by Erin Hart
“How did he have enough money to get to Australia?”
“He had the reward.” Brazil’s look suggested that everyone knew about the reward.
Teresa jumped in: “For the hoard they found on the bog. There was a finder’s fee.”
“Do you mind if I ask how much?”
“Twenty thousand—pounds, it would have been at that time.”
Ward tried to imagine a couple of Bord na Mona lads with that kind of cash. “You split the money equally?”
“I bought him out, his share of this place. He had enough for Australia.”
“And no one thought it strange that he never wrote? No one tried to find him?”
“What would have been the point, if he didn’t want to be found?”
Ward was taken slightly aback; Teresa Brazil had said exactly the same thing in his office. “Who were his mates? Anybody from the workshop that you can recall?”
“Never paid much attention to any of them. He had a couple of mates on the hurling team, but when he quit playing, they fell out. All he really cared about here was those bees.”
“Bees?”
“He kept hives above on the hill. Used to spend hours up there.” Teresa Brazil rose abruptly and left the room.
“What about girls? Was Danny involved with anyone?” Brazil shook his head, saving breath.
“Had he had a dispute with anyone? Over something on the job, maybe? You said he had a falling out with some of the hurlers?”
Brazil shook his head again, but no words came. He launched into another violent coughing fit, and this time Teresa was not beside him to help until it passed. Ward felt helpless watching the man go through agony, and knew he’d gotten all he was going to get from Dominic Brazil today. He would come back when they’d had a chance to let the reality of the situation sink in. It was the same whenever you brought this dreadful news to a family—they could never imagine anyone with reason enough to kill. As if reason came into it at all. He waited as Brazil’s cough gradually subsided, then rose and said, “I’ll leave you now. I may have more questions in the next few days.” Dominic Brazil nodded again, ashen-faced.
Ward found Mrs. Brazil in the kitchen, back at her cookery, scraping the skin from a carrot with furious intensity.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Brazil. You wouldn’t by any chance have a photograph of Danny? It might help in our investigation.”
She looked at him blankly, as if she’d never seen him before, then seemed to snap out of her slight trance. “Of course. I’ll see if I can find one.” She left him and went back down the hall. Through the cracked-open door, Ward could see that she went into a bedroom, and he heard her digging around, probably in the bottom of a wardrobe. She returned with a battered cardboard suitcase. “If there’s anything at all, it would be in here.” She flipped the latches and exposed a jumble of color snapshots and antique portraits, a collection of family history, corseted women and mustached men in well-worn Sunday suits, a dead child in its pram. He looked over her shoulder as she dug up ancestors, the jumbled details of their triumphs and tragedies long forgotten.
“My husband’s family were never great for taking photos, and after Danny—” She stopped momentarily. “After Danny was gone, his mother threw the few pictures she had of him into the fire. No longer any son of hers, she said.” Teresa Brazil turned her face away, apparently disturbed by the vivid memory. Ward’s own mind formed the image of a vigorous young man in a fading color photo, suspended for a few seconds against the orange glow of a turf fire, then curling up and crumbling away into ashes.
She continued looking, and at the very bottom of the case she found a newspaper cutting. “This was in the Tribune when the lads found all that in the bog,” she said.
Ward looked at the grainy image, softening into yellow and blurry gray with age and damp. Yet Danny Brazil’s face was clearly visible, along with the sword he held in his hands, like an offering, while his brother looked up at the camera from behind. It was astonishing to think that one of the vital men in the photo was now the living cadaver who sat in the next room. And the other was the wizened brown flesh he’d last seen on the stainless-steel table in the mortuary. He tucked the cutting into his pocket, thanked Mrs. Brazil for her help, and took his leave.
Driving back to the station, Ward tried to put his finger on the feeling he’d got in the Brazil house. It was like walking the bog; you had to be very careful where you put a foot down, in case you’d sink in. Stick to the well-trodden paths, and you’d be all right, you’d survive the crossing. But how had Danny Brazil happened to stray from the path? How exactly had he put a foot wrong and ended up dead?
