Barbara said, "I hope Grace will be all right."
"Ah, Flynn's not a bad sort when he's sober. Joe talked with Grace's mother. I think she understands the, er, situation."
Barbara did not look reassured.
"When we left, she was giving Flynn a piece of her mind." Maeve smiled at her. "Send Caitlin a retainer, if it will make you feel better. Grace is resilient. She'll be all right." She sat at the table and dug in.
"Is that Grace Flynn you're talking about?" Kayla's voice rasped.
Maeve raised an eyebrow, fork half-lifted. "I don't believe I know you, but you must be Miss Wheeler. How d'ye do? I'm Maeve Butler."
Kayla scowled at her. "Is it Grace?"
"Oh, yes." Maeve chewed with appreciative thoroughness and took a sip of wine. "We've been seeing to the safety and comfort of your nephew. Or niece." She beamed at Kayla. "What a blessing to know that your brother's, er, lineage will go on."
"If she's pregnant," Kayla said flatly, "the brat is not Slade's. He was a fiend for safe sex."
"Oh, Grace is safe as houses." Maeve raised her wine glass. "Slainté, Miss Wheeler."
Chapter 5
If I was a blackbird I'd whistle and sing
And I'd follow the vessel my truelove sails in.
Irish song
Although we didn't reach Mrs. O'Brien's house until eleven after the Stanyon Hall Theatricals, Dad and I set out for Ballitore before noon on Thursday. I decided that postponing the visit to the Quaker museum would be a bad idea. Dad had remarkable resilience, but the revelations of the evening had depressed him. I thought his morale needed a boost. After another heroic breakfast, we packed and checked out, promising to return for a visit, Dad with my mother when she came.
It seemed strange, given my apprehensions, but I found driving to Ballitore on the narrow secondary roads easier than driving south on the N11. There was little traffic, though the occasional lorry zooming along in the opposite direction kept my adrenaline flowing. I had to watch out for farm vehicles.
Dad had borrowed the atlas from Ballymann House and dug a guidebook from his book bag. He kept up a litany of place names every time we came to a signpost, which was often. There was no point in trying to follow a numbered route. The only number to be found on the signposts was the distance in kilometers.
We passed through villages with lilting names—Avoca, Aughrim, Tinahealy. We should have gone to Tullow as well, but I took a wrong turn and we wound up with an English clank in Hacketstown. I spotted a signpost for Carlow there and followed it.
We drove a while in silence. In fact, Dad had said very little to me beyond commonplaces since we left Stanyon Hall. I thought he was displeased with me for not telling him about the red paint. I was not going to apologize.
One of the disadvantages of nervous driving is that you focus fiercely on the yellow line—when there is one. The scenery rushed by in a green blur. I wondered why the tourists hadn't discovered the area. There were no B & Bs, which was how I knew they hadn't. The rolling hills and pasture land were as lush as Wicklow though lower. I crossed the main road to Tullow, still on course. As we rounded yet another blind corner, I spotted the first dolmen.
"My God, what's that?"
While Dad riffled through his guidebook, I heaved the car over a humped, one-lane bridge, pulled onto a wide spot that looked like a turnaround for tractors, and set the brake.
"I believe it's the Haroldstown Dolmen."
"Yes, but what is it?" I got out of the car and walked back over the bridge. My father followed. A van rattled past. The driver waved.
"A megalith. According to the guide, there are more than fourteen hundred of them in Ireland."
The dolmen resembled nothing so much as a stout, three- dimensional rendition of the Greek letter pi. It squatted in the middle of a field full of black and white cows. Affixed to the stone wall that girdled the pasture, a neat brown sign in Irish and English warned that dire punishments awaited anyone who defaced a national monument. So somebody else had noticed the dolmen's existence. Part of its eeriness arose from the fact that we had come on it unwarned.
I considered leaping the stone fence and slogging through the cowpats for a closer look. The cows seemed amiable. I saw no bulls. I didn't want to curdle some farmer's cream, though, so I just stood and looked. The hair on the back of my neck bristled.
