Brigid of Kildare

by Heather Terrell

  “Do you believe in penance after sin?”

  “We believe.”

  “Do you believe in life after death? In the resurrection?”

  “We believe.”

  “Do you believe in the unity of the church?”

  “We believe.”

  Patrick then turns his back to them, genuflecting and praying before the basin.

  Broicsech motions for Brigid to rise. They retire to an antechamber off the hall, with their servants in tow. The maids undress them and wrap them in white cloth to protect their modesty during the immersion ritual. They hang Broicsech’s and Brigid’s pristine robes with particular care, as the later wearing of these garments will signify their new life in Christ.

  Taking advantage of the servants’ preoccupation, Broicsech whispers, “What game are you at, Brigid?”

  “Pardon me, Mother?”

  “Your references to Mary and the veil—what are you about?”

  “I do not understand your meaning, Mother.”

  “And I do not comprehend yours, Brigid. But I will, mark my words.”

  xi

  KILDARE, IRELAND

  PRESENT DAY

  Alex’s second day in Kildare quickly fell into an excited rhythm. She woke at dawn and hastened to Saint Brigid’s Church, where Sister Mary had already beaten her to the bronze doors, despite Alex’s early arrival. She stood there on the marble floor of the Madonna Chapel while Sister Mary unlocked the relics from their storage space and spread them out on the altar. She waited until she heard Sister Mary lock her back into the chapel and leave the church altogether before she launched into her work. It was the most satisfying appraisal of her career to date, for the pieces lived up to every one of Alex’s initial expectations.

  The chalice and paten bore the hallmarks of a true artisan. Alex’s magnification equipment revealed a remarkable minuscule design embedded in the gold filigree of the communion vessels, a pattern of interlaced knots, birds, and animals alternating with kneeling men and women. On the chalice bowl, she discovered a nearly invisible inscription, the names of the apostles and the Virgin Mary. And when she turned the chalice upside down, she uncovered the most elaborate handiwork of all: a gold filigree circle inlaid with an enormous rock crystal. The craftsman had reserved his finest work for God, as the crystal could be seen only when the chalice was tipped up toward heaven as the celebrant drank of the communion wine.

  Yet for all their beauty, Alex did not think the two objects were of sixth-century origin. Their unique Gaelic design and iconography—called Hiberno-Saxon, a fusion of the earlier abstract La Tène Celtic style and the animal art then common elsewhere in Europe—were well developed, really too well developed for the sixth century, when the style had just begun to evolve. And the materials, many of which were not native to Ireland, spoke of an established trade relationship with the Continent, a tenuous tie at best in the sixth century. To be sure, she believed they were ancient, but they seemed born of the early ninth century, in the days before the Vikings began their invasion of Kildare. Not that the later date diminished the value tremendously, Alex would assure Sister Mary. The chalice and paten were of a quality and age similar to those of the Ardagh and Derrynaflan chalices—both considered to be priceless treasures of the National Museum of Ireland.

  Dating and placing the sumptuous gold and silver reliquary box proved a greater challenge, one Alex puzzled over that night at the Silken Thomas Inn. Huddled in a corner booth at the inn’s pub, she scarfed down her fish and chips while studying the array of photographs before her. The reliquary simply did not make sense. The shape was unusual for a small corporeal artifact, and its iconography—the symbols of the Gospel authors Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the four corners of the cross—made it a natural design for a sacred-text reliquary. The piece looked much closer to the book shrines in the National Museum—the Shrine of the Stowe Missal, the Miosach, the Domhnach Airgid, and the Shrine of the Cathach—and those reliquaries contained books that claimed saints’ ownership and were of much later origin than the sixth century.

  Other incongruous design elements made Alex’s head spin. The base of the reliquary was exceptionally deep and bore a much simpler pattern, one Alex might have expected to see in sixth-century La Tène art prior to the period when the Hiberno-Saxon style took hold. To further complicate matters, a beautifully crafted golden representation of the enthroned Virgin Mary with the Christ child on her lap overlay the cross frontispiece, but the image of the Virgin Mary arguably was not seen in Western art until the famous ninth-century illuminated manuscript the Book of Kells. So was the reliquary from the sixth century, as Sister Mary insisted, or had it been fashioned sometime in the ninth century, after the Book of Kells?

