by Erin Hart
She had two large rounds of brown bread and four half-sized loaves ready to go into the oven. Una took the bread knife and deftly cut a cross in the top of each one, just as her mother had shown her how to do, then quickly shoved the pan into the hot oven. She turned and regarded the mess in the kitchen, the large crockery bowl and table covered with the sticky remains of the brown bread and spilled buttermilk, the open bags of flour and wheatmeal, and she sat down wearily at the table and rested her head on her arms. A few hot tears trickled off the end of her nose and splashed in the flour left over from where she’d kneaded the bread. The world had fallen asunder, and she had no idea how to put it right again.
7
The phone beside his head roused Devaney out of a deep sleep. He rolled over and grabbed the receiver. “Devaney here.”
“Still in bed. Christ, how I miss dear auld Ireland,” Deasey said. “I’m calling with news. The least you could do is act surprised, if you can’t manage to be pleased this time of the morning.”
“I’m fucking delighted,” Devaney said, sitting on the edge of the bed and squinting. “What time is it, anyway, Jimmy?”
“Nearly half-nine, ye lazy sod.” Fuck it; nine-thirty, Devaney thought, and nobody had bothered to wake him. That meant he’d already completely missed the station meeting this morning.
“Thanks for ringing, Jimmy. What have you got?”
“Your man’s gone into a bank. The receptionist turned out to be a girl from Cavan, so I turned on the auld charm and actually got her to cough up a small bit of information. Seems he was at school with one of the top men there, and you know what chummy bastards old school boys are. No word on what the meeting was about, but nobody goes to a bank unless he’s got plenty of money, am I right?”
“Or needs money.” Devaney was completely awake now, struggling to put an arm through his shirtsleeve while keeping the phone to his ear. “Anything on the address from last night?”
“Oh, yeah. Bad news, I’m afraid. Or mebbe I should say no great mystery. Your man’s not a bigamist after all. The house belongs to a doctor named DeSouza. Well respected, good clientele. The woman and child were evidently his daughter and granddaughter, friends of Osborne’s wife. He always stays with them when he goes to London. Sorry.”
As he hung up the phone, Devaney knew he should have asked the Badger to follow up on Osborne’s movements in the days before the disappearance. Why hadn’t he just come out with it? The image of the carved letters in the church floated in his groggy head: He knows where they are. If somebody knew something, why wouldn’t he just come forward? The usual reason was that he’d have to put himself—or someone else—in a compromising position. Who among Osborne’s family, neighbors, and business associates might have something to hide? He already knew the answer: everyone.
8
Ned Raftery’s house was set at a right angle to the road, so that the gable end faced out, and the front of the house faced a walled garden. Nora pulled up in the gravel drive, and Cormac followed as she entered through the black iron gate. Inside, a chest-high boxwood hedge defined the margin of the garden, and against its tiny, dark green leaves grew hundreds of rosebushes. Most were just beginning to bud, but a salmon-colored climbing rose and several sprays of white shrub roses were already in bloom and gave off the most marvelous scent. Nora leaned in to the nearest open flowers to inhale their sweet, heady perfume, and let out a small, wordless exclamation.
“I’m glad you like them,” a man’s voice said. She turned and saw the man she presumed to be Ned Raftery rising from his knees, closing the lock on his pruning shears, and moving toward the sound of her voice. His clouded eyes seemed to look straight ahead.
“They’re wonderful,” Nora said. “I’m drunk on that fragrance, I swear.”
“And people wonder why a blind man bothers growing flowers at all,” Raftery said, smiling.
“We haven’t met. I’m Nora Gavin.” She was unsure whether a handshake was in order until Raftery put out his open palm, on which she placed her own. He brought a fresh-cut rosebud from behind his back and presented it to her.
“Welcome, Dr. Gavin. And Professor Maguire as well, I presume, welcome.”
“Thank you for taking the time to speak with us,” Cormac said.
“Not at all. I’m not sure I have any knowledge that might be useful to you, but you’re welcome to whatever I’ve got locked away up here.” Raftery tapped his forehead. “Please come in; I’ll make tea.” They waited for him to step onto the path before them, and followed as he ushered them into the house.
Just inside the front door was a long room. At one end, near a large fireplace, sat four well-used upholstered chairs; bookcases, crammed with volumes old and new, crowded the walls. A heavy oak trestle table with eight chairs divided the sitting area from the open kitchen, and a huge cook-stove stood opposite, where the fireplace used to be.
Raftery followed an obviously familiar path to the kitchen, where he put the kettle on to boil, and set about cutting some white soda bread studded with raisins, using his left hand to reach across the knife blade and gauge the thickness of each slice. Nora and Cormac each took a seat at the large table.
“Fintan McGann mentioned that you were his teacher,” Cormac said.
“Ah, Fintan. Bright lad. I tried to teach him something about history, but even then he didn’t care about anything at all except the music. He’s getting to be a tasty piper, wouldn’t you say?”
“Very decent,” Cormac agreed. “He was playing some great notes at the session last week.”
