A Game of Sorrows Read Online Free PDF Page A

grandfather was much against it, I have been told, but in the end he gave in to her, as he always has done. Our grandmother fell in love with an Englishman and she never forgave him for it.’
    ‘But our grandfather’s family have been settled in Ireland for many generations, have they not?’ I said.
    ‘Yes,’ said Sean. ‘And they have our Irish tongue and can ape our Irish ways when it suits them, and they have not, thank God, embraced the Protestant heresy that has infected these shores.’ Here he crossed himself and it sent a shiver to my soul to see my own image do so. ‘But for all that,’ he continued, ‘they are still the English, no more accepted by my grandmother and her like than she was accepted by them. She married for love, the one weakness, the one mistake of her life. To our grandfather’s wealthy family in Dublin, a marriage alliance with the O’Neills was potentially useful for business in the North, where Maeve’s family held sway, but in other ways it was beyond their powers of acceptance and they never did accept her. As for Maeve’s family, the O’Neills were well used to accommodations with the English for their own benefit, but for her to marry into a trading family was almost beyond disgrace. She soon gave up trying to find favour with her husband’s family and instead set herself to salvaging some with her own.’
    ‘And did she succeed?’ I asked, becoming interested, in spite of myself, in this woman who had been little more than a shadow in my life.
    ‘Oh yes, she did. And the fact that her son Phelim rose with the Earl of Tyrone against the English, and then went in to exile with him on the continent, has given her much honour with the native Irish of our land, but it is an empty honour.’
    ‘An empty honour? What do you mean?’
    Sean’s face became grave. ‘Because the Irish have no honour in Ireland any more. Tyrone’s rising was the last hope for our people – for our language, our laws, our customs. Perhaps even our religion. The lands the earls left are being settled now by the English and the Scots. The native Irish are being pushed to the margins – untrusted and yet needed still for their labour. Those who had honour amongst their people must now till their scraps of land like beasts, and pay the English Crown for the privilege.’
    ‘I am sorry for that,’ I said, ‘but what has it to do with me?’ Sean got up and walked over to my bookshelves. He picked up an edition of Horace and leafed through it a few moments before putting it back on the shelf and turning to me. ‘Nothing, cousin, it has nothing to do with you. With your books and your pen and ink, and your drab Presbyterian garments in your cold northern town. Your mother went far to ensure that your life should be free of such concerns, and had it not been for the happenings of Deirdre’s wedding, I think she would have succeeded.’
    And here, I saw from his face and from the increased tension of Eachan by the door, we had come to the point.
    ‘Tell me about Deirdre’s wedding,’ I said.
    Sean stretched out his feet towards the fire which had also, I only now noticed, been lit. I wondered how long they had been here waiting for me, whilst I, unknowing, had whiled away the evening with William. I saw, hanging where my own cloak would normally have done, another mantle of the sort his servant wore, but of much finer stuff and trimmed with fur. Over the back of the chair, a jacket of a soft, dark brown leather, quilted and stitched with gilded thread, had been hung. My cousin was evidently a man of wealth. He said something to Eachan and then asked me if I kept glasses in my room.
    ‘The life of a college regent is not that of an Irish gentleman,’ I said; ‘but I do have beakers.’ I took down the two pewter beakers I kept with my own plate and knife on a shelf, and the unspeaking servant poured into them some amber liquid from a flask he had hidden somewhere in the folds of his clothes.