Haunted Ground ng-1

by Erin Hart

  “I’ve been admiring your maps,” he said. “They look authentic.”

  Osborne nodded. “That one”—he gestured to the frame hanging above the fireplace—“was the first comprehensive map of this area, drawn up by Hugo Osborne, the chap in the portrait I showed you upstairs. I think I mentioned he was one of William Petty’s men. The story is that he surveyed everything himself.” Cormac stood to peruse the map. According to this drawing, the estate consisted of a large area around the house, and various other small pockets and parcels of land scattered throughout the parish. There was a crude, three-dimensional view of Bracklyn House itself, and the nearby priory, the tower, heavily wooded areas, small clusters of houses, the lake and surrounding bogland, and in the lower right corner, a computation of all the estate’s arable lands.

  “No mention of Drumcleggan here at all,” Cormac said.

  “That’s what I first noticed about it as well. Says something about the attitude of the conqueror, doesn’t it? Fortunately, the visual detail is spot-on. When you think about it, our vocations aren’t all that different. When you excavate a site, you’re cutting down through the actual physical evidence of human activity that took place there; in studying place-names, I dig through layers as well, but they’re usually layers of maps and papers, all jumbled up with Irish names, English, Danish, Norman names, some altered beyond all recognition. Bad translations are my greatest challenge.”

  “Are all those tapes?” Cormac asked, indicating the rows of white reel-to-reel tape boxes he’d just noticed lining the shelves behind the door.

  Osborne was warming to his subject now. “Yes, my own project. Interviews with old people from the area, on the subject of place-names. It’s amazing what some of them can recall, from years and years ago, if only one thinks to ask. And how place-names in particular have a tendency to stick where they’ve been put down. I’m afraid I’ve let the project slide recently, but there’s a whole lot of valuable documentation there; I’m thinking I should resurrect it one day. You should see some of the blunders being perpetuated on the maps and road signs. If you’re going to return to the old names, isn’t it important that they be correct, and not just quasi-Gaelic versions of bad translations? At some point it does get down to academic hair-splitting, I grant you, but there is principle involved.” He gave a wry smile. “Regretting now you ever got me started?”

  “Ah—actually, I did mean to ask how you became interested in bookbinding,” Cormac said, consciously playing into Hugh Osborne’s self-deprecation. Osborne drained his glass and rose briefly to pour them each another tott. Cormac was relieved that his remark had been received in the spirit in which it was intended.

  “At university, actually. I read history as an undergraduate, and was amazed that they’d actually let us handle all those rare papers and manuscripts. The conservator at the library used to let me lend a hand now and again. I set up this workshop a few years ago. Bookbinding is only a sideline, really; maps and documents are my speciality. I do a bit of work for libraries and collectors, partly because it brings in a few shillings, but mostly because I enjoy it. We’ve a whole lot of old family papers about the place, deeds and records of births, letters from a few historical figures that I think are worth preserving for the stories they tell.” His voice softened slightly, and Cormac felt he was about to receive a confidence that might not have been shared, if it weren’t for the hour and their mutual malady. “All things I’d hoped to pass along to my son, as they’d been passed to me.” Osborne raised his face slightly, and the two men regarded one another for a moment.

  Cormac got the sense that he could change the subject a hundred times, but the conversation would turn back to this place time and time again. He regretted harboring suspicion against this man. He pictured Hugh Osborne as a sea captain lashed to his wheel, staying his course through gales, high seas, and necromancers’ spells. After a moment, Osborne returned to his work, and Cormac’s eyes came to rest on a large pair of black wellingtons that stood in the shadow of the workbench. Was it his imagination, or perhaps a trick of the light, he wondered, or was their dark surface glistening with wetness?

  Book Three

  BEASTS AND BIRDS OF PREY

  …great multitude of poor swarming in all parts of the nation… frequently some are found feeding on carrion and weeds and some starved in the highways, and many times poor children who have lost their parents, or who have been deserted by them, are found exposed to, and some of them fed upon, by ravening wolves and other beasts and birds of prey.