“That was a mighty night, wasn’t it? Well now, you’re here to find out something about our local history,” Raftery said, bringing over the bread on one plate, a lump of butter on another, and a couple of knives. He drew out the chair at the end of the table and lowered himself into it. He must have been about sixty years of age, clean-shaven, with gray hair standing up a bit off his forehead. He was a burly man, with short legs and a long, barrel-shaped torso. He wore a button-down shirt and a sweater with a hole in one elbow, and heavy brogues on his feet. More the look of a laborer than a schoolteacher, Nora decided.
“We’re trying to find out anything that would help us identify the girl from the bog,” she said. “I assume you’ve heard about her—seems like everyone has. We know it’s a long shot, but we’ve just come across something that I hope could be a significant clue.”
Raftery’s face was impassive; his eyes seemed to fix their sightless gaze on the other end of the table. “Go on.”
“There was no sign of her body anywhere about. Just the head. Since then we’ve been able to do a fairly thorough examination. She was about twenty to twenty-five years old, with long red hair. From the damage to the vertebrae, we think she was beheaded, most likely with a single blow from a sword or axe. Now the recent development is that inside her mouth, we found a man’s gold ring with a red stone. There was an inscription: two sets of initials, COF and AOF; a date, 1652; and the letters ‘IHS’ set in brackets at the center of the date.”
“We’re still waiting on radiocarbon results,” Cormac said, “so we’ve started to do some historical research on beheading. Then Nora discovered this ring, which gives us a possible date—a place to start at least.”
“Our reasoning is that she’d probably been in the bog no earlier than 1652, since that’s the date on the ring, although it could have been any time since then.” Nora looked at Cormac and shrugged. She’d known he was right, even though it annoyed her.
“So you’re looking for the record of a trial, or an execution, or perhaps a marriage record of some kind,” Raftery said. He considered for a moment. “You realize that 1652 was smack in the center of the Cromwellian resettlement. There was pretty significant upheaval all over Ireland. Catholic Church records from that time are sketchy. Civil records, especially something as serious as an execution, might be another matter, it’s hard to know. Have you checked the National Library or the Archives?”
&n
bsp; “We have a friend in Dublin who’s working on that now,” Cormac said. “You were recommended as a person who might be able to tell us about the local history.”
“As I used to tell my students, there is no history but local history. And some of that is written down, and some of it lost, and a good bit of it is carried in what you might call the collective memory of ordinary people, whether they realize it or not.”
“What was happening here in 1652?” Nora asked. “I only have the most general knowledge of the transplantation. What was that time like for the people living here?”
“You’ve heard the expression ‘to Hell or to Connacht’?” Raftery asked. The kettle began to boil, so he rose and moved slowly to the stove, poured the steaming water into a battered tin teapot, and returned with it to the table to let the tea steep as he continued. “That was the choice many people were given, so they were on the move. For modern comparisons, think of the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia in the early 1990s, the ‘reeducation’ camps of Southeast Asia. Catholic landowners were being uprooted and shifted west, and when they proved understandably slow about going, Cromwell gave them a deadline. They had until the first of May in 1654 to relocate to whatever lands they’d been granted in Connacht. And the English were building garrisons and fortifications along the Shannon to keep them there.” Raftery’s voice was relaxed, but he was completely engaged with his subject. “There was terrible starvation where the English troops went about burning and cutting down the corn, and most ordinary people had to subsist on potatoes. Bands of refugees—entire extended families—were wandering the roads, so an order came down to transport the children who had lost their families, and the women who could work, to the colonies in America. Between the fighting, famine, transportation, and the plague, Ireland lost more than half a million people in the space of about two years. Wolves became so plentiful that the government issued an official order in 1652 prohibiting the export of wolfhounds, and they paid a generous bounty—five pounds for the head of a he-wolf, ten for a bitch. Heads of priests and Tories—the Irish word for outlaws—usually brought a good price as well. This part of Galway was considered a border area, so despite the fact that Connacht had officially been reserved for the Irish, the landowners in what the English called ‘riparian’ areas—along the coasts and navigable rivers—were displaced for security reasons.”
“Including the O’Flahertys?” Nora asked, with a sideways look at Cormac.
Raftery considered. “Yes, including them. Most of the lands around here belonged to various branches of the Clanricardes, the Norman family also known as the de Burgos, or the Burkes. They managed to hang on, despite the fact that they were Catholics. But there were a few smaller landowners as well; the O’Flahertys of Drumcleggan were among them. You’ll find a great number of O’Flahertys out in the west country, but there was one branch of the family that still held lands here. It was Eamonn O’Flaherty who built the big house at Drumcleggan in the 1630s—only to be evicted twenty years later. He was granted a parcel of land farther west, but died soon after being relocated.”
“And the Osbornes took over his lands,” Nora said.
