The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  “What are you doing with paraffin?” he asked.

  The look I shot her said, Be my guest.

  The look she shot back said, No. You!

  I let out a sigh.

  He glanced back and forth between Sylvia and me. I must have looked as hangdog as she did, because after a minute, Sam said, “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

  I took a deep breath. “Sam, can I ask you something?” I rolled a chair toward him.

  “Yeeessss …”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “No,” he said confidently. “Definitely not.”

  I glanced at the clock. Four fifty-eight. There were several ways to do this, but given the fact that I had to leave in a couple of minutes to meet Father Quinn and Bishop Soares, I opted to be direct.

  “Well, then, you might find the next hour a little … unsettling. Because in about fifteen minutes, I’m going to be back here with two, plus a bishop and a priest, and—”

  I looked over at Sylvia. She was nodding.

  “And the four of us—or five, if you stay—are going to have a … a visit.”

  Sam smiled, glancing from me to Sylvia and back.

  “Aw, go on,” he said.

  I nodded. “I don’t have time to explain now. I’ll be happy to later, but you have to decide pretty soon if you want to stay or not.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” Sam said.

  “No, she isn’t,” Sylvia countered.

  Sam’s smile began to fade. “Is it like an … exorcism?”

  Given my mention of a priest and a bishop, I supposed his question made a certain amount of sense. I shook my head.

  “A séance?”

  “Nope, just a regular old conversation.”

  “Between whom?” He gave me a tilted, suspicious look.

  “Between …well, actually, it’s between the bishop and the monks, but since the bishop won’t be able to see them, I don’t think, I’ll speak for the monks. He’s coming because they don’t trust me.”

  “Who? The ghosts or the monks?” He shook his head and said, “I can’t believe I’m asking that question.”

  “The ghosts are the monks,” I said, pulling on my coat. “Or rather, the ghosts were monks.”

  “They’re the monks who created the manuscript,” Sylvia volunteered. “They’ve stayed with it through all these centuries. They know some things they’ll only tell a bishop.”

  I could see Sam trying to add two and two, and continuing to come up with three. “But … the manuscript’s not here,” he said slowly. “Is it?”

  Sylvia shook her head. “We hope they know something that might help us find it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sam said.

  I glanced at the clock. Five after five. I had to leave. Now.

  “So you’re welcome to stay,” I said, “if you want. But if you’re not up for it, you can walk out with me.”

  Sam turned to Sylvia. “Are you staying?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I can explain a little more while she’s gone.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, “I guess I’m in.” And then he added, “Wow!”

  Father Quinn and Bishop Soares were standing beside a dusty green Subaru Legacy. I don’t know what model of car I expected, but I certainly expected it to be black. Priests always drove black cars. A bishop’s car, by rights, ought to have been really, really black.

  I felt an unwelcome breeze of doubt blow into the underground garage. I knew that bishops who had been ordained as Jesuits sometimes continued to wear the robe of their order even after they were promoted, but the cleric who stood before me looked like the monk stirring the oversized vat on the label of Trappist jams. Could he really be a bishop? He seemed awfully … regular, an average man in his sixties with thinning gray hair. I wondered if maybe it was like returning as an adult to a room that loomed large in childhood, only to discover that everything about and within it seemed shrunken. I hoped he had some really convincing props in that bag he was carrying, in case the monks demanded proof of his ecclesiastical stature.

  Father Quinn locked the car, but not before the ghost of a wan young woman had drifted out of the backseat. She looked sixteen or seventeen. Her long, curly hair hung in two thick braids, and she wore a flowered blouse with a little round collar and a jumper made of corduroy. The outfit appeared home-sewn. I didn’t make eye contact with her, though. I already had enough on my plate.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” I said.

  “Monsignor Dolan is a good man,” said Bishop Soares. “When he asks me to go somewhere, I go.” He spoke with a slight accent; he might have been Brazilian or Portuguese.

  “It’s a very valuable book,” I said, “the book that’s been stolen. We think it might be the Book of Kildare.”

  The bishop nodded slowly. Father Quinn didn’t look too thrilled to be here; the mention of the manuscript barely seemed to register. “His Excellency has had a very long day,” Father Quinn said, relieving the bishop of the satchel in his hand. “So if you’d be so kind as to lead the way.”

  In other words, Cut the chitchat, sister, and let’s get this show on the road.

  “It’s only a couple of blocks,” I said as we emerged from underground into the fading daylight.

  Bishop Soares looked around, a smile spreading over his face as he took in the skateboarders and three-card monte hustlers and the rushing commuters envisioning the moment when they would be home, opening their doors to a wife, or a boyfriend, or a child, or a drink, or a long, lonely night in front of a glowing blue screen.

  “Fall,” Bishop Soares said, pausing on the edge of the common and drawing in a slow, deep breath. I paused, too, and the breath I drew was cold and edged with the wood smoke of the season’s first fireplace fires, and there was the scent of coffee, good coffee, from No. 9 Park, and the odors of urine and fallen apples and pine mulch banked under the nearby bushes.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. He had quietly led me to a moment I would have missed, a moment in which I had stood absolutely still amid the beauty and bustle of the city in early evening and realized that I was alive, here, on earth, right this minute, as one season, in one of the finite number of years of my life, gave way to the next.

