by Erin Hart
Nora searched for the hint of a rebuttal in his eyes, and found none. They both looked away. She knew that her own countenance too often betrayed what she was feeling. What had he seen in her eyes? She suspected that in future she and Hugh Osborne would observe a polite but measured distance, like two magnets repelled by opposing poles. What exactly had she gotten herself and Cormac into here? Why had she ever considered it an acceptable idea to stay in this man’s home?
“Well, we’re very lucky,” Cormac said as he returned with the oversized map book. “There’s quite a lot of detail for this area.” He stopped short when he saw them. “Have I missed something?”
“I was actually just saying good night. I think I’m going to turn in early.” Cormac looked startled, but said nothing.
“The stairs are just to your left through the next room,” Hugh Osborne said. “I trust you can find your way.”
“I’m sure I can,” Nora said. She left the library feeling not a little disconcerted at the way the scene there had played out, and the way she’d reacted to Osborne’s statement. What should she have said? “I’m sorry”? What words could possibly be appropriate in addressing a bereft husband who was also the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance? The paneled door to her left was dark and heavy, with an ornate iron latch that did not move until she applied all her weight to pull it down hard. The hinges were badly in need of oil. She found herself not in the front foyer, but in another, narrower hallway, paneled with dark wood and dimly lit. This couldn’t be right—it wasn’t at all like the way they’d come up from the kitchen. Nora tried a door to her right, which led into a dining room furnished with a Baroque-looking table and sideboard, ornately carved with the leering faces of fauns and nymphs. The evening light was completely gone now, and in the gloom, the faces that peered out from the carved wood seemed to take malicious delight in her discomfort. She proceeded cautiously through the room to the next closed door, but when she turned one huge handle with both hands and pushed, nothing happened. She could simply retrace her steps, but that meant crossing the roomful of faces again, and besides, she’d be damned before she’d go back into that library to ask for directions. This was ridiculous. She turned and pushed once more with all her might, and at last the door gave, and sent her stumbling forward.
The room was dark, but she could see from the moonlight streaming in from the windows that the plastered walls were painted a deep shade of scarlet, and that its woodwork, including tall shutters on the windows, had been painted many times over in a glossy white. As in the library, the ceiling was elegantly coved plasterwork, but in this room curls of peeling white paint clung precariously to its surface. The floor was made from broad planks of oak, and the huge Persian carpet that very nearly covered it was threadbare. The room was decorated in a jumble of periods and styles. There were two settees, with slender carved legs, upholstered in gold damask, facing one another in front of a huge stone fireplace. Above the mantel hung a portrait of an aristocratic-looking woman in full riding habit but sans horse. An elaborately carved wooden screen and a large hookah hinted at some family member’s military service in India. Along with spoils of empire, this room also held the requisite hunting trophies from a country estate: stuffed pheasants and foxes, even the huge mounted antlers of an ancient Irish elk. Though the estate must undoubtedly be worth some serious money, this room and everything in it spoke of declining fortunes at Bracklyn House.
Nora pushed open one set of heavy double doors at the far side of the sitting room. The stairs had to be close by now; she felt as though she’d been going around in circles. The next shadowy chamber was some kind of office, but much of it was draped in dustcovers. She’d gone several paces into the room when she turned and saw in the darkness before her a pair of large yellow eyes. An involuntary cry escaped her lips. To her left, a door hidden in the paneling opened suddenly, and through it came Hugh Osborne, who quickly crossed to switch on the light. Cormac followed close on his heels.
“Nora, what is it? Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine. I just got lost,” she said, peering at the thing that had startled her: in the light it was nothing but a large brown and yellow butterfly in a bell jar. Nora’s eyes traveled upward and around the room. Butterflies—hundreds of them, some as tiny as bees, others with wingspans of nearly ten inches—filled nearly every inch of wall space. They were iridescent blue, and yellow, and brilliant orange, with eye spots and swallowtails, each one pierced through with a pin, neatly labeled and displayed under glass. Such beauty, but the vibrant colors and lifelike poses somehow did not make up for the fact that these lovely insects were all dead.
Hugh Osborne finally said, “I’d quite forgotten the impression this room can make. My grandfather had rather an avid interest, for an amateur collector. I remember him drilling me on all the scientific names.”
“I’ve never seen so many,” Cormac said. “Barring a museum.”
“I’m sure he intended them to end up in some museum, but in later years he lost interest in collecting.”
“What could make him give it up—apart from already having one of everything?” Cormac asked. Osborne hesitated, and Nora watched him study Cormac for a moment, apparently deciding how to answer.
“He’d been away on an expedition, and my parents were on their way to meet him off the boat in Rosslare when their car went off the road. They were both killed. My grandfather hadn’t much appetite for anything after that.”
4
“It’s got to stop, Lucy, before he gets hurt, or—God help us—before he does injury to someone else.” Hugh Osborne’s voice was agitated, and Cormac guessed that he was talking about Jeremy. He’d just come from taking another look at the priory plans in the library, and was returning to his room to collect the last of the gear for the morning’s dig. He’d reached the landing when he heard voices coming from behind a half-open door at the top. He knew he ought not to be listening in on a private conversation, and yet he felt caught, not knowing whether to retreat or advance.
