Lake of Sorrows

Nora’s stomach tightened with excitement. Nowhere in her previous research had she seen any reference to this body or this location. She was looking at a new paper body—the name given to bog remains that survived only in written accounts. She tore through the succeeding paragraphs in which the extremely observant Miss Bolton described the man’s glossy brown skin and the twisted withy made of sally rods around his throat, not to mention his shocking nakedness, from which the workmen had quite properly shielded her and Mrs. Haddington. She also described in detail the leather armband around the dead man’s upper arm, and the astonishing preservation of his face and feet. Of his disposition in the bog, Miss Bolton had written:

Mrs. Haddington has sent for the vicar, so that this unfortunate soul may be re-interred at the paupers’ cemetery outside the village. This discovery presents a most intriguing puzzle: how the peat and bog water could preserve both flesh and bone. Perhaps the cold may have some part in it, or perhaps there is some other reason. I have often heard the natives of this place tell that the bog water of this locality, and indeed the peat itself, is an excellent treatment for wounds and afflictions of the skin, and wonder if there is not something in it that may contribute to this most astounding suspension of decay.

Nora raised her eyes from the book, feeling an electric shock of recognition and a surge of affection for Miss Bolton. Only then did she realize she’d been reading silently since the first paragraph, ignoring the two men who were waiting expectantly for some more visible reaction.

“I’m sorry, it’s just—this is huge,” she said. “I’m fairly sure it’s a new paper body, one that nobody has in the records. To have this, and such a detailed description—what a gift.”

“It gives me great pleasure to share it with the one person best able to appreciate its true significance.”

“I wonder if I might borrow this book—just for a short while, I promise.”

“You may have it. I’ve read Miss Bolton right through to the end, and there are several other passages you might find interesting as well. She struck me as extremely curious and well-read. What do you think of her theory about the bog water?”

“Amazingly accurate. You don’t happen to have a map, so I could see the exact point she’s talking about?”

“I do. Cormac, you know where the maps are—in the cabinet there.” Scully was looking a bit drawn, and Nora knew they ought to go soon, but she felt an urgent need to find out how this new body fit in. Cormac brought out a flat map book, like his own, and opened it on the table before them.

“These are the maps O’Donovan was working on, originally drawn in 1838, and updated in 1914. Here’s Castlelyons demesne,” Scully said. “And here’s the gravel ridge Miss Bolton mentioned. It was left behind by the last glaciers, and the ancients called it the Eiscir Riada, ‘the Great Road.’ People used it for centuries as the main east-west highway across Ireland. There are a few breaks, but for the most part it was a useful roadway. It stood above the rest of the landscape, you see—especially useful in this ‘county of bogs and morasses,’ as O’Donovan once called it. If the ladies were walking toward the bog from the house, they must have been right about here when they encountered the workmen.”

Nora had seen the ruined shell of an eighteenth-century manor house near the crossroads she passed every day on the way to the excavation site. She tried to get her bearings from the map in front of her, looking for familiar names or features.

“Here’s where we are right now,” Cormac said, indicating a long, irregularly shaped land mass that seemed to be in the middle of a bog.

“So we’re actually on an island?”

“Yes; there was a bridge built across the bog a hundred and fifty years ago,” Scully said. “It looks like a peninsula now, but it was originally a dryland island. There were hundreds of islands like it, all across the bog. You often hear mention of such islands in the old place-names.”

“Where’s the excavation site?” Cormac pointed to an area only an inch away on the map, and the pieces began to fall into place. There was the place where the workshop was now, the tracts of bog that were all drained and measured on Nora’s own map.

“The Dowris hoard was found just over here,” Scully said. The Dowris treasure, one of the most famous Iron Age discoveries in Ireland, made up of hundreds of mysterious horns, crotals, and other votive objects, had been deposited in a bog about fifteen miles away.

“And where was the Loughnabrone hoard found?”

Scully’s thin finger pointed to the spot only about a quarter-mile distant.

Nora said, “So we have a couple of major Iron Age hoards and two possible sacrifices that follow the pattern of the triple death—all this from the same small spot.” She turned to Scully. “You haven’t by any chance heard that another body was found on Loughnabrone Bog the other day? Not ancient remains—much more recent.”