“That’s right,” Raftery said, pouring the tea now. “Hugo Osborne was granted the entire estate at Drumcleggan, which was considered a vulnerable location along the border. He rechristened it Bracklyn House. But O’Flaherty’s son became a rather notorious outlaw; he kept an armed band of men above here in the Slieve Aughty Mountains, and attacked various English garrisons in the locality. Even mounted a rather ill-advised armed raid on Bracklyn House—when the Osbornes were all away, as it turned out. Young Flaherty was eventually captured and sentenced to hang, but because he and his men had committed no serious outrages, he was transported instead—or Barbadosed, they called it.”
“Do you happen to remember when he was transported?” Nora asked. Raftery got up and crossed carefully to one of the bookcases filled with file boxes.
“I used to have a copy of the transport manifest here somewhere, if I can find it.” He felt the face of each box in turn. “I think it may be in this one, if you’d like to have a look.” He set the file on the table, and Nora opened it eagerly, scanning through the photocopied documents until she found a thick sheaf of handwritten ledger entries. She handed Cormac half the pages, and began scanning the list of names, ages, and what looked like occupations. She experienced an almost hallucinatory image of the hand that penned these lists, and suddenly grasped the fact that these simple quill scratches represented multitudes of uprooted, ravaged lives.
“Is there a date at the top of those pages?” Raftery asked.
“November 1653,” Nora answered. She scanned a few more sheets, before turning toward her companions. “Hang on, this could be him. O’Flaherty. Aged twenty-seven. Outlaw and thief. Transported for life. Do you know anything else about him? Did he have a wife? Is there any way to find out?”
Her barrage of questions left Raftery looking a little nonplussed, but he smiled. “I’m not sure there’s any documentation. The story I’ve always heard is that he ended up on the Continent somewhere, as a mercenary. A sad tale, but not uncommon. I’m not sure now whether or not he was married.”
“Nothing else?” Nora asked. “What was his name?”
“Sorry, didn’t I say? Cathal.” Raftery paused. “He was known as Cathal Mor because of his great height.”
“Cathal O’Flaherty. COF. You can’t tell me it’s just coincidence,” Nora said to Cormac, feeling a flush of victory. “The date is right. The location and the initials are right. So if our red-haired girl is his wife, and supposing she is, there’s no record of her being transported as well. And if he was only transported for his crimes, why would she have been executed?” She heaved a frustrated sigh.
“Has anybody collected songs from this locality?” Cormac asked. “It seems like a famous outlaw might be deserving of a song or two.”
“I’m not sure there’s any formal collection, but you know, for those sorts of things—” Raftery hesitated a moment, frowning.
“Yes?” Nora perked up slightly at the prospect of advice.
“There’s no one better than my aunt, Maggie Cleary is her name. Lives in a little townsland called Tullymore up the side of the mountain. Now I have to warn you, she can get a bit narky. She has good days and bad, and it’s come to the point where the bad are beginning to outnumber the good. But when she’s on, there’s no one can tell you more about the families around here. And she has loads of songs—hundreds. You never know. If you just chat to her awhile, show her some attention, she likes that. A naggin of whiskey wouldn’t go amiss either.”
9
Half-eleven the following morning found Cormac and Nora hard at work on the excavation site. Banks of low gray cumulus clouds scudded across the sky from west to east, and a damp breeze from the ocean blew in over the mountains. Resting for a moment on the spade handle, Cormac thought about his own life, and what might remain of it in three hundred, eight hundred, or a thousand years: items he’d lost down the floorboards, or hidden so no one else could find them, until he, too, had lost track of their existence. He identified with the hoarders of earlier ages, burying and protecting their precious possessions, and then—whether through faulty memory, migration, or death—unable to reclaim them.
He looked down to the end of the trench at Nora. Her job was once again sifting through the rubble with a large sieve, looking for artifacts: pottery shards, glassware, bits of slag, or the telltale green of corroded bronze. As far as artifacts were concerned, early Christian sites like this one usually yielded little more than the bones of slaughtered animals, and a few bits of broken crockery. Much of what would have been used in this sort of community was organic material that would have decayed long ago. Still, one never knew what one would find. Though no ruin existed at all aboveground, there was bound to be evidence beneath the surface, some clues to the methods of construction or the industrial activity that took place here. And there were a
lways the middens, of course, rubbish heaps where each layer contained a valuable cache of information. That was the beauty and mystery of archaeology to him. Each site had to be treated as a potential treasure, each step in the excavation undertaken with the same scrupulous care, in case valuable artifacts—or even more important, valuable details—might be lost or overlooked. He was not just undertaking this work for the present, but also for future generations, who might come to see some larger pattern in the discoveries that he and his contemporaries were now making that wouldn’t reveal itself for another fifty or a hundred or two hundred years, and perhaps then only if the previous research was thorough and meticulous. The soil samples he took today would be sieved back at the lab for microfossils, insect remains, seeds, plant matter. They still used many of the same techniques when excavating by hand, looking with the naked eye for layers and horizons, but so many new microscopic and chemical analysis techniques had been developed in the last few years, not to mention new types of sampling and scanning technologies, things Gabriel had never even dreamed of when he picked up the trowel.