“I’m very grateful for your concern.” It was Lucy’s voice. “Heaven knows you’ve tried to be like a father. But most boys Jeremy’s age go through a period of rebellion. Your worry is quite out of proportion.”
“He came into the house last night so drunk he could barely stand. Please, Lucy, we have to do something.”
“What can we do? He’s not a child anymore. I’ve already spoken to him on this subject more than once.” There was a pause.
“There are very good treatment programs—”
“I won’t have him taken away and locked up. I couldn’t bear that, Hugh, I truly couldn’t.” Their voices receded suddenly, as if they’d become aware of how loudly they’d been speaking.
Cormac began to climb the stairs once more. His eye caught a movement in a large mirror just beside the open door, and he could see Jeremy Osborne’s dark features reflected in its surface. The boy was standing in a doorway opposite the mirror; he appeared to have been listening as well. His face was deathly pale, and Cormac could see dark circles almost like bruises under his eyes. When Jeremy saw that he’d been observed, he pulled the door shut.
God, the drink was a bastard. What age could that boy have been when he found his father dead? He couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen now, if that. Cormac remembered his own complex feelings when he was ten, and his almost complete inability to express them. He remembered his hurt and anger when his father had left them, the dreadful helplessness he felt when he looked at his mother’s face.
He was sitting on the steps of his gran’s house, listening to his mother and grandmother argue below in the kitchen. They didn’t know he was there. He’d gone upstairs to get his hurling ball, and couldn’t slip out without being seen, so he decided to wait and listen. He pulled out his pocketknife to see if he could pry up a corner of the leather on the ball to find out what was inside.
“And he told you all this in a letter?” He could hear the i
ndignation in his grandmother’s voice, her anger boiling over as she stirred the sugar into her tea with a force that threatened to shatter the cup. “Didn’t even have the courage to tell you to your face. And what about Cormac? What about looking after his own son?”
“I’ve told you all I know, Mam,” his mother said, sounding completely exhausted. “Must we go over it all again?”
“What business is it of his what they do off in Bolivia—”
“It’s Chile, Mammy. People are disappearing.”
“I don’t care how much they need him in any godforsaken country on earth, he belongs here with his family. He’d no business getting mixed up in all that in the first place.” They went on talking, but Cormac listened more to the sound of their voices than the actual words.
They’d received his father’s letter a few days before, and he had watched first his mother’s anticipation, then her anguish, which she’d tried to keep hidden but couldn’t. After about an hour, she’d asked him to sit with her on the sofa. It was very important work that his daddy was doing, she’d said; he was trying to help a lot of people who were in desperate trouble, and he had to stay for another while, he didn’t know how long. Daddy had written that he loved them both, but it was far too dangerous for them to be with him, and that at least for now, he had to remain where he was needed. Cormac knew there was more she wasn’t telling.
The women’s voices floated up to him as he sat on the steps, and he began to realize that his father would never be coming home. He looked down at what had been a perfectly good hurling ball, now a loose flap of leather and a sphere of cork, pitted and gouged from all the places he’d stuck his penknife in it.
The memory unsettled him. He remembered how often as a boy he’d wished his father ill, but it was the kind of misfortune that a ten-year-old child could imagine: that he might trip and fall, or suffer some other small humiliation. He had never actually wished his father dead. But suppose he had? And suppose his father had then died? A suicide must be even worse, he thought, remembering the hours he’d spent trying to divine if there was something he might have said or done that could have driven his father away. No wonder Jeremy Osborne was a mess.
As Cormac slung his map book under his left arm and gripped the worn leather handles of his site bag, he knew that what he saw in Jeremy’s face could have been reflected in his ten-year-old self a quarter-century ago. All the wishing in the world had not altered reality, and yet life had not ended. He had survived, and the wounds had eventually scarred over. If there were only some way he could communicate that hope to Jeremy Osborne. But he was here to dig. That was all.
5
Nora was waiting for a call from the National Museum when Cormac left the house, so he had set off for the priory on his own. As he nosed the jeep down Bracklyn’s shaded drive, he thought about how trees had come to be a sign of privilege in Ireland, their presence associated with the walled estates of the English and Anglo-Irish aristocracy. In some cases, the big houses were long gone, and only the trees and walls remained as a legacy of the landlord class. Outside the gates the woodland soon gave way to green pastures on either side. Almost at once, Cormac spied the gray stone ruins of ecclesiastical buildings off to his right, and he pulled onto the muddy gravel lane that led to the priory. Without all the equipment he had to transport, he might easily have walked the distance in ten minutes. The nearby fields had been fenced for cattle, and a large gate blocked the end of the lane. Osborne had arranged for an excavator to come this afternoon and clear away topsoil before they could begin on the test trenches. Slinging a camera over his shoulder and grabbing a notebook from his site kit, he climbed through the wire fence to have a look at the priory itself before making his walking survey and taking some pictures of the excavation site.
