Lake of Sorrows ng-2

by Erin Hart

  “That was Ursula Downes, the archaeologist heading up the bog road excavation on the site. She was first on the scene when the body was found.” Cadogan looked vaguely preoccupied, shuffling through some papers on his desk, perhaps only to avoid having to make eye contact. “Since you’re here, Ursula said she’d escort you out to the findspot, but she’s rather tied up at the moment—so she’s asked me to run you over there.” He tried to offer a smile, but could only manage a worried grimace.

  “Do I really need an escort? I’m sure I could find my way there if you gave me directions—”

  “The trouble is that we’re liable for your safety, and it’s really much better if either Ursula or I or someone from Bord na Mona is with you out on the bog. It can be a much more treacherous place than it may appear. If you’d like to bring your own car, I’m happy to lead you out to the site—that is, whenever you’re ready.”

  Nora glanced down at the brown film of limescale floating atop her now-cold tea. “I’m ready now.”

  As she followed Cadogan in her own car, watching him cut corners and shift gears a bit more forcefully than was warranted, Nora wondered what had passed between him and Ursula Downes. After speeding down the winding, tree-lined drive from the office, Cadogan turned onto the long, straight bog road. A set of narrow-gauge train tracks ran parallel to the road just below the ditch, and three rusting railcars sat idle upon them, with no engine in sight. Where the rails curved away from the road and out into the center of the bog, she could also see a jumble of extra track and several large bales of black plastic beside a high bank of turf someone had cut away by hand. A dirty wing chair faced the bank, as if someone had been sitting watching the cutter at work. It reminded her that in addition to its ancient use as a ritual depository, the bog had more recently taken on the role of communal rubbish heap. There was a pervasive air of abandonment here that surely didn’t sit well with someone like Owen Cadogan, who still saw himself as young and vigorous. There wasn’t much time to take in details; Cadogan’s gray Nissan fairly flew along ahead of her, and she struggled to keep up on the bumpy road.

  As they came near the site, she could see figures working at cuttings along the drain faces. In the distance, a brilliant white marquee tent out on the bog billowed slightly in the wind, looking oddly medieval in this dark, barren place. That’s where the body was; it had to be. Cadogan finally braked abruptly when he came alongside a television news van and a couple of small rectangular trailers that seemed to have been dropped haphazardly by the side of the road. Between the sheds, a fair-haired woman was pacing and smoking a cigarette as she spoke on a mobile phone. She looked to be in her midthirties, and was dressed in standard work clothes for the bog: heavy-duty waterproof gear and industrial-strength rubber boots.

  As they pulled onto the patch of gravel beside the first trailer, the woman closed her phone and approached Nora’s car. Ursula’s spiky fair hair and full lips were certainly arresting, but it was her large, luminous green eyes—set off by the delicate gold ring that pierced her left eyebrow—that added a not-so-subtle air of sensuality to her appearance. Whatever had passed between her and Owen Cadogan on the telephone had created a tension Nora could feel from several feet away, as Cadogan got out of his car and strode toward them, arms crossed over his chest in a posture that demanded acknowledgment. He opened his mouth to speak, but Ursula deliberately ignored him.

  “You must be Dr. Gavin,” she said, and Nora was surprised to hear a voice that immediately betrayed working-class Dublin origins. “Ursula Downes. I’ve heard so much about you, I feel as if we’ve already met.” Heard so much from whom? Nora wanted to ask. As they shook hands, she felt the woman’s eyes sweep her up and down, and had the unmistakable impression that she was being judged. It wasn’t that Nora hadn’t experienced this sort of scrutiny before—she was a Yank, after all, and had grown accustomed to being inspected—but the sincerity in Ursula’s gaze had only to increase by the slightest margin before it crossed over into something much closer to condescension.

