The Library at the Edge of the World

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  “And you know how much that timber would have cost, do you?”

  “No. I don’t. But I know what I want. And I’ve told you that I want those slates retained. Do you understand me?”

  Fury reached over to the biscuit tin beside the teapot and selected a handful of custard creams. “Oh, I understand you perfectly, girl, never doubt me.”

  “Fine. I’ll be round to Maggie’s place tomorrow, and I expect to find the slates have been returned.”

  “Well, if that’s what you expect, you’ll be disappointed.” Fury hitched one bony hip onto the kitchen work surface. “That’s what I came in to tell you. I mightn’t be round for a week or so.”

  This was outrageous. And so, thought Hanna, was the fact that everyone, including herself, kept referring to her house as Maggie’s place.

  “You can’t just walk away and stop the work!”

  “God, you’re a queer woman for changing your mind.” Fury spoke through a mouthful of crumbs. “How long do you think it takes to get planning permission?”

  Hanna goggled at him and he shook his head at her.

  “Ah now, you can’t have it both ways. Do you want me to crack on or don’t you? Strictly speaking, there shouldn’t even be a goat on that grass till we’ve got the paperwork.”

  Irritated beyond measure, Hanna spoke without thinking. “Yes, but I don’t actually need planning permission, not given the size of the extension. And even if I did, I could get it retroactively.”

  “Retrospectively.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Well if you know that, Miss Casey, you’ll know that I didn’t need to apply for it.”

  Fury stared into the distance crunching a biscuit thoughtfully. There was a long pause during which Hanna realized the extent to which she had just made a fool of herself. Then he winked at her and left.

  28

  Fury approached Castle Lancy via the Carrick bypass, which took traffic eastward away from the peninsula and toward the Cork and Kerry borders. As his van rattled along the highway, the castle walls reared up on their outcrop of stone in the foothills of the mountain to his left. The medieval de Lancys had chosen its site with an eye to defense. Guarded by the mountain, but a good arrow shot from the nearest high ground at its back, the castle dominated the entrance to the peninsula. Carrick itself had begun as a market town catering to the de Lancys’ needs.

  There wasn’t a soul on the peninsula who didn’t know the story of the castle. It was built in the thirteenth century by the Anglo-Norman Lords of Finfarran as a fortified dwelling with a twin-towered gateway, a moat, a drawbridge, and sheer stone walls enclosing a keep. As time passed and the danger of attack from their Irish neighbors lessened, successive generations of de Lancys enlarged the windows, extended the building, smoothed out its medieval features, and, eventually, filled in the moat. By the eighteenth century the family had become successful spice merchants and vaguely philanthropic landlords whose control over the peninsula was absolute. They owned a house in one of the best squares in London where they spent ‘the season’ each year, marrying their daughters into the aristocracy and attending theaters and routs. In Ireland, they demolished what remained of their medieval home and replaced it with a Georgian manor house equipped with all modern amenities, though the walls of the original fortress, locked into the solid rock on which they had stood for centuries, still enclosed it like a fist. As time went on the de Lancys continued to make money in trade and to invest a certain amount of it in initiatives for the benefit of their tenants, like the library that they built in Ballyfin. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, a pioneering younger son discovered a silver mine in America and the family removed itself from the Land War in Ireland by crossing the Atlantic and buying a mansion in New York. When the controversy in Ireland turned to a War of Independence and a subsequent destructive civil war, the de Lancys divided their year between New York and London, leaving the castle in Finfarran to the protection of its medieval walls. And, unlike many other Big Houses owned by absentee landlords, Castle Lancy survived. The family, however, died out.

  Lady Isobel de Lancy, born in New York in the 1930s, was the last of the line and died childless. She and her husband, Charles Aukin, the son of a U.S. banker, spent most of their married life traveling the world in luxury cruise ships before falling in love with Castle Lancy in the 1990s. Restoring the house, which had been looked after by generations of local staff, became Lady Isobel’s hobby, and, when she died ten years later, Charles lived on there alone. Most of the rooms were shut up now, but a local woman continued to act as housekeeper while the yard, stables, and gardens enclosed by the ancient walls slid gradually into disrepair.