Osborne had said that Duchas maintained the priory, but from the state of the place, it appeared to be fairly low on the priority list. Someone had made a rather halfhearted attempt to arrange the fallen stones, and long grass grew up between them. The sweet scent of hay hung in the cool, damp morning breeze. Cormac shut his eyes and took a deep breath, letting his lungs fill with the fragrance. As much as he loved his work and enjoyed living in the city, he missed the sensory feast of the countryside. The ground was soaking from yesterday’s heavy showers, but the wind was pushing the clouds steadily across the sky, occasionally letting the morning sun break through. As he entered the cloistered square, he disturbed a flock of hooded crows, which took off in a great noisy, wing-flapping crowd.
Pillared archways were all that remained of the covered walkways, built to protect the monks from the elements as they went from church to work to sleeping rooms. The knee-high remains of storerooms, kitchen, and monastic cells lined the cloister’s outer rim. These stones, their worn surfaces incised with patterns, some carved into the shapes of dogs’ heads, had been laid by some monastic mason 850 years ago. There was a beauty, a rightness of scale in these old buildings that stirred some aesthetic appreciation in him, and a sense of wonder about the lives of the men who had lived here. Cormac looked into each room as he passed, imagining robed monks kneeling alongside the rude rush beds; working the surrounding fields; sharing a communal meal. At the base of one of the doorways, he knelt to take a closer look at a carving of a fernlike plant he could not name, perhaps six inches in height, its curling, pinnate leaves rendered in shallow relief.
He passed through an archway, its wooden door long ago removed or consumed by fire, and stepped into the nave of a small church. Though it was roofless and full of morning light, he imagined the echoes of medieval prayers offered in the chilly hours before sunrise every day of the year, and conjured the damp, visible breath of the Augustinian brothers as they knelt together in candlelight on these stones. In the niche left by a fallen crossbeam, he glimpsed the small figure of a sile na gig, an ancient fertility symbol. This one was typical: a wild-eyed female figure with splayed legs, her hands grasping at the outsized genitalia beneath her grotesquely swollen belly. Why these figures were often found among church ruins was an anthropological conundrum, often taken as a sign that Ireland’s pagan past had never really disappeared, only receded, and that Catholicism was only a modern facade on a much more primitive and atavistic religion. After snapping a photo, Cormac recorded the location of the figure in his notebook, and continued on his survey.
An opening at the far side of the chapel framed a small rectangle of green and a larger one of blue sky. Several lichen-covered gravestones tilted into the frame as well. Off in the far corner of the enclosure was a life-sized stone figure of Christ, streaked with rust and mottled with white lichen like the surrounding stones. Its feet were submerged to the ankles in grass dotted with tiny daisies. The left arm was missing entirely, and the right was broken in several places, leaving the iron rods that had once supported stone fingers curled into a rusty fist. Despite its ruined state, Cormac felt the vital energy in the figure’s naked torso, the sidelong droop of its head, and found himself strangely moved.
He backtracked to the graveyard. In among the antique graves were fresh stones; their polished surfaces and sharply incised lettering stood out against the weathered slabs from the eighteenth century and before. No doubt Hugh Osborne’s parents were buried here somewhere. Cormac crouched by one of the old stones and tried to read the inscription. Vegetation and damp had obscured most of the writing, but he could make out the name, Miles Gorman, and the dates, 1604 to 1660. He reached out to touch the ruffled, papery-dry edges of the yellow-green lichen that bloomed on the stone.
“If you’re looking for the Osbornes, they’re all under the floor inside.” The gruff voice came from about three graves away. Cormac looked up, shading his eyes against the bright sunshine, and saw Brendan McGann silhouetted against the sky. He was in shirtsleeves, and carried a hay fork. Against the sunlight, Cormac couldn’t tell if Brendan’s eyes held mischief or malice. How long had he been there?
“Thought you’d packed off home,” Bre
ndan continued.
“I did. But I’m back here on a job. Hugh Osborne’s asked me to—”
“That fucking squireen,” Brendan said, his face darkening. “Never had any use for this land the past twenty years. Then he sends me a letter saying he would be ‘obliged’ if I would shift my cattle from the pasture beyond within two weeks’ time.”
“Surely you knew about his plans for the site,” Cormac said. “He said your sister’s been involved—”
“He ought to be leaving this place alone. You can see for yourself how peaceful it is. What we don’t need is a lot of tourists coming around, gawping at us and clogging up the roads.”
Cormac found it hard to believe that an increase in traffic was really foremost among Brendan McGann’s concerns.
“Seems like this area could do with a bit of help—” he began, but Brendan cut him off again.
“We don’t need any help,” he said, looking at the ground, and the vehemence in his voice was suddenly alarming.
“The workshop seems to have a good bit of support,” Cormac said, “I gather—”
“I don’t give a fuck what you gather. If you were a wise man, you’d pack up right now and drive straight back to Dublin and let us settle things here on our own.” His words weren’t quite a threat, but the next thing to it.
“As soon as I’m finished here,” Cormac said, hoping he sounded calmer than he actually felt. Did Osborne have any idea of the animosity borne him so close to home?