  Ursula let go of Nora’s hand and finally turned to acknowledge Cadogan. “Owen.” The remarkable sea green eyes flickered across his face. “Mr. Cadogan usually pretends not to give a toss about what I’m up to out here, but he’s actually terribly, terribly interested.” Though these words were presumably addressed to Nora, Ursula’s eyes remained on Cadogan. “Thanks for escorting Dr. Gavin,” she said, glancing toward the television news vans. “I’ve been up to me oxters out here, trying to keep all the feckin’ reporters from tripping into the cuttings.”

  Owen Cadogan’s simmering annoyance was visible in his eyes, and in the grim set of his lips. “Could I have a word, Ursula?” he asked. “If you’d excuse us just one minute, Dr. Gavin…”

  “I’ll get my things,” Nora said. She went around to her trunk to collect the gear she’d need for the day, and to climb into her waterproofs. She tried not to listen as she stepped into the baggy rubberized trousers, but couldn’t help overhearing snatches of whispered conversation above the sound of the wind. “…treat me like your fucking errand boy,” Cadogan was saying to Ursula, his right hand in a close grip on her elbow. She shrugged him off.

  After Cadogan climbed into his car and roared away, Ursula Downes approached again, showing no apparent concern about the taut conversation.

  “I’m sorry if I caused any trouble,” Nora said. “I couldn’t get exact directions—”

  “Not to worry,” Ursula said. “Owen’s just in a poxy mood today. He got some bad news recently.” She didn’t elaborate, but somehow Nora got the impression that the source of Cadogan’s dire bulletin had been none other than Ursula herself. “That was Niall Dawson on the mobile when you were arriving; he said they’re about halfway here and should be arriving in the next hour.”

  Once again, Nora felt like a fifth wheel. “I’d love to have a look at what you’re doing until the others get here.”

  “I suppose. Come along, then.” Ursula led the way across a low-lying area beside the ditch, walking along in the impression left by a giant tractor tire. “It’s still a bit soft in the low spots. Just put your feet down where I do.”

  Nora followed, carefully treading the same path Ursula took, her legs unsteady in the soft peat. To their right stood a rectangular pool—no doubt the end of a drain—reflecting the deep blue sky and billowy clouds. Beside it sat a twisted stump of bog oak, whose striated, ash gray surface had the segmented, half-burned look of charcoal. No fire had burned it, Nora realized. The effect came from the foreign touch of parched air after centuries of immersion.

  “The wind is brutal today, isn’t it?” she said, trying to make conversation.

  Ursula turned back slightly, but kept walking. “I’ll warn you—after a whole day out here, it feels as if you’ve been scrubbed raw. The peat gets everywhere: in your eyes, in your hair, even in your pores. It’s almost impossible to get clean, and usually not worth the trouble.” Nora glanced down at Ursula’s hands, and saw black peat beneath the sculpted nails.

  As they climbed the gentle rise of a slightly rounded field between two drains, Nora felt the familiar, not-quite-solid sensation underfoot. It was like walking on dry sponge. The first half-inch of peat had curled and cracked into irregular puzzle pieces, like the mud of a dry lakebed. It was clear that the peat in this area hadn’t been cut in several years. Green plants sprouted at random; she recognized grass and sedge plants, sheep’s sorrel and butterwort, and behind the clumps of rushes lay whitish pellets left by the hares who had used the rushes for cover.

  “Your man’s away down here,” Ursula said. She pointed to the white tent, another hundred yards past the excavation site. A lone uniformed Garda officer sat on watch outside, his temporary seat an upturned white plastic bucket. The wind was still strong, and the blue-and-white crime-scene tape marking out the findspot trembled vigorously.

