The Book of Killowen ng-4

by Erin Hart

  Dawson’s gaze was still riveted on the manuscript. He glanced up briefly to address Anthony Beglan. “May I have a look?”

  Anthony nodded, and Martin Gwynne placed the codex carefully into Niall Dawson’s outstretched hands. The cover was rather ordinary, plain leather, more like an envelope than a bound cover. Apart from the one scratched design, there was no gaudy gold or stamped embellishment of any kind. Dawson gingerly undid the buttons and opened the wrapper. His eyes glinted with the curator’s heightened passion, a feverish curiosity bordering on greed.

  Gwynne said, “I think you may be surprised at what you find inside.”

  Cormac felt his breath halt as Dawson lifted the front cover to find a page inscribed in Latin. It began with a fantastically decorated capital and contained several margin notes in a tiny hand. “Looks like insular minuscule,” Dawson said, his voice filled with awe. “The text is definitely not Psalms. And am I mistaken in thinking there are two hands here?” he asked Gwynne.

  “No indeed. The first part of the book has been set down by two different scribes, but the primary hand disappears about two-thirds of the way through. The last portion is completed by the second scribe. Some people know him by the name Nisifortinus—”

  Dawson’s head turned sharply. “You realize what you’re saying?”

  “I do,” said Gwynne. “And as I’ve had ample time to study the manuscript, I feel no qualms about making that claim.”

  “I wish I knew what the hell you were talking about,” Cormac said.

  Dawson turned to the title page and read aloud: “Periphyseon. Liber sextus…” Dawson’s voice wavered when he spoke again. “My God, you know what this means?”

  “That last bit is ‘Book Six,’” Cormac said. “If I’m remembering right.”

  “But there were only five books in Periphyseon,” Dawson said. “There was never any mention of a sixth book, only a note from Eriugena himself at the end of Book Five that he hadn’t covered all the topics that he’d promised to write about.” He began to turn the pages, ever so gently, studying the handwriting on the vellum surface. “If this is truly authentic, it’s earth-shattering. In all sorts of fields—philosophy, history, paleography. I can’t even get my head around it properly.” He turned to Martin Gwynne. “If this truly is Eriugena’s last work, are you thinking he finished it here, in Ireland?”

  “Not quite. I’m afraid he might have died before he could complete it,” Gwynne explained. “I’ve gone over the handwriting again and again.” He turned to Cormac. “There are often two Irish hands in Eriugena’s major works, two individuals that paleographers have dubbed i1 and i2. Some scholars think one of them might be Eriugena himself, and the second his pupil and protégé, the man some call by the name Nisifortinus, for the way he introduced his additions, ‘Nisi forte quis dixerit’—Unless, perhaps, anyone shall say that… I’ve often wondered if this mysterious second hand wasn’t perhaps founder of the monastery at Cill Eóghain. As I said, the first hand disappears partway through this book, and it’s completed by the second hand. I think you may find, when you have a closer look at your bog Psalter, that it may be the work of Nisifortinus as well.” Gwynne paused. “I have a theory—entirely unprovable, but plausible all the same, I think—about what transpired here back in the latter ninth century. You’ll forgive my wild speculation. I am only a scholar, after all, and not a scientist.”

  “Enlighten us, please,” Dawson said.

  “I see two men, scholars and scribes, camped at the edge of this bog. They had come here to withdraw from the world of men, returning to the place from which they’d sprung. But they were not alone. One day while his young companion is absent, the older man is approached by the men who’ve followed him here, paid ruffians who fall upon him and stab him to death and fling his body in the bog. Since your recent discoveries, I have imagined the book and satchel flung after him, perhaps in frustration, because a Psalter, wonderful though it might have been, was not the book the assassins sought. They were after a book full of dangerous, heretical ideas, mistaken in the notion that they could destroy those ideas by destroying the written word.”

  “And where was this dangerous book, sought by assassins?” Dawson asked.