Dad was in lecture mode. "Dolmens were tombs. The stones formed the interior framework for a burial mound, and dirt was heaped over them. There are tumuli all over the country that probably contain similar stonework. Here the earth eroded away and exposed the stones."
A tomb.
We edged back to the car. I had not driven five kilometers when we found another one. Dad identified it as the Browne's Hill Dolmen, the largest in Ireland. The site was clearly marked and featured a graveled lay-by for pilgrims. I parked the Toyota.
The dolmen sat on the brow of a hill on the far side of the inevitable cow pasture. The Office of Public Works had built a tall wire fence that created a safe corridor through the field.
I turned to my father. "Do you want to walk over there? It's quite a distance."
He smiled. "Absolutely."
Close to, the dolmen was even eerier. The builders had heaved vast slabs of stone into the characteristic formation. Smaller stones marked the edge of the sanctuary, if that was the right term for the area surrounding the tomb. A pair of frolicking calves nudged the OPW fence, but the rest of the herd ignored us. The wind freshened.
I walked around the dolmen several times and even stuck my head under the huge capstone. I was searching for meaning, but the symbolism eluded me. When Dad began to shiver in the rising wind, we headed back to the car. As we walked, I kept looking over my shoulder at the massive stones. Just east of Carlow, a roundabout shunted us north onto the N9, and it began to sleet. I turned the windshield wipers on without messing with the turn signal, a sign of progress.
We had a snack for lunch at a pub in Castledermot, a town with Celtic high crosses we didn't pause to investigate. The sleet stopped, and the sun peeped out.
We reached Ballitore at two and found the museum. A Quaker academy and meeting hall had been restored as a public library. Museum exhibits—working tools from the village grist mill, items of clothing, ledgers in neat copperplate—ringed the main floor library. Up a flight of stairs from the foyer lay a small meeting hall that was still used for religious purposes.
I looked. I listened while Dad talked to the nice librarian. I followed the two men upstairs and admired the rows of plain wooden pews, two and two, facing each other, in the tiny meeting hall. The Friends who met there had no visual distractions. They would have to look at each other's faces. Not a bad idea, philosophically. I found the museum interesting, but my mind kept drifting back to the dolmens.
What did they mean? How did the dairy farmers who owned the land cope with their daily presence? A Quaker cemetery lay not far from the Ballitore museum. I was looking at a Quaker meeting hall and thinking about neolithic dolmens. The artifacts of religion are sometimes very strange.
We left Ballitore before four-thirty. I believe my father would have stayed until the library closed, but I wanted to get back to the cottage and settle in.
I drove past the ruins of the huge mill around which the Friends had built their settlement, then turned onto the N9, retracing our route as the simplest way to get back. There were any number of one-lane alternatives. I took a wrong turning and we missed the dolmens.
As we left Tinahealy, Dad said, "You didn't like the museum."
"I thought it was fascinating!" I braked for a manure hauler, passed it.
"Really?"
"Really. The bride's gray bonnet was especially fetching."
"Edmund Burke was a student at the academy."
"I heard that part, Dad." And Napper Tandy, the nationalist. I wondered why my father didn't mention him.
I met with Napper Tandy and I took him by the hand,
And I said how's poor
old Ireland, and how does she stand?
She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.
They're hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.
My father sighed. "I've never asked you what you feel about the Friends." His tone warned me the indirect question was a serious one.
I geared down behind a slow-moving car and tried to focus my mind. "I have great admiration for their courage and patience."
"Did you always feel that way?"
A straight stretch of empty road permitted me to pass. I waited until I had pulled back into my lane then said, "When I was small, I didn't think about it much. I loved my grandparents and the farm."
My Quaker grandfather had suffered a stroke in his sixties. Unfortunately, he had been driving a car at the time. Like Kayla's parents, he and my grandmother were killed in the wreck. It would be natural for my father to brood about that, given his own stroke.
After a moment, I added, "I remember the funeral service. I've always thought that was the way funerals were supposed to be. 'I will teach you, my townspeople, how to conduct a funeral.'" The quote from Carlos Williams was inappropriate, but my father didn't object.
