Haunted Ground Part 12

"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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.ton-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 a.s.sume 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 impa.s.sive; 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?"

"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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.i.t.c.h. 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 doc.u.ments 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 mult.i.tudes 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 doc.u.mentation. 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 c.u.mulus 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 h.o.a.rders 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, gla.s.sware, 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 always 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 a.n.a.lysis 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.

Cormac looked down to the other end of the trench, where Nora was working, kneeling in the dirt with her sleeves rolled up. Gray dust clung like mist to her dark eyebrows. She was about four feet away from him, concentrated on her work, searching through the damp soil with a trowel, then dumping the gravel into her growing pile of debris. Cormac decided he quite liked being here, the only sounds the sc.r.a.ping of the spade, the thump of each panful of soil, the occasional distant croak of a disgruntled crow.

"Do you ever get tired of turning up nothing?" Nora asked. "All this work, to find nothing but four solid feet of sand and gravel? What keeps you going, inch after b.l.o.o.d.y inch?" Strange how she seemed to know exactly what he'd been thinking.

"The potential, I suppose, the hope that something might turn up. Your work must have a good bit of drudgery as well, all those thousands of straightforward textbook cases before you get to the one really interesting anomaly. Isn't it this part, the sifting through the ordinary, that makes breakthrough moments all the more memorable?"

"You're right, of course," Nora said, "but remind me again what we're looking for."

"Artifacts from any period, of course, but also evidence of any structures, layers of ash or charcoal that might give us dates or horizons for the occupation of the site. Refuse pits, slag heaps, any specific waste from human activity. Communities like this often served secular needs as well as spiritual ones. We're looking to see what this spot can tell us about the events that took place here, and in what order." He continued talking as he pulled a slip of paper from his clipboard and wrote a number on it, then impaled the paper on a three-inch nail in the wall of the bank. "I will admit it's frustrating, trying to get clues about a whole culture from what you can see through a couple of what are essentially peepholes. But put our peepholes together with the peepholes from all over the country, and a larger picture begins to emerge. And who says we're turning up nothing?" He gestured toward the bank of clay in front of him. "See how the coloration of the soil changes here? And see this thin layer of black between? That's charcoal. Evidence of human habitation. With a little more work, we can even tell what kind of wood they burned. You have to learn how to look at it." He put down his spade and came to sit beside Nora.

"Look over there," he said, gesturing toward the landscape across the road, "and tell me what you see." Nora lifted her head, and gazed toward the horizon of hay fields and pastureland.

"Cattle, gra.s.s. Lots of yellow flowers. Why, what do you see?"

"Look again," Cormac said. "Straight ahead."

"I see a hill. Is this some sort of a trick?" Cormac said nothing, but watched her face as the rounded knoll that rose out of the canary-colored sea of dandelions, the shape she had no doubt first seen as a natural feature of the landscape, took on an altogether different profile. He knew that all at once she could see that it was too round, too regular to be an ordinary hill, and one end was cut out, almost like the entrance to a mine shaft. He watched appreciatively as her mouth dropped slowly open, and she turned to face him once more.

"What is it?"

"Could be the remains of a ringfort, or a burial mound." He was pleased that the discovery had made such a profound impression.

"You're giving me goose b.u.mps," she said.

"I swear that wasn't my intention."

They worked for a while in silence. "You know, Raftery said it might be a couple of days before he can get his aunt to speak to us," Nora said. "There must be something else we can do in the meantime."

"What do you propose?"

"Well, we could go to the heritage center you mentioned, see what kinds of records they keep. We could try bribing Robbie with biscuits to dig up all he can about Cathal Mor O'Flaherty." She paused, but he sensed there was more.

"And..."

"Well, what I'd really love is a look inside that tower house. Are you any good at picking locks?"

"Hang on. I'm not going to go breaking in somewhere."

"How else are we supposed to get in?" Nora asked, dumping out the sieve and banging it on the ground to dislodge the last bits of pebble and clay. "There isn't exactly a welcome mat at the door. I suppose you're waiting for an invitation."

"You realize that if you insist, I'll have no other choice but to go along, if only to keep you out of trouble."

"I'm perfectly happy to go on my own," Nora said. "I might have to, if you're going to be squeamish about--"

Cormac raised a finger to his lips to signal silence, and Nora clamped her mouth shut and listened. She heard nothing but the harsh aic-aic of a corncrake.

