Fatal Roots

by Sheila Connolly

  Fatal Roots

  A County Cork Mystery

  SHEILA CONNOLLY

  Na dean nos is na bris nos

  Chapter One

  The pounding at the front door woke Maura from a sound sleep. Did she have to answer it? She’d put in a late shift at the pub the night before, and she hadn’t planned to show up this morning until opening time. The pounding came again, and she could hear a female voice call out, “Hello? Anyone at home?” Irish accent, so she was probably local, or at least Irish.

  Maura managed to pry her eyes open. The sun was shining, always a wonderful thing in this part of the world. She had few visitors, and unfamiliar women of her own age were rarely among them. The visitor didn’t sound scared or panicked, so she wasn’t looking for help. Maura sighed and sat up slowly, then came to her feet and walked barefoot to the front window on the second story, the one over the door below. She pushed it open and leaned out.

  “Can I help you with something?” she said.

  The young woman below shaded her eyes. “Are you Maura Donovan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any relation to Michael Sullivan?”

  Who did she mean? Maura wondered. The man who had owned the house that was now hers because he’d left it to her in his will, or a living one she knew nothing about? What she did know was there were a lot of Sullivans in the area, and probably quite a few named Michael.

  “Not if you’re looking for the man who used to own this place. I never met the man, but this used to be his property. Why do you want to know?”

  “If you’re the owner, I’d like to talk with you. Before you ask, I don’t want to buy it or sell you anything, but I’m studying archaeology, and I’d like to explore your land, if that’s all right with you.”

  Maura sighed. The only archaeology she knew about in the region was the Drombeg stone circle, which the Mick who worked for her at Sullivan’s Pub had shown her when she first arrived. She hadn’t gone looking for any more, because she didn’t have the time, and she wouldn’t even know what she was looking for. But it couldn’t hurt to talk to someone who had managed to track her down to a small townland in the out-country. “Let me put on some clothes and I’ll be down.”

  “That’d be grand. Thank you!”

  Maura dug out a mostly clean pair of jeans and a shirt from the pile waiting to be washed. Laundry was something she seldom got around to doing. She also pulled on socks and shoes, because the house was shaded by old trees and the floor downstairs was made of concrete, so it was always cold, even in summer. She made it down the rickety wooden stairway against the back wall and opened the door to the stranger. “Come on in. I’m Maura. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Ciara McCarthy. I’m working on a postgraduate degree in the Department of Archaeology at University College Cork, and my thesis will be on early Irish ring forts in Cork.”

  “Uh, slow down for a second. Please,” Maura interrupted. “In case you can’t tell, I’m American, although my grandmother and her son—my father—were born near here. I’ve been in Ireland just over a year, and I haven’t seen much of it. I’ve never been to Cork city, except for the bus station. I don’t have a college degree, and I haven’t got a clue what a ring fort is. So you’ll have to start at the beginning and explain all this to me. Why is it you want to talk to me? Oh, and would you like some breakfast? Coffee?”

  “Yes, please. And forgive me for barging in on you like this, so early, but I really want to get started, and the weather’s been so nice lately I hate to let it go to waste. I’ll give you the short version. Ring forts are the most common archaeological monuments in rural Ireland, and most of them date to the early Middle Ages, up to about the year one thousand AD. There’s still a lot of controversy about who made them and why, but there are lots in Cork. One thing that makes them even more intriguing is that there’s a lot of folklore attached to them, and the people on whose property they lie treat them with respect. You might say they’re scared of them, and even nowadays they leave them alone. That is, they don’t just plow them under to give their cows more room.”

  Maura poured boiling water from her kettle over the coffee grounds in her coffeepot and found two mugs. “Bread okay? Because that’s about all I’ve got to eat at the moment.”

  “That’s fine. You want me to keep explaining?”

  “Yes,” Maura said firmly, as she sliced the bread and added a chunk of local butter to the plate before setting it in front of Ciara.

  “First of all, they’re circles, but they’re not usually made of stone. So you might not notice the ring forts if you drive past them, because they’re big and not very high and they’re often overgrown with brambles and the like, but once you recognize them you’ll find them everywhere. Others are long gone, or have been raided for building materials, mainly in the past. But there are maps that were made in the middle of the nineteenth century, when more of them were still intact, that show them all over, and I’ve been tracking these down. Once I think I’ve found them all, I plan to analyze their locations, how they relate to each other, how close or far apart they are—things like that. What do you know about your property?”

  Maura placed a second plate with sliced brown bread and a chunk of butter on the table, then sat down. “Not a lot. I told you, I don’t know much about Ireland. My grandmother moved to Boston before I was born, with my father, and then he died, and she raised me. I guess she was worried about how I’d get by once she was gone. She knew Old Mick Sullivan, who owned this place. He was some kind of distant relative, and he had no family to leave it to, so he and my grandmother fixed it that I’d inherit it, but she never told me. I didn’t find out until I got here. Old Mick also owned a pub in Leap, which is now mine, and it’s where I work. But I haven’t had time to do much exploring. As for this property, I signed a bunch of papers, and I know there are a lot of bits and pieces of land that belonged to Mick scattered around, but I couldn’t tell you where they are, or if there’s anything on them that would interest you.”

