few moments, as discomfited as I, I think, to learn of another who lived his life in his own exact image. ‘You have no brother or sister?’ he asked.
    ‘None,’ I said. ‘Nor mother or father either now. And you?’
    ‘I have a sister,’ he said, ‘Deirdre. Four years younger and twenty wiser than I. Our mother died when she was born, and our father left before she was five years old or I nine, in the train of Tyrone; he fled to the continent.’
    ‘Tyrone?’ I said, stupidly almost, as some image from my childhood stirred in my memory. A memory of my mother weeping, as I had never seen her do before nor indeed did I ever afterwards.
    ‘Aye, Tyrone,’ said Sean with some bitterness. ‘My father fled Ireland with the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, when they took fright at only they and God alone knew what. They left their people and their lands to be parcelled up amongst the English and the Scots as your king and his deputies saw fit, and Deirdre and I were left to be brought up by our grandparents, to inherit our grandfather’s wealth and our grandmother’s dreams.’
    ‘I think my mother was saddened that she had not known her brother better.’
    Sean sighed. ‘It was not our grandmother’s way. She insisted that Phelim be brought up in the Irish fashion, fostered with her O’Neill kindred in Tyrone. Our