House of the Dead Page 8

  As Cornelius and Donovan wandered about the stricken buildings stray individuals emerged, one by one, from the shadows to join them. A townsman took them to a vantage point which looked out over the town of Cashel below. Cornelius saw that it too had been fired and destroyed. The heat of the day was making the stench worse and carrion crows, circling in the sky overhead, were alighting in murders to pick the flesh of the dead. A contingent of Confederate troops arrived around noon and Cornelius was shocked by their laconic acceptance of massacre. The mangled faces of his people stared at him in mute accusation. Abruptly, he ordered the troops to organise group burials. The few religious treasures that he and Donovan had managed to take with into the secret room needed to be kept safe and reluctantly he entrusted them to the Confederates. But the Archbishop did not offer up the ornately carved box that had taken up so much room in the cramped chamber that he and Donovan had so recently occupied.

  Some days, and many funerals later, they left Cashel by cart. Donovan held the reins of the lone nag that pulled their small wagon and the Archbishop sat alongside him. Both were dressed as ordinary working men and wore not a single token to disclose that they were men of the cloth. Behind them on the cart, bales of rough cut firewood concealed the large box so effectively that, not only could you not see the intricate carving on its surface, you couldn’t actually detect a crate there at all. Cornelius was silent, shaken by the turn of events and how close they had come to total disaster. He knew now that there was no room left for complacency. No longer could he rely on the power of his Archbishop’s ring and robes. He must take bold, practical steps to guarantee protection for the Triskell.

  Chapter 24

  Sligo, Ireland, 15 September 2014

  When lunchtime came and went and still there was no sign of Jack, Mrs Ryan insisted on mounting a search. With Tara and a reluctant Neil in tow they set out, each armed with a variety of garden implements to help them hack their way through the wood. Niamh stayed put as she was planning to cook the evening meal and pick up the others. Brian had taken Aoife to Dublin by train the previous day for a visit to Imaginosity, a children’s museum that she had seen on TV, and they were expected back later in the afternoon.

  ‘Someone has to pick them up,’ Niamh intoned, her voice carrying an accustomed air of martyrdom.

  ‘And who better than you,’ riposted Tara as she passed by, pulling on her kagool. ‘Come on gang, let’s get going.’ She was reassured not to be returning to the thicket alone.

  Reaching the wood, they retraced Tara’s steps of the morning, using the loppers to widen their route, secure in the knowledge that getting out of the undergrowth would at least be easier than entering. Pushing on deeper into the trees, their calls were rewarded after a time by the sound of a muffled bark from the thicket ahead. Locating Jack, however, was a different matter. Several times the dog seemed so close that rescue seemed assured, only for his barks to recede. A vigorous, rapidly shifting breeze didn’t help.

  ‘Hold on a minute!’ said Neil. ‘Something isn’t right here. We should have found him by now. Do you think he is moving about?’

  They decided to stand still and test this theory. Sure enough, the call and response showed that Jack was on the move but if he could move about why didn’t he come to them?

  ‘That’s it!’ shouted Tara. ‘He can move, but he can’t come to us because he is underground. He must have fallen into a rabbit warren or something. We need to look for an opening in the rock.’

  This inspiration spurred their efforts and they tracked Jack’s barks to a group of boulders that broke surface nearby. Putting her ear to a gap in the rocks Tara was rewarded by the sounds of excited scampering and fresh yelps. The gap was very narrow, however, and Tara doubted that Jack had got in by that route.

  ‘Let’s spread out and look for a larger hole – there must be one.’

  In the event it was Neil who found it - or rather it found him, for letting out a cry of surprise he suddenly disappeared from view. Rushing over, Mrs Ryan and Tara found that he had slid down into what looked like a small tunnel.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ The anxiety in Mrs Ryan’s voice betrayed a life spent looking after and fretting about others.

  ‘Yes, I am – just a bit shaken but nothing broken, I don’t think,’ came Neil’s reply, ‘and Master Jack has just given me a face wash, so he seems fine.’

