A Game of Sorrows Read Online Free PDF

‘Are you having none yourself?’ I asked, as he stoppered the flask. He answered me in words I did not understand and returned to his place by the door.
    Sean smiled. ‘Eachan could drink us both under the table and through the floor, if he had a mind to. But of late, he has not been of a mind to. He prefers to keep his wits about him. Do not be fooled by his sullen looks – he has wits enough for both of us, and at times has needed them.’ He downed the liquid in the beaker and formed a resolution. ‘Deirdre’s wedding. Where do I begin? You will think me biased in her favour, but I assure you I am not. My sister would have been a prize for any man in Ulster, and many sought her hand, but two months ago she turned her back on everything she had been brought up to, taught to value, and had herself married to the son of a wealthy London planter at Coleraine, on the north coast of our province. Her new husband’s father is a builder, a master mason, and in great credit with the English authorities there, for that he has built many of their properties and walled their town of Londonderry for them.’
    ‘Then our grandmother must have been well pleased at the match,’ I said.
    ‘Pleased?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Maeve was about as pleased as you would be by a visit from the Holy Father, I suspect. No. She was not pleased. She was almost unrestrained in her fury that her granddaughter had chosen the same path in marriage as your mother and indeed she herself had done.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    Sean regarded me for a moment. ‘She taught you so little then, that you do not understand even that?’ He held out his beaker without even looking at the servant, who again silently filled it. He drank a little, then spoke again. ‘My sister married outside the blood of the Irish, the Pure Irish. She married an Englishman, a newly settled planter, worse still than your mother having left Ulster to marry a Scot, and worse than our grand-mother’s crime in having married into the Old English.’
    ‘And our grandmother could not prevent it?’
    He shook his head. ‘For the one and only occasion in my lifetime, our grandfather overruled her. He said he would not lose Deirdre as he had Grainne, he would not demand that they sacrifice their love to her pride. There were such storms in the whole of Carrickfergus over it that I was surprised to see ships still put to sea. But in the end there was something, I think, that may have made her come to believe it was in her interests to let the match go ahead in any case.’
    ‘What was it?’
    He shook his head. ‘I cannot be sure … Anyway, it does not matter; that is a tale for another time.’
    I looked at the candle, which had spluttered low in the sconce. I took another from the shelf and lit it, for it was clear that Sean’s tale was not over. He told me then of my cousin Deirdre’s wedding, of the English solemnity of the service and the imagined propriety of the celebrations afterwards.
    ‘It was not to my taste, cousin, I’ll tell you that. Such long faces and at so cheerless a feast I have rarely seen. The Blackstones could scarcely content themselves between showing their shame at their son’s marriage to a common Irishwoman as they see her – for these people understand nothing of lineage – and their fear of opening their purses for the sake of it. Had I not taken precautions on my journey north to the “festivities” I would surely have died of thirst. My grandmother was in a triumph at the utter Protestant misery of it.’
    ‘And what of Deirdre?’ I asked, feeling something already, some care and kinship for this girl I had never seen, nor known existed until less than half an hour ago.
    ‘Deirdre sat still and determined throughout it all. She held herself with such a grace – it is something that the women of her husband’s family could never muster. I fear this marriage will bring her much grief.’
    ‘But if her husband loves her?’
    ‘Her