by Declan Burke
I poured myself a lukewarm coffee and strolled across to the French windows. Outside was a wide terrace with potted palms at each corner, steps down to a lawn. Beyond hung an azure sky. It all put me in mind, for some reason, of Tender is the Night, although the guy sitting on the wall with his back to the house and tapping cigarette ash into the potted palm, a shotgun propped beside him, rather ruined the illusion. It was hard to tell, given that he was sitting rather than lying sprawled out, or pointing a shotgun in my direction, but I guessed it was my old friend Sam.
Then again, it was entirely possible that Bellapaix was guarded by roving gangs of tooled-up thugs, the shotgun their preferred weapon of choice.
From behind me there came a clearing of the throat that was meant, I guessed, as a politeness, a discreet way of letting me know I wasn’t alone. What it sounded like was a cement truck going through the gears, the clutch long since burnt out.
The elusive Sebastian Devereaux.
But not yet. When I turned I found myself looking at a woman who was tamping tobacco into a clay pipe.
I’d been expecting an old man, something wizened and shuffling, so it took me a moment to readjust. I got the impression that she was anticipating a pause, that she tended to have that effect when she walked into a room, expected or not. The eyes a faded but glittering blue, the kind of blue you half-glimpse and think you might have imagined if you stare long enough into a diamond. She wore her hair loose and wild, an autumnal tumbling of russet and grey, and there was something in the imperious upthrust of nose and chin that suggested she was constantly defying the world to disappoint her. She had the look of a woman who hadn’t been so much born as carved out of the void by a loving but crude hand.
She puffed a cloud of aromatic smoke from the pipe, the wide nostrils flaring. ‘Tom, I take it?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Lady Carol?’
She stepped forward, the pipe clawed between the fore and middle fingers of her left hand. When we shook, her grip was strong, wiry. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony here, Tom,’ she said. A bright smile, faintly yellowing teeth. ‘We don’t sit on ceremony either, for that matter. Or turn handsprings on ceremony, even if such were possible. At Bellapaix we prefer to simply go about our business with the minimum of fuss. Attracting as little attention as we can get away with. So please, call me Carol. How are you?’
‘Fine, I think. A bit stiff and sore, but I’ll survive.’
‘I’m sure you will.’ She had another draw on the pipe, studying me. ‘Will you accept our apologies for the unfortunate incident last evening? It was unforgivable. Eoin can be, shall we say, a little enthusiastic about defending hearth and home. Is your coffee not cold? Never mind, Mary will be bringing through a fresh pot.’
It was a disarming blend, the awkwardly formal words softened by a thick Donegal brogue, the apology delivered and immediately forgotten.
‘Coffee would be good,’ I said.
‘It will be here presently.’ She gestured out beyond the French windows. ‘Are you able to walk and talk,’ she said, ‘or would you prefer to have your coffee first?’
Shotgun Sam stood up when we stepped out on to the terrace, then sat back down when Carol said, ‘That’s fine, Eoin. We won’t be going far.’ Then, as we descended to the lawn, she stopped mid-stride on the steps, fumbling in a pocket for a box of matches. When she got her pipe going again, a pungent blue cloud rising on the breeze, she said, ‘So what is it you want to ask me, Tom?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Erin tells me that you wish to conduct an interview with Sebastian Devereaux. Or was she just flattering me?’
There was a devious twinkle, or a glint, in the diamond-blue eyes.
‘You’re telling me,’ I said, ‘that you’re Sebastian Devereaux.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that all depends. Sebastian Devereaux was my father. But Erin tells me that it’s Sebastian Devereaux the author you wish to interview.’ The bright, disarming smile of a cheeky child. ‘And that would be me, yes. Do I disappoint you?’
There was a wooden bench near the end of the lawn overlooking an abrupt drop into forest and beyond that the Swilly opening up northwards towards the Atlantic. At both corners of the lawn was a set of crazy-paved steps that curled into a central path and then disappeared into the pines below. The breeze was stronger now, so she abandoned her pipe, tapping it against the sole of her shoe to loosen the dottle and slipping it into a pocket.