  Leaning down into the gap, Tara could see nothing but darkness.

  ‘Have you got your mobile on you?’ she called.

  ‘Yes,’ came the reply.

  ‘Well, use it as a torch,’ Tara shouted down. There was silence for what seemed like an age.

  ‘Neil, are you sure you are all right?’ Again anxiety crackled in Mrs Ryan’s voice. This time they got a reply.

  ‘Yes, I’m OK but you should see this place. It looks like a cave but I don’t know. I am going to have a look.’

  ‘Be careful, for God’s sake!’ Mrs Ryan’s voice moved sharply up the register, making Tara jump.

  After a few agonising minutes Neil’s voice came back.

  ‘Tara, I think you had better come down and see this.’

  ‘Why, what is it?’

  ‘Well, I think it is – well, I suppose it is a...tomb.’

  Tara and Mrs Ryan exchanged glances. Despite the look of protestation on the housekeeper’s face, Tara knew she was going down the hole to join Neil. Mrs Ryan pointed out that Neil couldn’t even get out as things stood, so how would Tara? She was right about that, as Neil reported that the chamber’s walls were smooth and offered no footholds.

  ‘Never mind that,’ Tara rejoined. ‘Just give Shay a ring, tell him what’s up and get him to bring some lads, ropes and torches.’

  She hadn’t felt this energised in a long time. Lying flat on the ground and stretching her upper torso down into the gap, she wanted to see if she could retrieve Jack from Neil’s up-stretched arms. Mrs Ryan grabbed her heels just to be on the safe side.

  The cave must be over twelve foot deep, Tara thought, as she felt the dog’s fur make contact with her fingers. Once reunited with her four-legged dependant, Mrs Ryan conceded ground. After all, it did make sense to involve others. Waiting only to see Tara slip down the cavity and land safely, Mrs Ryan headed back to the house clutching her trophy, Jack, firmly in her arms, despite his yaps of protest. She wasn’t going to let go of him after all this upset and she moved along the boreen with the determination of a woman with a singular mission.

  Chapter 25

  Brussels, Belgium, November 2004

  Once they had gained the ground floor again and were out of the hideous overalls, Jean muttered his excuses and headed into the hallway. The patron however swiftly interposed himself between his colleague and escape, and glared at him. Jean felt his hot, angry breath on his cheek.

  ‘Not so fast, Jean, no one leaves until this is finished. Get back into the living room!’

  Terrified, Jean obeyed. They waited nervously but before long Erik appeared with a platter of cold food and beers and the men, tucking in, began to relax a bit. Erik’s manner was completely unperturbed as though nothing untoward was in train. Is this what close association with the patron led to, wondered Jean? Would it happen to him too in time? Why was he in this predicament, he asked himself self-pityingly. The truth was actually plain enough: he was greedy, on the way up and looking for short cuts to the top. But Jean was not in a self- critical mood. He felt exposed because he was not in control. And fearful of what might happen if they were caught.

  The patron, he noted, was also withdrawn and tense. It was a waiting game and nothing would happen until the search for the parchment was completed. When one of his men arrived at the house, almost two hours later, with a document the boss immediately poured over it, satisfying himself that it was the real thing.

  ‘Excellent!’ he exclaimed with relief. ‘Now let’s talk a little more with the professeur,’ he added, the tension draining from his face. For the third time
they trooped down the dingy stairs to the cellar. Pushing his legs into fresh coveralls, Jean felt a terrible foreboding and his bowels started to quake. For an awful moment he actually feared that he was going to shit in his pants.

  Once more down in the torture room, Jean noticed how readily they all resumed their roles in inflicting pain. There was safety in obedience. The patron insisted that they rip off three more of Le Maitre’s nails, just to make sure he knew nothing further. He didn’t. The boss was getting increasingly excited and Jean sensed that he was getting ready for a further escalation. Why else had he prevented him leaving? Jean felt his guts quake again.