  Perhaps the justification for the disparity was simple, Alex tried to reassure herself. Maybe craftsmen had reworked the reliquary over time; Alex had seen eighth-century book shrines that had been retooled as late as the sixteenth century. Yet somehow that explanation didn’t fit. The overall effect of the reliquary was too cohesive, and its materials had aged uniformly.

  “Care for another, miss?”

  Alex looked down at her glass and then up at the waitress as if waking from a dream. She’d drained her beer without even realizing it. “Sure, thanks.”

  Rubbing her bleary eyes, Alex glanced around the room. The other tables were crowded with couples and families eating dinner, and the bar was packed with a bunch of sweaty football players fresh from a match. A roaring fire enhanced the lively, cozy feel, and Alex enjoyed the atmosphere and companionship vicariously. Then she noticed a young woman at a nearby table staring at her with a curious, pitying look.

  The compassionate expression took Alex aback, almost like a slap. She’d grown used to working alone, dining alone, and living alone. During her many years at Columbia, she’d always had a few close friends, but she’d shied away from groups, seeing their games as a drain from her pursuits. Even when she selected her career, she stayed away from the predictable museums, auction houses, and academic institutions for the same reasons; all the traditional avenues seemed riddled with time-sapping office politics. There’d been boyfriends, though she was always attracted to men whose artistic endeavors demanded freedom from convention. She’d always told herself that she’d chosen the margins; but now her painful reaction to the stranger’s expression made her wonder.

  The next morning Alex actually made it to the bronze church doors before Sister Mary. A highlighted reproduction of a seventh-century Life of Saint Brigid practically burned in her black bag, propelling her there early. She had turned to one of the several extant histories of Saint Brigid the night before as a way to take her mind off both the puzzle of the reliquary and that of her own life. Though she’d reviewed the narrative by the seventh-century cleric Cogitosus before her flight, a reread passage suddenly struck her and took on new meaning. Cogitosus mentioned that in the seventh century, the Kildare abbey church contained a reliquary holding Brigid’s body, “decorated with a variegation of gold, silver, gems, and precious stones, with gold and silver crowns hanging above them.”

  Obviously, Sister Mary’s reliquary was not that described by Cogitosus—her smallish box could not possibly hold Brigid’s body—but if a lavish shrine had existed as early as the seventh century, was it also possible that Sister Mary’s reliquary had been created in the sixth century, as she claimed? If Alex could pin the reliquary to the sixth century, she’d pull off quite a coup; the oldest known book shrine dated from the eighth century. And if the reliquary dated from the sixth century, perhaps the chalice and paten did as well.

  Alex said nothing of her hopes to Sister Mary. She didn’t want to excite her unduly if the theory proved incorrect—and she didn’t want the prickly nun to know she’d questioned her assertions about the relics’ dates in the first place. She waited patiently as Sister Mary undertook the slow process of removing the relics from the altar safe. Or so she thought.

  “Antsy today,
aren’t we, Miss Patterson?”

  “Just anxious to start working. It’s a real honor to study your pieces.”

  Sister Mary nodded in agreement, but she scanned Alex warily as she did. “Well, I’ll let you get down to brass tacks.” She pulled out two keys from her crammed key chain and said, “I’ll be back a few times before nightfall. Are you all set?”

  “Absolutely.” Alex couldn’t wait for Sister Mary to leave the shrine so she could get to work.

  “All right then. I’m off.”

  Alex paused until she heard the sound of Sister Mary locking the church doors behind her. Then she set upon the reliquary, intent upon examining it with fresh eyes rather than her usual skeptical vision. Scrutinizing every design, every material, and every nuance of the exterior with her equipment, Alex determined that her theory was indeed possible. She would face criticism—doubters would say that the materials were too exotic, the style too inconsistent, and the Virgin Mary all wrong—but her hypothesis that they indeed hailed from the sixth century was possible.

