The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (17 page)

The first room she encountered seemed to be some sort of scriptorium: beside the windows stood a couple of tall desks, angled surfaces covered in large sheets of vellum. Shelves hanging on the back wall held rolled-up parchments and jars of brightly colored pigment; a long table between the writing desks held a mortar and pestle and several clamshells with brilliant colors crusted in their cupped surfaces. A basket of eggs stood on the center table as well, along with metal rulers, white cotton gloves with the index fingers cut off, a jar of long feathers and others holding tiny brushes and sharp knives. She ran a hand over the vellum on the nearest table, struck by the anatomical quality of the medium. You could still see blemishes, fly bites, spidery veins. She remembered reading stories, at the start of her training, about ancient medical books bound in human skin.

A few samples of the writer’s art hung framed upon the walls here in the studio as well. Unlike the precise, perfect character of most calligraphy she had seen, there was a certain extra degree of expression in these
pieces, a primitive spirit that came out in the arrangement of shapes and colors. The staring animal forms that inhabited the pages seemed ready to blink. She turned to read the labels on the pigments: auripigmentum, verdigris, lapis, azurite, cinnabar, yellow ochre, purpura, malachite, red lake. Some of the names hinted at far-flung origins.

Nora began to feel self-conscious, wandering through someone’s private workroom, and was about to retreat when she was stopped by the sight of a large bowl of black marble-sized spheres. She picked one up to examine it more closely. Turning the thing over in her palm, she found a tiny hole drilled in one side.

“Can I help you?” The man’s voice came from the doorway, startling her and causing the pod to fly from her palm and roll under one of the writing desks. The speaker was a tall, lean man, perhaps in his early sixties, dressed in jeans and a plain black sweater. His hair was arranged in a thick fringe above his ears, ginger going to white, and behind the smile in his blue eyes was an inquisitive expression. Nora felt flustered, caught snooping where she probably ought not to have been. When the man spoke again, his voice held no accusation. “Would I be right in guessing you must be one of our guests from the National Museum?” The rolled
r
and rising inflection pegged the accent as Welsh.

“Yes, sorry, Nora Gavin.”

He took her hand. “I’m Martin, Martin Gwynne.”

“Is this your studio? I didn’t mean to blunder in here. Sorry if I’m intruding.”

“Ah, no, you’re all right.” Gwynne bent down to pick up the object she had dropped. He began to play with it as he spoke. “You’re interested in illumination, are you?”

“I teach anatomy, so I’m naturally interested in calfskin, but I’m also intrigued by all the exotic pigments.” She gestured toward the shelves.

“Ah, you’re thinking of lapis lazuli—the truest blue, brought all the way from Afghanistan in the Middle Ages. But there are local sources as well. Woad grows here, as an example. Irish monks also used ground-up shellfish, charcoal, red earth.” He reached for a jar containing a yellow powder. “This one, auripigmentum, is made from the gallbladders of eels.” He enjoyed Nora’s reaction.

“Do you still use all the old pigments?”

“Well, I’ve given up on a few of the more poisonous compounds. Orpiment, for example, a beautiful golden color, is actually arsenic trisulfide,
not something into which I wish to be dipping my quill. And cinnabar—Chinese red—is mercuric sulfide. I’ve managed to find suitable substitutes for some. But somehow the modern pigments are never quite as vivid.”

“I’ve always wondered, how did the monks discover all those bizarre compounds?”

“That’s a good question. It must have been a process of experimentation, I suppose. Some knowledge carried through from even more ancient cultures. And every scriptorium had its Book of Secrets, where the monks would record their recipes. Knowledge was passed down, refined along the way, as with any branch of science or alchemy.”

Nora glanced toward the illuminations in progress she’d spied earlier. “Is this your own work? It’s beautiful.”

“You’re very kind. Yes, most of it is mine, but I’ve been working with an apprentice recently, so a few are hers.” He pointed to a couple of smaller works hanging beside the door and an unfinished piece on the nearest writing desk. “Anca’s still a bit hesitant about her design, but there is a certain boldness at the back of it. The power is in her, no doubt. She just has to learn to let it out.” Martin Gwynne frowned. “At a certain point, you can’t teach people anything further. They have to make their own mark.”

