The Celtic Riddle

by Lyn Hamilton

  He smiled as he caught up to us. “Don’t you want to see Rose Cottage, Mr. Stewart?” he said. “I could show you where it is.”

  I looked at Alex and shrugged. “Why not? Is it far?”

  “Not far,” he replied, “but,” he said looking rather dubiously at my feet, “it’s a bit of a climb, Ms. McClintoch.”

  “Call me Lara, and I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I said tartly. I had eschewed my normal comfortable flat shoes and squashed my feet into something a little more fitting for such a formal occasion as the reading of a Will at Second Chance, a decision I’d been regretting long before this.

  “Okay, Ms. McClintoch,” he said, ignoring my attempt at familiarity, and making me feel rather old. “This way.”

  We went around to the back of the house, and down toward the water, then followed a path that led beside a hill on the right. The path started to climb, affording us a magnificent view of both the sea and the grounds of the Byrne estate. To one side of the house was a very large kitchen garden, four square beds of vegetables and herbs surrounded by a low hedge of what looked to be rosemary, and bisected by a stone path. An arch, almost obscured by white climbing roses, led to a cutting garden, I supposed, filled with a profusion of flowers. An almost perfect lawn divided that from the rose garden on one side, and a tropical setting of palms and flowers. I thought of the rather patchy swath of grass I called a lawn at home and felt more than a tinge of envy.

  “Do you like them?” Michael asked. “The grounds, I mean?”

  The gardens were exceptionally beautiful, and I said so.

  “I’m really quite proud of them myself.” He grinned.

  “Are you ... ?” I paused. Should I say gardener? I wondered.

  “The groundskeeper,” he said. Of course, I thought. People like me might have a gardener. Should have a gardener, I corrected myself, thinking of my pathetic attempts at making something of the backyard. The Eamon Byrnes of this world, however, have grounds-keepers.

  “You’ve done a wonderful job,” I said, and Alex agreed.

  “Mr. Byrne says I have the touch,” he went on. “Said,” he added. “He always said I had the touch.” He looked out to sea for a moment. “He could be a mean old bugger, I know, but I’ll miss him.”

  “Are those orchids?” I asked, pointing toward the palm grove, and trying to change the subject.

  “They are,” he replied, turning back to me. “This is a tiny ecosystem,” he said. “A little tropical paradise where you might not expect it. This part of Ireland is warmed by the Atlantic currents, and some rather unusual plants and animals are the result.” He went on to talk knowledgeably about various aspects of horticulture as we continued our climb up and around the side of the hill. I could see why Eamon Byrne thought Michael Davis worth supporting and sending back to school.

  The path continued to curve around to the right and away from the house, until we reached a headland, high above the water. Here, the wind was in our faces, waves dashed the rocks below us, and a mass of yellow gorse and purple heather stretched as far as we could see, a feast for the eyes of a different kind from the carefully tended gardens around the house. This was the wild side of the hill. I looked back, but the house was now obscured from our view. Ahead of us was a small cluster of houses, derelict, roofs gone, and abandoned.

  “It’s not far now,” Michael said. We continued along the path, which followed the edge of the cliff, occasionally veering too close to the edge for someone as uncomfortable with heights as I. The water lay rather far below us. It was spectacularly beautiful. Though it was still clear, as it had been all day, dark clouds were forming close to the horizon, and the sky on this side was a very dark gray, almost black. From time to time, the sun would pierce through the cloud, almost like a spotlight, and a bright circle of light would appear on the water below. As I watched a heron swooped low, skimming the water below us, “Next stop is America,” Michael said, pointing out to sea. It was true, when I thought about it. There really was nothing but water between this point and North America. “I’d like to go there some day,” he said wistfully, then more practically, “Rain coming. Weather comes up very fast here. We won’t stay long.”

  Stay where, I wondered, but then I saw it. It was not quite as I’d imagined it: Rose Cottage. In every way, in fact, it was quite inappropriately named. Heather House, perhaps, or even Gorse Cottage, but not a rose to be seen. Instead, there was a wind-weathered house a hundred yards inland, its face to the sea, and its back to a mountain. It was not large, not compared to Second Chance, that is, and in many ways rather plain. Instead of the thatched roof of my reverie, the roof was slate. The walls were whitewashed and two rather tired-looking wooden chairs sat out front.