‘This way,’ she said, indicating the left-hand set of steps. Down we went until we intersected with an unpaved dusty path branching off, which opened up into a tunnel between the trees. The breeze fainter now.
She had asked me to be patient, and that – the devious glint again – all would be revealed. So we strolled along in silence, Carol with a faint limp that appeared to originate in her hip, her left leg swinging out in a small semicircle. The pace was gentle, but already the bruising on my back was beginning to ache.
So I was grateful when she indicated another path, a short downhill incline that opened out into a small sloped clearing, a horseshoe space cleared from the pines. A tiny meadow dotted with daisy and buttercup, and a bench at the near end, two crude stones in the middle, and then wild grasses and flowers flowing on to a cliff edge. We were lower down now, but the view was more or less the same: the vivid blue of Lough Swilly, mountains rising either side, the paler blue of the North Atlantic shimmering in the far distance.
Carol eased herself down on to the bench, then indicated the graves. ‘My parents,’ she said. ‘Margaret and Sebastian Devereaux.’
‘May I?’
‘Of course.’
The rough stones had been dug out rough rather than quarried. If it hadn’t been for the smooth squares where the names and dates were chiselled you might have thought they’d been there for millennia, mossy and veined yellow. Grass and flowers flowed around them, swelling high against the foot of both, but there was no sense of neglect. Rather, the effect was to suggest that the stones were simply part of the landscape, their only notable feature the side-by-side symmetry and the few millimetres that didn’t so much separate them as confirm their unity. The dedications were as minimalist as decency allowed.
Margaret Devereaux
1913–2004
Sebastian Devereaux
1915–1997
I went back to the bench, where Carol Devereaux was poking a matchstick into the stem of her pipe.
‘I’m afraid Shay has brought you a long way,’ she said without looking up, ‘to interview a man who has been dead for more than ten years.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d kind of assumed all along he was dead. My condolences, by the way.’
‘You’re very kind. And there is no reason why you should have known if he was alive or dead. Ah.’ She dislodged the blockage, began tamping tobacco into the bowl. Now she looked at me. ‘Whose business was it but our own?’
‘He was a well regarded writer in his time. It seems a pity that no one noticed his passing.’
‘Untrue. He was mourned by those who knew him.’
‘I’m sure he was. What I mean is he—’
‘I know exactly what you mean. But my father was an intensely private man, Tom. He would have been very pleased indeed to learn that he slipped away without being subjected to the usual vulgarities. Besides,’ a match flared, and she puffed the pipe to life, ‘what was there for anyone else to remember? He was not Sebastian Devereaux the well-regarded writer, as you put it. To celebrate him in such a way would have been the most horrible sham.’
‘I suppose it would.’
‘You suppose correctly. Now let’s suppose that you ask me the questions you had planned to ask my father.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not exactly that straightforward, is it?’
‘How so?’
‘Being honest, I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that you wrote the books.’
‘The last two only,’ she said. A
bird came dipping through the clearing with a piercing pee-wit, and was gone. She watched it go. ‘My mother wrote the others.’
‘Your mother?’
She turned to me again. ‘My mother was a remarkable woman, Tom.’
‘It’s my experience that most of them are.’
A faint grin. ‘Nicely put. Ingratiating, but nicely put.’ Her pipe had gone dead, so she took a moment to crack a match, cupping it in her palms until the blue smoke came again in ragged puffs. She put the dead match back into the box and fixed the diamond-blue eyes on mine. ‘Just ask, Tom.’
‘Ask what?’
‘The one question you want answered.’
She made it sound so simple. Somehow, illogical as it might sound, it felt as if I’d be betraying a confidence if I traded Gerard Smyth’s name. Bartering his death for information. And yet, a small voice in the back of my mind insisted, Gerard Smyth had told me his story in the hope of having it confirmed. So that the truth would out.