We drove for a while in Friendly silence.
Dad eased his seatbelt. "I left the Meeting when I married your mother."
"Would the Friends have disapproved of Ma?" My voice squeaked with surprise. My mother was not of Quaker descent, but it was she, not my father, who had participated in the Peace Movement of the 60's and 70's.
"Possibly not. I didn't ask. You know I was a conscientious objector, don't you?"
"Yes. Ma said you were drafted after the Second World War." I took the sharp turn for Aughrim.
"I did my national service with the American Friends Service Committee—in Europe."
"Refugees?"
There was another interlude. At last, he said bleakly, "We interviewed survivors of the concentration camps. When I came home, I found I was still in agreement with the Friends, that coercion of any kind was an evil. Unfortunately, I no longer believed in God."
I glanced at my father. His eyes were closed. I drove along a stretch of green fields. "But you still find the Friends worthy of study?"
"Of course, though their numbers continue to decline and, I suppose, their influence. There were never many Friends in Ireland."
The little I knew of Irish history had come to me indirectly, in an English history course and in bits and pieces in literature classes that focused on Irish writers. None of my reading had so much as mentioned the Society of Friends, though there was a great deal about religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. I gained the impression that the Protestants were mostly Anglicans in the south, and that the Scottish Kirk was strong in the north.
"Mary Leadbeater," Dad murmured.
"I beg your pardon?"
"She lived at Ballitore, a granddaughter of the founder. Mary was a poet of some repute, like your mother. She wrote the most lucid account we have of the rebellion of 1798, Napper Tandy's rebellion."
So he had noticed the nationalist connection.
He added, "The librarian showed me one of Mary Leadbeater's manuscripts while you were looking at the display cases."
"1798. The United Irishmen?"
"Yes. It's sometimes called the Wexford Rebellion, though violence occurred in Wicklow, Tipperary, and Kildare, too. It began as a high-minded political revolution, modeled to some extent on ours and also on the French Revolution. But it degenerated rapidly into sectarian slaughter of Protestants by Catholics and vice versa. An appalling failure."
I shivered, remembering Liam's comments on sectarian killing in Bosnia. "And Mary Leadbeater was an eye-witness?"
"Oh, yes." He sat up straighter and his voice strengthened. "Before the revolt broke out, the Friends had refused to support coercive measures against their Catholic neighbors. During the rebellion, the community at Ballitore nursed the wounded of both sides. There was some looting, and the government hunted the insurgents down ruthlessly, but no one harmed the Quakers."
I said, "No wonder you found the museum interesting."
"It's not academically interesting. There's not much left in Ballitore for a scholar. The records of the Dublin Meeting are more useful for my purposes, but I found the museum touching. The building was restored by the Kildare County Council, even though there are fewer than fifty Friends left in the area."
"That's impressive."
"Yes. The local people want to remember the Quaker community." He sat silent for a while. "And, of course, they remember the role of the Friends during the Great Famine. That's what I'm studying. Quaker efforts in America to organize famine relief were the genesis of the American Friends Service Committee."
We were approaching Woodenbridge. I slowed and crossed the bridge, bound for Avoca. "I thought you were just studying the Dailey family."
"The Daileys left Ireland after the Wexford Rebellion. The brutality was too much for them. In fact, the whole Quaker population of Ireland began to dwindle from that time on, mostly through immigration to America. There were less than five thousand Irish Friends by the 1840s."
Maybe Quaker women had hereditary fertility problems, I mused, irreverent. "But small as it was, the Dublin Meeting still had enough energy to organize an international famine relief effort?"
"They had help from the London Meeting, from the Committee on Sufferings," Dad said seriously, "but yes. It doesn't take many determined people to make a difference."
We crossed the river into the village of Avoca. The streets had been laid out before the invention of the automobile, so I concentrated on driving. When the Toyota broke through into open country, I said, "Doesn't stumbling on mineshafts of historical fact bother you?"
"I beg your pardon?"
