Free A Game of Sorrows by S. G. MacLean Page B

a vegetable cart gave off their attentions when they saw the party come to a halt, and soon left at a brisk jog in the direction of the castle.
    If the riders noticed any of the interest they had occasioned, they showed no sign of it. The stillness of their waiting contrasted with the noise and busyness I could hear rising from the floors beneath me. Doors banged, orders were shouted, and feet flew up and down stairs. At last the entrance door to the tower was opened and my grandmother emerged. Sean was a step behind, and while she went towards the main rider, he went directly to Roisin’s horse and took the bridle from the servant who held it. The older man dismounted and his three sons did likewise. My grandmother gave him a long greeting, which I could not hear, and received an equally long response. When it was over, and acknowledged, the two embraced warmly. It was only now that Sean helped Roisin dismount from her horse. He was stiff, formal, and did not look directly at her as he spoke.
    This was a new guise to me, my cousin’s incarnation as a courtly gentleman. This was not the man who had brawled and debauched in the inns of Aberdeen; who had sung to me, with me, on our journey from Scotland and who, despite the shortness of our acquaintance and the sadness of the time, could make me smile simply at the sight of him. I wondered how many guises he had. Roisin stood before him, tall, slender and still. Her composure masked some great uncertainty that her eyes could not quite hide. I felt something in my stomach, a pull, a kind of shock, like a ghost of something: she was like Katharine, that was all; she reminded me of Katharine. The feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and I watched Maeve go to her and kiss her on both cheeks, before slipping her arm through the young girl’s and leading her into the house. I stayed where I was, pondering the arrival of this party, unannounced to me and so formally received. And I wondered about the girl, so beautiful and so sad, whose name I had first heard on the night of our arrival from Scotland, and why, in the long list of loves and conquests with which he’d regaled me for much of our journey, Sean had never mentioned her once.
    That night there was to be a great feasting before my grandfather’s burial the next day. Each night since his death there had been a wailing and keening of women such as I thought could not have issued from anything human. ‘It is their way,’ Andrew Boyd had said. ‘Their excess in grief is matched only by the gluttony and drunkenness of their funeral feasts. You will never know anything more pagan given a Christian name. Their enjoyment of it would shame Lucifer himself.’ On this final evening there was a constant rumble of feet back and forth from the kitchens to where the mourners were to gather for the last night of waking over my grandfather.
    I had returned to my chamber at around five, to begin my nightly letter to Sarah, as if putting my feelings into words now could somehow reclaim for us all the time that had been wasted. I hardly noticed the footsteps on the stairs, so many comings and goings had there been in the house that day, and I didn’t lift my head when the door opened, thinking it was only Andrew. Only when I heard the sharp intake of a woman’s breath, a surprised ‘Oh!’, did I look round and see, standing in the doorway, in front of Sean, a vision from my own dreams. She was like a spirit, a princess, a myth from the whispered bedtime tales I had gone to sleep to. She was like a story in herself, a fable. The hair that hung down her back in waves of red and gold was not the black of myself, or Sean, or our grandmother, but the face illumined by the arc of light thrown by Sean’s lantern was the face of my own mother. My heart was thumping and my breathing came hard to me. I looked down at my hands and realised they were clenched in determined fists. At last I stood up and went towards her; I felt barriers