8
“We’ve got a standing invitation to have a drink over at Michael Scully’s house,” Cormac said, when they’d finished their evening meal. “We could go over tonight, if you’re up for it. Michael keeps a bottle of Tyrconnell single malt for special occasions, and apparently we qualify. He’s quite anxious to meet you.”
Nora knew that Michael Scully had been one of Gabriel McCrossan’s great friends; that was enough incentive. “I’m delighted to go along for a drink. But I can’t understand why he’d be anxious to meet me.”
“Gabriel told him about your research project. He probably wants to meet the mind behind it. Michael would be a good person for you to know. He’s retired from the Heritage Service a good few years now, but his interest always ran much deeper than the job required. If you’re interested in bogs, archaeology, antiquities, the history of this area, Michael Scully is your man. He’s devoted years to going through all the annals and old manuscripts, especially the ones that mention this part of the county. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard tell of hereditary historians, families whose job it was to remember the whole history of an area. He’s a bit like that. An amazing character, for the most part self-educated, very grounded in the old culture. There are so many people around here who have nothing of it left in them at all. He’s fluent in Irish, and reads Latin and Greek. An unappreciated treasure stuck out here in the middle of the bog.”
When they arrived at the Scully house, the first thing Nora noticed was that the property seemed to be overrun with poultry, including strangely tufted guinea fowl, matronly buff-colored hens, and many black-and-white barred pullets, all bright-eyed and alert to movement, randomly scrabbling at the ground for things to eat. The sole rooster, a scrappy bantam, strutted among them, flicking his fall of beautiful black and brown and purple tailfeathers and eyeing the human visitors suspiciously as they approached up the gravel drive.
The house was plain and large like many farmhouses of a certain age, the yard beside it a small green patch edged with gravel. As they passed by one of the windows, Nora thought she saw a curtain flutter, but it must have been her imagination; when she looked back the drapery was still. Someone had made sure the grass was kept in trim, but the house didn’t boast much in the way of plantings—or adornment of any kind, in fact, except for the heavy brass knocker on the door, which was painted a deep carnelian red. There was no movement visible inside.
Cormac rapped loudly with the knocker, then stood back. “Mind yourself,” he said under his breath. Nora turned to see a black-and-white sheepdog creeping up toward them on its belly around the back end of the car parked outside the door. “That’s a wicked dog,” Cormac said. “He’ll try to nip you. Stick close beside me.” The dog moved closer, as if his rolling, innocent eyes and obsequious posture put him above suspicion.
A human figure appeared behind the rippled glass of the front door, and the dog slunk away silently, much to Nora’s relief. The door swung open to reveal a man perhaps in his seventies, wiry and gray-haired, with brows that stuck out above his intense dark eyes like a pair of caterpillars. He was dressed rather formally, in wool flannel trousers, with a V-neck sweater over his shirt and tie, as if the routine of getting dressed each day provided a modicum of helpful structure. Scully moved with some difficulty, and his neatly pressed shirt collar seemed
a few sizes too large for him, giving the impression that he was shrinking, slowly but steadily.
When Cormac introduced her, Michael Scully took Nora’s hand in his own with an inquisitive, approving look. “Ah, Nora—delighted to meet you. Gabriel spoke of you very fondly. Since his passing the one thing this old house has most sorely lacked is good conversation.” A look passed between Cormac and Scully that said there was something more in the remark, but she let it go.
They followed Scully into a large sitting room that could have been much the same in the nineteenth century. Heavy Victorian furniture claimed the floor, and framed family photos hung from a high picture rail on the flowery papered walls. A gramophone and a huge collection of 78s took up one entire wall. To the other side of the room stood a large table, completely drifted with books and papers, like the cluttered desk of many an academic Nora had known, a visual representation of the scholar’s crowded mind. And yet the underlying impression was not one of squalor, but of order and cleanliness, as if the absentminded chaos of one consciousness was underlaid by another that cared whether the floor was swept and the cobwebs dusted away. Someone—and clearly not the keeper of this disarranged archive—was at work to maintain cleanliness at least, if order was out of the question.