Weasel words, of course. What it all came down to was I wanted to know.
So I told her. About Gerard Smyth and how he had decided to live beyond the law. How he had reminded me too much of my father in his own final days to ignore him. That he hadn’t lived beyond the law very long, and was now prone on a slab awaiting autopsy.
‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Tom.’ A husky quiver in her tobacco-stained throat. ‘Now be so kind as to tell me what he said.’
There was every chance she was testing me. That they had, as Kee suggested, retrieved the hard drive from the mangled laptop. So I kept to the basics. Once in a while those diamond-blue eyes glittered, and at one point seemed to glisten, but she heard me out in silence.
When I was finished she considered for a moment or two and then cleared her throat and said, ‘Yes, that appears to be more or less it.’
‘It’s true then.’
‘As your Mr Smyth saw it, yes.’
There was a cold kind of horror in her words. Or perhaps not the words themselves, but the detached way in which she spoke, as if reminiscing about a summer holiday when it had rained every day.
My stomach began to churn. Delayed shock, perhaps, although disgust played its part.
‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is why they didn’t lynch him after.’
‘My father?’ She seemed amused. ‘There were some who wanted to, certainly.’
‘It never occurred to him to save them the trouble?’
‘Apparently it did, yes. Many times.’
‘But he didn’t do it.’
‘Sometimes it takes more courage to be a coward than a hero.’
‘That’s rot.’
‘Is it though?’
There must have been a hive nearby. Bees hummed through the clearing on their solitary missions.
‘Whose idea was it?’ I said.
‘Pardon me?’
‘The book. The first one. Whose idea was it to write a thriller about the massacre of innocent children?’
A thin smile this time, one that seemed to slice her words. ‘Would it have been more appropriate had the children been guilty, Tom?’
‘Guilty of what? Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Precisely. Why should we emphasize the children’s innocence? All children are innocent, are they not? Your own daughter being a case in point. Emily, yes?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your daughter. I imagine you had her baptised, Tom. To wash away her sin. Did you not?’
‘That has nothing to do with this.’
‘No? Then answer me this. Did you do it as a believer in the Christian values? Or was it social convention?’
I couldn’t really blame her. If my father had been responsible for children being herded into a church and burned alive, I’d very likely have tried to dissemble too.
‘If you really want to know,’ I said, ‘we had Emily baptised because it’d make it easier to get her into the village school when she was old enough to go. Happy now?’
‘That you have admitted your hypocrisy? Yes.’
‘There’s a difference,’ I said as evenly as I could. ‘Having a child baptised is one thing. Writing a novel about a massacre of children and passing it off as fiction is another thing entirely, and that’s putting it pretty fucking mildly. Especially when you bank the royalties and end up buying whole islands and calling yourself Lady Muck.’
‘Let’s not say anything we might regret, Tom.’
I almost laughed. ‘Seriously? You’re the one trying to equate a child’s baptism with an atrocity.’
‘I only asked about your daughter in order to tell you I was never baptised myself. Would you like to know why?’
‘Go on.’
‘My mother decided it would be inappropriate. Because there was no miracle for my father that night. No divine intervention. Because those young children were simply abandoned to their fate. And please, I beg you not to suggest that the evening’s events were devised as a perverse examination of faith and forbearance. The very idea that an intelligence capable of creating an entire universe would indulge in such petty games is laughable. No. Even as she watched the church burn my mother understood that if she was to survive then it would be by her own hand. That she could rely on nothing but her own—’
‘Wait. She was there?’
‘Yes.’
‘That night?’
‘Indeed. You have your eye-witness testimony, Tom. I have my own.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Margaret – more commonly known as Morag – Devereaux, née Rutherford, was indeed a remarkable woman. The first time she descended out of the Highlands, via Inverness, was to attend university in Edinburgh.
‘She hated it,’ Carol said. ‘Not Edinburgh itself, she thought it a fine old town. Just the fact that she had to be there.’