  It was hard to imagine what this place must have been like thousands of years before. It must have taken a s
imilar communal effort to make the roads that Ursula and the crew were digging up today, to cut down hundreds of trees, to fashion spikes, to weave hurdles from saplings. Whole villages must have turned out. If bogs had been sacred, then this area must have been a very holy place indeed. There were only sporadic patches of dry land, scattered like islands across the marshy center. What had it been then? A place of offering. Larder. Death trap. Quagmire. Healer of wounds. Nora tried to imagine the time when all this had been wild bogland, crisscrossed by floating roads, a fearsome place roaming with wild beasts and bandits. She played the picture in her head, of the last hundred centuries, from glaciers to forests and solitary meadows, lakes gradually filling in, building up until the peat was ten and fifteen meters deep, dead but undecayed, immune to corruption. Home to strange and primitive carnivorous plants, delicate orchids, clouds of midges.

  When she looked up, Ursula was yards ahead of her, easily jumping the drain to the next bank. Nora’s palms began to sweat as she approached the drain, unsure if she could make it across. She saw Ursula turn to watch her, a subtle challenge in her expression. What had she done to earn this woman’s scorn? They’d barely met, and already Ursula seemed to dislike her. She gathered her courage and cleared the drain in one hopping step. Safe.

  “Who actually found the body?” she asked.

  “I did,” Ursula said. “We were clearing out this drain yesterday, getting ready to start another cutting here. I was directing Charlie Goggles, one of the Bord na Mona lads, who was driving the Hymac, trying to make sure he didn’t put the spoil where the cutting was supposed to be. After he dropped the first bucket, I saw something sticking up out of the peat. Thought it was an animal bone at first, but it wasn’t—it was the bog man’s thumb. Still attached to his hand, which was still attached to his arm, which was still attached to his torso. Poor Charlie Goggles. Nearly pissed himself when he saw it.”

  “Charlie Goggles? You don’t mean Charlie Brazil?”

  “Ah, you’ve met him. None other.”

  When they reached the tent, Ursula ignored the Garda officer’s cautious gesture of greeting and ducked through the flap. Nora followed. The space inside was an oasis of diffuse light and sublime calm after their windy trek across the bog. Stepping inside felt like entering another realm, another dimension. As she looked around, Nora felt Ursula studying her once more, making sure that her anticipation reached full fruition before lifting a corner of the black plastic sheeting that had been staked to the ground over a mound of loose wet peat. Nora’s eyes searched the sodden heap until she saw a glistening, dark brown patch that she knew immediately was human skin. Like the previous bog remains she’d seen, it had an iridescent, slightly metallic cast.

  “Do you think it would be all right if I—”

  Ursula cut her off: “Do what you like. I’m not in charge of him; Niall Dawson has made that perfectly bloody clear.”

  Nora was aware for the first time that she had blundered into a potentially hazardous competition. Archaeologists had their turf wars, the same as everyone else, and maybe it was just the fact that she was part of the museum team that had put Ursula in bad humor. Whatever the politics here, she had to remain neutral. The problems of the living were the least of her business.

  She knelt down and realized that she was holding her breath. The peat was wet and crumbly, like very damp, fibrous cake. She removed several handfuls of the stuff and saw how the excavator’s gargantuan teeth had bisected the man at an angle just below his diaphragm, exposing muscle tissue and shrunken internal organs. The thought of such violence done to a fragile human being, even one centuries dead, suddenly made her feel queasy.

  No one had mentioned how extraordinarily well-preserved this man was. His head, shoulders, and upper chest were almost miraculously intact. And if the Hymac had cut the body in half, there was a good chance that the rest of it was still under the bank below their feet. The man’s skin was a rich dark brown, the typical tanned-leather appearance of a bog body. Tufts of hair about half an inch long stood out from his head, dark, but with the unmistakable reddish tinge of bog water. In the lab, they’d be able to tell how recently it had been cut, and with what kind of blade. Nora’s eyes traveled the contours of his face again. She didn’t want to forget anything about this moment, about the picture before her. In the next two days, he would be photographed from every angle, and finally removed from this place where he had slept so long undisturbed. There was no evidence of clothing, but a braided leather armlet circled his left biceps, and a thin piece of twisted leather lay coiled behind his head. Nora reached into her jacket pocket for a magnifying glass. Through the thick lens, she traced the cord to a triple knot just below the right ear, and saw how the leather cut into the wasted flesh. She crawled around to get a better look at the throat and noticed one end of a deep gash just below the ligature. From the position of the cut, inside the body’s protected curve, she knew it could not have been made by an errant machine blade. By all appearances, someone had strangled this man and savagely cut his throat.

