My mind ran with that one for a while. Mary, the pure maiden; Mary, the fallen woman. One Mary representing motherhood; the other, female sexuality. If Mary was milk, then the Magdalene was blood. But since menstrual blood was understood to be converted into milk in the lactating mother’s body, that made the two of them inseparable aspects of woman. Was that it? Had the makers of the statue incorporated these two elements – the bare-breasted mother with the come-hither look? And had that caused a scandal, making some observers think that Mary Magdalene had been depicted suckling the Infant Jesus? Had the statue been hidden away because of the confusing signals it sent out?
Chapter Twenty-Five
DEADLY OUTBREAK CAUSED BY IMMIGRANTS!
YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN ARE BEING PUT AT RISK BY AN INVASION OF SO-CALLED ‘ASYLUM-SEEKERS’. MANY OF THEM ARE CARRIERS OF DISEASES THAT COULD DEVISTATE OUR POPULATION. THE ONLY WAY TO PROTECT OURSELVES IS TO RUN AFRICANS, ASIANS AND OTHER FOREIGN NATIONALS OUT OF CASTLEBOYNE. WE WERE COLONISED ONCE. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN.
IRELAND FOR THE IRISH!
The notice was pinned to the front door of my house. I wondered what had happened to turn the outbreak into a race issue.
Driving through Castleboyne shortly after 9.00 a.m. I had seen that a flyer of some kind was posted on telephone poles and shop windows and stuck under the wipers of cars parked along the streets, but I had assumed it had to do with the quarantine – a circular from the Town Council, perhaps. Most of the shops were shuttered and the streets deserted, and there was no traffic passing through. As I passed what had been the Maudlins cemetery, I glanced up and saw three figures clothed in white biohazard suits from head to toe, yellow tanks strapped to their backs, spraying the area fenced in at the top of the field. Despite the findings of CRID, they were taking no chances. It was probably a precautionary measure before they allowed work to start on the site. I thought the poster might have to do with that. I turned on the radio but the news was just over. The weather forecast said that the change heralded by the previous night’s thunderstorm was under way: the long hot spell was ending and typical Irish summer conditions were going to prevail. We would now have bad weather as well as the quarantine to contend with.
Whoever had distributed the notice hadn’t come out as far as Brookfield, but when I pulled into my own drive I could see they had reached my house. But the notice pinned to the door wasn’t from the Town Council.
I ripped it off and screwed it up into a ball, then went through the house calling for Boo. He refused to turn up, often his way of punishing me for leaving him alone even though he was well supplied with food and water. But when I least expected it, he would be around my feet, or I would see him uncurling from an unlikely perch – the bookshelves, for instance – where he’d been sleeping all the time unobserved, like the creature in the final scene of Alien.
While having a shower, I heard the house phone ringing. It would be ringing in the office too. Where was Peggy?
There was a message on the answering machine when I came out into the hall, towelling my hair. I hit Play and listened to a recording of a very tired Groot, apparently just on his way to bed. ‘Hi there. I tried your mobile but you have it switched off. It’s been a late night and I’m too tired to go into it all now. But when we last spoke I forgot to tell you about something else that came back from CRID – something they found in the coffin liquor. It completely baffled them, and that’s one reason they took so long getting back to us. For a start, there was more than one body buried in the coffin. You’re probably thinking straight away that it was a mother and child, but it’s far more bizarre than that. That fingernail was obviously human, and they found human DNA as well; but the hair, believe it or not, was from an animal, more than likely a dog. And with that spine-tingling news, Dr Frankenstein says good night, or rather, good morning.’
Spine-tingling? I thought it more stomach-churning. A dog buried in a coffin with human remains? Why would anyone do that? A favourite hunting hound or pet, perhaps?
But while I dressed, Finian’s story of the hell-hound outside the Magdalene graveyard came to mind and I have to admit my spine did tingle. And I was intrigued, not for the first time, by the way folklore passes on information about long-forgotten events from our ancestors to us.
My thoughts were cut short by the sound of Peggy’s car arriving. ‘Sorry, I’m late,’ she said, when I went through to the office. ‘I drove around the town trying to get a newspaper. When I finally found an open service station, I discovered that, of course, there are no newspapers being delivered. But I know there’s an article in Ireland Today on the meeting last night. Darren Byrne was there.’
