The Book of Killowen ng-4

by Erin Hart

  Stella reached for the phone and flinched as it began to buzz and vibrate on the table. The blue window said “Cusack.” She punched a button to answer.

  “Stella, it’s me.” He’d always been on to her that way, ever since she’d known him. It’s me. As if he were the only possible me. “It’s Barry.”

  But something was up. She picked up on a subtle difference in the sound of his voice, a note of something—was it regret?—that she had never heard before.

  “Barry, where are you?”

  He hesitated. “Outside.”

  She found him standing in the shadows, wearing his olive-green mac, even though the sky was clear. “Thanks. Didn’t want people to think you had a stalker.” He glanced sideways at the twitch of a curtain at the neighbors’ window. “Can I come in?” She turned and walked away, leaving the door open. He stepped into the foyer but didn’t remove his coat.

  “What is it, Barry? What do you need?”

  He seemed insulted. “Do I have to need something to come and talk to you? Why do you—” He closed his eyes and stopped himself from saying any more.

  “Whatever it is, Barry, just say it and get it over with. We need to talk about Lia.”

  He looked so awkward and miserable, standing in the middle of the foyer with his raincoat on, that Stella found herself beginning to take pity on him.

  “Take your coat off, then. Do you need a drink? I know I do.”

  “I wouldn’t mind, if you’ve got something. That’s one of the things I miss, just having a drink with you, Stella.” He was looking at her strangely as he peeled off the mac and draped it over the back of the sofa.

  She’d crossed to the liquor cabinet and was pouring out a couple of short glasses of whiskey when she felt Barry standing behind her. So close that she could smell him, could feel his warm breath against her hair.

  “Where’s Allison tonight?” she asked, her own breath coming fast and shallow.

  Barry didn’t respond, just slipped his hands around her shoulders. “Stella—”

  She turned, seizing the two glasses and ducking under his arm in one motion, before he could react. She shoved one of the glasses into his hand as she passed.

  Barry squinted at her in puzzlement. She could almost hear the gears turning inside his skull. They were both adults. What was the point of denying physical need? And besides which, hadn’t he got lucky here just a couple of weeks ago?

  Stella took a sip of the whiskey to steady herself. “Well, since you won’t tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what I need: Lia home with me, now. I want her to stop playing us. She knows exactly how to get what she wants, and we both know she’s better off here. We also know that you can’t keep this up forever, the whole engaged father act. It’s been what—four whole days now? That’s got to be getting old.”

  Barry looked at her with an expression she’d never seen before. He was sizing her up, taking her measure. “I’ll drop Lia home on my way to the office in the morning.”

  Stella still couldn’t suss out what was going on. Why was he being so agreeable? “You never said where Allison was tonight.”

  Barry’s head dropped forward. “You know, I’m not sure where she is, and I’m not sure I care. I was wrong about her.” He glanced up. “And wrong about you as well.”

  Stella could feel him checking for a reaction, so she didn’t react, but she found herself backing up as he moved closer. “Relax,” he said, gently bumping her glass against his own. “Just offering a toast. To you, Stella, for being a great mum.” He paused. “And, all told, a pretty fuckin’ great wife.”

  8

  “Cormac? Are you awake?” Nora’s whisper came whooshing out of the velvety darkness to curl around his ear.

  He turned to her. “Can’t sleep. You?”

  She brushed his cheek with a cool palm. “Too much going on. Would you be up for a soak downstairs? Might help you sleep.”

  They slipped, hand in hand, past the closed doors of the other slumbering guests, down the main stairs, and into the corridor outside the thermal suite. As they passed the courtyard windows, the garden was awash in pale moonlight. All at once a bolt of lightning seemed to flash through the grass at the edge of the herb beds. Nora jumped. “Did you see that? What the hell was it?”

  At first Cormac couldn’t imagine, but after a moment, he understood. “Do you know something odd? We’re quite far inland, but this place seems overrun with eels. They must come up the rivers and canals into the bogs.”