  She raised her head and heard a hollow noise in her ears. That sound might have been the last thing he’d heard out on the bog as well: the gusting wind, or a faint whistle as it dragged through the sharp points of furze and heather. Or perhaps what he had heard were the few words whispered by his executioner just before the fatal blow. She wondered whether the armlet signified anything. Had he been a member of the society that killed him, a high-born leader, perhaps—or a prisoner, a hostage, an outcast? Had he gone willingly to his end, or been carried here bound and under protest? She imagined his killing carried out in darkness, some secret ritual witnessed only by the moon and stars, but maybe it hadn’t happened that way at all. Maybe the bloodletting had been part of some public display.

  She was suddenly aware of Ursula Downes standing beside her. “Looks like someone wanted to make sure he was dead,” Ursula said. “Did you see the stakes? Look at his arms.”

  Nora saw several thin wooden stakes about an inch in diameter that had been driven through the flesh of the man’s upper arms.

  “I don’t suppose you ought to do anything more until Niall Dawson gets here,” Ursula said. She looked down at the bog man again and probed at his curled fist with the toe of her boot, a gesture that made Nora cringe. She wanted to shove Ursula away from the fragile body, out of the tent. But instead she slowly replaced the wet peat over the corpse and they stepped outside, back into the harsh sun and wind.

  “Might take a couple of days to get him crated up,” Ursula said. “I assume you’ve got accommodation sorted.” The extraordinary green eyes shot her a stealthy look, and Nora suddenly felt foolish. Of course—everything was falling into place now; Ursula’s having heard so much about her, the sideways glances that said she was under close scrutiny. It should have come as no surprise at all that Ursula and Cormac were acquainted—Dawson too. They were probably all old friends, and she was the mug. She should have remembered that here in Ireland, the world of archaeology was a tiny sphere, and Cormac knew everyone in it. Clearly Ursula had been toying with her since the moment they’d met, but there was no reason to let on that she knew it. Nora struggled to put on her blankest expression. “Yes, I’m staying with a friend nearby.”

  Ursula gave a mysterious smile, then looked across the bog toward her crew and sighed. “What the bloody hell are they up to now?” She checked her watch. “They’re not due a tea break for another hour.”

  Nora followed Ursula’s gaze. The crew were all standing about one of the cuttings. With the wind, it was impossible to hear what anyone was saying, but their postures communicated a disagreement of some sort. One young woman broke away from the group and started running toward them. “Ursula!” she shouted, voice faint against the wind, and her hail was followed by a gesture, a single sweep of the arm that said “Come.” Nora followed as Ursula began to run.

  When they reached the crew, Nora could see expressions of shock and dismay around the circle of fr
esh, windburned faces. A dark-haired girl crouched on the bank above the drain, her wellingtons covered in fresh muck to the midcalf.

  “Jesus Christ, Rachel, why didn’t you say anything?” demanded one young man.

  “What’s going on?” Ursula demanded. “And you—” she said to the television cameraman who had wandered over to see what was happening “—get the hell off this bank before I run you.” He raised his free hand in a gesture of submission and beat a hasty retreat back to his van. Ursula turned to the crew. “Now, somebody tell me quick what’s going on here.”

  Several of them responded at once: “Rachel fell into the drain—”

  “We had to pull her out—”

  “I was concentrating on what I was doing,” the girl said. “I accidentally stepped off the end of the plank. I didn’t ask anyone to rescue me.”

  Ursula’s tone was incredulous. “I can’t believe you’re all in such a state about having to pull someone out of a drain. For Christ’s sake—”