‘The meeting? What meeting?’
‘In the Town Hall. The Town Council called one to discuss the outbreak.’
‘I’d no idea they were having one.’
‘They sent a car around making the announcement. You were probably in Brookfield, so you wouldn’t have heard it.’
‘Have heard it? God, what were they up to? Trying to make it seem even more like a medieval plague by sending around a town crier? Dammit, they should have contacted me directly.’
‘The notice was on local radio as well,’ Peggy said defensively.
‘Sorry to have barked at you, Peggy. It’s just a strange feeling to realise there was something like that going on and I was completely unaware of it. Tell me what happened.’
‘Feelings ran very high, I can tell you. Hundreds turned up, and they were really angry at the way the town was sealed off overnight. The Council and Health Service officials were nearly drowned out when they tried to explain their decision, but just when everyone was calming down, they let something slip. Darren Byrne asked if Dr Groot had done a postmortem on the second victim, and this Health Service guy said that he had and that detectives would probably be questioning some people in Castleboyne. Byrne demanded to know who they were, but the Health Service guy wouldn’t budge. That made the crowd go bananas. They said they wouldn’t let the officials out of the hall until they got the information. So they finally told us that it was a Nigerian family whose house the young Bolton lad used to visit.’
‘Damn,’ I said, banging my fist on the desk. ‘That was a stupid thing to announce to a crowd like that, I don’t care how scared the officials were. Look at the result – racist rubbish plastered everywhere.’ I was also mad at Groot. I assumed he had told the Gardaí about the boys playing with the knife, but he could have informed me that he intended doing so.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ I said abruptly. The feeling of being hemmed in was really getting to me.
I left the office and walked down through the garden. A gate at the far end led into a leafy lane that would bring me to the river.
The lane was lined with pillar-like beech trees, their canopies providing a branching roof and high diaphanous walls that the sun turned a glowing green, winking through occasional open panes and spangling the floor. I thought, not for the first time, that scenes like this must have inspired the designers of the great Gothic cathedrals. Then I noticed black, sooty stains on the leaves of a branch at head-height. They weren’t the products of pollution, but aphid secretions. Beauty and blemish are close companions in nature. Darren Byrne was like that: the canker in the rose. Why is it that some people seem to think their role in life is to make the rest of us feel uncomfortable? Life is tough enough – you don’t need some bastard going around making it more hellish.
At the bottom of the lane, the trees thinned out and pink dog-roses were spilling over the hedgerow. The elders were in blossom too; the flowers were meant to taste like champagne, but I knew from experience it was more like chardonnay. Which put me in mind of Finian and what was happening to us. What should have been only a passing moment of tension between us had been amplified by the arrival of Groot, and perhaps by the caged-in feelings brought about by the quarantine. But now there seemed to be a worm eating away at the very core of our relationship.
At the e
nd of the lane was a single sycamore, and out of its base was growing a huge lilac-coloured fungus, two lobes with a corrugated surface, making it look like a giant clam. It seemed that everywhere I looked I was seeing the grotesque keeping company with the sublime. One of the best-known motifs in the art of the Middle Ages is the encounter between the three living and the three dead – three young nobles out hawking are depicted meeting up with their own rotting, worm-eaten, skeletal cadavers, the inscription underneath saying, ‘We have been as you are, and you shall be as we’: today a handsome prince, tomorrow a decomposing corpse.
Could that be the significance of the other lead coffin in the graveyard? The foul sediment of death and corruption, side by side with the ever-beautiful image of the life-giving Virgin?
I wondered why these gloomy thoughts and images were preying on me. I can’t claim the gift of second sight, but occasionally some arrangement of objects will strike me as having a significance that I can’t explain – until events come to pass that reveal what it signified. It’s like the more ominous side of my quirkily clairvoyant clothes sense.
As I emerged from the lane onto the riverbank, I saw that rain-clouds in the colours of my bruised neck were gathering above the meadow on the far side, whereas on my side, the heat of the sun was extracting the eel-smell of flagger roots from the earth.