  “Not a problem! I’ve got copies of the old maps, and I can tell you that nothing much changes around here, except maybe somebody puts in a new road. Like the one at the bottom of the hill on the north side—that’s relatively new. Your cottage here is just over a hundred years old, I think, and it’s probably not the first house on this site.”

  “And there were people living here and building these ring fort things like a thousand years ago?”

  “Roughly,” Ciara said. “So I came here to ask if you’d mind if I did some surveying of where there are any old structures. It may be that there are none on your land, but I’d bet money there are some nearby, and it’s kind of hard to guess who owned which pieces or how much, back before anybody was writing history down. I won’t be in your way, but I thought it would be polite to ask your permission.”

  “No problem. I’m not here much anyway. I’m at the pub from opening to closing. I’m still learning the business, and sometimes we’re shorthanded.”

  “You live here alone?”

  “Yeah, mostly. Look, I don’t mind if you want to poke around. I don’t have anything worth stealing, and I’m sorry I can’t tell you more about what’s in this neighborhood. You might want to talk to one of the guys who’s at the pub a lot—we call him Old Billy, and he was a friend of the former owner Mick. He’s over eighty, but his memory’s sharp. Or Bridget down the lane—she’s as old as Billy, and she’s lived right around here most of her life, and she seems to know everybody and everything. Maybe they won’t know where to find these fort things, but they can tell you where to look.”

  “Thank you for the suggestions. This is my first real field survey, and I want to learn as much as I can and record all the details. It’s a challenge
, you know?”

  “I’m sure it is. You said you already have maps?”

  “I do. Luckily the property boundaries haven’t changed much. Do you know how much total acreage you have here?”

  “Not at all. I just signed whatever papers the lawyer handed me. Old Mick had lived here all his life, I gather, and his ancestors before him. I don’t think he sold off anything. Or farmed it, for that matter—I’ve been told he made his money at the pub. He didn’t seem to need much, and he wasn’t keeping cows or sheep. Some of the other owners here do. How long do you think this will take you?”

  “Longer than I have,” Ciara said ruefully.

  “Are you staying around here somewhere?” Maura asked.

  “It’s only an hour to the university, so that’s not a problem. Though I’ve enlisted some university friends to help, with photos and the like. And this county is a large one.”

  “Well, let me know if you need someplace to crash now and then. And I guess I’d like to know more about a place that’s mine. Owning something like this is still pretty new to me.”

  “I could show you the basics, on your computer.”

  “Uh, Ciara, I don’t own a computer. I barely know how to use one.”

  “Oh. Well, I can bring my laptop along, though the images wouldn’t be very large. But it might be useful to you to know where your land is. From what I can tell, sometimes local farmers are looking for a little extra grazing land, and they might pay you to use it.”

  That was something Maura had never considered, but she’d never learned anything about farming when she was growing up in Boston. She could tell a cow from a sheep, but that was about as far as it went. “It’s mostly cows, I think. There’s a creamery up at Drinagh that’s pretty big. Sometimes I see their milk tankers go by on the main road.”

  “There are several major ring forts scattered around Drinagh. And other places too. There’s still so much we don’t know about them! But one thing seems clear: people still believe there’s something supernatural around them. Sometimes they’re called fairy forts.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That you shouldn’t mess with them. I’ve read that up until several years ago farmers were destroying a lot of them, but bad things started happening to them, like tractor accidents or sick cattle. So in the past decade or two they’ve stopped tearing them apart. Which is good for me. Same thing’s happened with new construction, close to the towns. A company wants to build a new factory where there’s a fairy fort, but they can’t find any local workers to build it because the workers are scared of what might happen to them.”

  “Sorry, but that sounds weird to me.”

  “Weird but true,” Ciara said, smiling. “I treat the ring forts with respect, but I’d like to know who built them and why. I make sure I don’t do any damage. So, do you have to get to your pub?”

  “I should leave soon, and I need to shower. Feel free to go wherever you want, although I can’t tell you how my neighbors will react, since I haven’t met a lot of them, but like I said, Bridget—she lives in the yellow cottage just downhill—loves company, and I’m sure she can tell you a lot of about the history of this townland, which is Knockskagh But I would like to know more about what you’re looking for, and what you find.”

  “I’ll print out the maps for Knockskagh, so you can see where the circles might be or once were. I’m really glad you don’t mind my wandering about. I’ll get out of your hair now. If you’d like to see where I’m guessing your land is, maybe we could take a walk in the morning? If you’re in the pub most of the time?”

  “It’d have to be early, but you may have noticed the sun comes up pretty early in June. Come by and maybe we could spend an hour or two checking things out.”

  “Thank you!” Ciara swallowed the last of her bread, drained her coffee mug, and all but bounced out of her chair. “And thank you for the breakfast. I hope I’ll be seeing more of you.”

  “I’d like that,” Maura said, mainly because it seemed polite, although she wasn’t sure she’d have to time to chase down old circles in the fields. But she should know something about the property she’d inherited, and about the history that came with it. “I’ll be up early. And I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” Ciara said, and made her exit.