  —The Commissioners’ Report on the State of Ireland, May 12, 1653

  1

  Distances could be deceiving at night, but looking out from the kitchen window in the light of morning, Cormac could see the edge of the lawn against which the light had seemed to travel last night—or rather, earlier this morning—and he felt he’d judged the path of the light fairly accurately. A small flock of sheep grazed near the lakeshore, some standing, some lying as though their spindly legs had been cut out from under them. He looked farther, past the perimeter of the lawn, to the Bracklyn woods. Rising up out of the branches only a few hundred yards from the house was O’Flaherty’s Tower, its ivied walls a shade of green subtly different from that of the surrounding leaves. From this angle he could see a few wooden roof beams still intact, their slate covering long since robbed to patch holes elsewhere, probably on Bracklyn House itself.

  After he’d had his breakfast, Cormac headed to the jeep parked in the drive and deposited the books and tools he needed for the day’s work. But the furtive movement of the torch beam—not to mention Hugh Osborne’s dew-covered wellingtons—had pricked his curiosity. Instead of climbing in and driving off, he rounded the corner of the house, past the stable that now served as shed and garage, and followed the tumble-down bawn wall that formed the first defensive barrier around Bracklyn House. He tried to imagine living in such a circumspect state of mind, as generations of landowners in these parts must have done, ever watchful for some enemy to come and batter down their doors. Not all that different, he supposed, from the Dublin pensioners shut up in their tiny flats, windows barred and doors bolted with sixteen locks.

  He followed the wall, now up to his ankles in thick grass. This patch was one of several to which the sheep had yet to turn their attention. About thirty yards from the lake, the wall came to a crumbling end, no doubt toppled by time and the thick, ropelike vines that snaked over it from the wild wood. He hadn’t been careful to make sure no one saw him, but he could just claim that this exploration was somehow related to his business at the priory.

  The woods were thick, and the light that filtered through the leaves felt cool and indistinct. It struck him how quickly rampant vegetation could take over any place abandoned or neglected by humankind. The sounds of the wider world were muffled here, soaked up by moss and loamy soil, the carpet of ivy and the green canopy above. What a riot of shapes and textures existed in this monochromatic world. Cormac thought of Una and Fintan playing here as children, of the treasure Aoife McGann had brought home, and understood the attraction a place like this would hold for any child with a vivid imagination. It was the very sort of place that would make you believe in ancestor spirits. How often at the site of some primitive settlement had he tried to conjure up an image of Ireland before it was cultivated—a wild green expanse of forest, lake, and bog, when the people dressed in the skins of animals and plaited their hair and worshipped the sun and the spirits of trees and water?

  There was no apparent footpath here, and the thin, thorny branches that stuck out from the confusion of undergrowth caught at his clothing. He pressed on, and eventually found a narrow trail, or, rather, a place where the ferns did not grow quite as thick. He stepped over a fallen tree, its bark and fleshy wood being slowly subsumed by a radiantly pale green moss, and as he did so, he heard the distinct snap of a branch. Cormac whirled to see who might be following, but the wood seemed to have closed up behind him. Perhaps it was just
paranoia. He turned back toward the tower, listening carefully for any movement besides his own footsteps. The path began to wind this way and that, and Cormac began to understand the reason: he nearly lost his balance when his foot struck a jagged stone embedded in the earth. He knelt and parted the underbrush in several places, finding a handful of similar rocky points within arm’s reach. It might be part of a chevaux-de-frise, an ancient defensive tactic used around ringforts to prevent easy assault by enemies on horseback. There was the tower, dead ahead, the dark gray stone of its base-batter blooming with lichen and moss. He picked his way carefully through the ankle-breaking stones, then climbed across an overgrown earthwork ditch that might be the remains of a medieval motte. The tower was about four stories tall; the only windows were arrow loops several feet long but only a few inches across. How dismal it must have been to live in such a place; how like a prison it must have seemed. Above him jutted a square garderobe that flanked a corner, and above that he could see stone corbels made to support some wooden structure long since destroyed. No sign of crows today. Cormac skirted the base of the tower, looking for the entrance doorway, which he discovered on the far side from his approach. The doorway was a simple pointed Gothic arch, above it a carved stone that might have been a family escutcheon, but it was too damaged to make out. The fact that there was a wooden door at all was curious, because the tower looked to be long abandoned. More curious still was the stout, shiny new padlock that hung from a latch firmly anchored to the wall. He lifted the lock and examined the keyhole at its base. Newly made scratches shone where someone had tried to insert the key and missed the mark. Once the door was locked, there was no way into or out of this tower short of scaling the walls.

