by Erin Hart
Charlie remembered the sound of his father’s voice, no words, but the notes desperate and pleading. After that he’d been afraid on the ride home, but the man had dropped him at the gate and driven off without a word, the taillights of his car growing smaller and smaller and then disappearing into the night. His father had come out of the house then, shaken him by the neck and cuffed him, and told him never to get into a car with a stranger, no matter what, and never to tell his mother what had happened that evening, because it would surely kill her. He never had told his mother; and since no great harm had come of it, eventually the memory had simply faded away. It was after that extraordinary evening that his father had begun checking the doors and windows each night. Now he realized what grave danger he’d been in, and why his father’s reaction had been so extreme. But the question still remained: Why had Desmond Quill decided to spare his life?
He had never seen Quill in the intervening years, but he had seen that same desperate look come into his father’s eyes. It was when the Guards had come to the house, asking questions about some animals that had been mutilated and killed out along the bog road, two lambs and a kid goat taken from his mother’s small flock. Everyone had thought he was responsible, Charlie knew well, but they had all been wrong; he could never have done those things to any animal. The memory of blood in the pictures they’d shown made him feel ill, even now.
Charlie whirled as something brushed against him from behind. Turning in place, he found that he was alone. He had felt a distinct touch—unless he was imagining things—in the very same place where Desmond Quill’s hand had once rested on the back of his neck. Trying to shake off the feeling of disquiet, he moved through the ruin, surveying the splintered mass of debris where a few days ago there had been a house. If there had been no explosion, the structure would eventually have collapsed from the weight of knowledge, the roof beams finally unable to withstand the burden of shame and guilt they had supported for so long. All the things he had wondered about—his mother’s secret absences, the photograph of her he’d found in his beekeeping shed, the artifacts hidden under the flagstones—were fragments of the picture beginning to take shape in his mind.
If it was true, what Ward had told him, then Danny Brazil might have been something more than his uncle. He remembered the first jarring sight of the body in the bog, the cord around its neck, and his fingers moved unconsciously to his own leather charm. He’d tied it there nearly ten years ago and had never taken it off since, believing those three knots somehow held the power to protect him from harm. No one had explained to him exactly how Danny had died out on the bog. They didn’t have to; he’d seen enough for himself to imagine how it had happened. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it. Over the past several days, going about his work out on the bog, he would suddenly picture the scene, and the earth would feel as though it were dropping away beneath his feet. He would stumble or tip backward, feeling unbalanced, disoriented, and dizzy.
It didn’t help that he’d hardly been able to eat or sleep for worry about Brona. He had to see her again soon—he couldn’t keep away. He understood that if he showed his face at the hospital everyone would know, but none of that seemed to matter anymore.
Three times over the past eleven nights he had sneaked into the hospital to see her. The first two times he’d just watched her as she slept. But last night she’d been awake, and when he’d reached out to touch her face she had taken his hand, placed it over her own beating heart and then down over the curved softness of her belly. He had closed his eyes and traveled back to the night of their third miraculous meeting.
He had lit the bonfire and was watching the flames, thinking of Brona, aching inside to see her again, to feel her fluttering pulse beneath his hand, when suddenly across the fire he saw her face, illuminated in the flickering blaze. She started circling slowly around the fire, and for some reason he moved in the opposite direction, away from her. Three times they circled the bonfire. He knew almost instinctively what had to be done, and felt the hair prickle at the back of his neck. For the first time in his life, he felt no hesitation. He seized Brona’s hand and together they took a few steps back, then threw themselves forward and hurdled the fire. He felt its scorching heat and the flames licking at the soles of his shoes. If they fell they would surely be done for—but he knew they wouldn’t fall. They landed safely on the far side, heels first, and toppled forward. Before he could recover himself, Brona Scully was lifting him up, taking his face in her hands. Her fingertips felt lovely and cool.
Standing beside her hospital bed, he had opened his eyes again and looked down at the place where his hand rested, and had felt filled up, vibrating and brimming over with life. The vision of Brona cloaked in living insects still haunted him and filled him with wonder. In a flash he had understood what she must have felt.
Charlie moved through the debris and stood in the place that had once been his room. He saw how few steps it actually was from the door, the sitting room, the kitchen. He finally saw the very small universe in which his family had traced the separate orbits of their daily lives, avoiding one another more often than not. He lifted a piece of roofing to find that the shelf where he’d kept all his beekeeping books was flattened sideways, the books charred at the edges and warped from the water used to douse the fire. He felt their loss acutely, although he knew that everything he needed from them had already been absorbed, and was locked up safe inside his head, worn into his consciousness. He needed no more lessons; he knew what was to be done simply by gauging the temperature and rainfall, feeling the dampness in the air, anticipating the seasons for trees and meadow flowers, reading the moods of the bees themselves.