“I see you’re still hard at work,” Cormac said.
“Impossible to keep a rein on it,” Scully said. “Some people collect stamps, some collect tunes; I collect what Fionn MacCumhaill once called ‘the music of what happens.’ And since I’ve retired, people insist on giving me these things. They tell themselves it’s because I’m keen, but it’s also partly because they don’t want to deal with it themselves—all the boxes of old letters and newspaper cuttings in their granny’s wardrobe. Some of the things I get are really beyond redemption. In a climate like this, paper can turn to mildew in a few weeks’ time. It’s impossible to keep up with the rate of decay. But I can’t bear not to at least have a look through it all. You never know when something interesting may turn up.”
“Cormac was telling me you know a lot about this area,” Nora said.
“And not just paper history, either,” Cormac said. “Michael has walked every tumulus and fairy fort for fifty miles around. He can tell you what’s inscribed on every castle wall and standing stone, even take you to the spot where the ravens in legend sang over the grave of a king. A worthy heir to O’Donovan.”
“Ah, pure flattery and you know it,” Scully demurred. He turned to Nora. “It’s invariably this way when he’s craving my good whiskey. You’ll have a drop as well, won’t you?” He crossed to a carved cabinet beside the fireplace and, with much effort, searched for one particular bottle among a small collection. To Cormac he said, “I don’t have to remind you that O’Donovan never had much affection for this part of the country. What’s the verse he quoted from the Dinnseanchas? ‘Plain and bog, bog and wood, / Wood and bog, bog and plain!’”
Nora looked blankly from one to the other, hoping one of them would take pity on her and explain. “Dinnseanchas means ‘place-history,’” Cormac said. “It’s actually a series of fragments of the old oral history that were set down in manuscript form during the twelfth century. Sometimes it’s also called Seanchas Cnoc, the History of Hills.”
“And who’s O’Donovan?”
Michael Scully said, “John O’Donovan. One of the great Gaelic scholars of the nineteenth century. He and his brother-in-law, Eugene O’Curry, were employed by the Ordnance Survey during the 1830s. O’Donovan worked in the field, traversing the country, documenting ancient sites and checking contemporary maps against old manuscripts. He sent letters back to the Ordnance Survey office in Dublin almost daily, with a sort of running commentary on all he was finding along the way, and he always sowed in snips of poems and songs and quotations—the letters make tremendous reading. And the depth of his scholarship is absolutely frightening. But he should have known better than to cover this part of the country in the dead of winter. It spilled rain almost every single day, and he often complained about the damp rooms where he had to spend the night. Survey work did him in eventually, poor fellow. Dead of rheumatic fever before he ever saw sixty years of age.”
Scully finished pouring and handed them each a small tumbler of whiskey, which smelled sweet and smoky as a turf fire. Nora could imagine Michael and Gabriel and Cormac staying up too late over the last drop of this stuff. Scully lifted his glass. “As Gabriel always used to say, Go mbeirimid beo ag an am seo aris! May we all be alive this time next year.” The defiance in his voice was tinged with sadness as he repeated his old friend’s perennial toast. They drank to Gabriel in silence.
Scully finally roused himself from his brief reverie and moved to sit near the fireplace, gesturing to them to do the same. “I see you brought the flute,” he said to Cormac.
“I’ve a new tune for you, Michael. Something of local interest, a set dance Petrie collected somewhere near Kilcormac.”
“George Petrie, another of O’Donovan’s contemporaries,” Scully said in an aside to Nora. “He and O’Curry between them collected hundreds of tunes, and all kinds of information about the old music.”