  “Perhaps the younger man had it,” Gwynne said. “One book, one satchel looks much like another. It’s true even today. But as I said, I have no proof. I merely speculate.”

  Cormac said, “So, if our bog man is indeed this philosopher, Eriugena, what reason would anyone have had for killing him? Was there such great harm in what he wrote?”

  “His ideas questioned the very foundations of the church in Rome,” Gwynne said. “To church theologians, Eriugena’s writings skirted too close to pantheism. They were condemned by two separate councils in his lifetime. His argument against predestination, his thoughts about the presence of God in nature, about the nonexistence of evil—these things were considered subversive, heretical, dangerous. They remain so to this day.”

  “So how did you come to know that Anthony was in possession of this book?” Dawson asked.

  “I had noticed that Anthony shared a name with the heirs of the termon lands, the Ó Beigléighinns of Killowen. And I thought it a little strange that Anthony hadn’t learned his letters, being the descendant of scholars. Perhaps it should have been no surprise that schoolteachers always underestimated Anthony, because of his tics and stammers. But as it turned out, here was a man possessed of knowledge that none of his ignorant schoolteachers dared dream of. I heard him speak it, when he didn’t know I was listening.” He cast a weary glance at his friend. “Would you grace us with a bit of that knowledge now, Anthony?”

  Beglan had been standing to one side, an arm’s length from them, watching the commotion over the ancient book, listening to the story. Now he looked self-conscious, as if he’d rather have been anyplace but the spot where he was standing. “Where shall I stuh-start?” he asked Gwynne, his jaw flexing as he spoke.

  “What about ‘Si enim libertas naturae,’” Gwynne said gently. “Don’t mind us, Anthony. Just imagine you’re out with the beasts.”

  Cormac felt a twinge of memory, harking back to the strange sounds coming from Beglan as he drove the cattle down the lane. Anthony closed his eyes and began to sway slightly as he recited the words from memory: “Si enim libertas naturae rationabilis ad imaginem Dei conditae a Deo data est…”

  Gwynne turned to what seemed to be a familiar page in the book, marking the words with his finger. Cormac and Dawson could only stand by as Beglan continued: “necessario omne quod ex ipsa libertate evenit, malum seu malitia recte dici non potest—”

  It was the same passage that was on the wax tablet, the one they’d brought to Gwynne for translation. And it was only after Anthony finished his recitation that Cormac also realized that the tics and stammers had ceased as the Latin words fell from his lips. Perhaps repeating the text of this book over and over like an incantation somehow stopped the errant brain waves that caused his muscles to contract, his tongue to shudder, his voice to come unbidden.

  “Is that your cure?” Cormac asked. “That recitation?”

  “N-n-n-not exactly,” Beglan said. “You take the book and duh-duh-dip it in the basin, and then get two cuh-cupfuls of that down yeh—”

  Dawson couldn’t hold his tongue. “Wait, you put this book into water?” He looked down at the manuscript in his hands.

  “Aye, to buh-bless the water,” Beglan replied. “Does no harm.”

  Gwynne said, “He’s right about that. Iron gall ink doesn’t just float upon the surface, you see—it bites into the page. Gallotannic acid bonds with vellum. That’s why this ink cannot run. Not anymore.”

  “And that’s why the writing in our bog Psalter is intact,” Niall Dawson added. “Despite being wet for centuries.”

  “Indeed,” Gwynne said. “It’s the gall that makes the words indelible.”

  “You said you weren’t the only one following Eriugena’s trail,” Cormac said.
“We know about Kavanagh, and the corrupt detective Molloy and his accomplices who were after the shrine, but were there others as well?”

  Martin Gwynne smiled wearily. “Remember what I said a few moments ago, about Eriugena’s ideas being too dangerous still? We have had in our midst these last eighteen months a Catholic priest, an investigator sent here by the Vatican to find and destroy the Book of Killowen.”

