her. In the silence I tried to hear her voice. Sometimes I would catch a fleeting glimpse of her smile and then it was gone, leaving me with nothing but a searing emptiness, as if the essence of her had been clawed out of me. Each day ended with the burning of the letter in the flame of the candle by which it had been written.
My daylight hours were spent in watching. Musket loops and arrow slits on the walls gave perfect views down the high street of the town. It was broad and long, flanked by the great stone sentinels that were the other tower houses of wealthy aldermen and burgesses. The governor might have his palace, but the old families of Carrickfergus had each their stronghold. Only from the open parapets, from which I had been forbidden, might I have seen the castle, or the church or Irish Gate behind us, but all the life of the marketplace, courthouse, jail and any travellers who entered the burgh from the North or Sea Gate, or from the Scots Quarter outside the town walls, could be seen by a watcher at one of my windows.
In the evening, Sean would come and spend a half-hour with me and elaborate for me on what I had seen. Mourners had been called and were gathering. I had learned from my mother not to believe the tales of the Irish peddled by those who had no interest but to denigrate them, and so it was no great surprise to me to see the mourners from the West who brought their magnificent horses to rest at the gateway to my grandparents’ tower house; they bore themselves with a sense of their own dignity that would not have shamed an earl. With them came their retainers, their humbler mounts heavy-laden. Sean knew them all, went to greet them all, and in the evening would regale me with tales of every tragedy, scandal or feud they had ever laid claim to. Between mouthfuls of food and drink, he could reel off levels and generations of cousinage more complex than any mathematics I had ever stumbled over, and the next day would express genuine astonishment that I could not remember my exact relationship by blood or marriage to every soul who had the previous day passed beneath the portals of the house.
Late in the afternoon of the day before the funeral, a party arrived from the direction of the Irish Gate, five well-mounted and richly clothed riders and their followers. Of the leading group, four were men, attired much as Sean had been when he had come to fetch me from Aberdeen, and in their midst, as if cordoned off from the lesser beings inhabiting the world outside, was one woman. I could not see her face and her head was covered by the hood of her furred cloak, but the tendrils of pale gold that escaped from it were those of a young woman. I had been so entranced by the sound and sight of the new arrivals, I had not heard the footsteps come up behind me. I spoke without realising I spoke or knowing I would be heard. ‘Deirdre.’
‘You should stay back from there. You might be seen.’
It was Andrew Boyd. He had often passed me in this attitude before, without remark. I ignored his warning. ‘I have been watching my cousin arrive; she travels with a larger retinue than I had expected.’
He came towards the opening and I stepped aside to afford him a better view. His eyes can scarcely have lighted on the party below us when he turned away again. ‘It is not Deirdre,’ he said, without looking at me. ‘It is Roisin O’Neill.’ He went past me into our chamber and closed the door behind him.
I continued to watch. Of the four men, the leading rider was perhaps about fifty years of age: the others were around my own age, and enough alike each other and the older man to be his sons. Their arrival before my grandmother’s house had not gone unnoticed in the marketplace and the high street; of the many arrivals over the preceding three days, none had occasioned as much interest as this. Traders left off their business and turned to watch, wary. Two English soldiers who had been flirting with a girl at