  Alex finished her inspection by gingerly lifting up the reliquary’s lid to examine the inside once again. The simple interior left her no reason to rethink her theory, so she closed it. She thought about the many legendary false bottoms in her line of work. Such devices were rare, though not unheard-of, with reliquaries. After all, the designer—and the owner—wanted to protect, even hide, the precious saint’s remains above all else, especially if they bore magical properties, as so often claimed. But Alex had never come across one herself. An impulse overcame her to run her sterilized fingers along the border between the ornate lid and the simpler, wide base. Deep inside a decorative filigree knot in line with the Virgin Mary, she felt a groove. Reaching for her pliers, Alex gently pressed the little furrow with her instrument. The bottom of the reliquary flung itself open.

  Almost afraid of what she might uncover, she looked inside. Instead of a decaying finger bone or a rotting scrap of a burial shroud, a leather-bound manuscript lay within. Just as she reached for it, she heard the fast clip of footsteps across the church’s marble floor. Acting on instinct, Alex slipped the manuscript into her black bag.

  xii

  KILDARE, IRELAND

  PRESENT DAY

  Her hands trembled violently as she unlocked the door to her room at the Silken Thomas. Alex couldn’t believe what she’d done. She tried to tell herself that she’d only borrowed the manuscript for further study. But she knew better; hubris—her belief that she alone could uncover the relics’ full story—had pushed her to jump from the periphery into the abyss.

  How she’d managed to make it through the day, she didn’t know. She’d gone through the motions of photographing and examining the three pieces as she’d planned, all the while obsessing about the manuscript secreted in her bag. Sister Mary’s watchful gaze had had to be navigated, as she’d unexpectedly returned—and stayed—more frequently than normal throughout the day. What did she sense, Alex wondered? Or suspect?

  Locking the hotel room door behind herself, Alex grabbed the desk chair and lodged it firmly beneath the handle. Intellectually, she knew that no one was going to come barreling through her door, but emotionally, she couldn’t help herself. She knelt next to her bedside and placed her black bag on the chintz coverlet. Slowly, Alex unzipped the bag. She’d carefully wrapped the book in a protective sleeve during a rare moment alone. She slid the book out of her bag and then out of the sleeve, onto some plastic sheeting she’d spread out on the bed. It was larger than she’d remembered, nearly twelve by ten inches.

  Alex was as afraid to look at it now as she had been when the base sprang open, though for a very different reason. What if the find didn’t meet her wild dreams of a late-sixth-to ninth-century illuminated manuscript? The text was probably just some seventeenth-century printing-press Bible inserted by some superstitious nun long after the reliquary’s completion.

  She stared for a long moment at the manuscript’s red binding and its thick, tooled leather cover. Spirals and knots and swirls—typical for La Tène art—so densely blanketed the entire front that not a single empty area remained. Mustering up her courage, she opened it the tiniest bit and heard a crack. Alex winced; she knew it to be the sound of a book spine, untouched for centuries, expanding dangerously.

  Slowly, she opened the book a little farther. A breathtaking female face stared out at her from the very first page. Four delicately wrought angels and an intricate border of emerald green, cobalt blue, bright yellow, deep gold, mauve, maroon, and ocher surrounded the image. The backdrop was so distracting that it took a minute for Alex to realize that she recognized the central figure. It was the enthroned Virgin Mary, with the Christ child on her lap, the same image as the reliquary lid.

  Mesmerized, she kept turning the vellum folio pages. Ethereal angels, symbolic evangelists, Eucharistic emblems, and images of Christ leaped out at Alex, all wrapped and woven and interlaced with the distinctive and colorful La Tène and Hiberno-Saxon patterns. Even the text pages, covered with biblical words rendered in plain brownish iron-gall ink, contained bold decorative letters and icons. Each folio was more arresting than the last—except for the first. In Alex’s estimation, the Virgin Mary image surpassed all that followed.