  Why would Osborne want to keep this building locked? The place was in ruins. Probably something to do with liability, preventing local hooligans larking about and getting themselves killed. But why would someone be out here in the middle of the night? If it were some sort of trysting place, that would explain the secrecy. But a trysting place for whom? Maybe he was wrong about Hugh Osborne and Una McGann. If they were involved, they certainly had reason not to be seen together in public. He couldn’t imagine Lucy Osborne in a place like this, but what about Jeremy? It could also be someone completely unconnected to this house, some local lothario who could have claimed this abandoned fortress as a meeting place. If that were the case, however, the whole village would know about it. Dolly Pilkington would certainly know who had purchased such a whacking great padlock, and might even have divined its purpose. Here he was again, acting the policeman.

  As he stood at the door, Cormac heard the croaking call of a crow. He turned and saw nothing but leafy greenness all around, heard nothing but the distant shout of a corncrake. Was someone out there, watching him? The teeming silence of the wood gave no answer.

  2

  Nora overslept the morning after the mysterious phone call. She was hurriedly repacking her case for the return trip to Bracklyn when she remembered to check her mobile phone for messages. There was only one, from Cormac, wondering if she would mind picking up a few items for him while she was in Dublin. Robbie McSweeney had a key to the house, and was going to gather up the stuff; she could just collect the bag from him. She erased the message and punched in Robbie’s office number. They arranged to meet at Cormac’s house.

  Coming from the city center, Nora crossed over the Grand Canal at Charlemont Street and found herself immediately in the heart of Ranelagh. If the daylight seemed a bit harsh this morning, it was probably because the leaves on the trees were still small, still a fresh shade of pale green against the sky. Cormac’s street, Highfield Crescent, turned out to be one of those gracefully curved and chestnut-lined Dublin avenues that seemed miles from the cacophonous bottlenecks of the main roads. Robbie hadn’t arrived yet, but he was coming all the way from the Belfield campus. Nora studied the face of Number 43, a tidily terraced red-brick row house, with an arched entrance trimmed in leaded glass, one of the thousands of nearly identical Victorian doorways in Dublin. Why did it seem curious to her that Cormac’s door was painted a bright, sunny yellow? The fenced front garden was a sharply edged patch of green turf so small that he might easily keep it trimmed year-round with a pair of embroidery scissors. Though she hadn’t yet seen the inside, she knew it would be a space very different from her airy, modern flat across the canal. She felt a twinge of uneasiness. It was strange coming here without Cormac’s knowledge. Should she have arranged to meet Robbie at his office? She hadn’t time to answer her own question when Robbie tapped at the driver’s-side window.

  “You can wait out here if you like,” he said as she rolled down the window, “but I was hoping you might come in for just half a minute. I’m dyin’ for a mug of tea. And your reward would be the small bit of news I have for you.”