A child of the heather, and an only child, Morag had grown up on her father’s estate shooting and fishing and swimming and running wild. And digging, digging, digging.
She was the daughter of a laird who was rarely home and a mother, widowed at the first battle of Ypres and reluctantly remarried, who was a great-great-granddaughter of the Scottish Enlightenment. Laird Rutherford wasn’t unique in the House of Lords for his support of the Suffragette cause – this when he was younger and rather more vital than the man Morag came to know – and he was by no means the only man from north of the border to be told he wore a kilt because his wife was at home parading around in his trousers. Unusually, there was an element of truth in this particular slur; even more unusual was the fact that the laird, a man partial to fine wine in excess and something of an evangelist on behalf of the Laphroaig distillery on the Isle of Islay, never tired of repeating it, or was unaware of the repetition, on his infrequent forays home.
Morag grew up on her mother’s stories of the Great War and the Highland clearances and the brutal suppression of the Suffragettes. Her understanding of men, as gleaned from her mother, was that they were not exactly a necessary evil – which was to say, they were not necessarily evil, and not necessarily necessary. Which meant they were not to be trusted in any matter of importance, a phrase that grew, as Morag grew, to incorporate anything from war and politics to philosophy and fashion. Most important of all, of course, was her unswerving belief that no man should ever have a right to make any decision that might impact on any aspect of any woman’s life.
‘An unsustainable credo,’ Carol observed dryly. ‘But you couldn’t fault her for lack of ambition.’
Morag went down from Edinburgh University in the spring of 1935 – her mother deigned to attend, her father sent flowers and a bottle of 10-year Laphroaig – with a first in the History of Archaeology. By October of that year she was battling the flies in southern Egypt, serving a penitential apprenticeship at Tell el-Amarna under John Pendlebury, although by then the dig was in the convulsive throes of its final months. When Pendlebury moved to Crete early the following year, Morag found herself on the
south coast of the island, working on what they hoped would reveal itself as one of the summer palaces of the Minoans.
It was in Heraklion during the Easter recess (‘Easter was late that year. Doesn’t it always seem that Easter is always late?’) that she met Peter Kingsley. ‘Tall, beaky and sallow.’ An older man, of course, married twice and twice divorced. He’d been through Eton, Cambridge and the Somme, worked under Evans and Petrie, and somehow survived them all. His field now was the Old Religion, the pre-Greek worship of goddess and matriarch glimpsed through the veil of the Eleusinian Mysteries. ‘A passion for dead women,’ observed Carol, ‘that cost him two wives.’
He came and went from Crete all that year, on occasion venturing to the south coast. For the most part their rendezvous were in Heraklion and Chania. That Christmas he told her war was in the wind, that he had no intention of fighting another, and that anyone who could decently absent themselves from that particular kind of hell should take the opportunity to do so. He suggested a thesis that might overlap with his own, which was that the pre-Greek colonisers who came marauding down out of Central Europe into the Mediterranean shared a common heritage – and not incidentally, a penchant for fierce goddesses – with the Celts, who had spread west and north.
‘He duped her,’ Carol said, ‘although I can only be grateful he did.’
Kingsley introduced her to MórrÍgan, the Great Queen of the Celts, the Supreme Warrior Goddess. The shape-shifting mother of war and death, goddess of magic and prophecy, fertility and revenge. ‘His theory was that MórrÍgan shared a common root with the Erinyes, the Furies. In some variations she keeps company with Hateful Fea, Badb the Fury, and Macha of Battle. A trinity to be reckoned with, Tom, wouldn’t you say?’
I would, and did. What I didn’t say, so as not to interrupt Carol’s flow, was that I’d come across MórrÍgan before, as a code name in Gerard Smyth’s account of the atrocity.
‘Kingsley offered to pull strings back in London and secure a commission. He knew of a site associated with MórrÍgan, a monastic Irish settlement of beehive cells built on a much older place of worship. If she was agreeable, he believed he could get the permissions and enough funding to allow them to excavate together.’