I abandoned my extravagant metaphor. For a man who has been married more than forty years to a poet, my father has a curious resistance to figurative language. "I was thinking of the dolmens, too, not just the museum. There we were, tootling through the countryside, minding our own business, and all of a sudden, wham, we were back in the Stone Age. It was like a time warp."
Dad chuckled. "I'm a historian. I like time travel."
A milk truck loomed, horn blaring. I crunched onto the shoulder. A space warp. Our brushes with automotive disaster were now so commonplace I was almost able to ignore them.
We made it to the cottage without mishap, though I nearly turned off for Ballymann House in a fit of absent-mindedness.
At Bedrock Cottage, the Gardai had gone, and the long- suffering constable had even tidied the kitchen before they left. I sent Dad downstairs for a nap while I fixed dinner. As I was, what else, peeling potatoes, the telephone rang.
It was Barbara Stein wondering whether the police had let us return to the cottage. I assured her of that and thanked her for dinner.
She laughed, a short unhappy sound. "I should have known better than to put Kayla and Maeve at the same table."
"Ah, well, at least no blood was shed."
"So far. Who knows what the future may hold? Kayla stormed around for an hour after you left. The drawing room smells like a pub. Fortunately, she drank half a liter of gin and slept until noon. She's been tying up one of the phone lines talking to her lawyer ever since. Is George okay?"
I thought he was in fine shape and said so. I told her about our trip to Ballitore, thanked her again, and announced that I had to go back to my potatoes.
"Right. I just thought I'd mention that we tend to unwind in the drawing room every afternoon around six-thirty. If the thought isn't too repulsive, drop in and let us know what's happening."
That was kind. As I scraped away at the spuds, I reflected that my initial hostility to Barbara was thawing. Alex was easy to like. Barbara just required more effort. I was sorry for Kayla and jealous of Grace. I wasn't sure what I felt about Maeve. I admired her confidence.
I put the potatoes on the Rayburn, which I had switched over to its c
ooking function. It had no broiler, so I would have to pan- fry the lamb chops. I was rummaging among the pots for a skillet when the telephone rang again.
This time it was Sgt. Kennedy. He sounded rather distant. He was, he said, just checking to make sure the lads from Dublin had left the cottage livable. Though there were smears of fingerprint powder on the downstairs woodwork, I said everything was all right. The smears weren't the sergeant's fault. I said flattering but true things about his sister's B & B, too. That warmed him up a little.
I asked about Grace. She was safe and talking to the Arklow solicitor. Kennedy reminded me that the inquest was set for ten Monday in the hall of the disused Protestant church just down the lane. Convenient. I promised to be there.
"Ah, sure," he said, "I almost forgot. Mahon said your husband called this morning. Now where did I put the message?" Sounds of rummaging among papers.
If Jay had called around eleven that morning, it would have been 3:00 a.m. in Shoalwater. He must have stayed up all night. I felt a twinge of guilt.
"Here it is. He's arriving at Dublin Airport at eleven tomorrow and wants you to meet the plane."
"What!" I swore.
"How's that again?"
"I'm sorry." I fumbled in the desk and found paper and pencil. "Aer Lingus, you said. What's the flight number?"
He read me the flight information. Apparently Mahon had given Jay the phone number of Ballymann House, and Jay had called there, too. Kennedy said his sister had tried to reach me several times during the afternoon.
"My father and I drove to Kildare." I was so angry with Jay I could barely articulate. What business did he have rushing to Ireland to take charge? He hadn't even talked the situation over with me.
Kennedy was making polite closing remarks.
I asked him, through my teeth, how the case was progressing. He assured me that Mahon had it well in hand, but that Toss Tierney's son had gone missing.
"His son? I thought the father was the one who disappeared."
"They've both done a bunk," Kennedy said glumly. "The lad's been gone since Easter Monday, too, but the missus didn't admit it to me until today. I knew she was hiding something. Tommy Tierney and I had a run-in this winter. He's a wide boy is our Tommy, and he was one of Wheeler's wargamers to boot."
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