by Erin Hart
“You’re very kind; that sounds great,” Cormac said, sitting on the edge of the bed to put on his shoes. “I won’t be a minute. Devaney mentioned there’s a good traditional session here on a Tuesday night.”
“It’s brilliant. My brother Fintan always goes along for it. Do you play, yourself?”
“Flute.” He indicated the instrument case that lay beside him on the bed. “What’s Fintan at?”
“The pipes. Ah, sure, Fintan’s pure stone mad for the music—always was.”
“I was hoping for another chance to speak to Brendan, too,” Cormac said, pulling his last shoelace tight. McGann had disappeared from the bog so quickly this afternoon that he hadn’t had a proper chance to bring up the subject of financial compensation. Artifacts found on Bord na Mona lands paid a fairly decent finder’s fee—mainly to keep the turf board workers honest—but there was no regular system of payment for objects that turned up on private property. Most people didn’t expect anything for discovery of human remains. But part of his job here was to find out whether that would be a problem—without actually asking the question, of course.
“He can be a bit rough, I know, but Brendan is really the decentest man you could meet,” Una said. “He’s just out of sorts because it’s another setback. It’s already the end of April, and he figures we should have finished footing the turf a fortnight ago.”
As they drove out of the village, Cormac began to feel he was getting his bearings about the place. Dunbeg was in the center of a small peninsula that jutted out into Lough Derg. He knew that around the curve of the small inlet north of the town was Bracklyn House, and beyond that another quarter mile down the shore lay the brown expanse of Drumcleggan Bog. The day’s fair weather had lasted into evening, and now there was a high, milky cast to the sunlight that played on the waves of Lough Derg, visible now and again through the overgrown hedgerows as they made their way up the high road out of the village.
Una was quiet for a moment, then asked: “You got the cailin rua safely off to Dublin, then?” The cailin rua, Cormac thought. It was a fitting name for her: the red girl. “Nobody said what’s going to happen to her.”
“Well, Dr. Gavin and the museum staff will see if they can estimate her age, and try to figure out how she died, I suppose. There’d be more to go on, obviously, if the body were also intact, but they can still gather quite a lot of information.” Una was silent, and he could feel her discomfort in the face of his enthusiasm.
“That’s not what you wanted to know, is it?”
“Actually, what I meant was what will happen to her in the end, after all that.”
“Well, at the moment the National Museum is keeping all its bog specimens in a special fridge,” Cormac answered, feeling as he said the words how callous it sounded.
“But what’s it in aid of? Maybe the poor girl deserves some peace.”
“If we can preserve bog remains, then we have a chance to answer questions in the future that we haven’t even conceived of yet. The examinations are carried out with the greatest respect.” Una didn’t seem satisfied by his answers, but said no more.
As they rounded a bend in the road, a forbidding tower house hove into view among the trees. The imposing stonework looked mostly intact, but its roof gaped open toward the sky and tufts of grass and wild phlox grew out of the chimney stones. Narrow windows were slashed into the sides of its gray stone bulk, which was half enshrouded in ivy. Though he’d been down this road earlier, Cormac had not seen it before.
“That’s O’Flaherty’s Tower,” Una said. “They were the big family around here once. It belongs to Bracklyn House now—to Hugh Osborne.”
As Cormac slowed the jeep to study the tower more closely, a large crow appeared out of one of the upper windows, spread its wings, and began to wheel around the ruin. A second bird joined it, then another, and another, in rapid succession until the topmost part was enveloped in a whirling mass of dark wings and a cacophony of croaking calls. The sight touched that place inside him, unrevealed to anyone, where he tucked away such otherworldly images and impressions, things connected somehow to myth and memory, to times and places that modern humankind could not completely understand.
Then, as unexpectedly as they had appeared, the noisy crowd of birds vanished, leaving a single dark shape dipping and soaring around the castle walls, the evening light glinting off its jet-black wings. A voice broke through beside him: “Are you all right?” Una asked. Cormac looked down and saw his hands on the steering wheel, feeling as if he’d just awakened from a dream. The jeep wasn’t moving. He’d come to a full stop in the middle of the road.