  Edging across the highway, Fury took the exit road for the castle and drove through the arch between the twin towers, where the iron-bound doors that had remained closed during the family’s long absences now stood permanently open. He pulled up under the portico that had once protected powdered ladies emerging from their carriages and, leaning over to open the cab door, released The Divil from the passenger seat. Then, swinging his long legs out of the van, he crunched across the gravel. The Divil disappeared round the side of the building in search of the kitchen cat, who was an old enemy. Fury climbed the broad, shallow steps and entered through the main door, which was standing ajar. Then, standing at the foot of the branching central staircase under its fluted dome, he raised his voice and shouted. Moments later there was an answering shout and Charles Aukin appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Well, you took your time! Come on up, I’m in the drawing room.”

  “It’s not where you are that interests me. It’s where the problem is.”

  “Oh it’s the boiler again, like it always is, but you don’t want to be fussing round in the basement.”

  “Damn right, I don’t. But that’s what brought me.”

  Fury stalked toward the door at the rear of the hall that led to the back staircase. Charles hung over the balustrade and shouted after him.

  “Well, come up when you’ve worked your magic. I’ve got something to show you.”

  Installed for a family wedding, the hot-water system at Castle Lancy was the acme of Edwardian plumbing. The bride, who was Lady Isobel’s aunt, had never been to the castle before, but the idea of being married in the wilds of the Irish countryside had appealed to her. Hip baths in the bedrooms and servants staggering up the stairs with jugs of hot water had been deemed unacceptable, however, so workmen were brought down from Dublin to install a monstrous copper boiler in the basement and running water in a series of newly constructed bathrooms.

  The boiler was the bane of Fury’s life. Admittedly a beauty in all its coppery magnificence, it ought to have been replaced years ago. Sourcing and installing new parts for heating systems was one way for a tradesman like him to make an honest profit, as Charles Aukin was well aware. But trying to find new parts for the monster in the basement was a nonstarter, so all Fury could do was invent more and more ingenious ways of coaxing and cheating it into continuing to do its job. After which, all he could charge Charles for was his time.

  He was a fool to himself and he knew it. The truth was that, unless he was to charge mad prices, it wasn’t worth his while even to drive to Castle Lancy, let alone to spend uncomfortable half hours there crouched in the basement. But at some point along the line, keeping the monster up and running had turned into a personal challenge. Besides, he had a grudging admiration for Charles’s cunning; you could see how the old so-and-so had got rich. And you had to admit that the likes of the de Lancys had put plenty of money into the pockets of craftsmen and tradesmen in their day. More important still was the fact that Fury’s family connection with the castle was an old one. Much of the lumber that went into it had come from the ancient forest at the center of the peninsula which, long before the de Lancys were granted rights to it in the Middle Ages, had belonged to the O’Sheas. So, as far as Fury was concerned, eight hundred years of paying rent to de Lancys ma
de no difference; the whole crowd of them were nothing more than blow-ins. The people who really owned the castle were the people who had built and maintained it, lifted the stones, selected the lumber, and created the whole edifice, from the foundations locked into the mountain to the panes of polished glass enclosed in the fanlight above the front door. Now, squatting down in front of the copper monster, he laid his hand on her side and breathed deeply. She might be well past her sell-by date but she wasn’t going to die on Fury O’Shea’s watch.

  Half an hour later Fury climbed the staircase to the drawing room and found Charles sitting by the window doing a crossword puzzle.

  “Is she back on her feet?”

  “She’s wheezing like an old cow.”

  “Oh, that’s just temperament.”

  Charles got up and cleared a space on the sofa opposite the window. He was a mild-looking, balding man in his seventies, in a custom-made suit and a pair of scuffed leather slippers.

