Praise for Shona MacLean
‘An astonishingly accomplished first novel. Shona MacLean has wrought a fine, rich, beautiful thriller that never loses sight of the heights to which the human soul can soar, even while it explores the depths to which envy, jealousy, hatred and greed can take it. This is a delight on all levels, literate, engaging and moving.’
Manda Scott
‘Pacy and literate, this is an accomplished and thought-provoking debut.’
Laura Wilson
‘A book for C J Sansom fans, A Game of Sorrows deftly tackles religion, superstition and murder. With informed attention to detail, MacLean has crafted an intelligent and engrossing mystery.’
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
‘Such is the quality of the recreation, not only of the reeking ebb and flow of everyday life, but also of the period mindset that it’s easy to believe that Satan is walking abroad. This is an accomplished and thought-provoking debut.’
Guardian
‘Mistress of mystery and suspense … This is a substantial story, well researched, never slackening pace.’
Scotsman
‘The book is written in the mould of writers like C J Sansom and Ariana Franklin, but goes beyond usual thrillers … The book is excellently plotted with a genuine mystery at the heart of the story.’
Crime Squad
Shona MacLean has a PhD in history from Aberdeen University, specialising in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scottish history. She was encouraged to write by her late uncle, Alistair MacLean. She lives in Banff, Scotland with her husband and four children. This is her second novel.
Also by Shona MacLean
The Redemption of Alexander Seaton
A GAME OF SORROWS
Shona MacLean
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Quercus
This paperback edition published in 2010 by
Quercus
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Copyright © 2010 by Shona MacLean
Maps Copyright © 2010 by Raymond Turvey
The moral right of Shona MacLean to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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without permission in writing from the publisher.
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from the British Library
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
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To James
The wild or mere Irish have a generation of poets, or rather rhymers vulgarly called bards, who in their songs used to extol the most bloody, licentious men, and no others, and to allure the hearers, not to the love of religion and civil manners, but to outrages, robberies, living as outlaws, and contempt of the magistrates’ and the king’s laws … For the mere Irish, however … they nothing so much feared the Lord Deputy’s anger as the least song or ballad these rascals might make against them, the saying whereof to their reproach would more have daunted them than if a judge had doomed them to the gallows.
Fynes Moryson, hostile commentator
on Ireland, 1617
Historical background
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, Ulster was a province undergoing tremendous change. From the time of the first Anglo-Norman incursions in the twelfth century, English power and interest in Ireland had fluctuated significantly, but the ‘Old English’, as they became known, never left, and over the centuries became deeply rooted in Irish society, at times marrying into the native Irish aristocracy and adopting their speech, manner and way of dress. In the course of the sixteenth century, the Tudors under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I made resolute efforts to extend English royal power throughout the island. The greatest obstacle to their plans was Ulster which, under its native families, remained the most thoroughly Gaelic part of Ireland, with distinct language, dress, landholding and economic practices, cultural and religious beliefs and loyalties. The most powerful of these native Irish families was the O’Neills.
It became clear to the administration that for English power in Ireland to be assured, Ulster must be brought under control. This was not simply a question of political or military conquest, but of cultural assimilation. The native Irish leaders of Ulster must be brought to acknowledge the sovereignty of the English Crown, and the people under their authority brought into conformity with English mores.
While the native leaders appeared at first to be willing to secure their own title to land in return for acknowledging royal authority, increasing awareness of the concomitant assault on the Gaelic way of life brought them to rebellion. The most significant of these rebellions was that led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, in what became known as the Nine Years’ War. The brutality and hardships of this war devastated Ulster. Tyrone’s ultimate submission in 1603, followed four years later by his flight to the continent with the Earl of Tyrconnell and other native Irish leaders, left Gaelic Ulster open to what English advisers had been urging for some time – not the Anglicisation of Ulster, but its colonisation.
Following ‘the Flight of the Earls’, the Crown initiated mass confiscations of native Irish land. Those who retained their lands held them on terms which greatly circumscribed their power and standing. Others, whose loyalty to the Crown was judged suspect, faced imprisonment, exile or death. Ulster was to be secured by the granting of the escheated lands to new landholders whose loyalty to the British state and the Protestant religion would not be in doubt. Pre-eminent in this new order were to be the ‘New English’ settlers, especially the ‘London Companies’ who were to re-establish and ‘plant’ the towns of Londonderry and Coleraine and vast tracts of land in the North with well-affected, mainly English or Scots, tenants. Only those judged most ‘well-affected’ amongst the native Irish were acceptable as tenants, generally on the poorest land and at the highest rents.
