Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

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.”

“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 describe 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.

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.