Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

Stella propped her elbows on the glass and gazed at the book. This was only a photographic copy, and yet she felt herself pulled in by the tiny spirals and twisted birds, the serpent that formed the border, the odd rectangular shapes of letters hidden in plain sight. And the colors—red the color of half-dried blood, gold, green, and black—and eyes, everywhere, creatures staring unblinking from every corner of the page.

“Very fine, isn’t it?” The librarian’s voice startled her. “The original is in Oxford, but it was made at the monastery right here in Birr.”

“Yes, I was just reading about it,” Stella said. “I suppose there were lots of books like this made in the monasteries around here.”

“Yes, but only a few survive. Which makes them all the more valuable.”

“I wonder, you wouldn’t happen to have heard of the Book of Killowen?”

“Ah, the lost book of Killowen and its shrine.”

“If the book was lost, how do you happen to know about it?”

“There are several accounts of it. Monks wrote down the stories of important books, who made them, who kept them, any controversy. They say the first copyright case in the world was over a manuscript illegally copied by Colmcille himself. We librarians are like a secret society, Detective. Even in the digital age, we make it our business to know about books.”

Stella was puzzled. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

“Not formally, but I’ve seen you about. Mary Anglim—I should explain. I know your daughter, Lia. She often comes to our writers’ workshops for young people. You must be pleased—she’s turning into an excellent writer.”

“Yes… yes, she is,” Stella said, although this was the first she’d heard of any literary aspirations. She’d never even seen her daughter with pen in hand. What on earth did Lia write about? And why had she kept this part of herself so well hidden?

“Must be frustrating,” Stella said. “Reading accounts of something like the Book of Killowen and never being able to see it. Especially if it was as spectacular as this. Where do you suppose MacRegol’s book was between the time it was made and the time it was presented to the library at Oxford?”

“Most likely in private hands, but there’s no way to know for certain. Were you just here to see the Gospels, or was there something else?”

Stella said, “No, I came to see if you have the Irish Times on microfilm. I’m looking for a specific date.”

“Anything before 1996 is searchable on the Irish Times website. Let’s have a look. What’s the date?”

“Let’s start with the eighteenth of August, 1991,” Stella said. Mary Anglim brought up a search screen on a library computer beside them and typed in the first date. Smudgy black-and-white images of newspaper pages came up on the screen.

“Thanks.” Stella got down to it, letting her eyes wander over the headlines, anything that might pop out as connected to Vincent Claffey and his black market in secrets. Follow-up reports on the freeing of the Birmingham Six and the IRA firing mortar bombs at 10 Downing Street a few months earlier. There were items about the brouhaha over the minister of defense being spotted at an IRA funeral, and preparations for the opening of the Dublin Writers Museum at Parnell Square. A small headline on page six stood out: “Gardaí still seek leads on missing woman.”

Stella made the article larger and began to read. “Gardaí investigating the disappearance last month of Co Dublin woman, Ms Tricia Woulfe (23), have not ruled out the possibility that the case could become a murder investigation. But Supt Gerald Murray from Harcourt Street, who is in charge of the investigation, said yesterday there was no evidence to suggest that the young woman has been murdered. Tricia Woulfe, from Greystones, Dublin, was last seen in the Cuffe Street area of the City at around 1 am on 13 August.”

That was the day before the Cregganroe bombing. Twenty-two years ago this month. A photograph accompanied the article, a blurry black-and-white image showing a young woman with short dark hair and a broad smile, her friends obviously cropped out of the frame.

Where was Tricia Woulfe now? Stella thought she had an idea.

Cormac looked up from his work at the excavation site to see a figure approaching through the small trees and clumps of sedge that dotted the surface of the bog.

“Nora,” he said. She stopped digging. Niall Dawson was about forty yards away. Cormac climbed up out of the cutaway and waited for his friend. “They cut you loose,” he said.

“Didn’t have enough to hold me. Never did. What a mess.”

Nora shaded her eyes as she looked up from the pit. “I’m so glad. Welcome back, Niall.”

“Tell me what you’re up to here,” Dawson said. “I’m in desperate need of distraction.”

Cormac jumped off the bank into the hole once more, while Niall peeled off his jacket and began to roll up his shirt cuffs. The three of them stood in the middle of the large rectangular void.

“We’ve finished going over the area where we found the satchel,” Cormac said. “So I thought we’d get going on a couple of test pits. I was just going to start breaking the surface in that area.” He indicated a plot that he’d finished marking off with stakes and twine. “Maybe you’d care to let off a little steam?”

Cormac handed his friend the pick, and Niall attacked the dense, spongy peat. Once the top layer was broken, they would use spades and trowels and eventually graduate to bare hands to sort through the increasingly sodden material below.

“I stopped by the farm—Claire told me about the fire,” Dawson said, breathing heavily as he slung the pick. “She said there were old books in that storehouse.”

Cormac said, “Yes. That nice French couple turned out to be Swiss art thieves on the run from Interpol.”

Dawson stopped his work. “Lucien and Sylvie? Claire didn’t mention that.”

“They were the only people missing after the fire,” Cormac said. “They must have seen us go into the storehouse and saw their chance to escape.”

“Yes, but why start a fire?” Dawson asked. “Why not just lock you in while they made their getaway? That level of violence, it doesn’t fit the profile of book thieves I’ve seen. They like money, or they like books, but very few resort to murder.”

“Unless they were involved in Kavanagh’s death.”

“Why stick around after he was killed? That doesn’t make sense either.”

“Unless they didn’t have what they’d come here to find. Niall, did you ever hear of a manuscript called the Book of Killowen? Shawn Kearney seemed to know about it,” Cormac said. “She seemed rather frightened, to tell you the truth.”

“I found a brief mention of it in John O’Donovan’s Ordnance Survey notes,” Nora added. “It was evidently a special book, but it was said to have been burned back in the twelfth century. O’Donovan also mentioned a fancy book shrine, but it may have been melted down after the book was destroyed. And the family that was reported to have done all this were called Beglan.”

Dawson stopped swinging the pick and leaned on the handle. “What else do you know?”

“The Beglans were successors to the founder of the monastery at Killowen. But it’s all so convoluted,” Cormac said. “I meant to tell you, Niall, we showed the photos of the wax tablet to Martin Gwynne. I thought it was rather curious that a medieval manuscript expert should be living here at Killowen, so I rang up Robbie and asked him to check into Gwynne’s background. Turns out he was sacked from the British Library over a stolen manuscript, twenty years ago. The thing is, the stolen book was a revised edition of Deeds of the English Bishops by William of Malmesbury—”