  “I suppose they’ve been here forever, if the monks figured a way to use their gallbladders for ink,” Nora said. “Maybe they’re like salmon, living their whole lives in the sea, until they return to freshwater to spawn.”

  Cormac had a sudden feeling that he had been forever tracing a line inside the twisted maze of the past. “Strange…”

  “What’s strange?” Nora asked.

  “To think that the gold ink in our bog Psalter, or the Book of Killowen, could have been made from the ancestors of eels who still swim up the rivers here. If you keep going backward, it’s entirely possible. That homing instinct—part of the great mystery, I suppose. All we know about the natural world at this stage, and we’re only beginning to scratch the surface.”

  They continued to the thermal suite, and ten minutes later the soaking tub was full of brown peaty water, and candles around the room cast a flickering, golden light. Two piles of clothes sat at the top of the stairs down into the pool.

  “Have you heard any news of what’s going to happen to Deirdre Claffey and her baby?” Cormac asked.

  “Claire told me Mairéad Broome is working with Social Services,” Nora said. “She’s going to see if she can bring Deirdre and the child to live with her. What’s going to happen to the Book of Killowen?”

  “Anthony’s decided to donate it to the National Museum. The book, and the Psalter, and all the other artifacts discovered here will make an amazing exhibit someday. I think that’s what Anthony would like, to see his family’s legacy preserved. And I’m sure there are academics who’d like to pick his brain about the Book of Killowen and its whole colorful history. What’s happened here in the last few days could change his life completely.”

  “I don’t know. It seems to me that Anthony might be content to carry on tending his cattle, fishing for eels, and making vellum for Martin Gwynne. Although Martin did tell me that he’s finally teaching Anthony how to read and write.”

  “I wish you had seen the Book of Killowen, Nora. I can’t begin to describe the illuminations. It’s almost like the creatures in it are alive—and from what Martin Gwynne says, the ideas in it are equally electrifying. He believes the book contains the handwriting of this ninth-century scholar Eriugena and his scribe. Gwynne says it may be the final proof that scholars needed to establish their identities, once and for all. I don’t suppose there’s any way to be certain of our bog man’s identity, whether he could be the great man himself? I mean, we’ve got his wax tablet. Maybe the writing in the tablet could be linked to the text in the Book of Killowen—”

  “I just don’t see how his identity could be definitively proved, unfortunately. We have no way to run his fingerprints, nothing to compare his DNA. We’ll just have to be satisfied with the tantalizing possibility, I’m afraid.” Her expression turned serious. “Speaking of identity, can I ask you something? Did you ever suspect that your father had another family in Chile?”

  Cormac winced. “Jesus, Nora, you make it sound like he was a bigamist.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know, I’m sorry. For so long, I was certain he had another family. Another son. At one point, I had myself convinced that it was the reason he left. It never occurred to me that he might have felt bound to a cause rather than to any flesh-and-blood person. I suppose I always thought if it was danger he was after, he could have found that just as easily in Ireland.”

  “Some people—and maybe your father is one of them—I don’t know how to de
scribe it, exactly, except to say that they aren’t born in their own skins. I’ve known people like that, who have to go looking for a place, or a purpose, that feels like home to them.”

  “What are you saying? Do you not feel at home here?”

  “I wasn’t talking about myself. No, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me, like it or not.” Cormac felt Nora’s hand under the water, her fingers twining through his own.

  He said, “Do you know what baffles me? That even though they spent all those years apart, my father and mother were still married, right up to the day she died. My father offered to come back to Ireland then, and I wouldn’t have it. I sent him packing. It never occurred to me that he would have been grieving as much as I was. That wedding picture we found, of my father and Paz—it was taken long after my mother died.”