  Strapping the victim back up again on the hook, the patron made the men flay Le Maitre again, this time on the front of the body. The blood was spraying everywhere, in great splays and arcs on the walls and floor. Looking around at his colleagues, Jean thought they looked like demented sixties Pop Artists at a mad happening, the white overalls and the floor sheets now liberally splattered red, like a hideous pastiche of a Jackson Pollock drip painting. So much so that Jean had to avoid slipping in it. Their leader whooped with laughter at the mayhem, and one of the other committee members vomited. This made the smell down there – a mix of stale air, male sweat and the metallic odour of blood - even worse and, at a signal from the boss, Erik pulled what was left of Le Maitre off the hook. Theo, pulling over a large wooden block, put it under the head of the unconscious professor.

  The patron, Pascal de Waverin Looz, leered at his accomplices.

  ‘Now, my friends, let’s finish this properly, like our Celtic forefathers would have done!’

  Picking up a small hatchet, he paused briefly a moment to savour the looks of horror and incredulity on his colleagues’ faces. Then he set to work. Jean’s stomach heaved.

  III: Father and Son

  Chapter 26

  Tipperary, Ireland, 18-19 June 1649

  His first glimpse of Ormond Castle caused William Howard’s heart to skip a beat, for he had seen nothing like it in seven years since leaving England. Rounding a corner on the approach, he had to duck low in the saddle to avoid the leafy boughs of a large oak tree. Seconds later, raising his head, there it was in front of him, framed by a green garland of branches on a sunny June afternoon. Taken aback, he pulled up his panting horse to stop and stare. A wave of homesickness washed over him.

  Half a mile distant stood a perfect manor house of a type commonly built in England during Gloriana’s reign. Resuming his journey at a trot gave him time to absorb the simple, unaffected symmetry of the building, with its flat, unadorned surfaces and fine mullioned windows. Behind the main building he could just make out a taller, older, ivy-covered bastion. Given the current circumstances of the Ireland the unfortified character of the house seemed astonishing. Yet if William was right it must be at least eighty years old. Whoever had built Ormond Castle was clearly an optimist, he thought, smacking his steed into a canter and closing the distance between him and his destination.

  The following morning four other people sat around the table with him in the gallery of the Castle. It was, he had been told, the grandest room in the house, almost sixty-foot long, with two great fireplaces. The walls were panelled in oak and the white ceiling ornately plastered with stucco portraits of Queen Elizabeth and members of the Ormond clan. Archbishop Cornelius Walshe was lodging at the Castle by courtesy of a Catholic nobleman who was amongst the many friends who had rallied to his aid after the fall of Cashel. William didn’t doubt that the Archbishop had chosen this fine room deliberately to impress his three guests. The atmosphere was laden with anticipation. A lot must hinge on the outcome of their discussions today, William surmised.

  Cornelius sat at the head of the oak table. A gangling man, over six feet tall, with a large head and a marked widow’s peak, he was every inch the Cavalier nobleman. Long, fair hair curled down to his shoulders, flanking a thick moustache and goatee beard. Although active and able, age was gaining on him and he would be seventy within the year.

  On his right sat Donovan Lally, a small man with black hair and eyes to match. A Mayo man, his copper coloured skin, along with his surname, marked him out as Black Irish, a descendant of the early Iberian settlers in Ireland, whom some called the Milesians. Beyond Donovan sat Guion Bihan a monk from Brittany who was a renowned medic. Next was Sister Áine, a nun who sat next to the Archbishop Cornelius. William, a scion of the noblest Catholic family in England, sat to the Archbishop’s left and completed the circle. He had a passing acquaintance with the other guests but did not know them well. From their expectant glances it was clear that they knew they had been invited to help Cornelius with a special task.

