Hobgoblin

by John Coyne

  Derek used the firebreak road to reach the cemetery, racing one of the Foundation jeeps up the steep incline. Barbara clung to the dashboard with one hand and held on to her seat with the other. When they hit a big bump she yelped with pleasure, as thrilled by the rough ride as a schoolgirl. "God! That was wonderful!" she exclaimed as the jeep bounced to a stop at the crest of the hill. Breathless and flushed from the ride, she stood in the open cab and scanned the horizon. "Why, you can almost see forever," she remarked, and jumped down to survey Steepletop. "It's lovely, isn't it?" Derek said, calling after her. "Fergus took the best site at Ballycastle for his graveyard. Some sense of values, right?" "Oh, I don't know. It brings the deceased closer to heaven, doesn't it? I can understand why Valerie is so fond of this spot." Barbara stepped to the edge of the cliff and stood quietly for a moment, taking in the vast view. Below was a section of the property that she could not see from the mansion, and it reminded her again of the wealth of Ballycastle. "What's that?" she asked, pointing off to the far corner of the hilly terrain. "Where?" Derek picked up the picnic lunch and came to stand beside her. "There!" she pointed. "That house. I don't remember ever seeing it on the landscape map." She turned to Derek, frowning, afraid she had made a mistake in her work. "Oh, that." Derek set the picnic basket down and began to spread a blanket on the grass. "It's nothing," he said. "It looks like some sort of log cabin. Derek, I can't remember any mention of a log cabin on the property." Barbara had raised her hands to screen out the bright sun and she squinted into the distance, trying to decipher the structure. "That's what it is, a log cabin." Derek stretched out on the blanket and began unpacking sandwiches. "Fergus had several on the property. He used them as hunting lodges, I guess. The others have been torn down because of disrepair, and that one is next. We'll get around to wrecking it next year. "Now, how about a sandwich? Let's eat," he suggested, sounding eager. "I'm starving." "Wait." Barbara turned away from the view. "I want to look around for a minute." She stepped through the open iron gate and went inside the graveyard, walking from one tombstone to the next. "They are unbelievable, aren't they?" Barbara laughed, shocked by the grotesque shapes of the headstones. She moved from grave to grave, silently reading the out-thrust scrolls and searching for Carmel Burke's headstone. The graveyard was small and in the second row she spotted it:

  Carmel Burke 1912-1931 Adieu ma cuisette folâtre

  Strange, Barbara thought, carving an obscure French epitaph on an Irish housemaid's grave. She glanced at the other headstones. They, too, bore similar lines:

  Adieu, ma gorgette Adieu, mon sein Adieu, mon oeil Adieu, mon coeur Adieu, ma délicate main

  And so on, down the line of headstones. Barbara's French was rusty, but a few of the words came instantly to mind: ma main, my hand; mon oeil, my eyes; mon coeur, my heart. It struck her then. When Fergus's people died, he bade them good-by, not as servants, or even as family members, but as parts of his own body. "Farewell, my delicate hand. Farewell, my eye. Farewell, my heart." She couldn't recall the meaning of "gorgette," "sein," or the others, but she imagined they would fit the pattern. How creepy, she thought-and how like Fergus. What he owned he owned totally. Barbara took out a small pad and pencil and jotted down the names and dates on each headstone. Maeve Donnellan's was the last, and Barbara noticed that this particular maid had not been honored with an epitaph. "Fergus must've run out of good parts," she thought wryly. "At least he had the good taste not to say, `Adieu, my elbow.'" She circled around then to the front of the cemetery, to the only monument in the small graveyard-a giant bronze angel of death hovering over a raised slab of Connemara marble. She stepped closer to read the name on the stone.

  Fergus O'Cuileannain 1900-1945

  There was no French or English epitaph beneath the lettering. No words of mourning. She backed away, suddenly uncomfortable. The gargoyles, the epitaphs, the strange black figure of the angel-the whole graveyard, she realized, made her nervous. "Fergus was a young man when he died," she commented, quickly stepping through the gate and joining Derek on the picnic blanket. "What happened to him?" "An accident on the steeplechase field," Derek said. "It was right after the war and he had just begun having house parties again. He was killed the first grand weekend after V-J Day-thrown by his favorite jumper, Nightfall, and dragged clear across the steeplechase." "Oh, God, how ghastly." "I guess it was even worse than that. The body was all mangled and mutilated and he was buried at once, in a private service. He had no living relatives, or so they thought at first." "What do you mean?" Barbara settled down with her back to the cemetery. "Well, his will established the Foundation, worth thirty million in trust, to do good works here in America. When they read the will-" "How did he make all that money, anyway?" she interrupted. "Lots of ways. Like many poor boys, he started young and took a lot of risks. In his teens he went out to South Africa to look for gold and ended up smuggling diamonds instead. After the First World War he came back to Europe and put the money he'd made into buying and selling scrap metal. He even had oil wells in the Middle East before Mobil." "And he died without any heirs?" "So it seemed, but before the Foundation could be put into operation, some distant cousins from Galway hired an American lawyer and tied up everything in Irish and American courts. That's why it has taken so long to establish the Foundation. "I was only hired myself shortly before I interviewed you last spring. In the interim Conor lived alone at Ballycastle, except for people hired by the estate from time to time for repairs and upkeep. You should have seen the place when we took over. Wild dogs living in your house, bats hanging from the ceiling of my office, junk and garbage everywhere. Conor isn't much of a caretaker, but he is, of course, our sole link with Fergus and Ballycastle as it was then." "And as we well know, Conor can be maddeningly oblique on the subject." Derek glanced across at Barbara, registering the frustration in her voice. "I know," he said understandingly. "But you're really making it harder for yourself. You can write your report so that the history of the castle is general rather than detailed. That would be fine with the board of directors. What they really want to know about is the art and furnishings-what's there and what it's worth. Don't forget, that's the bottom line." Barbara nodded, as if agreeing. But then she said, "I'd feel cheated if I didn't make one last effort to locate all the missing files. After all, that's how you re-create history-by piecing it together, bit by bit. I want to know what it was like to be an indentured servant here in the thirties. I want to get to know Fergus." She took a gulp of her diet soda. "That's the real fun of this job-finding out what Fergus was all about."

  That afternoon Barbara found Carmel Burke. Recharged with energy, she returned from lunch ready to tackle the task of cataloguing several storage rooms of furniture. It was there, in the cellars of Ballycastle, that she found them-a set of black payroll ledgers, stashed away in an old cabinet. As she turned the thick, stiff pages, she spotted Carmel's name almost immediately, between Bernadette Comerford and Ray McManus, the name entered in the vertical, almost backward-slanting script of a European. Barbara sat down on the nearest old armchair and slowly turned the pages of the ledger, picking out Carmel's name in each month's listing from the year 1930 through the summer of '31. In September 1931 Carmel disappeared from the list. Barbara closed the book. It was a beginning, she realized. The personnel files were still missing, but Conor was searching for them, and now she had what looked like a meticulous listing of all of Fergus's employees for the period in question. Collecting all the remaining ledgers from the cabinet, she carried them excitedly upstairs, as if she had discovered buried treasure.