"There's somebody here," Cormac said under his breath. "Up in the cloister walk. Keep working. Maybe we can get whoever it is to come out." They busied themselves at their work again, stealing an occasional glance toward the cloister wall.

"Let's walk back to the jeep," Cormac said quietly. "Slowly. You go first. Create a distraction. Cut through the cloister at the near end, here, and I'll go to the far end. Unless whoever it is wants to climb out a window, he'll be stuck in the middle." As he spoke, Cormac wondered if he was a physical match for Brendan McGann, if it came down to that.

Nora nodded and stood up, brushed the knees of her jeans, and spoke loudly enough that the eavesdropper could hear. "Well, I can't wait any longer for lunch, I'm ravenous." She walked a diagonal to the corner nearest where the jeep was parked. "I believe our choices today are plain cheese or cheese and tomato." She had reached the end of the cloister, and turned to find Jeremy Osborne pressed against the wall at the far end of the corridor. He looked at her, and turned to retreat, but by then Cormac had come up behind Jeremy and received the tackle solidly, catching the boy by the shoulders.

"Hold up there," Cormac said gently. "No need to run." Jeremy was wresting his arms away from Cormac as Nora came up behind him. "h.e.l.lo, Jeremy," she said, and he turned to look at her again. Out here in the daylight, how fragile he looked, she thought, with the same large eyes, p.r.o.nounced cheekbones, and pale, translucent skin his mother had. His features were more pleasing, however, and his cheeks still had the youthful high color Lucy's had lost. Something in the way he moved reminded Nora of a skittish horse, and from what she'd seen of this boy with his mother, he was not unused to bit and bridle.

"What are you up to?" she asked, hoping that the glimmer of friendship she'd once seen in his eyes could be coaxed back if they used gentle words, and avoided sudden movement.

"I wasn't spying," he said. "I came to help." Nora looked at Cormac and raised her eyebrows in silent exclamation.

"That's great," she said. "I'm sure we can find plenty for you to do. Nice of your mother to spare you."

Jeremy's eyes met hers for an instant. "I'm here on my own."

"Well, we can certainly make use of you," Cormac said. "Always good to have an extra pair of hands. You don't mind being a general dogsbody, do you? I'm afraid that's the only position available on this dig."

"I don't mind."

"Can I show you what to do?" Cormac led the boy over to the trench, while Nora went to the jeep to get their lunch pack; she really was ravenous. When she came back, she watched them for a while: Cormac, his voice quiet and confident, was explaining what they were about, what Jeremy should look for, and how he was making a record of everything they found. This was a side of him she hadn't seen: Cormac the teacher, down on one knee, demonstrating the proper way to sift debris, letting the boy try it, then praising him for a quick study. Jeremy was hunkered down on his heels like a child, filling the pan, sifting through it with his fingers, and methodically dumping the gravel into the small pile she had started.

"Well, now you're fully broken in," she said to Jeremy, "how about some lunch? We've plenty of food." She could see the boy hesitate slightly before accepting. They settled on a patch of gra.s.s a short distance from the trenches and Nora began pa.s.sing the sandwiches, then poured them each tea from a flask. Cormac took out his pocketknife to cut a pair of green apples so the three of them might share. The sky was overcast, but behind the clouds they could tell the sun had climbed to its place at the top of the sky; the day was growing more close by the minute. They'd been saved from sweltering thus far by a gentle but steady wind that seemed to roll down from the mountains in the west.

"Ever work on a dig before?" Cormac asked. Jeremy shook his head, and Nora was struck by the mannerly way the boy swallowed his food before answering.

"I used to come and watch, when they were working on the priory," he said, "but they'd usually run me off. Didn't want me messing about, I suppose. I was only a kid."

"You must be finished with secondary school," Cormac said. Jeremy nodded. "Are you thinking about going on to university?" Though it was asked without judgment, this question seemed to make the boy uncomfortable. He started methodically uprooting handfuls of the gra.s.s that grew beside him.

"I've still got exams. I'm not sure yet what I want to do. Mum says I ought to be learning something about how to run an estate," Jeremy said, his voice betraying how little he thought of such an occupation.