  Cormac shook his head. “How do you know—”

  “I have it from the man himself. I always knew that Diarmuid Lynch wasn’t what he claimed to be,” Gwynne continued. “Tried to pass himself off as an itinerant when he came here, but anyone could see that his hands were far too soft for any farm laborer. Diarmuid finally confessed his true purpose to us just the other night, how the Church had been seeking the Book of Killowen for years and had given him the mission to discover its location. But in doing all that digging, he had a chance to study Eriugena’s work in detail, and he’d been won over by the man’s ideas. So he began lying to his superiors at the Vatican about new information he’d found, about the book’s location. He realized, long before he ever came here, that he could never go through with destroying such an important manuscript.” Gwynne looked at Dawson. “And that was why he phoned you with a story about treasure hunters, hoping the National Museum would take an interest and send someone down to investigate. He reckoned that the Church would be in an awkward position if the book’s existence were made public in that way.”

  “Why didn’t he just hand it over when I was here?” asked Niall.

  “Cuh-cuz he never knew where I kept it,” Anthony said.

  Cormac was still puzzled. “Kavanagh, he’d been after the manuscript as well for years, hadn’t he?”

  “Indeed,” Gwynne said. “And I was going to show it to him. That was my grand plan, God help me. I wanted to invite him here, to see the blackguard’s face as I snatched away the one thing that was most precious to him.”

  Gwynne sank into one of the chairs, looking spent. “At first, I simply closed my eyes to Kavanagh’s crimes, because I knew we could do nothing. We’d no evidence against him, only our daughter’s word about what he had done, and since she’d gone from us—” He paused briefly, overcome. “I’d told Tessa about all my discoveries here, the carving at the chapel and the notes in O’Donovan, about the Beglans and their legacy. I never mentioned Kavanagh by name, but I didn’t have to—she knew very well that he would stop at nothing to get this book. And she had the courage to act, while I…” His head dropped forward, and he let out a long breath. “My beautiful Tess, she suffered a long and painful death, these past twenty years. Punishing herself, wrestling with demons. And I stood by all that time and did nothing. I ought to have protected her, I ought to have helped her.”

  Cormac’s father had been silent, taking in the strange conversation all around him. Now the old man reached over and placed a hand on Martin Gwynne’s arm.

  “Peas,” he said. “Now your author shall have peas.”

  3

  Stella Cusack sat at her desk, just having returned from the required visit to the district commander’s office. Since she’d managed to bring embarrassment on the force by arresting her own partner for murder, inquiries had to be made. Just as she anticipated, Molloy had stopped talking the moment he was extracted from the furze. His solicitor was probably going to argue coercion on the confession, but they still had the mark of his shoe on Anca Popescu’s skin. And Stella was hopeful in that regard, because Catherine Friel was known as an outstanding expert witness.

  Tessa Gwynne’s husband had given his full cooperation. He swore that he had begun to suspect his own wife’s involvement only after Benedict Kavanagh’s murder was discovered. According to the Director of Public Prosecutions, simply suspecting one’s wife was not enough to warrant criminal charges as an accessory after the fact. Vincent Claffey’s death had finally been ruled an accident, from the blow to the head when Anca Popescu apparently pushed him. It looked like premeditated murder only after Molloy mutilated the body and shoved the gallnuts in Claffey’s mouth to throw Stella off the scent. She blushed to the roots of her hair, remembering how had she let that bastard play her. Best not to think about that now.

  She turned the key in her largest drawer and brought out a metal strongbox that looked as if it had been through the wars. It had turned up in a search of Molloy’s flat, this nest of secrets that he’d removed from Claffey’s shed. She hadn’t had a chance to go through the whole jumble of newspaper cuttings, official documents, scribbled notes, and photos, but it was clear from the contents that Molloy himself had been feeding Vincent Claffey blackmail fodder for months, a way to keep him mum about the treasure-hunting ring. It turned out that Claffey had been writing cryptic threatening notes to the people at Killowen, hoping to extract money from everyone. And he’d evidently succeeded. Stella found Mairéad Broome’s fat packet of cash, along with a few rolls of twenty-euro notes. Hard to fathom how Molloy had managed to scrape up some of this dirt. Everyone at the farm was represented. There was information on Shawn Kearney being slighted by the academic committee that had turned down her bid for a doctorate, newspaper cuttings about Tessa Gwynne’s father attempting suicide in police custody after he was charged with fraud in the 1980s.