  Nora found herself following reluctantly as Robbie pushed open the front door, careful not to knock down the old-fashioned black bicycle that stood in the narrow front hall. “I’ll round up the things he’s asked for, shall I, and you can get started on the tea.” After pointing her in the direction of the kitchen, at the back of the house, Robbie disappeared up the stairs, half lilting, half humming a faintly familiar tune. Nora entered the clean black-and-white-tiled kitchen; a table and two chairs stood in the small conservatory that jutted off the back of the house into the walled garden, giving the room a bright aspect, even on this slightly overcast day. She filled the electric kettle, found tea in a tin beside the stove, and prepared two mugs, then checked the fridge for milk. Plenty for tea; she held the bottle to her nose to make sure it hadn’t turned. The kettle boiled quickly, and while the tea was steeping, she ventured into the dining room, or what would normally have been used as a dining room, for this place was set up as a study: bookshelves lined the walls and a large table in front of the window was piled high with books and manila folders that almost obscured the view of the garden. Through an open set of double doors was a sitting room, with a deep leather sofa in front of a fireplace, and a couple of chairs upholstered in Turkish-looking geometric tapestry. The walls of both rooms were painted a ruddy ochre, and at the front of the house was a broad window seat flanked by two bookcases that reached to the ceiling. The atmosphere was orderly, unfussy, much like the man himself, and yet there were a couple of pieces that didn’t seem to fit, like the pillow-covered chaise in the corner at the far side of the fireplace. She tried to imagine Cormac at home here. The stereo cabinet in the near corner was piled high with homemade tapes. Nora scanned them, recognizing the names of some older traditional musicians. She approached the bookcases in the living room. The archaeology titles were no surprise, but Cormac also had quite a collection of books on art history, world religions, architecture, and language. There was a whole section of books on Irish place-names. What was it he’d said to Hugh Osborne? “Interested, but not very knowledgeable.” Right. She moved to the other set of bookcases, running her fingers along the spines of old editions in Irish, antique collections of Dickens, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen, newer translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, a pile of Graham Greene novels, books of poetry by Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh. Had Cormac read them all? She was suddenly seized with homesickness, remembering her own precious books, save for the few volumes she couldn’t possibly live without, packed up in storage at home in Saint Paul. Seeing this wonderful collection only served as a reminder that nothing in her life was the same as it had been before. She sank down slowly on the window seat and closed her eyes, overcome by a terrible and familiar craving. And what if her need to scrabble through the evidence to find something, anything—what if it never satisfied her emptiness? Nora opened her eyes. She could still hear Robbie’s absentminded lilting from upstairs.

  A small framed photograph on the mantelpiece caught her gaze. It was Cormac and Gabriel McCrossan, looking up from an excavation pit and showing off a hoard of artifacts they’d just uncovered, looking tired and dirty and immensely pleased with themselves.
How was Cormac faring after losing this man he must have considered a second father? Maybe Robbie had some clue about how he was getting on. She set the picture back on the mantel as she heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “Find everything all right?” Robbie asked. “For the tea, I mean,” he added hastily, and from the look that came with it, she knew he was giving her a gentle ribbing for having a look around the place.

  “Everything was exactly where it ought to be,” she said. “Cormac is a very logical fella.”

  “Oh, he is,” Robbie agreed, following her into the kitchen. “Promise you won’t hold that against him?”

  “Robbie, I’m anxious to hear what you found out.”

  “And I’m just as anxious to tell you. But hang on, hasn’t he got a biscuit or something to go with the tea?” Robbie asked, opening a cupboard and rummaging around until he found what he needed, an unopened packet of plain chocolate wheatmeal biscuits. “Doesn’t even fancy these, but keeps a few on hand because they’re my favorite. Commendable, isn’t it?”

  “Very touching,” Nora agreed. “But, Robbie, what did you find out?”

  “You understand that what I was doing was only very general research.”

  “I do. Go on.”

  “Well, it’s interesting,” he said, through the crumbs of his first biscuit. “Beheading was generally reserved for people of some importance. Old-fashioned hanging was considered sufficient for most crimes, and for most criminals, right up through the nineteenth century.” He was warming to the subject now. “And hanging generally meant slow death by strangulation. I found several reports of people being resuscitated after a half hour on the rope.” He spoke with some amazement at this fact. “Of course, we have a couple of Irish doctors to thank for the long drop. They took into account the prisoner’s weight, and how much force it would take to break his neck. It was all very scientific; they had tables for calculating the length of the rope. Though it seems the main reason for the change wasn’t to put the condemned out of their misery any more quickly, but to spare witnesses the discomfort of watching them dangle.”