  “So she’ll do for the time being, huh? Good man. Sit down. Have a drink?”

  “I will not. And if you didn’t know that I won’t, you wouldn’t offer me one.”

  “Take the weight off your feet anyway. What’s the story?”

  From anyone else, the question would have produced a stream of anecdotes. Coming from Charles, it always left Fury dumb. Charles was a nice enough man with a fine independent spirit, but what was the point in trying to tell him a story? He had no notion of who owned what field in Finfarran, of which family was at odds with another, or of the echoes of the past that informed each local drama. Fury’s style as a storyteller was as carefully crafted as his work as a builder, and he wasn’t prepared to be interrupted every five seconds for a series of explanatory footnotes that would only disrupt his flow. All the same, he felt for the poor man stuck here in his castle. They said that Lady Isobel had left a will saying she wanted to be buried in the crypt below the family chapel, and that Charles had announced that he’d die here himself rather than leave her there alone. Fury always found that story kind of touching. They’d say anything, of course, round these parts, but it could be true. And if the poor man was keeping his boiler in a constant state of jeopardy on the off chance of a bit of a conversation, you’d have to feel sorry for him.

  Ignoring Charles’s question, he sat down on the sofa, which was piled with old newspapers. “You said you have something to show me?”

  “Ah, right. Take a look at this.”

  Charles crossed the room and returned with a carved wooden lectern, designed to be placed on a table or a desk. It had a slatted back set at a slope and a shelf across the bottom. Attached to the shelf were two leaf-shaped pieces of brass that could be swiveled from the horizontal to the vertical to hold pages open at a particular place, like those that keep books of sheet music open on a piano. They were screwed to a narrow baton of wood that sat neatly across the front of the shelf, with the leaves set into the wood and the screws countersunk into the brass, so that the finish was perfectly level. Fury took the lectern from Charles and glared at it suspiciously.

  “The timber’s split.” He turned the lectern in his hand. “Three hundred years old if it’s a day and somebody’s made a hames of it!”

  Charles nodded apologetically. Fury glowered at the lectern more closely. The strip of wood at the front had cracked on either side of one of the brass leaves, leaving a horizontal split.

  “You tried to replace a screw, didn’t you?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Name of God, man, can you not tell the difference between one damn screw and another? You’re after screwing in something far too big!”

  “I thought—”

  “. . . and when you felt the resistance what did you do—only give it another twist, the way you’d destroy it altogether?”

  Fury rose to his feet and glared at Charles magisterially.

  “And now you want me to fix it. Am I right?”

  “Can you?”

  “And it’s not just the screw, is it? Not now. It’s finding the right timber. That strip will have to come off and be re-carved. And a new screw made. And the placing of the brass adjusted. You’ll have made a pig’s ear of the screw hole. And if I shift the placing of this one I’ll have to reset the other one. And that means rethinking the design. Holy God Almighty, you’re a savage.”

  Charles sank into his armchair. “But I need it for my crosswords.” He nodded at the pile of newspapers on the sofa. “I can’t get through them like I used to. These days they pile up. So I have a system. The one that I’m working on always goes back on the stand. But I need the stand to be functional. Otherwise the system gets thrown.”

  Charles’s expression changed from resentment to resignation.

  “This is going to cost me, isn’t it?”

  “Well, you could always send it to Sotheby’s. I hear the branch they have in New York has a grand restoration service.”

  Charles winced. “You’re sure you won’t have that drink?”

  “I tell you what, Charles. I’ll take this away and deal with it, and you can be checking your cellar. And I’ll tell you this, too. Whatever you decide to offer me isn’t likely to be old enough.”

  29

  Hanna parked the van in its designated space behind the County Library and went inside the building to return the keys. Tim Slattery was beside the desk as she arrived, with a spotted handkerchief in his breast pocket and what appeared to be a deep-sea diver’s rubber watch on his wrist. He shot his cuffs and waved as Hanna approached, revealing a pair of onyx cufflinks.