  I no longer doubted that he was a bishop.

  I had to go looking for the monks. You would have thought, given that they had been waiting for nearly nine hundred years to have a conversation with a live cleric, that they would have been all over the afternoon’s activities in the bindery. But no, they were nowhere to be seen. I found them in the first-floor reading room, hovering beside John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Annie Adams Fields.

  The young monk saw me first. “Herself is here, Father,” I heard him whisper.

  The abbot turned around. Fortunately, given the hour, there was no one in the room to observe me talking to the air.

  “They’re waiting for you,” I said, trying to keep a exultant tone from creeping into my voice. “And they haven’t got all day.”

  “Who?” snapped the abbot.

  “His Excellency Bishop Esteban A. Soares, of the Diocese of Boston,” I informed him coolly. “And a senior member of his staff.”

  “Where?” the abbot demanded. “They’re down in the bindery,” I said.

  As I probably could have predicted, the abbot was impatient and rude. Did he thank me for delivering what he had requested, or rather, demanded? Not a chance. Wasting not a fraction of a millisecond, he disappeared. The younger monk, on the other hand, gave me encouraging proof that some mothers, even those in twelfth-century Ireland, manage to impart impeccable manners to their sons. He floated across the room, then silently kept pace beside me as I made my way down the hall and then down the stairs. I had no doubt in my mind that if he could have, he would have held open the doors.

  It had been lucky, after all, that Sam had shown up, because when we entered the bindery, he was entertaining our guests with a charming history of the Athenaeum, d
escribing the eccentrics and artists and visionaries and kooks who had all played their parts in its history. I would have loved nothing better than to have sat down and listened, but Father Quinn greeted my arrival with a curt little nod and a glance at his watch. It would have been so much fun to watch him fly out of his chair, if he could have seen the abbot pacing furiously behind him. On a couple of occasions, the older monk had reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin, but today he made me think, with a giggle I could barely repress, of Yosemite Sam.

  “Maybe we should start with a prayer,” I suggested.

  The bishop nodded. “Let us pray.”

  The two monks fell to their knees, fairly quivering with anticipation.

  “May Almighty God have mercy on us,” intoned Bishop Soares, “and guide our hearts and hands to the accomplishment of good, the appreciation of the day, and the adoration of God, our eternal Father in heaven. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”

  “Amen,” we all said, the Catholics among us also making the sign of the cross. The monks returned to a standing position, and everyone turned their attention to me.

  I addressed the bishop and the priest. “Uh, I don’t know how much Monsignor Dolan told you about … how he and I met.”

  “He told me enough,” said the bishop.

  “So there’s nothing you’d like me to explain, before we start?” I asked.

  “Ready to go,” said the bishop.

  Father Quinn couldn’t resist a grumpy interjection. “You know, of course, the Church’s official position on ghosts.”

  “I do. But once you’ve had an experience with an earthbound spirit—” I shrugged. “It’s the Church’s doctrine versus what you’ve seen with your own eyes.”

  I could tell he didn’t like my answer. I wouldn’t normally do what I was about to do, but we really didn’t need ants at the picnic. I had to pick up Henry by eight.

  I focused my attention on the spirit who had floated out of the car in the underground garage, and who had remained near Father Quinn ever since.

  “Who are you?” I asked her.

  “His sister,” she answered.

  “What’s going on?” asked Father Quinn.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Kathryn Quinn,” answered the ghost. “But everyone called me Kat.”

  I looked Father Quinn in the eye. “You had a sister named Kathryn. But she went by Kat.”

  The expression drained from his face. He glanced around nervously. “What are you …?”

  “Why are you here?” I asked her.

  “Because he blames himself for the accident. We were hiking in New Hampshire, seven of us. We took some chances. But it wasn’t his fault, what happened. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine.”

  It was kind of intense just to lay this on the poor fellow, here in public with everyone around, but I couldn’t have him mucking up the works.

  “She says it wasn’t your fault, the hiking accident. She says that if it was anyone’s fault, it was hers.”

  “Kat!” he cried, spinning around. “Kat? Are you here?”

  “She’s here,” I said quietly. “If you like, we can have a conversation with her later, in private.”

  Instead of what I’d expected, a meek admission that there was something to my claim of being able to speak with spirits, the priest turned on me. “This is a trick,” he said. “A cruel trick. I don’t know where you dug up this—”

  I glanced at the spirit of Kat. She understood that I needed help.

  “Tell him that … say, ‘Tickles toppled the tower!’” she said, smiling at the memory of what had to be a private joke.

  I didn’t have a clue as to what these words meant, but I did as she said.

  Before our eyes, Father Quinn seemed to crumple into a much smaller and older version of himself. He closed his eyes and nodded.

  I glanced around. The bishop wore a compassionate look of concern, and Sam looked panicky. Sylvia slid her chair over beside his and took his hand.

  I sighed and glanced at Bishop Soares. “Should I go on?”