  I turned to Alex. He stood almost transfixed by the sight of it, as if he could not believe his good fortune. He loved the place, I could tell, and even though I knew this might mean I’d lose his company back home, I felt a rush of happiness on his behalf.

  “Take a pew, why don’t you?” Michael said, gesturing to the chairs, “while I get the key.” Alex sat on the sturdier-looking chair of the two and gazed about him. I looked around as well, out to sea, and then beyond the cottage to a patch of trees. When I looked back, Alex had a small smile on his face and was nodding his head.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” I said, feeling just so pleased for him.

  “Quite wonderful,” he replied, having found his voice at last.

  Michael continued his search, lifting a couple of old pails on the porch and feeling up into the rafters. “What’s the problem?” I asked him.

  “The key,” he replied. “It’s usually around here somewhere. I thought Mr. Stewart would like to see inside.”

  I tried the door, and it opened. Michael shrugged. “Last one here forgot to lock up, I guess. No harm really. There’s never anyone about, and there’s nothing in here worth much.”

  We stepped inside into the main room. It may not have been the little jewel I’d imagined, but I immediately fell in love with it. On our left was a stone fireplace, cold stubs of candles stuck in wine bottles on the mantel, melted wax making little sculptured bee-hives at their base. Facing it was an old couch, not the perfect chintz I’d pictured, but satisfyingly comfy, and at right angles to it, two large chairs, the kind you yearn to flop down in. Another chair had been placed beside one of the two windows facing the sea, turned slightly so as to best capture the view. And what a view it was, across the heather to the cliffs and then as far as you could see over the water. I turned my gaze out to sea. It was one of those times when the light is extraordinary, when the sun is shining, but the sky and the water are almost black, the circling gulls slashes of white against the approaching dark. The wind dropped suddenly, the shriek of gulls as well, and the world fell silent, a kind of morbid stillness, as if breathless, waiting for something terrible to happen.

  Thinking that even an hour or so locked with the Byrne family in that dark room with the red velvet and the war paintings and the swords and spears had put me in a dreary frame of mind, I wrenched my attention from these gloomy thoughts and turned back to the room.

  In contrast to my unease about the world outside, the room had a very ordinary and comforting feel to it. To the right of the door was a rough-hewn table pushed against the wall, with two wooden chairs on either side. There was a pile of books on the table, and a well-worn sweater had been placed over the back of one chair. At the back, there was a tiny open kitchen, rather primitive in terms of appliances, just an icebox and a gas cooktop with two burners, which I took to mean there was no electricity. There was water, though, an enamel sink with a pump, and mismatched dishes stacked on open shelves. A doorway led off to the right, to what I assumed was the bedroom.

  I looked about me. “Breeta,” I called out. “Come and say hello.”

  The two men looked perplexed. After a few seconds, Breeta sidled through a door to the right of the fireplace. She was the kind of young woman, I thought, that peop
le always made a point of saying had a pretty face, by way of ignoring her excess weight. She did have many good features, beautiful dark hair set against flawless pale skin and blue eyes, but at this very moment, she looked dreadful. I wanted to take her home to my friend Moira’s beauty salon and get her straightened out. Her dark hair was unkempt, and she kept twisting a lank tendril round and round her finger. Dressed in black jeans and a baggy and rather unflatteringly-colored brown sweatshirt, she looked lumpen. Her pale skin was blotchy. She was suffering, it suddenly occurred to me, despite her uninterested demeanor, but whether it was from sorrow at the death of her father, or disappointment at being cut out of his Will, I couldn’t say. “How did you know?” she asked accusingly.

  I pointed toward the floor. “The tortoise. I saw its little brown head poking out from under the sofa,” I added.

  “He,” she said getting down on her knees and reaching under the sofa. “It’s a he, not an it. His name is Vigs.” That appeared to be all she was prepared to say.