“People say the place is haunted,” Una continued, “and looking at you just now, I’m half tempted to believe it.”
“Sorry,” he said, pressing on the accelerator once more. Around a curve in the road, the dense forest around the tower gradually gave way to light undergrowth, and finally to the stone-walled grounds of the Osborne estate. “This is where Hugh Osborne lives?”
Una nodded. Through the imposing stone and wrought-iron gates Cormac could see a lawn and formal gardens, and Bracklyn House itself, a sturdy manor house of dark gray stone, its steep slate roof rimmed around with stepped gables and crenellations. It was modest, as Irish country houses went, and retained the rough-hewn look of the century in which it was built.
“Fine old place,” he said. A harmless remark, but one glance at Una told him that it had tipped the scale.
Her words came in a torrent: “I suppose Devaney explained to you how the police have tried over and over again to pin the blame on Hugh for what happened? Of course there’s no proof, because he didn’t do anything. Just a lot of malicious talk from spiteful people with nothing better to occupy their minds. Whatever happened to Mina and the child, I’m certain Hugh had nothing to do with it. Anyone could see how he adored his family. The last two years have been awful, on top of everything else to have the police sniffing around asking questions, and the whole town watching, and waiting—” She stopped and took a breath, but seemed determined not to shed any tears. “Sometimes I really hate this feckin’ place.”
Why did he imagine that Una McGann had more than once been in the position of defending Hugh Osborne? “I suppose you’ve known him a long time?” He watched her face and posture soften.
“Not long, actually. He’s quite a bit older, and he was always away at school when we were growing up. But I got to know him when I was taking some classes at the university in Galway—he teaches geography there. I’d be hitching up to school the odd time and he’d give me a lift.”
“What were you studying?”
“Studio arts,” Una said. “I never finished.” Her tone suggested there might be more to the story, but he gathered it was not something she felt comfortable talking about. “You’re very good, listening to me go on,” she said.
“Did you know his wife?”
“Not really. Just to say hello. We used to pass along the road. I don’t know how Hugh has kept going at all.”
Cormac hadn’t reached a point where he’d begun to think of himself as a confirmed bachelor, but he had never been married, never been a father. He searched the windows of Bracklyn House for signs of life as he tried to put himself in Hugh Osborne’s place. Una followed his gaze, then looked down at her hands, doubled into fists in her lap.
He wanted to ask Una what she thought might have happened to Mina Osborne, but thought better of it. As they pulled away from the gate, Cormac wondered whether Una’s ministrations to Osborne out on the bog were anything more than neighborly concern. He remembered the fork twisting uneasily in her brother’s hands as well.
They had driven less than a quarter mile when Una spoke up: “You can turn in at the next gate on your left.” Cormac did as she instructed, and the jeep thundered over a cattle grid and up a steep drive. The McGann house was all but invisible from the road, tucked up against the side of the hill, and surrounded on three sides by pale green fir trees th
at brushed against its eaves. Like many old farmhouses, it was broad-shouldered and compact, close to the ground, with small-paned windows. The exterior had been freshly whitewashed, and the front door and window frames recently painted with glossy black enamel. An old-fashioned dog rose grew to one side of the door, and every flower bed looked lovingly tended. An ancient black car was parked on one side of the tin-covered shed in the haggard. Everything about this place suggested a family farm of thirty, perhaps even forty years ago.
“Brendan’s the man with the spade and the paintbrush here,” Una said. “He loves this place as if it were his child. He was that upset when my father replaced the old thatched roof—he slept out in the shed for three days. When they wanted to build a new house, he was like a briar. Wouldn’t hear of it.”
Cormac understood. A man who still insisted on cutting his own turf by hand wouldn’t exactly be a man who thrived on change. Una pushed open the shiny black front door. The house was divided in two equal halves, with the main hallway down the center. She led him into the kitchen, clearly the heart of the house. A heavy pine table stood in the middle of the room, its oilcloth heaped with onion skins and carrot peelings, and a dresser full of blue willow delft china stood beside the sink. The old stone fireplace still dominated the room, but it was cold at the moment. What heat there was apparently came from the enormous cooker that stood to one side of the fireplace, and the smell wafting from the cast iron pot that sat on top of it reminded Cormac that he was ravenous.