Further along the bank was a solitary weeping willow. A momentary gust of wind upturned its leaves, revealing their silvery undersides as though an icy breath had blown on them. But as it reached me, the breeze brought something with it – not the scents of the river, but something deeply unpleasant. I recalled that, according to Finian, the first thing his father had noticed on the day he found the body was the smell.
Some of the willow’s branches hung out over the river. As I dipped my head to get under its umbrella of leaves, I immediately saw the poor creature about three metres from me, hanging from a branch out over the water. A cloud of flies rose up from it briefly, then descended again, giving me the chance to see it was a rabbit. It had been hung by the neck, and its abdomen had been ripped open.
As I ran back up the lane, marble-sized hailstones slashed through the leaf canopy, sending green shards spiralling earthwards.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The hailstorm was still in full spate when I pushed open the hall door of Brookfield. I could hear the stones rattling on the glass roof of the conservatory where Finian and I had talked the previous night. I stood there in the darkened hall, drenched and shaking, wondering where I might find him. It was as if the light had been sucked out of the house by the atmospheric conditions, so when I saw a vague shape coming across the hall towards me, I wasn’t even sure that it was Finian. Then I felt his arms around me and I knew I was safe.
‘You’re shaking, love. What’s happened?’
As I was describing what I’d seen, he ushered me into the living room. I was surprised, yet strangely comforted, to see a fire in the hearth. Not only that, but it was a briquette fire, so the pleasant aroma of burning peat was wafting through the room. Then I saw that Arthur was snoozing on a couch in front of the fire and that Bess was lying full length on the rug between his feet and the fender.
Finian sat me down in the armchair closest to the fire and took the space next to his father on the couch. This brought Arthur to life – he opened an eye – although he said nothing until I finished my account of what had happened by the river. While Finian cast about in his mind for an explanation, Arthur began to chuckle. ‘Poacher,’ he said. A stroke had made it difficult for him to string words into sentences, but it was easy enough to follow him. ‘Old trick… Open dead rabbit…hang it. Maggots fall in river. Fish…trout lined up in droves. Poacher drops hooked maggot in – bingo! Works every time.’
‘It was left by a poacher? Are you sure?’
‘Sure as eggs are eggs. I guarantee…branch will have groove…from twine used to hang rabbits over years… Check, see I’m right.’
Arthur’s confident reassurance, combined with the heady, aromatic smoke from the fire, helped to make me relax. And then Finian suggested something that fitted into my idea of how a gloomy summer’s afternoon should be spent.
‘Let’s go and sort out the rest of this statue’s history,’ he said. ‘I’ve already dug up quite a bit on it.’
‘I’m all on for that.’ I stood up. ‘You’ve put my mind at rest,’ I said to Arthur, ‘whatever about my stomach. It’s a horrible practice, don’t you think?’
‘Not fair play,’ he said, but I think he was referring to the poacher’s methods rather than to the fate of the rabbit.
Finian led the way across the entrance hall to his office. ‘Why were you so freaked by a dead rabbit?’ He turned on the light.
‘I think because my mind was dwelling on some gruesome things just before I came across it. To be honest with you, Finian, I’m all over the place at the moment where my feelings are concerned. And what’s not helping is the casual way you’re treating our relationship. It seems to be the last thing you’re considering in your plans.’
Finian sat down at the computer. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been very absorbed in myself. I promise I’ll put my mind to it – us, I mean. I just need a day or so to get my head straight.’ He looked at me with great sincerity.
‘A couple of days, then.’ What had Gallagher said? ‘Don’t let it drag on.’
‘I won’t.’
‘OK, then. Let’s get going on this.’
Finian hit a key, and SIV came up on the screen. ‘Why don’t I print out what SIV’s turned up so far, and you can read it while I keep going?’
‘That’s fine by me.’
The first recorded reference to the shrine of the Virgin at Castleboyne was in the year 1259. It noted that the image had been venerated ‘since the early years of the century’ and that ‘the Irish and English vie in reverencing it’ – a sentiment that was echoed in the later entry I had read. It meant that the shrine had the beneficial effect of bringing the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman communities under one roof, at war only in their devotion to Our Lady of Castleboyne. Perhaps as a consequence, it was decreed in that year that ‘any person who should attempt to rob or assault any pilgrim on the way to or from this shrine be attainted of felony and excluded from royal protection’.