  “Just the woman I was looking out for! Hang on a minute.”

  Leaving the desk and going into his office, he came out a moment later with a cardboard tube in his hand.

  “I knew you’d be in today so I kept this back to save the postage. Every little helps.” He held the tube out to Hanna. “Can you see that it goes up on your board ASAP?”

  There was a public notice board outside the library in Lissbeg and Hanna was used to receiving material from various official sources to put on it. She peeled the tape off the end of the tube, half slid out the roll of paper inside, and recognized the poster that Gráinne from the tourist desk in Ballyfin had put on the board outside the Interpretative Centre.

  “What is it?”

  “End of a long road. Not, of course, that we’re there yet, but there’s a plan in place and we’ve come to the consultation process. And not that it has anything to do with me, personally. It’s the council’s plan. Interesting stuff.”

  Hanna doubted it. Each year produced discussions about how the county council’s annual budget would be allocated, and, as far as she could tell, though she’d never paid much attention, the outcome amounted to ever-decreasing sums of money being moved from square to square on the same old chessboard. Road lobbyists occasionally crushed conservationists, and local politicians claimed famous victories in matters of public lavatories or enhanced traffic systems, but in the end, few people noticed the difference. Now she put the poster in its tube into her bag and turned to go, telling Tim that she’d see him next week.

  Tim nodded.

  “Enjoy your evening.”

  “You too.”

  Tim shot his cuffs again. Seeing them at close quarters, Hanna observed that the cufflinks were carved with little skulls and crossbones. Worn with the diver’s watch, they projected the subtle suggestion of piracy on the high seas, which presumably was Tim’s private source of amusement for the week.

  It was raining as Hanna crossed the parking lot. She negotiated the puddles with her head down and her hands in her pockets groping for her keys. Not finding them by the time she reached her car, she stood digging in her bag with her shoulders hunched against the rain.

  “Hello again.”

  Startled, Hanna looked up to see Brian Morton standing by the car parked next to hers. He was holding a large umbrella.

  “Sorry. Did I give you a fright?”

  “No, it’s just that I did
n’t notice you. My keys have vanished and I think I’m starting to drown.”

  Brian walked around the car and held the umbrella over her. Hanna stepped back.

  “Gosh, no, there’s no need for that. I’m grand, really.” Her fingers discovered her keys at the bottom of her bag and she fished them out triumphantly.

  “See. Thank you, though.”

  “No problem.” As she unlocked her car door he spoke again. “Look, I wonder . . . would you be up for that drink now?”

  Before Hanna could reply, he smiled down at her. “You don’t actually have to have one. I’m just offering you the opportunity to snub me.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it pleases my sense of symmetry. I was immensely rude to you the other week.”

  Despite herself, Hanna laughed. “I’d say we both had our moments.”

  “And anyway, you don’t want to drive in a downpour.”

  Actually, she didn’t. And by the look of the clouds, in half an hour the weather would most likely clear.

  “Well, okay, yes, thank you. But I owe you one.”

  “Let’s fight about that on the way.” Brian tilted the umbrella to look up at the sky and suggested that they wouldn’t want to walk. “Do you know The Royal Victoria? We could go in one car.”

  They chose Hanna’s car because that meant that Brian could walk back to the parking lot with the umbrella if it happened still to be raining when they were done. Later Hanna realized that it also avoided their walking through the streets of Carrick arm in arm under the umbrella like Lucy and Mr. Tumnus. Not to mention ensuring that none of the library gossips would see her car still in the parking lot long after she’d left to go home.

  Things weren’t looking good by the time they reached the hotel. After a stilted conversation in the car and one of the most ham-fisted attempts at parallel parking she’d ever made, Hanna was mortified. This was a relaxed drink after work with an acquaintance. Why was she behaving like one of Jazz’s schoolmates on a first date? Actually, she told herself severely, Jazz’s generation would be a lot less silly. On the other hand, Brian Morton wasn’t doing much to help.