“You’ll have tea? Of course you will,” Una answered for him. “Fintan must have finished up the stew before he went out. The lads pretend to be useless, but they’re well able to fend for themselves.” She checked the kettle, and began to fill it at the sink, giving Cormac a chance to look around the space.
A narrow stairway led up to a closed loft that hung over the far side of the room. Cormac wondered if the bedrooms here were like those in his grandmother’s house: he pictured the horrid flowered wallpaper in musty rooms of his childhood, furnished with swaybacked metal beds and pictures of the Sacred Heart. Beneath the loft stood a second cooker, this one covered with white enamel buckets. In shelving all around it were large glass canisters, all labeled in the same neat hand. They contained mysterious organic substances that looked like bark, roots, and other dried plant material. He recognized pale green lichens, coppery onion skins, and the fibrous rhizomes of wildflowers, but others were strange in name and appearance: “Madder root,” “Cochineal,” and “Hypernic.” Hanks of yarn, some dyed, some natural, bawn-colored wool, were stacked in binlike baskets on another set of shelves. The low ceiling, coupled with the strange-looking contents, gave this place the atmosphere of a medieval alchemist’s lair. In the back corner of the kitchen, beneath the stairs, stood a large loom, its complicated system of warp and weft temporarily at rest. Hanging on the wall beside it was a length of cloth, a textured landscape in earthy tones reminiscent of lichens and sphagnum moss, with flecks of purple fox-glove and butterwort. Cormac’s eye was drawn to the subtle variations in color; he could make out the incomplete arcs of two circles, almost like the long-buried footprints of a pair of ringforts.
“This your work?”
“Yes, such as it is,” Una said, sounding somewhat preoccupied. She swept around him, scooping up a pile of papers, a jumper, and a newspaper from the well-worn sofa whose back rested against the front window.
“Please, do sit down, and forgive the mess. I’ve become a bit blind to it, I’m afraid.” What she called mess was the comfortable, familiar flotsam of everyday life, and it gave the room a sense of warmth and animation he suddenly felt his own orderly house in Ranelagh sorely lacked.
“What is all that?” he asked, gesturing toward the area under the loft.
“I suppose you could call it my studio. It used to be all very tidy when I was just doing the weaving. But since I’ve begun making my own dyes, it’s taken over the whole bloody kitchen. I’m hoping to get a bigger space soon.”
Cormac heard a commotion at the back door, and a small girl about five years old burst through the door, her round face circled by a corona of fair ringlets. She wore denim overalls, yellow wellingtons, and a tweedy green jacket with large red buttons. The child’s bright eyes traveled to Una, then to Cormac, and she darted out the back door again as quickly as she’d come in.
“Fintan, will you come on?” they could hear her plead in an exasperated tone, as though he’d been holding her up all day. “We’ve got company for tea.”
A clean-shaven young man in a baggy sweater smiled and nodded as he stuck his head in through the door, and set down a basket that seemed to be laden with moss and mushrooms, then turned to pull off his boots outside. “Stew should be nearly ready,” he said to Una through the open door.
“Cormac Maguire, this is my brother, Fintan, and this,” Una said, as the child scurried around to her side, “is my daughter, Aoife.”
Conversation at the McGanns’ supper table reminded Cormac of the few times he’d gone home for a weekend with a classmate from school. At home there was only himself and his mother, and they never wanted for conversation, but in the circle of a larger family than his own, there was a kind of uncontrolled energy he found irresistible. The subject matter around this kitchen table was nothing lofty, and yet Cormac watched with fascination as words and laughter leapt and slid across the table. There was only one party noticeably silent: Brendan had barely acknowledged Cormac’s presence when he came in, and after answering a few questions, sat apart from the rest of them at the end of the long table. He chewed noisily, mopping the meaty juice of the stew with rough pieces torn from a heel of brown bread, and spoke not a word to anyone. Soon he pushed away from the table and retreated to the chair beside the fireplace, grinding tobacco between his rough palms and filling his pipe in a way that suggested years of habit. Indeed, everyone behaved as if this were a perfectly normal occurrence, and perhaps it was.
