Lake of Sorrows

“So if the collar in the drawing is real, and not just a figment of some artist’s imagination…”

“It would be an unbelievable find. Priceless. And whoever found it—presuming that they turned it over to the state, and that it was found legitimately and not through illegal means—would get a pretty whacking great reward. Once an artifact has been dug up, its provenance comes into question. It loses a lot of archaeological significance if we don’t know where it came from—but of course the monetary value always remains. I’m wondering now about the other drawing—whether it’s an actual object that exists, or as you said, just a figment of some artist’s imagination.”

Nora handed him the shield drawing, and they both began to search through the book of artifacts, comparing it to the objects pictured. The names of all the findspots started to blur in front of her eyes: Dowris, Ballinderry, Moylarg, Lagore, Loughan Island, Lisnacrogher…The organic forms snaked and twisted and curled across the pages, mirroring the natural world in abstract. Eyes and animal faces were everywhere. She imagined the metalworker hunched over his tools, making delicate herringbone patterns, birds whose beaks formed the heads of pins. She paged past a triskelion disc and felt a tug of familiarity; where had she seen that image before? The graceful spirals, everything counted in threes…She scoured her memory, but could not place the image. Never mind; it would come back sometime, probably when she wasn’t even trying to remember.

“Here it is,” Cormac said. “A shield boss, part of the Loughnabrone hoard.” Nora looked over his shoulder and saw a photograph that matched the drawing exactly. She thought of all the other drawings, probably at least ten or twelve of them, that Charlie Brazil had in his tin box.

“I have an idea,” she said. She ran to get her mobile, and scrolled through the memory until she found Niall Dawson’s home number. She heard his familiar voice over the background noise of children chasing one another, breathless with laughter. She could imagine them in the back garden of the Dawsons’ house in Sandymount, getting ready to take the food off the barbeque, and the sound of normal life suddenly made her feel like weeping.

“Niall, it’s Nora Gavin. I know it’s the weekend, and I’m calling to ask a favor. I’m wondering if there’s any way I can get a complete list of all the items found in the Loughnabrone hoard.” She waited for a moment, while the children’s voices carried on in the background. “I wouldn’t ask, Niall, except that I think it could be vitally important.”

“No, I’m happy to oblige, Nora. It’s just that I’m a little astonished, because you’re the second person in two days to ask for an itemized inventory of the Loughnabrone objects. I faxed the same list off to Ursula Downes yesterday evening.”

Book Four

DEVOTE TO DEATH

…in such cases they devote to death a human being and plunge a dagger into him in the region of the diaphragm, and when the stricken victim has fallen they read the future from the manner of his fall and from the twitching of his limbs as well as from the gushing of his blood…

—the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing about the Druids in the first century B.C.

1

Ward drove out to Illaunafulla on Saturday morning in bad humor. Rachel Briscoe had not turned up at her lodgings in Offaly or in Dublin, so he’d arranged for a ground search of the area around Loughnabrone, starting in Ursula Downes’s back garden where the girl’s binoculars had been found. So far, however, the search arrangements had not been progressing satisfactorily. There was too little manpower available, and it was taking too much time to mobilize and organize the extra officers and volunteers. Nothing was going right. A contingent of men would have to be sent to Ferbane, where the Leinster Fleadh Cheoil was on this weekend. The once-a-year regional traditional music competition meant extra security would be needed, since the town would be overflowing with people in the pubs and on the streets, and unguarded handbags and musical instruments would be ripe for the picking. And to top everything off, after a near-record fortnight of fine weather, a slanting rain had begun to fall.

“They’re all assembled, Liam.” Maureen Brennan leaned in through the car window he’d cracked open. “Waiting for your instructions. I told them to wait in the shed, around the back, to keep out of the rain while they could.” Low, shifting gray clouds moved silently across the sky, making the space between heaven and earth seem even narrower than usual.