"What are you interested in, Jeremy?" Nora asked. His eyes met hers, and for a second she thought she saw something in them vaguely akin to an accusation. Then they dropped to the ground again, to the rapidly balding patch beside him.

"I--I don't know," he stammered. As though that were something to be ashamed of, Nora thought, at his age. She could see his ears begin to burn a bright crimson.

After lunch, they continued working a good three and a half hours until teatime. Cormac took a break from his spadework to take some photographs showing the general progress of the dig and to check levels. Jeremy acted as his a.s.sistant, holding the meter staff in place to mark the depth of the trenches, and the scale of variances in coloration. As the afternoon wore on, the breeze died down, until there was hardly a breath stirring. Nora stopped to take a long drink from her jug, then tipped her head down and poured some of the lukewarm water over the back of her neck. As she stood straight again and mopped the extra droplets with her bandanna, she found Jeremy Osborne staring at her. When their eyes met this time, he did not look away, and something in his look made her inordinately self-conscious. Nora turned away and knelt to gather up her tools. She remembered helping the sodden young man to his feet the night they met, and wondered whether he might have acquired an unhealthy yen for her. If that was the case, she'd probably only encouraged it, chatting away like that the afternoon she found him asleep in the nursery. How could she get him to talk to her now? She had had no business fueling any adolescent fantasies. Nora suddenly remembered the breathy voice on the telephone. Could the words of warning have come from Jeremy Osborne?

10.

Nora had been surprised when Una McGann and her daughter stopped by the dig on Friday to ask for a lift into town on Sat.u.r.day morning for the market, but she'd agreed, partly out of curiosity. The market was just gearing up this time of year, Una said, but there were small baskets of new potatoes, early hothouse strawberries, flowers, peas, lettuces, white and brown hen eggs, duck eggs. No one made cheese anymore, but there were homemade sausages and black and white puddings, along with household goods like rush brooms and baskets.

Sat.u.r.day morning arrived damp but mild. Nine o'clock seemed late for a market to open, Nora thought, as she approached the McGanns' house. She hoped she wasn't late. Through the open window, she could see the little girl, Aoife, skipping in a circle around the kitchen table and hear Una counting aloud, no doubt totting up how much her wares would bring. The little girl's voice broke in: "Mammy, Mammy, can I get a bun from the sweet shop, can I please, Mammy?"

Una's reply was short: "I'm still counting, Aoife, can't you hush?"

"Mammy, Mammy." Aoife was pulling on her mother's hand now. "I think she's here. I think she's here." Una withdrew her hand in annoyance, and Aoife, who had been pulling with all her strength, went sprawling backward. There was a moment of horrified silence before the child began to whimper, and Una dropped to the floor beside her.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm just so tired, Aoife. I'm not angry with you." When Nora came to the open door, Una was kissing her daughter's head, and rocking back and forth to calm them both.

"h.e.l.lo," Nora called. "Anyone home?" Una was helping Aoife to her feet, and wiping her eyes with the back of one hand.

"Are you all right?" Nora asked. Una looked frayed, but she patted her daughter's hand and said, "We're grand now, aren't we, a chroi? Nora, could you manage a few of these bags? Aoife, you take a couple as well." Una herself picked up the heavy box full of sweet cakes, and followed them out the door.

When they arrived in Dunbeg, the market vendors were still setting up: Travelers setting out cheap mobile phones and garish rugs next to farmers selling brown eggs and wild heather honey. Una shared a stall with a few fellow artists, some of whom had finished work to sell, and some, like herself, who sold whatever they could. Aoife hung on her mother's conversations with fellow vendors though it was clear, from the number of times she had to be asked to stop touching the goods and to be careful not to knock things over, that she was getting underfoot.

Nora pulled Una aside. "Aoife and I could take a little excursion, if you like, down to the tearoom or something. At least until you're set up."

Una's face revealed a mixture of grat.i.tude and relief. "That would be brilliant. Wait, I'll give you some money," she said, reaching for the small pouch that was slung around her waist.

"Oh no, my treat, please. But maybe we'd better ask Aoife what she thinks of the idea."

Una made her way over to where the little girl was strumming the fringes on a whole rack of Indian scarves. Nora observed their conversation from a short distance, then saw Aoife running toward her, face aglow with antic.i.p.ation.