  “Vigs,” I agreed, as I walked to the kitchen counter. A half-empty bottle of whiskey sat on the counter. I opened it and sniffed. It smelled just fine to me. I grabbed four tumblers, and turned to the others. “How about a get-acquainted drink?” I asked. “We might as well, it’s starting to rain,” I added, as the room grew suddenly darker.

  “Should these young people be drinking this?” Alex asked severely, eyeing the bottle of Bushmills.

  “This is Ireland, Mr. Stewart,” Michael laughed. “We’ll be getting this in our mother’s milk. Whiskey was invented here, you know. Irish monks. For medicinal purposes, of course. Took the recipe to Scotland, where they’ve made a bit of a botch of it.”

  Wisely I think, Alex and I chose not to get into a discussion of the relative merits of Scotch and Irish whiskey.

  Seconds later, the wind was blowing sheets of rain almost horizontally against the window. Breeta slumped once again in one of the chairs in front of the fireplace, a large wing chair covered in a cabbage rose print, and stroked the tortoise’s head. I poured. Breeta sulked.

  I felt myself getting irritated. Words cannot express how much I dislike people who sulk all the time. Mercifully, Jennifer Luczka has grown out of such a phase. Actually it was not so much growing out of it as a miraculous transformation when her father’s then live-in girlfriend Barbara vacated the premises. Barbara is a perky blonde I call Ms. Perfect on account of how she designs her own clothes, irons everything, even socks, runs marathons, and never serves a salad that doesn’t have a flower of some kind in it, all the while holding down a job as a vice president of a bank. Come to think of it, I like perky even less than I like sulky. Perhaps Jennifer does too.

  “How about a fire?” Michael exclaimed. He peered into the wood box, shrugged, and headed for the door. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  I stood by the window peering out into the mist. It was impossible to see more than a few feet from the window, and Michael had disappeared from view almost immediately. The rain drummed on the roof, and made splintering sounds against the windowpanes. In the distance I heard a squawk, a gull perhaps, or an animal scurrying from the wet, a sound that for a moment brought back the edginess I’d been feeling earlier.

  In what seemed rather longer than I would have thought necessary, Michael returned, soaking wet and very dirty, a pile of dark lumps about the size and shape of bricks in his arms. “Turf,” he said, noticing my expression. “You’ll need to get more, Mr. Stewart. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to reach the last of it under the house. We’ll have a fire.” In a few minutes he had the fire smouldering away, and stood, his back to it, drying out. Turf, I decided, was the famous Irish peat.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Michael said suddenly, taking a rather sodden piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. “My clue. I didn’t tell the others because they wouldn’t tell after you told them yours. They may get over it,” he added. “He gave them hard of his tongue, Mr. Byrne did, on that video. Maybe put them a bit out of sorts. Anyway, here it is: The furious wave.”

  “I am the sea-swell. The furious wave,” I said, very much doubting that the family would get over it, as Michael hoped. They seemed way too set in their miserable ways for that. “How very obscure. And speaking of obscure, who, by the way, is Padraig Gilhooly?”

  Dead silence in the room: Breeta’s hand paused in midstroke over the head of the tortoise.

  “Nobody,” said Michael. “Now, my clue has a two beside it. Do you think that means something?” Deft change of topic, that was.

  “I don’t know,” said Alex, taking his envelope out too. “Mine has a one.”

  “Of course it means something,” I said, abandoning my attempt to ferret out Gilhooly. “The clues are in some order. Eamon Byrne was, I surmise from his comments on the video, occasionally nasty as they may have been, a reasonably astute judge of character.” I hesitated for a moment before going on, realizing that he had judged Breeta too. She gave no indication that she was paying attention at all, though, just went on stroking the head of the tortoise in a monotonous way. “Knowing you both, he assumed you’d give your clue first, Alex, and that you, Michael, would be next.”

  “But what’s it mean?” Michael said.

  We, and by we I refer to the three of us, Breeta continuing to pretend we weren’t there, went on for a few minutes, speculating about what it might mean. It was pleasant enough with the flames licking around the turf, the rain pattering against the windows, the Bushmills sliding down quite nicely, and entertaining, in a kind of mindless way, to try to guess what this was all about: a game of twenty questions with the person who knew the answer gone from this world.