Nine years later, the Bishop of Meath founded Our Lady’s Priory, ‘wherein was installed the image of the Virgin’. It was noted more or less immediately that ‘many miracles of healing were worked through the shrine, to wit: eyes to the blind, his tongue to the dumb, legs to the lame’ – an entry that seemed designed to validate the decision of the Anglo-Norman ecclesiastics to take the image into their care. In 1272 the bishop laid the foundation for the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul at Oldbridge. By now it was obvious that Castleboyne was experiencing the vigorous religious development characteristic of the thirteenth century. I was familiar with the next entry – it was the first reference to the Magdalene hospital in the records. In 1273, the prior of Our Lady’s issued instructions for a levy to be paid by pilgrims for the upkeep of the Virgin’s shrine and the leper hospital of ‘St Mary Maudlin’.
That same year, a Lord Robert de Fay returned from the Holy Land and presented Our Lady’s Priory with ‘a sacred relic rescued by his noble hand in Jerusalem, a fitting donation as the image of the Virgin is said by some to have come to Castleboyne in the same way’. This was intriguing. De Fay had evidently returned with the relic from the Crusades; so did ‘in the same way’ mean that Our Lady of Castleboyne had been brought back by Crusaders too?
I had a question for Finian. ‘Can I disturb you for a second?’
‘Go ahead,’ he said, without turning.
‘Remind me – which of the Crusades was in the first few years of the thirteenth century?’
He tilted his head back for a couple of seconds, no doubt closing his eyes, and then answered. ‘The notorious Fourth. Launched in 1198 to go to Egypt. The Crusaders got into debt with the ban
kers of Venice, so the bankers sent them off to sack Constantinople, which they did in 1204 against the express wishes of the Pope. It was ultimately a fatal wound for the Byzantine Empire and the end of any hopes of a reconciliation between the Latin and Greek Churches.’
It was like one of those brief, boxed articles you get in travel guides. ‘Thanks. That will do nicely.’ Was it possible? Had the miracle-working image of the Virgin come back from the sack of Constantinople?
The early entries for the fourteenth century were innocuous enough. ‘1312 – The image of Our Lady wrought many miracles and rich offerings were made.’ ‘1336 – In March, Maurice Tuite was appointed guardian of the hospital of lepers of St Mary Maudlin. In May, an Act was passed in the parliament held at Castleboyne, granting Our Lady’s Priory two water mills on the Boyne for the purpose of supporting a perpetual wax light before the image of the Virgin.’
Then, in 1343, came a significant entry: ‘Geoffrey Balfe, Bishop of Meath, wrote to Prior Thomas proposing that a new reliquary be installed at Our Lady’s in time for the Holy Year of 1350 announced by His Holiness, Pope Clement, and that funds be raised for this purpose from the donations of pilgrims.’
That was as far as Finian had got. I waited for him to finish compiling the next selection, which would cover the time of the Black Death. It was like waiting for the next episode in a cliff-hanger: a new reliquary being commissioned; the plague about to descend. I looked out the window and saw clouds as thin and high as vapour trails stretched over the washed-blue sky. I thought I could hear a phone ringing somewhere in the house. Finian handed me the next print-out.
‘1345 – Many flocked to the shrine, including English, Welsh and Flemings.’ This was the first documentary evidence I’d read of pilgrims from the Low Countries coming to Castleboyne.
‘1347 – In September, Maurice Tuite, guardian of the Maudlin hospital, was indicted for stealing the possessions and donations of sick pilgrims. His wife, for shame, entered the convent. A son of curses and a devil for his evils, it was decreed that he should be starved to death ad dietam and share the fate of Donncadh MacMurrough.’ This was a strange entry. In the patchy chronicle of Irish medieval history, it was hard to know if the event had been recorded because it was deemed such a grave offence at the time or whether it had secured its place merely by accident while accounts of greater significance had been lost. It also required interpretation. But I wanted to move on.
The Lazarus Bell, an Irish Murder Mystery Page 20