  “Please,” he said.

  I took a deep breath. “We’re in the presence of two monks. We think they died in Ireland in the twelfth century. We’re pretty sure they created the book that was stolen, and we think that book was the Book of Kildare.”

  “You think,” said Bishop Soares. “If you’re able to speak to them, why don’t you know for sure?”

  “Because,” I answered, “earthbound spirits are kind of stuck in the period of time in which they lived. And died. The monks are uncomfortable revealing information to me. They wanted to speak with a person from the Church.”

  “All right. So, here I am. Speak, dear friends!” Bishop Soares glanced around the room, but of course he couldn’t see them. “Where are they?” he asked me.

  “Over by that table,” I said, indicating a table by the far wall.

  Bishop Soares stood up and crossed the room. He held out his hands. “Speak, brothers,” he said. The younger monk made a gesture of yielding to his superior; the abbot would speak for both of them.

  I could tell that the old ghost hated to rely on me, being compelled to pause every sentence or two while I related his story to the people in the room, but we soon fell into a rhythm. Here is the story he told, just as he told it.

  “Saint Brigid was my patroness; the monastery at the Church of the Oak—Cill-Dara—was our home. Welcomed the traveler did we, with ‘a clean house, a big fire, and a couch without sorrow.’ Lived we by the words of our grace before meals, to us come down through the ages from our saint of saints:

  A great lake of finest ale should we like

  For the King of Kings.

  A table of the choicest food should we like

  For the family of heaven.

  Of the fruits of faith shall the ale be made,

  Of love shall be made the food.

  Welcome the poor to our feast should we,

  For the children of God are they.

  Welcome the sick to our feast should we,

  For the joy of God are they.

  With Jesus at the highest place should the poor be seated

  And with the angels should dance the sick.

  The poor God bless.

  The sick God bless.

  And so our human race.

  Our food God bless,

  Our drink God bless,

  All homes, O God, embrace.

  “Simple was our daily life, and clear were our tasks. From the hands of our brothers in God came parchment, from the breeding of the beasts with the lightest of fur, and the lightest of skins, beasts delivered, shorn of these skins, back to God their Creator in the month of the Feast of the Harvest, Lunasa. For one Bible, needed we the skins of hundreds of beasts: into His Kingdom may God welcome them, and so my brothers for the cleaning and the stretching of the skins.

  “Ogham was our alphabet, but soon learned we the Latin and the Greek. A spell for the eye weaved we, letters of magic to sanctify the page as the flower sanctifies the meadow and the song of the bird the air.

  “Nightly came the angel to my cell. In sleep, opened he my eye to the vision of the beauty of the Kingdom of God. By day held he my pen, flowing the lines of my ink, pressed by my brothers from the lees of the wine, and the rind of the pomegranate. With my pen wove this angel his spell from the tombs of Valley of the Boyne, the spell for the eye of no circle, but a spiral, of no line as is the line between the sky and land, but alone as the curve where wave meets sand.

  “Then, by night, come the Vikings and with sword and fire consume our earthly shells. Fly our souls inland with the horse and, on his back, the devil, our ransacked book in his cape rudely wrapped. To this place, tonight, come we, shades of our earthly forms, as in the song of the psalmist, through a thousand years, which is as yesterday when it is past.

  “For the fields of heaven long we. For the table of Saint Brigid long we. For the
embrace of our Lord God long we. Yet stay we in the shadows of this earthly world until the will of Our Lord be done: to the abbey of Cill-Dara is returned its jewel.”

  This was easier said than done. First of all, the abbey didn’t exist anymore. Bishop Soares stepped in at this point, assuring the ghosts that he would personally safeguard the manuscript’s journey, right into the hands of Pope Benedict XVI, if need be. This was all very well and good, an earnest promise if there ever was one, and one that visibly delighted the monks, but the fact remained that we didn’t actually have a book for the bishop to safeguard.

  Then came the second worst news we’d had in the past ten days: someone—a woman, we eventually figured out—had lately been coming into the bindery in the middle of the night and using a “flint” to remove individual pages from the book. By a process that resembled a game of charades, we managed to ascertain that a flint was the twelfth-century equivalent of a razor blade.

  “Oh my God,” said Sam.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Oh no, nothing,” he said. “I’m just … taken aback that someone would … to a priceless manuscript like that.” He shook his head in dismay.

  The bishop was due at an important dinner in less than an hour, so we thanked him profusely for coming, accepted a round of blessings, and made arrangements to keep in touch. As he reached for his coat and gathered his belongings, I pulled Father Quinn aside.

  “I’m really sorry I sprung that on you.”

  He nodded and shrugged.

  “If you like, I could meet with you some day, alone. You could talk to her; I could help you.”

  “I’m confused,” he said. “I never knew …”

  “How could you? But she hasn’t crossed over for a reason, the reason being that she’s not at peace. I’m sure you want that for her.”

  “It was my fault,” he said. “All these years, I—”

  “When would you like me to come?” I asked.

  And so it was agreed. He would call me in a couple of days and we would figure out a time and a place. In the meantime, I told him, he should speak to her.