Cormac sat on a stiff chair beside the fireplace and began putting together the flute as he spoke, deftly lining up the finger holes, wetting his lips in anticipation of playing this tune for Scully, and Nora realized that to come bearing a new tune was like bringing flowers or a naggin of whiskey—it was an offering. Cormac had been storing this up for some time, she could tell, and now the notes seemed to fall from the flute in slow motion, suggesting a dignified, almost courtly dance. As he listened, Michael Scully filled his pipe with tobacco and lit it, the smoke curling around his head and shoulders. From time to time, his features took on a worn, gray pallor, as though he was suffering great pain but did not wish to acknowledge it. Eventually the pain seemed to subside, and a look of satisfaction stole once more across his face as the tune’s main theme returned. The whiskey was good, and warming, and the windburn she’d gotten from a few days out on the bog made Nora’s face feel warm and flushed.
Cormac set down the flute when he finished the tune and took up his glass. “Petrie called that ‘The Hurling Boys.’ Said it was a most popular tune in the King’s County in the 1860s. It’s probably an old set dance piece, but it’s quite stately—almost like a walking march.”
“Yes, isn’t it? It would put you in mind of this one—” Scully broke off and began to lilt. He had to strain to reach the highest notes, but in the lower register his voice was rich and resonant. Nora had never learned how to lilt, and envied the ease with which some people made this sort of music. It was almost as if they heard it inside their heads all the time, like language. They were steeped in it, changed by it, down to the deepest recesses of their souls.
“I never played an instrument,” Scully said, looking at Nora, “and I’m sorry for it now. But the music’s here.” He pointed to a spot just below his breastbone. “Cormac tells me you’ve got music in you as well.”
“I don’t know about that. I just can’t help singing.”
“Will you give us a song now, Nora?” She saw in Cormac’s expression that her own presence was part of his gift to Michael Scully this evening. He sat apart from her, but it was as if she felt his hand at her back, pushing her forward like a child sent with flowers. She could not refuse. With a flutter in her stomach, she took a breath, and opened her mouth with no idea what song might emerge.
’S a Dhomhnaill Oig liom, ma their thar farraige
Beir me fein leat, is na dean dhearmad;
Beidh agat feirin la aonaigh ’gus margaidh,
’Gus inion ri Greige mar cheile leapa ’gat.
O are you going across the water?
Take me with you, to be your partner;
At fair or market you’ll be well looked-after,
And you can sleep with the Greek king’s daughter.
O Donal Og, you’ll not find me lazy,
Not like some high-born
expensive lady;
I’ll do your milking, and I’ll nurse your baby
And if you are set upon, I’ll defend you bravely.
You took what’s before me and what’s behind me;
You took east and west when you wouldn’t mind me.
Sun, moon, and stars from the sky you’ve taken,
And God as well, if I’m not mistaken.
The last verse contained such pure aching sadness, and Nora felt its familiar pain as she sang the words about a bruised and broken heart:
Ta mo chroi-se bruite briste
mar leac oighre ar uachtar uisce,
mar bheadh cnuasach cno tar eis a mbriste
no maighdean og tar eis a cliste.
“Lovely, Nora,” Michael Scully said. “Thank you.”
She opened her eyes, feeling cool tear tracks on her face. “I’m not sure where that came from.” It was true. She had known the song forever, but had never sung it particularly well. This evening something was different; maybe the good whiskey had helped. But underneath she knew it was more than that; she’d felt, while singing, almost as if she was being played like an instrument, as if she was a mere conduit for the unnamed young woman’s despairing cry. And now that the song was gone, she felt uncomfortable and self-conscious.
It was Cormac who came to her rescue. He looked at her, not at Scully, when he spoke. “Michael, didn’t you say you had something for Nora?”
“Ah, I do.” Scully climbed slowly to his feet and went to his desk, carefully extracting a slim leather-bound volume from one of the piles so that he didn’t set off an avalanche of papers. “I’ve been holding on to this for months, and it got buried underneath everything. But when Cormac phoned and said you were coming out, I did a little excavating.
“About a year ago, among one of the latest loads of old papers and photographs, I discovered a diary kept by a Miss Anne Bolton, companion to Mrs. William Haddington of Castlelyons. Miss Bolton began her record on the first of January, 1835.” He handed Nora the small book and directed her to the place on the page with one thin finger. His eyes beamed his pleasure in this moment of discovery. “Read what she says about the second of May.”