He began climbing the hill and looked back at the empty space his parents’ house had once occupied, and knew at that moment that he didn’t want or need to know which of the Brazil brothers had actually been responsible for his existence. When the time came, he would bury two fathers. There was no need to think about it right now. At this moment he had Brona to think about. Besides, it was midsummer, and the bees needed looking after.
5
On their return from the hospital, Nora tried once again to persuade Michael Scully to come and stay at the cottage, or at least to let her or Cormac stay the night with him, but he scoffed at the notion.
“Haven’t I survived here on my own this last week and a half? I’m not so bad that I can’t endure one more night. Go,” he said, “and enjoy the time you have together. You’ll not budge me on that, so you may as well give up and be gone, the pair of you.”
“All right,” Nora said, “but we’ll be back to say good-bye before we have to leave tomorrow.”
“Just one more thing before you go,” Scully said. “Do you happen to know what’s become of Charlie Brazil? Has he any place to stay? I should have inquired before now, I realize, but—”
“You’ve had plenty of other worries, Michael. And Charlie’s all right. I saw him in Kilcormac the other day and he told me he’d found a bedsit above one of the shops there. Probably not ideal, but he’s got a roof over his head, at least.”
Scully nodded. “Good. That’s very good.”
Nora returned to the Crosses thinking about Michael Scully’s question. Had it just been neighborly concern, or was there some other reason he might be interested in Charlie Brazil’s welfare?
“Fancy a walk up the hill before the sun is gone?” she asked Cormac.
“Lead on,” he said.
They walked up the hill, close but not touching, as they had when Nora first arrived. With each step they took toward the setting sun, she felt time diminishing, slipping away. Night’s cloak would cover the landscape for a few short hours before the daylight came again, and with it, as the song said, a dreary parting.
At the topmost point of the hill they came upon a huge pile of ashes, the remains of a bonfire. They walked around it, either side. Nora saw two sets of deep footprints, the heel marks deeper than the rest. “Look at this,” she s
aid to Cormac. “What do you suppose happened here?”
“Did you ever hear of midsummer bonfires?” Nora shook her head, and Cormac continued, “It’s one of those leftover pagan traditions that’s probably fallen off in most areas. Sometimes it was just a family, but sometimes a whole community would come together and build a fire big enough to burn all night. It was supposed to be a time for blessing the house, the crops, the animals. People walked three times sunwise around the fire to ward off sickness, and sometimes young people would leap the flames.”
“You think somebody jumped over this fire?”
“Looks that way to me. After the fire died down, you were supposed to drive the animals through the ashes or singe their backs with a hazel wand. Everyone carried a burning stick home from the bonfire, and the first one to bring it into the house was supposed to bring good luck with him. They’d also take home a glowing ember from the fire and carry it around the house three times, and save some of the ashes as well, to mix with the seed for the following spring. I didn’t know anyone here still built a midsummer fire. I’d love to know who it was.”
You could ask Brona Scully, Nora thought, but she said nothing. Perhaps Brona and Michael Scully would like to keep their family matters private, and she wasn’t about to talk about things that had been told to her in confidence, even with Cormac. “I meant to ask what Mrs. Foyle said about your father. Is it something serious? You’ve never had to go up there to sort them out before.”
“No, it’s not that. My father’s had a small stroke,” Cormac said, trying to downplay it, no doubt for her benefit. “Not life-threatening, but Mrs. Foyle doesn’t want to be overstepping her bounds, she says. I’ve got to go and see what’s going on. I’ll probably be back in Dublin before you have to leave; I just won’t know what’s happening until I get there.”
“I could come with you for a couple of days—”
“Ah, no, I couldn’t ask you to do that, to miss the exam on the bog man. It’s important.”
“You’re important to me too.”
He took her hand. “Thanks. I appreciate the offer. But I know how much that examination means to your work. You’ll never have another chance at him, not like this one.”
“Why does Donegal have to be so far away? Why couldn’t your father be from Kildare?”
“I suppose he could be, but then he wouldn’t be my father, would he?”
Nora thought of Joseph Maguire, whom she’d never seen except in pictures, a fierce-looking, white-haired oak tree of a man. “No, you’re right.”
They came over the top of the hill and the sudden sight of Brona Scully’s fairy tree, bedecked in all its ragged finery, once more took Nora’s breath away. She leaned her back against its trunk and looked up into the twisting branches. “What is it about this place that I love so much? I just wanted to come here once more, because it might look very different when I come back, and I want to soak up every detail.”