No one had mentioned Aoife’s father. Perhaps he was absent, as Cormac’s own father had been. After the meal, the little girl set out the spoils she’d collected—a broad white toadstool, acorns and chestnuts, soft patches of pale green moss, and, finally, a small sprig of white hawthorn flowers. Brendan’s face darkened.
“Aoife, take those outside. Right now—do you hear me? It’s bad luck bringing them into a house. And you,” he said, jabbing a finger at Fintan, “ought to know better.”
“Ah, Brendan, they’re lovely,” Aoife protested, as she playfully thrust the pale flowers into his face. He recoiled and stood, towering awkwardly over the little girl.
“Why must you always argue? Jaysus, you’re just like Una,” he said, the pitch of his voice rising. “Can you not just do as you’re told?” He wrenched the flowers from the child’s grasp and marched to the back door to fling them out into the darkness. Cormac remembered his grandmother’s horror when he’d brought a similar bouquet home as a small boy. His mother had tried to explain that it was just superstition. It was only years later he’d read that hawthorn was considered unlucky because its sweet, stale fragrance suggested the smell of death. What would a child know of that?
“Maybe I’d better be getting back,” Cormac said, remembering the music session in Dunbeg. He turned to Fintan. “I can give you a lift in, if you like.”
The pub was already fairly crowded when they arrived, and a handful of musicians had gathered just inside the door near the stone fireplace. A half dozen pints of porter, creamy tops measuring their levels, stood waiting on the short tables at the center of the group, while the air above their heads coursed with the swirling rhythm of a reel that Cormac recognized immediately as a splendid setting of “Rakish Paddy.” As Fintan stepped to the bar to order drinks, one of the fiddle players turned to look at them—it was Garrett Devaney. The policeman raised his eyebrows by way of greeting, all the while keeping his bow in motion and his chin lovingly pressed to the body of his fiddle.
When Fintan handed him his pin
t, Cormac sat down and began putting together his ebony flute, carefully wedging together the silver-rimmed seals of waxed string, lining up the finger holes, testing the sound and the feel of it against his lower lip. As he did so, he watched Fintan’s elaborate process of assembling and strapping on his uilleann pipes, one narrow leather belt buckled around his waist, the other around his right arm to work the small bellows. It had always seemed to Cormac a ritual akin to strapping on the phylacteries of some ancient religion.
As the pulsating rhythm of the tune ended, an old man with a bald head burst out laughing as he set down his flute and reached for his full pint. “Be the holy, that was a good one,” he said to the fellow beside him. “A real scorcher.” Fintan quickly introduced Cormac around the circle. The stocky man beside the chortling flute player sat leaning forward, listening intently. At first Cormac wondered what set this man apart from the others. No instrument, for a start, but as the fellow reached out and touched the table for his drink, Cormac realized that he was blind, though he moved like a person who hadn’t always been so.
“That’s Ned Raftery, my old schoolteacher,” said Fintan. “Great fuckin’ singer.”
Devaney broke in beside them with a sideways glance. “Glad you could join us.”
Cormac didn’t quite know what to make of the policeman. The wry look didn’t disguise the fact that Devaney’s eyes were everywhere, even here, among his friends and neighbors, sizing things up, cannily recording and filing everything away.
The pub door swung open, and Hugh Osborne entered. Conversation suspended for the briefest instant as his presence registered around the bar, then resumed at normal volume, but Osborne seemed completely unaware of the momentary stir he caused. As he surveyed the room, his gaze alighted on Cormac, hesitating slightly, as though he only half recognized the face. He moved to the bar, where he ordered a drink and stood alongside a young man whose dark, cropped head seemed barely suspended between the peaks of his shoulders. Osborne spoke a few words to the boy, who jerked his arm away awkwardly, though Cormac would almost swear he hadn’t been touched.