As they talked, Martin Gwynne was still playing with the pod he’d picked up from the floor and was now rolling through his fingers with the deft skill of a magician.

“What do you call that?” Nora asked. “I know I’ve seen them before, but I can’t—”

“This?” Gwynne said, stopping the little orb on the flat of his palm. “It’s an oak gall, sometimes called a gallnut.”

“Of course!” Nora felt the knowledge returning.

“We get all we need in the oak wood just beyond.”

“And what do you use them for, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“For ink, of course. Grind up a few of these, add iron shavings, wine, and gum arabic, cook it all down, and voilà!” He handed her the gall and picked up a stoppered bottle of dark liquid. “You get a very serviceable black-brown ink. It was the basic everyday stuff used all through the Middle Ages, right up to the nineteenth century. Not much in favor these days. Too caustic, you see, eats right through paper. A surface like parchment is able to withstand the bite of acid.”

And all perfectly harmless, Nora thought. Unless you’d just seen a handful of these gallnuts in the mouth of a corpse.

A voice came from the doorway. “Martin, love, do you happen to—” The woman who entered stopped short when she saw Nora. She was slender to the point of gauntness, probably in her midsixties, dressed in a hand-knit linen sweater and jeans. Her hooded eyes were dark pools that called to mind a wild creature constantly on the lookout. “So sorry, my dear, I didn’t realize you were occupied.” The accent was English, a cultivated drawl that suggested private school and money.

“My wife, Tessa, this is Dr. Gavin, one of our visitors from the National Museum,” Martin Gwynne explained and then turned to Nora. “I believe you came to help with our bog man, isn’t that right, Dr. Gavin?”

“Yes,” Nora said, and then hesitated. Was it possible that they hadn’t yet heard about the second corpse? Perhaps it was better not to divulge too much. She began to get the impression that she was holding up a private conversation and hastened to make her exit. “I stumbled in here looking for someone, so I’ll just keep hunting, if you’ll excuse me. Very nice to meet you both.”

She withdrew to the cloister walk outside the studio and stopped a short distance down the corridor to examine the gallnut still in her left hand. It looked exactly like the objects they’d found in Benedict Kavanagh’s throat, she was sure of it. She ought to share this new bit of information with Cusack, but she’d also promised to find Joseph. She tucked the gall into her pocket for the time being and set out for the kitchen.

As she crossed the courtyard, she could see Joseph and Eliana coming up from the bottom of the garden. They were accompanied by a tall, awkward-looking figure dressed all in brown, from the worn corduroys to his tweed jacket and cap—even his wellingtons were brown. He carried a couple of fishing rods and a basket.

“Nodding!” Joseph cried. “Noddy in the busker—in the biscuit.” He pointed to the creel, and the brown man opened it to show off their catch: a tangle of gray eels, still alive and wriggling in the bottom.

Eliana said, “We helped to catch them.” She gave a mock shudder. “So horrible, but very . . . em . . . tasty?”

“You actually eat them?” Nora asked, unable to take her eyes from the writhing mass in the basket. She glanced up to see the brown man’s chin jutting forward.

He shrugged and blinked rapidly a few times, then let out a series of small barks, looking mortified and blushing furiously all the while, until Eliana intervened, speaking under her breath: “Oh, yes, we eat
anguilas
many ways at home.” The fact that she was standing between two grown men who couldn’t manage to put two coherent words together didn’t seem to faze her in the least. “This is Anthony Beglan,” Eliana said, stumbling a bit over the foreign surname. “And this is Nora, Anthony. I think you will like her.”

Nora endeavored not to stare at Beglan but found herself fascinated by the tics that seemed to take him over whenever he tried to speak. All the signs—the rapid gestures, the facial tics, and vocalizations—pointed to Tourette’s. She had read a bit about it in the medical literature, of course, but never before had such an up close and personal encounter with the disorder.

