Erin Hart - Haunted Ground

The surface of the floor had begun to break apart beneath the steady scouring of the stone, but Nora didn’t seem to notice until her fingers brushed against a tuft of ragged cloth that stuck up from the loosened soil. As Cormac watched, she brushed away the soil to uncover a bundle of what looked like rough-textured woolen homespun. When she carefully lifted the top layer of frayed and moth-eaten fabric, a tiny, fragile-looking skull lay exposed on the surface of the soil, its empty sockets upturned toward the sky.

“Cormac,” she whispered. “This is a newborn baby.” He experienced a kind of slow-spreading horror at the realization that Mina and Christopher Osborne might not be the only victims entombed here, merely the most recent. “Help me,” she said, and began to scratch at the surface of the soil again with the rough edge of stone.

“We should get the Guards.”

She paused only briefly to scan his face. “I’m not stopping now.”

“At least let me get some tools. Please be careful, Nora. Let me show you what to do.” He hurriedly reached up to the bank above their heads and felt around for the handle of his site kit. He handed her a trowel, and used another himself to help clear away bits of soil and animal bones, until the infant was completely uncovered, and what was clearly recognizable as an adult’s elbow joint protruded from the earth beside it.

Within the space of a few minutes, they’d uncovered almost the entire right side of an adult human skeleton, curled around the bundle containing the remains of the child. They really ought to stop now; the standard protocol in the discovery of any human remains was to inform the Gardai immediately. But Cormac knew he’d have a job convincing Nora on that point. Besides, these bones were too old to be of any concern to the police, he was certain. At least a dozen skeletons like this turned up every year, as building foundations were excavated and pipelines and sewage schemes were launched; such discoveries had become almost routine in a place that had been so densely populated for so long.

“See how the surrounding material is full of bones and broken shells?” he said. “That probably means this area was used as a midden; people had to live in these places for extended periods if they were under siege, so they needed not only a stock of supplies, but also a place to get rid of rubbish. It seems like these two weren’t just left in the souterrain, but were actually buried here. Though I couldn’t tell you why.”

About two inches from the adult skeleton’s flexed knee joint, Cormac’s trowel suddenly came in contact with what appeared to be a small patch of metal just under the surface of the clay. He quickly scraped away the dirt and gravel to expose one side of an oblong metal container, about the size of a small bread box and rather ordinary-looking. With further digging, the box turned out to be a sort of coffer or strongbox, now heavily corroded from being buried in damp soil. It was decorated with nail heads and secured around with two heavy iron bands. When he finally had the whole thing excavated, Cormac could see the remnants of leather handles on either side that had rotted through, and the rusty padlock that secured the vaulted lid.

“Maybe something in here can give us an idea who they are,” he said.

Nora could perceive that Cormac was speaking, but his words didn’t register. She had seen hundreds of human skeletons in the course of her career, but each time, she couldn’t help being struck by the beauty and ingenuity of the form, the strength and flexibility in the triangular bones of the spine. She was studying the way the soil had infiltrated the child’s chest cavity, cradling the breastbone, ribs, and collarbone. She knew how difficult it was to tell whether an adult skeleton was male or female without precise measurements of the pelvic bones, though this one being found in the company of a newborn child increased the probability that it was female. Nora knelt over the mute remnants of what might be the second mother and child hidden in this dark place, and understood from the posture of the whitened bones lying before her, now exposed to the light, that again there had been no laying to rest here, no ceremony, but another hurried inhumation cloaked in secrecy. All at once she began to experience the same prickling sensation she had in the lab the day she was alone with the head of the cailin rua. “Cormac,” she said, “do you realize what we haven’t found?”

Nora worked feverishly to remove compacted soil until it was clear that no skull was attached to the end of the adult’s spinal column. She quickly counted the vertebrae, careful not to touch the bones themselves for fear of scratching or damaging them. A normal human spine should have seven cervical vertebrae; this individual was missing the first three.

“My God, Cormac, this could be our red-haired girl,” Nora said, then almost immediately reversed herself. “No—that would be just too fantastic.”

“Of course it would. But I don’t know why it should be. The girl Raftery told us about—Annie McCann—who was executed, she was from around this place somewhere. And what would have become of her body after the execution? You wouldn’t very well bury a convicted murderer in the churchyard with all the proper Christians.”

If by some remote chance this actually was the cailin rua, why would someone take the trouble to conceal her body in a souterrain—with the corpse of the infant she’d presumably murdered? Of course none of it made logical sense. Nora’s head ached, and her shoulders finally began to feel the crushing weight of the last few days’ events. She looked down at the child’s tiny skull, and tried to imagine what little effort it would take to stop the breath of such a helpless creature. It would be over in a few brief seconds. Is that how this child died, when its mother’s touch turned murderous? The infant’s empty orbits stared up at her, unanswering, and Nora felt suddenly cold, kneeling in the damp, shaded corner of the underground room.

Malachy Drummond had returned and confirmed Cormac’s assumption that the remains found in the souterrain had indeed been buried there for several centuries. Now he sat with Nora in the evidence room at the Loughrea Garda station. They were waiting for Niall Dawson from the National Museum, who was coming down to have a look at the strongbox and to take it and the skeletal remains with him back to Dublin.

“You’re very quiet this morning,” Cormac said.

“I’m just thinking about how thin the line is between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. And once it’s done, how everything changes.”

“We have nothing to be sorry about, Nora. If you and I had never come here, Mina and Christopher Osborne would still be missing. All we did was to help uncover what was already done.”

“I know, I know. I keep telling myself that. But the way I went about things here only ended up causing extra pain, to you, to everyone. It’s ironic that the whole point of coming back here was supposedly to find out more about the cailin rua, and we haven’t even managed to do that.”

“Hang on,” Cormac said. “We found that bit of a song. Raftery found the story of an execution that fits the dates. And we should know within a few days whether the skeleton from the souterrain belongs to our red-haired girl. That’s an incredible amount of information, Nora. What more could we possibly learn?”

Her eyes pierced him. “That she didn’t do it. That she didn’t murder her own child.” As Cormac studied Nora’s face, he knew that she was also thinking of Hugh Osborne. The awful uncertainty over the whereabouts of his family had been replaced with an even more dreadful probability—that one or more of the people they had come to know in these few days at Bracklyn might be involved in a double murder. The thought had been weighing upon him as well.