  Michael was particularly enthusiastic. “Maybe it’s about a shipwreck, some old ship off the coast here loaded with gold bullion,” he said.

  “Could be,” Alex agreed.

  “But it’s the sea-swell and furious wave, both on top, and not under the ocean. I wonder if we have to take it literally. Perhaps its an anagram, a cryptic clue of some sort.”

  Breeta sighed loudly. “It’s a poem,” she said, looking at the three of us as if we were members of a subhuman species, several notches below that of the pet she still held in her arms.

  We all looked at her. “Ah, come now, Bree,” Michael said in an exasperated tone. “Don’t just say ‘it’s a poem’ and leave it at that. What poem? What’s the rest of it?”

  Still Breeta said nothing. I felt like shaking her until her eyes bugged out, but resolved not to get emotionally involved in all this. Alex had his lovely little cottage, I told him, he’d done his part in giving the rest of them his clue, and now we should get back to having a holiday and ignore this horrid family.

  “‘Song of Amairgen,’ ” she said finally.

  “What?” we all said.

  “‘Song of Amairgen.’ Pronounced Av-ar-hin, spelled A-m-a-i-r-g-e-n, or sometimes A-m-h-a-i-r-g-h-i-n. It’s very old. Amairgen was supposed to be a file, that is a poet, of the Milesians, the first Celt to set foot on Irish soil. He’s claimed to have chanted this poem when he first stepped off the boat in Ireland. It’s all bullshit, of course.”

  “Who are, or were, the Milesians?”

  “Don’t you know anything?” Breeta replied. My, she was an annoying young woman. I told myself to be sure to tell Rob how lucky he is to have a daughter like Jennifer, who was not all that much younger than Breeta, as difficult as he may occasionally find her. “It’s in the Leabhar Gabala,” she said, “if you want to find out.”

  The Leabhar Gabala. Now that was helpful, almost as useful as the reply to the question about Padraig Gilhooly. This might be a good moment to remind myself how glad I was I’d never had children. Being, like many of my women friends, most of them in business like me, a little ambivalent in that regard, it was good I had such opportunities to clarify my thoughts on the subject from time to time.

  “Well, if you’re so smart,” Michael said, sounding as irritated as I felt, “what’s the nex
t line?”

  “The roar of the sea,” she said smugly.

  “Sure must have something to do with water,” Michael said.

  “The next line is about a stag,” Breeta said acidly. At least she was talking.

  “But we don’t know that Eamon was using the whole poem, now do we?” Alex said. “We’d need to see more clues for that.”

  “Breeta has a clue. Mr. McCafferty—or was it Mr. McGlynn?—put it in the safe in your father’s study, Bree,” Michael said. Breeta continued to look bored.

  “Come on, Bree,” Michael said, shyly leaning over and touching her hand. She pulled her arm away. Undeterred, he carried on. “Let’s go and get your envelope. It might be kind of fun to look for this thing, whatever it is. And if it really is worth something, like your Da says, and you find it, then everything will be all right. You’ll be set, you know, maybe for life.” But Breeta ignored us.

  Just as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Alex and I went outside to look about. Behind the house, inland, clouds still hovered over black mountains, but where we were was a world of bright, lush colors, greens predominantly, but also yellow and purple, and the intensely dark blue of the sea.

  “I could get used to this place,” Alex said, looking about him. “It wasn’t what I expected, with a name like Rose Cottage. I was thinking of something more like an English country garden, or something. But this suits me better, I think.”

  “I’m pleased for you Alex,” I said. “We can make it really nice.”

  He smiled. “I think I like it just as it is.”

  Michael came out to join us. “Don’t mind her,” he said, gesturing back toward the house. “She’s missing him terrible no matter how it looks.” Breeta appeared at the door, and he quickly changed the subject. “Right, we’d best be off. We’re in for some weather again,” he said, pointing to a new set of black clouds out to sea, and waving us back to the house.