These ‘New English’ planters were distinct from the Catholic, Hibernicised ‘Old English’, having more in common with the Scots, who had been colonising areas of Antrim and Down for decades. Four peoples – native Irish, Old English, New English and Scots, with all their cultural, political and religious differences – were now left to forge a new society in what until the turn of the century had remained the most thoroughly Gaelic part of Ireland. Tensions and resentments were inevitable, and would eventually find expression in the carnage of the 1640s and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
Despite references to some actual historical figures and events – Randal MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim, James Shaw of Ballygally, Julia MacQuillan, the disaster of Kinsale, the abortive uprising of 1615 – and although the vast majority of locations mentioned in the text exist or existed, what follows is an entirely fictional account of how these tensions might have affected one family in Ulster in 1628.
Shona MacLean
July 2009
Prologue
Coleraine, Ulster, July 1628
The bride’s grandmother smiled: she could feel the discomfort o
f the groom’s family and it pleased her well. This wedding feast was a sickly imitation of what such things should be – her father would have been ashamed to set such poor fare before his followers’ dogs. But no matter. The music had scarcely been worthy of the name, and of dancing there had been none at all, for fear of offence to their puritan sensibilities. It was a mockery of a feast; she should not have permitted it, regardless of what her husband had said. It might well be politic to pander to the ways of these new English settlers, but it was not the O’Neill way, not her way. She should have insisted that the marriage took place in Carrickfergus, and according to her own customs. But the girl too had been against it – like Grainne, she would reap what she had sown, and she mattered little, anyhow.
Maeve looked down towards the far end of the table – they should not have put him there; he should have had the place of honour – these people knew nothing. Finn O’Rahilly was resplendent in the saffron tunic and white mantle, bordered with golden thread, that she had gifted him for the occasion. He would be paid well enough too, although it was not seemly at such times to talk of money. Regardless of all that her granddaughter and her new husband’s English family had said, on this one point the old woman would not be moved. There had been a poet at every O’Neill wedding through all the ages and, despite all that had happened, there would be a poet at this one, to give his blessing on the union, to tell the glories – fallen, broken though they now were – of the great house of O’Neill. As Finn O’Rahilly rose and turned to face her, Maeve felt the pride of the generations coursing through her: her moment had come.
He spoke in the Irish tongue. Everything was still. All the guests, even the English, fell silent as the low, soft voice of the poet filled the room. Every face was turned towards the man with the startling blue eyes whose beard and long silver hair belied his youth. No hint of the chaos he was about to unleash escaped his countenance, and it was a moment before any but the most attentive auditors understood what was happening. But Maeve understood: she had understood from the shock of the very first words.
Woe unto you, Maeve O’Neill:
Your husband will soon lie amongst the worms and leave you a widow,
You of the great race of the O’Neills,
Woe unto you who lay with the English!
Your changeling offspring carried your sin,
Your son that died, with the earls, of shame.
Your daughter, wanton, abandoned her race and her name and went with the Scot.
Woe unto you, Maeve O’Neill,
Your grandchildren the rotten offspring of your treachery!
Your grandson will die the needless death of a betrayed Ulsterman,
Your granddaughter has gone, like you before her, whoring after the English – no good will come of it, no fruit, only rotten seed.
Your line dies with them, Maeve O’Neill.
Your line will die and the grass of Ireland grow parched and rot over your treacherous bones.
And the O’Neill will be no more.
The poet turned and left, without further word, and all for a moment was silence, save the sound of Maeve O’Neill’s glass shattering on the stone floor.
ONE
The Taste of Tomorrow
Aberdeen, Scotland, 23 September 1628
I had waited for this moment without knowing what it was that I waited for. The college was quiet, so quiet that the sounds of the life of the town and the sea beyond permeated its passageways and lecture halls unopposed by scholarly debate or student chatter. The shutters on Dr Dun’s window, so often closed at this time of year against the early autumn blasts of the North Sea gales, were open today to let in the last, surprising, golden glows of the late summer sunshine. The rays lent an unaccustomed warmth to the old grey stones of the Principal’s room, less austere now than it had been in the days of the Greyfriars who had walked these cloisters before us, in the time of superstition. The Principal’s words were as welcome to my ears as was the gentle sunlight to my eyes.