Cormac leaned on a low branch beside her. “Are you saying you will come back?”
His doubt was a quick knife. “I know I’ve not been very forthcoming. I hope you can understand why I have to go home. It’s not that I want to be away from you—”
“I understand loyalty. I understand keeping a promise. So even if you have to go away for a while, it can’t be for too long. Too long doesn’t exist.”
“I want to believe that…. I just don’t know that we should make any promises.” The searching look in his eyes unsettled her.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe it’s best if we just leave things as they are. But wait here for a minute, will you?”
She stretched out beneath the tree while he crossed to a stand of hazel wands growing from a nearby stump. Taking a penknife from his pocket, he sliced through several narrow green shoots, cutting pieces about twelve inches in length. Then he came back and stretched out on the grass beside her. “It’s well known that hazel is a powerful charm against mischief,” he said. She watched intently as he bent the supple greenwood in his hands, then quickly fashioned a simple plait, like those she had seen in museums—a love knot. “Here,” he said, “keep this with you.”
She took it, knowing that, whatever happened, she would never let it go. She would carry it with her always, that hopeful pledge, unspoken. She pulled him down beside her and they lay in the tall grass, limbs tangled together, gazing up into the fairy tree’s wild profusion. She thought of what faced each of them in the days to come—an opportunity to look death in the face, to find out more about themselves and the people they loved than they ever wished to know. She would be far from this sanctuary. She knew it was just an illusion, that there was no real protection here, no place of safety, and yet she felt it more strongly than in any other place she’d ever been.
As if he’d been reading her thoughts, Cormac turned to her and said, “There’s just one thing… I don’t want you to go around thinking you’re invincible, now that you have that.” He reached out and fingered the hazel knot. “It may be powerful, but it doesn’t mean you can throw caution to the wind. Please be careful, Nora.”
She hadn’t told him the real reason she was going home. How would she have explained it—that she hoped to prevent her sister’s killer from claiming any new victims? But at that moment she realized that Cormac knew why she had to go and that, even if he feared for her, he understood.
The sun hung just above the western horizon, a bright orange disc in the dark haze of churned-up peat dust. She thought once again of Mide, the middle province, and felt Cormac close beside her. If she left now, it was possible that they would never find their way back to this place. Would she remember this spot as a sanctuary, or as a place of sacrifice? Perhaps the ancients had been right in their belief that those things were one and the same.
Keeping Cormac’s hand tightly clasped in her own, Nora sat up and faced out toward Loughnabrone, Lake of Sorrows, thinking of the ancient people who had named this place. What sacrifices, what sorrows, what infinite griefs had they borne here? What riddles had they tried to answer about the beginning of life and its end? She held very still and watched a solitary heron wading slowly, elegantly through the shallows until a passing flash of silver caught its downcast eye.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
M any thanks to the people who helped with research for this book: Barry Raftery, for help with all things archaeological, and for his wonderful book Pagan Celtic Ireland; archaeologists Jane Whitaker and Ellen O’Carroll, who answered hundreds of questions, and allowed me access to their bog excavations; Conor McDermott, Cathy Moore, and Cara Murray, of the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, whose knowledge of bog archaeology could fill volumes; Dr. John Harbison, Ireland’s state pathologist, for sharing his vast experience of crime scenes; Heather Gill-Robinson, for sharing her expertise on bog preservation; Kevin Barry, for showing me where he found the body in the bog, and his wife, Betty, for her hospitality; Eamon Dooley, for his fascinating history of Bord na Mona at Boora; Paul Riordan, Boora Bog general manager; Boora workshop foreman Cormac Carroll, and all the men at the workshop; Eddie O’Sullivan, of the Federation of Irish Beekeeping Associations, and John Donoghue, who let me tag along around his apiary one soggy afternoon; retired Garda Siochana officer Patrick J. Cleary, for continuing advice and information on police procedure; Daithi Sproule, for helping once again with Irish translations; and finally all the wonderful musicians who have inspired the music in this book. Thanks also to my remarkable editors, Susanne Kirk at Scribner and Carolyn Caughey at Hodder & Stoughton; to Sarah Knight at Scribner, for her invaluable support; and to my incomparable agent, Sally Wofford-Girand. To all who offered encouragement, most especially my writers’ group, my family, and my wonderful husband, go raibh mile maith agaibh.
Also by Erin Hart
HAUNTED GROUND
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiousl
y. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Pocket Star Book published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright (c) 2004 by Erin Hart
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