  “Are there not some things that defy understanding, things we just have to let be?” Nora’s chin rested on her drawn-up knee, a pale island in their peat-laden pool. Her eyes glowed, even larger and more luminous in the wavering candlelight.

  “When my mother died, it seemed as if I’d lost the only person to whom I felt… bound. I had to learn to be on my own, and I got used to it. Then came you, Nora. And now I suddenly find my family doubled, tripled”—he glanced up to the ceiling, beyond which his father and sister slept—“quadrupled. Just like that. Difficult to take it all in.”

  Without a word, Nora slid over and tucked herself around him, wrapping her legs about him, twining her arms through his, until they were bound together like a pair of interlaced figures from the pages of an ancient book. She leaned forward and laid her head on his shoulder, and he could feel her heart beating, through solid flesh, in quiet double rhythm with his own.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The Book of Killowen began, as did each of the books in this series, with a real-life archaeological discovery. In July 2006, Eddie Fogarty was operating a mechanical digger in the bog at Faddan More, County Tipperary, a few kilometers southwest of Birr. He spotted a leather-bound book as it fell from the bucket of his digger into an adjacent trench and immediately called the landowners, Kevin and Patrick Leonard, who had some experience with artifacts previously found in this particular bog. The Leonards knew they had something unusual when they spotted some illuminated pages, and they phoned the National Museum with the news that they’d discovered something like the Book of Kells. The manuscript in question turned out to be a Psalter, a book of Psalms written in the ninth century. Several lines of text were visible, and Dr. Raghnall Ó Floinn of the National Museum managed to pick out one legible phrase: “in ualle lacrimarum”: in the vale of tears. It was a line from Psalm 83, verse 7: “in ualle lacrimarum in loco quem posuit”: In the vale of tears, in the place which he has set. The Faddan More Psalter is now on permanent display at the National Museum of Ireland, part of an exhibit titled The Treasury: Celtic and Early Christian Ireland.

  The leather satchel that Cormac Maguire and Niall Dawson discover at Killowen Bog is based on fact as well. After the discovery of the Psalter, previous artifacts discovered at Faddan More took on a greater significance. I visited the Collins Barracks Conservation Department at the National Museum of Ireland in June 1999 while doing research for Haunted Ground. On the very day I toured the conservation lab, a technician was beginning work on a leather satchel that had just been discovered in a Tipperary bog—at a place called Faddan More. Ned Kelly, Keeper of Antiquities at the National Museum, told me that the workers who discovered the satchel described it as looking “for all the world like Tina Turner’s miniskirt.” The satchel was found only a few yards from where the Faddan More Psalter turned up seven years later. Archaeologists say there’s no way that the book and the bag can be definitively connected, but Irish monks commonly used leather bags to carry and store their precious books. Depictions of Irish monastic life show satchels hanging from pegs in early medieval scriptoria. The wax tablet discovered in this story is based on the Springmount bog tablets, which you can also see as part of the Faddan More Psalter exhibit at the National Museum in Dublin.

  As to the existence of John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century philosopher named in this story, both he and his pseudonymous scribe, Nisifortinus, are real historical figures. We know from his name that Eriugena was Irish-born and that he lived from about 815 to 880. He was known for his knowledge of Greek and for the originality and breadth of his ideas; he is often called the most creative thinker of the Middle Ages. He lived and worked for many years at the court of Charles the Bald (grandson of Charlemagne), and his work On Divine Predestination (he argued against), and his magnum opus Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature), still provide fodder for lively debate among scholars. Paleographers have long pored over early manuscripts of his work and tried to distinguish between Eriugena’s own handwriting and that of his assistants and scribes. The sixth book of Periphyseon imagined here is a complete fiction, although Eriugena did leave a note at the end of Periphyseon apologizing for all the topics he’d been obliged to omit from the preceding five volumes, “because of the weight of the material I had to deal with and the number of doctrines I had to expound,” and offering his pledge to deliver soon, point by point, on the promises contained in the text.

