Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

“Everything all right?” Cormac asked.

“Gráinne threw me out. I’ve never seen her so angry.” He made eye contact. “Thanks for the advice.”

“Niall, I’m sorry.”

“You know, I don’t feel much like talking right now.” He reached out to push the door shut, and Cormac had to jump back to avoid being hit.

He’d made a total bollocks of everything. Nora was still staring at her computer screen when he opened the door to their room. She glanced up.

“Niall’s back from Dublin. Gráinne threw him out. I urged him to come clean, Nora, and now—”

“The two of them will have to figure out what to do, Cormac. We can’t help them.” She pointed to the floor beside her. “Come and sit.”

Her cool fingers gently massaged his temples, the tension melting away down his neck and shoulders, wherever her hands came in contact with his skin.

“Nora?”

“Hmm? You know, if you keep talking, you’ll never relax properly.”

“There’s something I meant to ask you. I followed Anthony Beglan home from the bog this afternoon and watched him clean and dress about a half dozen eels. He cut something from their entrails—I wasn’t close enough to see, but he brought whatever it was to Martin Gwynne.”

Nora kept working at the cords in his shoulders. “Go on.”

“They were small bluish sacs, about this size.” He made a shape with his fingers, held it up to show her. “After Anthony left, Martin cut open each one and drained off a bright yellow liquid into a jar.”

Nora stopped kneading. “Ah, yes, he told me about that. I wandered into his studio the day we arrived. We were talking about all the strange sources for pigments, and he said the monks used to make a yellow ink from the gallbladders of eels—”

A knock sounded at the door. And another, urgent.

Eliana was outside, in pajamas.

“He’s gone, your father. I don’t know where he is.”

Cormac froze. They’d never had a problem with him wandering off at home in Dublin, but each day out here seemed to hold a new and distressing surprise.

They headed downstairs, with Cormac and Eliana each taking a wing of the house and Nora checking outside in the car park. As Cormac ventured down the corridor of the south wing, he spied the door of the thermal suite ajar.

The old man was up to his chin in peaty water, eyes closed, clearly enjoying himself. “He’s here,” Cormac shouted. “Nora! I’ve got him.”

Eliana arrived at the door. “I’m sorry, I should have been watching.”

“No harm done, none at all,” Cormac insisted. “This isn’t your fault. It’s just that he’s very… independent.”

“Please don’t be angry with him. It’s my fault. Perhaps he doesn’t understand me, my English—”

“Your English is fine,” Cormac said. “Now, please don’t be upset. No one is in trouble.” When Nora arrived, he said to Eliana, “Maybe you and Nora would make us a cup of tea while I get him dressed again.”

Nora slid her arm around the girl’s shoulder. “Come on, Eliana, I think there’s a bit of porter cake left.”

When they’d gone, Cormac sat down on the bench beside the sunken tub and studied his father’s face: eyes closed, a film of perspiration on his forehead and upper lip. Suddenly the old man’s eyes opened, and he seemed overcome by a gust of feeling. Cormac sat helplessly, not certain what to do. He reached out and placed a hand on his father’s shoulder, the aging flesh soft as kidskin, loose against bone. To his surprise, the old man’s hand covered his. “You’re my sum,” Joseph said. “My sum.”

Cormac sank down on one knee beside his father, not wishing to withdraw his hand too soon. At last the old man sighed heavily. “I’m wet,” he said, as though noticing that fact for the very first time.

“Yes,” Cormac said, “that you are.” He reached over and pulled one handle to begin draining the tub, another to switch on the shower spray.

“Mmm,” Joseph said absently. He took Cormac’s hand once more and pressed the palm against his breastbone. “My sum.”

As Cormac came down the stairs into the kitchen at Killowen the next morning, Niall Dawson was staring down into a cup of steaming coffee. He looked like hell—unshaven, dark rings under his eyes. But he glanced up as Cormac poured himself a cup of coffee.

“I’m sorry for taking everything out on you last night,” Dawson said. “It’s not your fault I’m in this mess—it’s all down to me. It’s probably good that I’m here, actually. It’ll give Gráinne time to think.”

“She loves you, Niall. You’ll work things out.”

Dawson nodded numbly. “Listen, before we head back to the site, I was thinking of nipping over to the hospital, to see if I could use one of the scopes and have a closer look at that wax tablet. Thought you might like to come along.”

Twenty minutes later, they were pulling into the parking lot at the hospital in Birr. The tablet had been kept with evidence from the Kavanagh murder, which included Killowen Man, his clothing, and other effects. Dawson brought the tablet to the adjacent pathology lab where they could examine it under a microscope.

“I’ve been thinking about the stylus Shawn found at Killowen last April,” he said, placing the tablet gently on the scope’s stage and adjusting the angles of the lamps. “I spent hours looking at that thing under the magnifier at the Barracks. One side of it had a small flattened spot—not clear how it happened exactly, but it gave the thing a particular fingerprint. And with a material as impressionable as wax, it just might be possible to prove an association between the stylus and this tablet. Each stylus has a signature, and if there’s any way of identifying its mark—if there’s a flattened area on one side that could be identified on a microscopic level, for example—we might be able to say with a high degree of certainty that the stylus Shawn found was used on this tablet.” He peered through the lens, moving the tablet carefully across the stage to inspect each line of text.

Dawson’s voice took on an excited edge. “You’re not going to believe this. Take a look.”

Cormac leaned in and looked through the lens.

“Do you see it?” Dawson was almost dancing. “I had hoped, certainly, but never… can you see it?”

Cormac could see a distinctive flattened impression, repeated wherever the writer had made a mark upon the wax.

“No other stylus could make exactly the same mark. This is enormous.”

Cormac understood how Niall was feeling. That sudden, visceral connection with the person who wrote those words on the tablet, or left his mark on metal, his fingerprint in clay. No one talked much about the emotional fallout of these discoveries, rare glimpses so deep into the past. Staring at shapes graved into the wax, he suddenly saw how letters began, as animal signs and drawings on cave walls. The words before him still carried the horns of the ox, the sinuous curve of the serpent.

Dawson began to pace in the narrow laboratory space. “I’m thinking Killowen Man must have been a rare specimen indeed, if he could read and write Greek. Must have been a scholar of some degree.” He was thinking aloud. “If we could get a better angle on the lighting, perhaps we could make out the words more clearly.” Cormac stepped back, and Dawson began adjusting the lamp to rake light across the surface of the wax. “Better be careful,” he muttered to himself. “Christ, that’s all I’d need right now, to melt this! Have you got the camera—”