  Maura sighed. What had she let herself in for? She knew vaguely that she had more land than the small piece the cottage sat on, but she had had no intention of looking for it, much less doing something with it, and nobody until now had come to ask her about it. But after more than a year in West Cork, maybe she should know more about where she was living, and its history. Did they teach that in schools around here? In Boston, her history teacher had devoted about two class hours to the American Revolution, and Lexington and Concord and Paul Revere. But, she realized, she didn’t have any knowledge of the history of West Cork, apart from the bit about the O’Donovan who supposedly jumped his horse over the ravine next to the pub—a story she took with a grain of salt, because she had doubts about whether any horse could have made that jump. But it made a nice dramatic story and people still remembered it.

  Were fairy forts in the same category? She might as well go with Ciara at least once and find out what all the fuss was about.

  Chapter Two

  Despite Ciara’s interruption, Maura arrived at Sullivan’s before anyone else. Admittedly, business would be pretty slow early in the day, but she welcomed the time to clean up the place. A couple of months earlier Rose Sweeney had persuaded her to expand the kitchen and make it usable, and the improvements were moving along slowly but steadily, although Maura still had no idea when they would be finished. Maura had inherited Rose along with the pub, and though she was still a teenager, she had proved to be a hard worker, and she knew more about running the place than Maura did. In addition to her shifts at the pub, she was now taking cooking classes in Skibbereen. Whether they would ever progress to serving more than sandwiches was still an open question, but Maura was giving Rose free rein to get the old kitchen up and running. Fancy dreams were one thing, but reality was something else.

  Sophie and Niall, a sister and brother she’d met and kind of rescued earlier in the spring, were working at two different restaurants in Skibbereen, with the promise to return to Sullivan’s if business ever picked up. Maura wasn’t holding her breath, but she was keeping her fingers crossed. Rose had met Sophie while they were taking the same cooking class in Skibbereen, and Maura knew Sophie had real talent as a cook. Niall had turned out to be a great bartender, and he was beginning to attract a younger crowd, not to mention more women.

  There were rooms upstairs, but under Old Mick they had been neglected for a long time. Maura hadn’t quite made up her mind whether to offer them as a plus for employees, which weren’t easy to find, or whether to actually rent them out. She gave Ann Sheahan at the Leap Inn across the road first rights to any paying guests, not that she and Ann had discussed it, though she had volunteered to take Ann’s overflow, if any. But Maura’s main hope was that her current staffing would be adequate to cover the summer tourist season until the kitchen remodel was finished.

  Mick Nolan, her sort-of boyfriend was the next to arrive. “Yeh’re in early, Maura,” he commented. “It was wild last night.”

  “And profitable, I hope,” Maura said. “I was planning to sleep in, but I had an early visitor.”

  “Someone yeh know?”

  Maura shook her head. “Nope. Although most people who find me up in Knockskagh usually do know me, because my cottage isn’t exactly easy to find if you don’t know where to look. This was a grad student at the university in Cork. She wants to do some archaeology work on my land. Of course, apart from the cottage, I have no idea where my land actually is. I got the impression when I first found out about it that there are small pieces scattered all over the place up there, but I’ve never looked for them.”

  “Could be,” Mick said. “Th
e English often set it up that way, a while back. They weren’t happy about giving away any land at all to the Irish, so they made it hard for the farmers to use it without wastin’ a lot of time. Imagine herding your cattle from field to field every other day.”

  “Mick, I don’t know squat about managing cattle. I grew up in Boston, remember? No cattle there. But I can see your point. It wasn’t an efficient way to do things, if you were a farmer. Are things better now?”

  “Some,” Mick said. “Or there may be fewer dairy farmers, with larger land holdings—there’s a lot of milk comes from this part of the country. So what’s this Cork woman lookin’ for?”

  “Ring forts, she said. About which I know exactly nothing.”

  Mick smiled. “How long is it yeh’ve been in Cork?”

  “Over a year now, more or less, but I never have the time to wander around the countryside looking for things I don’t even recognize. You know about ring forts?”

  “I do, but I grew up in this county. Pay attention when yeh’re drivin’ around and you’ll most likely see a few of the bigger ones. There’s one just over the hill from yeh, on yer way to Ballinlough, but the road’s crumbling away now, so yeh’d have to walk it.”

  “Right past that lovely piggery, right? I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, the woman’s name is Ciara McCarthy, and she says she wants to do some serious surveying—find as many of these things as she can and figure out how they relate to each other. If they do. She also said something odd.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “That there’s something weird about ring forts, like they’re sort of haunted. People leave them alone, mostly.”

  “The fairies don’t like to be disturbed,” Mick said.

  Maura looked at his face to see if he was joking. He wasn’t smiling. “You too? Seriously? Should I be watching for fairies? And what would they look like?”

  “Depends on what yeh believe. There’s a long history of fairy folk in Ireland, and there’s plenty of people who believe in ’em. Or half believe, in case it’s true. There’s those as have wireless connections and satellite dishes, but they still won’t mess with a fairy tree.”