‘It is in you, Alexander, that we have decided to place this trust. It is greatly at short notice, I know, but you will understand Turner’s letter only came into the hands of the council yesterday, and response, not only by letter but in the form of the appointed agent of the town and college – yourself – must be aboard the Aurora by the turn of the tide on Thursday. We met in the kirk last night to discuss it, and our choice was not long in the making.’ He named a dozen names, all that mattered for learning and the word of God in our society. There had been a time when knowing that I had been the subject of such a conference would have engendered apprehension in me, for there could only have been one result of such a council then – censure, condemnation, exile. But that had been a long time ago, and in another place, and these two years past I had lived quietly and worked hard at my post in the college. My students in the third class, where I taught arithmetic, geometry, ethics and physics, liked me, I knew. I passed myself well enough with my fellow regents, and from Dr Dun, from the beginning, I had known nothing but kindness. My friends were few, and I did not seek to add to their number. William Cargill and his wife, friends both since my own college days, George Jamesone the painter, Dr Forbes, my former teacher and my spiritual father, and Sarah, since the day I had first met her, there had been Sarah. I seldom travelled, and rarely returned to Banff, the town of my birth, where I had friends also who were truly dear to me, and all the family I had in the world. Yet I did not like to return to the stage of failures past, so I did not go there a tenth of the times I was asked. I had had no fear, then, on being summoned to the Principal’s presence. Neither had I had any inkling of the news, the great prospect that awaited me there.
‘You are well versed in the German tongue, are you not?’ enquired the Principal.
I asserted that I was. My old friend Dr Jaffray, in Banff, had insisted on teaching me the language. He had spent happy years of study on the continent in his youth, and having no one else to converse with in that tongue, he had decided he would converse with me. Despite the ravages of the war which now raged over so many of the lands he held dear, he never lost sight of the hope that one day I would follow where he had first walked. And now, at last, his hope was to be fulfilled, but not, perhaps, in a way he might have foreseen. I was to sail on Thursday for the Baltic, and Danzig. From there I was to travel to Breslau and then Rostock.
‘Our brethren in the Baltic lands, in northern Germany, in Poland and in Lithuania, suffer greatly under the depredations of Rome and the Habsburgs: the King of Sweden struggles almost alone in their cause. Our brethren thirst for the Word and for their own ministers. Turner has written here, as the town of his birth, asking that we might accept two Polish students to study divinity for the next three years, that they might be sound and strengthened in their doctrine, and when they return to their homeland to fulfil their calling and spread God’s word there, that they should be replaced by two more. He has mortified to that cause the sum of ten thousand pounds Scots.’ Dr Dun paused for a moment to allow me to contemplate the incredible vastness of this sum.
‘Praise be to God for such a man and for such a gift,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ said the Principal.
‘You wish me to escort the two students to Scotland?’ I asked, for the Principal had still not made clear what was to be my role in this enterprise.
He shook his head. ‘No, Alexander, some returning merchant or travelling townsman of good report could have performed that task. I wish you to travel to Poland to meet with Turner, and with his assistance, to seek out and find the two most worthy young men you can to fill these two places. I wish you to travel to the universities, to question the young men you find there on their learning, their soundness in doctrine, their strength of heart in adversity, their love for the Lord. When you find the two young men you know in your heart to be fit and right for this ministry, then you are to bring them back here with you. The council and the college will give you four months for the fulfilling
of this task. Will you take up this trust, Alexander?’
The sounds from outside the open window were shut out by the contending voices in my head, all my own. Here at last, after false trails and false dawns, was the chance I had never believed I would be given. Here was the moment where Dr Jaffray’s hopes for me could be fulfilled. I would at last travel beyond the narrow bounds of our northern society, and all in the work of God and for my fellow man. Here was a chance fully to justify the kindnesses and the faith in me of Dr John Forbes, my mentor, and of Dr Dun himself, who had plucked me from my self-imposed obscurity in Banff for something better. Here was the moment, and I was as an idiot, in a stupor.
Dr Dun smiled kindly at me. ‘Do not tell me you mislike the commission, Alexander, for I can think of no other better suited to it. The loss of your own calling to the ministry – and I know you suffer from it yet – will make you a better judge than any other of those who would aspire to it. Will you go, boy?’
At the age of twenty-eight, it was a long time since I had been called boy, and never before by Dr Dun. The warmth unlocked my seized tongue. ‘Aye, Sir, I will go.’
There was much to be done and less than two days to do it in. By midday on Thursday, I would be aboard a merchant ship and bound for the Baltic. Many had gone before me, to increase and pursue their learning, to better master their trade, to escape present drudgery in the hope of a new and better life. I was not to be embarking upon the journey of a new life, but I felt that what the next few months would bring would change the life I had to come. There were letters to write, bills to pay, and farewells to make. It would be another week before the students began to arrive back in the town after their long vacation, and Dr Dun already had the matter of my temporary replacement in hand. I almost flew to my own chamber on leaving the Principal’s study, taking the granite steps two at a time and nearly knocking over the old college porter as I did so.
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