  Cornelius greeted them warmly. ‘My dear friends, I have invited you here today to enlist you in a mission of the greatest importance. But first I must caution you. The burden you will take up, should you proceed, will be great and your families, from generation to generation, will be called upon to carry it in their turn. To proceed you must commit to absolute secrecy, and your oath will part you from all other allegiances, be it of kin, country or even the religious oath of obedience to your superior.’ Here the Archbishop paused to glance at each in turn, fixing his eyes on theirs before continuing. ‘At times great sacrifice will be demanded of you and at other times, for long periods, you and your successors will be free to live a normal life. But make no mistake, the penalty for betrayal will be certain damnation in Hell! I beseech you now to search your hearts on this matter. If you have any nascent doubt that the Holy Spirit is calling you to serve me in this special vocation then I beg you to withdraw now. My friends, are you with me?’

  The guests exchanged glances. Donovan was the first to respond. He reached forward, grasping his master’s hand impulsively, saying, ‘I agree, my Lord.’ Guion’s reply was more measured. ‘I trust you, Cornelius, so speak on.’ William and Áine simply nodded. Their readiness to assent which was not so surprising, William supposed. He knew that he had been probed and tested in various ways by Cornelius over the last year, and expected they would have been too. Like him, they would know that the task, whose nature was never stated explicitly, must be momentous.

  Chapter 27

  Sligo, Ireland, 15 September 2014

  As Tara’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark, they followed the light from Neil’s mobile as it fell on the walls about her. The sloping sides were covered in an array of strange shapes which, as the beam followed them, she saw included zigzags, curves, circles and spirals. She had seen striking rock carvings like this as a child at Newgrange and Knowth further east in the Boyne Valley, but never anything like it in Sligo.

  The silence in the chamber was intense and the patterns on the walls seemed a dumb chorus on life, creation and belief. For a second she thought she could actually hear singing but it must have been her imagination. Maybe it was just the rocks, she thought. Perhaps they vibrated in some way and the hum got under your skin and into your brain. Suddenly Joe, whom she had quite forgotten about, came back into her mind. How had he known the tomb was here? She doubted he had been in here physically for how could he have got out? Perhaps there was another entrance and he had found it?

  ‘Not often I’ve seen you dumbstruck.’

  Neil’s wry comment boomed beside her in the subterranean darkness, making her jump. The acoustics in the tomb were something else.

  ‘Mind where you step, we are not alone.’ He swept the light about their feet. She could see lined up against the bottom of the wall earthenware pottery and jugs. Fragments of bone in some of them emphasised the primary purpose of the structure as a house of the dead.

  ‘Neil, pack in the wisecracks, you’re giving me the creeps,’ Tara whispered tensely.

  Neil’s response this time couldn’t conceal his anxiety.

  ‘Yes, well it is rather spooky. You realise that we are probably the first people to enter here in thousands of years?’

  The thought made her shiver. Reaching into her pocket Tara brought out her
mobile phone and turned it on. Looking down by its light the only footprints she could see in the dust, apart from Jack’s paw marks, were hers and Neil’s.

  Together their makeshift torches swept around the chamber, and the patterns sprang again into life like hypnotic images from a soundless carousel at a fairground. It was odd, she reflected, how such an evocative array of images could convey so little. She didn’t know what any of the symbols meant. Yet instinctively she knew that they must have shouted out loud to the original visitors to the tomb. The artwork was bold and confident and writ large: a major communication exercise turned silent by the passage of many millennia.

  For the first time Tara began to get a measure of the size of the chamber. A shaft of light marked the point of their entry. The gap had formed between two large boulders, which were part of a circular set that formed the basal rim of the roof. Above it boulders, of decreasing size and increasing flatness, rose in an interlocking mosaic to form a corbelled roof that culminated about thirty feet above the floor. Her memory told her that Newgrange was on a less grand scale than this.

  Lower down, where Tara stood, up-right boulders, almost the height of two persons, formed the walls of the room. It was circular and, in three places, smaller boulders had been used to create niches in the wall about four feet off the ground. Each niche was big enough to hold several large jars. In them were piles of dust and fragments of bones, presumably placed there post-cremation, she thought. In all, the room was about seven paces across and a passageway, presumably the original access route, diverged off on one side.