Anthony tipped his head back, his jaws snapping together fiercely as his eyes searched her face for the familiar look of alarm he must have encountered daily.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Beglan,” Nora said. “Are you one of the . . . I don’t quite know what to call them . . . the residents here?”

The jaws snapped shut a few more times before he could manage a response. “No, I live just bug-bug-bug-beyond, but”—again the tics interrupted—“we share the work. I keep cuh-cuh-cac-cattle.”

“And what about these eels? Are they really going to be our dinner?” Nora smiled, and Anthony Beglan’s glower split into a reluctantly wolfish grin, a complete transformation. “Because if they are, I hope Eliana’s telling the truth.”

She glanced at Joseph, who was gazing intently at Eliana again. Whatever disturbance Cormac had seen this morning seemed to have dissipated. When the girl moved past him, he reached out and grasped her hand, in a gesture that neither surprised nor annoyed her, so it clearly was not the first time. Nora felt a small twinge of trepidation, remembering Joseph’s attraction to Cormac’s friend Roz Byrne last year before his stroke, and worried about where this new attachment to Eliana might lead. He’d still not managed to recognize Roz, and although she stopped by the house every few weeks to see how he was getting on, there had not yet been any flicker of recognition in his eyes. Each time Roz came for a visit, she went away bereaved yet again.

Eliana’s hand looked so small and pale tucked inside Joseph’s large
fist. Was the attachment significant enough to mention to Cormac? The girl hadn’t been with them even two full days. Nora decided to let things be, at least for the moment.

“Anthony, are you coming?” The woman they’d awkwardly encountered in the bath last night emerged from the French doors. “I’ve got the pot ready for your catch.”

Anthony’s jaws snapped together a few more times before he could answer. “Be there stuh-stuh-straightaway. Just have to take cuh-cuh-care of these.” He lifted the creel slightly.

The woman waved and then retreated.

Nora lowered her voice. “Shawn, isn’t it? She said she was an archaeologist.”

Beglan nodded. “That’s right.”

“And what does she do now?”

“You ask a luh-luh-lot of questions,” Anthony Beglan said. He turned and strode away.

Nora stood in her room, looking over the available change of clothing. She always required a shower and change after a postmortem. Through the open window she could hear a smattering of electronic music, someone’s mobile phone. A man’s voice floated upward from the drive. “Christ,” he muttered, “what the fuck is it now?”

Glancing out the window, she could see it was the same rather scruffy young man who had been with Kavanagh’s wife at the hospital earlier. He was in the middle of retrieving two cases from the boot but had set them down after receiving a text message. He stared at his phone and spoke aloud to whoever had sent the text. “Not here, you bollocks. Are you mad?” He texted furiously, then sent off the message and picked up the cases again, heading toward the other end of the car park. His phone jingled again, a real ring this time, before he’d traveled to the other side of the car.

“What the hell are you doing?” Nora heard. “I told you I’d be in touch. No, no, that’s not going to happen. I explained to you how we were going to handle it—”

Just then a small motorbike carrying Vincent Claffey came puttering up the drive from the road. He stopped at the outer edge of the farmyard and trundled the bike off the drive and up against the nearest shed. Claffey had a mobile pressed to his ear all the while, and soon it became clear that he was the person on the other end of the call with the young man. They both hung up, and the younger man headed over to meet Vincent Claffey, glancing around in case they’d be seen. Nora watched from her invisible perch, fascinated. The young man pressed a brown envelope into Claffey’s hands. “You’ve got what you want now—and you know what we want.”

Claffey’s expression seemed to hold both amusement and triumph. He held up the envelope. “Oh, yes, I know what you want. But it’s a lot to ask of any man.” He slipped the envelope inside his jacket and patted it. “I’m afraid ye’ll have to give me a little more time to think it through. Don’t worry, I’ll be in touch.” When he reached the bike, he threw his leg over it, and sped away down the drive.

Alone again, the young man leaned forward and banged his head slowly against the wall of the shed. Then he returned to the car to pick up the cases and trudged down the path that led into the oak grove, disappearing from view.