  There was also a series of photographs, taken at Killowen Chapel, of Diarmuid Lynch, lying facedown on the ground at the altar. She found a piece of paper stuck to the back of the last photo. It was an image clipped from a magazine, showing three smiling men looking over an architectural drawing. Stella adjusted her desk light and reached for her magnifier, peering through the glass at the picture. Nothing but a concentration of dots, so close up. Still, the man in the center looked familiar. All three were wearing clerical collars. The caption read: “Monsignor Guido Mariani, the papal nuncio, and members of the Vatican party, Monsignor Andrew Fothergill, and Canon Michael Feery, looking over plans for the new building at the Apostolic Nunciature on Navan Road, Dublin.”

  She spotted one of her uniformed colleagues approaching and moved to cover the image. Guarda Pollard tipped his head toward the front of the building. “Stella, someone to see you. Duty sergeant asked me to pass it along.”

  Stella headed to the front reception area, a tiny cramped foyer with a window for the duty sergeant. She pushed open the security door to find Claire Finnerty waiting outside.

  “Detective Cusack, I wanted to let you know that we’re holding a wake for Anca, tonight, at the farm, in case you’d like to—”

  “Thanks for letting me know. I’m not sure if I can make it.”

  “There was something else I wanted to ask.” Claire Finnerty looked away. “We could have done so much more for Anca. She probably arrived at Killowen thinking it would be a safe place, and it turned out to be anything but safe. I don’t know how we could have been so blind. None of us had any idea what Vincent Claffey was doing—”

  “What was it you wanted to ask?”

  “Maybe it’s a foolish notion, but I thought you might know of people who find places for young women like Anca, where they can recover from everything they’ve been through. I’ve talked it over with the others, and we’re all agreed. We’d like Killowen to become a sort of sanctuary. We’ve got the space, and, well, digging in the dirt and growing things sometimes has a healing effect.”

  “Interesting proposition,” Stella said. “I’m not sure how I can help—”

  Claire Finnerty’s voice was low but urgent. “You must know people. It’s too late for Anca, but we want to do something—we have to do something—to make amends.”

  Stella looked into the eyes of the woman before her and saw the whole picture: the resolute expression, the sweat-stained clothing and worn hands, dirt under the nails, unruly hair only partially constrained by a head scarf. Here was a simple portrait of human need, a need that, for once, was within her power to answer.

  “All right,” Stella said. “Let me make some inquiries. I’ll see what I can do
.”

  “Thank you.” Claire Finnerty’s expression was still intense, but something in her eyes seemed to brighten. As she bent to collect her packages, Stella glimpsed a small strip of ink inscribed on her lower back—a delicate scalloped pattern in blues and greens. The shirt rode up slightly as she slung one of the bags over her shoulder, briefly exposing the whole tattoo. Stella could see that it was a snake swallowing its own tail. At the door, Claire Finnerty turned back to her. “Anytime after eight tonight. Just a simple home wake.”

  Stella returned to her office, feeling that she hadn’t probed deeply enough. Why had the person who called herself Claire Finnerty taken the identity of a dead child? What was she running from? It might be wise to find out more about the circumstances of Tricia Woulfe’s disappearance before trying to throw the light on someone with an assumed identity. A person could have all sorts of reasons for not wanting to be found. Interesting that Claire Finnerty was so eager to make amends for Anca Popescu’s death. Perhaps the clue was embedded in that need.

  Her desk was covered with open files and half-finished reports, not to mention all the piles she’d begun to try and organize Molloy’s stuff. Time to force a bit of order and logic on the clutter of thoughts and images that filled her mind, as well as the mess of papers on the desk.