  Alex could translate only a few words of the insular majuscule Old Latin script. Her work required only that she decipher the names and places critical to appraising early liturgical vessels, and she knew her gifts were visual, not linguistic. Yet she also knew that a proper translation would give her the quickest sense of the text’s age and import.

  Regardless of the gaps in her knowledge, her professional instinct told her that the reliquary had been created to house the manuscript. And that this manuscript was the priceless relic.

  xiii

  KILDARE, IRELAND

  PRESENT DAY

  Alex rose at five A.M. She went through the motions of greeting and chatting with Sister Mary the next morning. Uncertain as to her next steps, she allowed the nun to lead her to the place she’d requested access to the day before—the basement storage housing the convent’s archives.

  Sister Mary had assured Alex that this would prove fruitless to her appraisal, that the convent had preserved no documentation earlier than the mid-1800s. Still, Alex felt honor-bound to complete the typical next stage in her provenance search, to ascertain whether the records contained any reference to the artifacts. She was grateful for the silence and the solitude of the subterranean space. She needed the mental and physical room to decide what to do with the manuscript.

  Pawing her way through countless musty cardboard boxes, she began to believe that Sister Mary was right. The Order of Saint Brigid had saved only a scant few documents from earlier than the late 1800s. Perhaps the secretive nature of the order in the midst of all the Catholic persecution had mandated sparse evidence of the convent’s early existence. The nuns had relied on oral tradition to keep their long history, after all.

  Regardless, Alex felt compelled to look through each box with methodical care. She paged through decades of detritus reflecting the convent’s mundane daily activities: the convent’s financial accounts, inventories of supplies necessary to feed and clothe the nuns, lists of donations received over the years, and records of the order’s ever-diminishing numbers. Prayer pamphlets and religious literature she found aplenty, and these too she thumbed through with her usual attention to detail.

  The dim basement light and the jet lag began to hit Alex, and she yawned and rubbed her eyes as she knelt down to examine yet another cardboard box. She was sifting through the unorganized piles of old financial records when her hand brushed up against a leather object buried within the papers. Reaching in with both hands, she pulled out not one but two small leather-bound books tied with cords.

  Her exhaustion evaporated as she held the books up to the flickering fluorescent light: the leather looked and felt old. Certainly nowhere near as ancient as the cover and binding of the manuscript she�
�d found in the reliquary, but far older than the nineteenth-century documents contained in the boxes. Possibly even centuries older.

  Normally, Alex would have held off on opening the books until she was in a more protected environment, but her heart beat fast at the thought that the books might contain some provenance evidence for the relics. And her experience of finding the manuscript made waiting impossible.

  Drawing closer to the faint available light, Alex untwined one of the books and opened it up. Ancient Latin script on vellum pages much older even than the antique leather cover stared up at her, scribed in a hand familiar to her from the reliquary’s hidden manuscript. And the second book bore the exact same qualities. With sudden clarity, Alex knew what she must do.

  Sitting on the church steps, she rehearsed her excuse for Sister Mary over and over again. Even though she didn’t think of herself as religious, she hated lying to a nun. But she wanted to piece together the hidden tale of the reliquary, the manuscript, and the trunk’s books more than anything, and she could not be certain that Sister Mary would grant her that honor.

  The loud jangle of Sister Mary’s keys made its way up the steps before she did. The forewarning gave Alex a moment to compose herself and stand up before the imposing nun arrived.

  Before Alex could offer her greetings, Sister Mary said, “Done so early today?”

  Alex eked out a smile at the nun’s attempt at banter. “Actually, I waited out here to tell you that I need to go to Dublin for a few days to do some research.”

  “So urgently? You didn’t mention a peep about a trip when I left you this morning.”

  “I was hoping to deliver you some good news today. But as I reviewed my notes at midday, I realized that I need to tie up some loose ends first.”

  “Good news?”

  “I’d really feel more comfortable sharing my assessment when it’s finalized.”