  Since Book Six of Periphyseon is a fabrication, so, necessarily, is the cumdach, or shrine, in which it was purportedly encased. Such jewel-encrusted book shrines are real, however, and you can see some wonderful examples on display at the National Museum of Ireland, or if you’re willing to veer off the beaten path, there was a particularly fine example at the Boher parish church in Offaly, but it was stolen by treasure hunters in the summer of 2012 and may not be returned to its original display. The notes that Nora discovers about a particular family charged with protecting the Book of Killowen are also part fiction and part fact, pieced together from actual accounts in Annála Ríoghachta Éireann, Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, by The Four Masters, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1616, translated and annotated by the great Celtic scholar John O’Donovan and published in 1851, and Devenish (Lough Erne): Its History, Antiquities, and Traditions, by Canon J. E. McKenna, published in 1897.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I extend grateful acknowledgment to all who assisted with background material for this novel, including Eamonn P. Kelly, Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, who generously answered questions about archaeological fieldwork and artifacts, and the scourge of treasure hunting in Ireland; John Gillis, Senior Conservator at Trinity College Library, who was responsible for painstakingly rescuing the pages of the Faddan More Psalter; Julie Dietman and Matthew Heintzelman of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, who arranged access to, and answered many questions about the medieval manuscripts in their collection; Dermot O’Mara of Sunny Meadow Farm, Powers Cross, County Galway, for organic farming information; Dáithí Sproule, for advice and assistance with Irish language usage and translations; Molly Lynch O’Mara and all of her Mountshannon farmers’ market cohorts; and Ann and Charlie Heymann, for the loan of books about Irish scribal arts. To Jody and Sean Henry, who looked after me with such kindness after the unfortunate misstep at Dun Aengus; and to Mary and Sean O’Driscoll and Brian and Margaret McGrath, who provided me with sustenance and a place to lay my head on the follow-up research trip, thank you. Thanks to Shawn Kearney, both for her enthusiasm about becoming a character in this story, and for her generous donation to the important work of the American Refugee Committee. I’m grateful to my entire extended family for letting me slip off to a quiet space to finish writing this book in the midst of happy chaos. Thanks to my wonderful aunt and uncle, Betty and John Rogers, for jumping into our Irish travels with both feet and for their support through this and all previous endeavors; to Lisa McDaniel, for providing encouragement and distraction when needed in equal measure; to Karen Mueller, who walks along beside me on the daily path of creativity; and to my pal Bonnie Schueler, to whom I am inde
bted for her example of unbridled joie de vivre and so much more. Sincere thanks, once again, to the incomparable Sally Wofford-Girand (along with assistants Melissa Sarver and Kezia Toth) of Brickhouse Literary Agents; to Samantha Martin, Shannon Welch, Greg Mortimer, and Susan Moldow at Scribner; and to Susanne Kirk, the most patient and gracious of editors. I’m grateful to my sweetheart, Paddy, for cooking many a splendid dinner (too many to count, really) while I was out wandering imaginary bogs. So, to all of the above, and to any others I have inadvertently neglected to mention here, a toast: Your blood should be bottled. Go mhéimid beo ag an am seo arís.

  About Erin Hart

  © JOYCE RAVID

  ERIN HART is a theater critic and former administrator at the Minnesota State Arts Board. A lifelong interest in Irish traditional music led her to cofound Minnesota’s Irish Music and Dance Association. She and her husband, musician Paddy O’Brien, live in St. Paul, Minnesota, and frequently visit Ireland. Erin Hart was nominated for the Agatha and Anthony Awards for her debut novel, Haunted Ground, and won the Friends of American Writers Award in 2004. Visit her website at www.ErinHart.com.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  JACKET ART © THE STAPLETON COLLECTION/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © RICHARD CUMMINS/CORBIS

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Also by Erin Hart

  Haunted Ground

  Lake of Sorrows

  False Mermaid

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.