Lake of Sorrows

She checked her watch. Charlie Brazil wouldn’t be at the apiary just yet. At midsummer bees had to be tended quite closely and checked at least once a day, she knew, but Charlie probably worked until at least four o’clock on the bog. She wasn’t sure what direction to choose, until she saw several bees, heavily laden with golden pollen, rise up out of a wild rose hedge beside her and fly off unsteadily away from the Crosses and the way she’d come. She followed the cattle path and saw the circle of trees first, then the hives, set like standing stones around the open ground in its center. Off to one side was a house, with door and window frames gaping open to all weather. No one was about except for bees, buzzing in the midsummer plenty amid the globes of clover. She had no protective gear, but she didn’t feel nervous. The insects were consumed in their business, and not interested in her.

Walking into a house with no door didn’t seem as intrusive as breaking and entering, but Nora still felt strange, venturing into Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed. Two things drove her past the discomfort: the image of Cormac being interviewed as a suspect, and the lingering regret she always carried with her that she had not done more, had not pushed harder to find things out when her sister was still alive. She couldn’t afford to risk timidity anymore.

The door frame had once been painted green, and the whitewash had long ago crumbled from the walls with damp. She stepped across the threshold and saw a ragged curtain tacked to the window frame with nails. You could imagine a father and mother in their traditional places by the fire, and thin-faced barefoot children in pinafores. Was there no place in Ireland that wasn’t hip-deep in ghosts?

Charlie Brazil had stacked new frames along the walls. His bee suit, hat, and veil hung on a hook beside the doorway, and his smoker—a small can with a built-in bellows that keepers use to control their bees—sat ready on the window ledge with a box of matches beside it. Under one of the small windows sat a plain metal cot, blanket neatly tucked under the mattress. Someone stayed here—if not every night, then at least from time to time. A dozen or more small holes in the thick, crumbling quicklime of the wall at the bed’s foot said something had been tacked up there, and fairly recently, too. Nora got down on her knees to look under the cot, and saw something like a postcard lying facedown on the dirt floor next to the wall. Reaching one hand in, half afraid of what she would find, she felt the thick, smooth paper.

The image on the other side was not a photograph, as she’d half imagined, but a detailed pen-and-ink drawing, like those she’d seen in Cormac’s archaeology books, only this one was graying slightly with mildew. Its subject was a plate or shield, with decoration that was vaguely familiar; something about it said Iron Age. She let her fingers travel over the sinuous S-curves and scrolls, drawn on paper here as they had been engraved in the original metal. What was a drawing like this doing in Charlie Brazil’s beekeeping shed? She noted the pinhole in the paper, with a thumbtack still through it, and counted the pinholes in the wall; seventeen, regularly placed, as if more drawings like this had once hung there. Was this what Ursula had found?

Nora slipped the drawing into her jacket pocket and looked around the tiny room once more. She wondered what had become of the people who had lived here. The house seemed to have been abandoned more or less intact; the worm-eaten shelves built against the dividing wall were still stacked with cracked cups and saucers. Someone kept the bare floor swept fairly regularly, presumably with the broom that stood in the corner, and the wooden steps up into the loft had been mended recently; several nail heads shone against the weathered wood. She tested the first step, and, finding it sturdy enough, ventured up the short ladder into the attic. An open suitcase lay on the floor. She stooped to examine the contents scattered about: clothing that looked as if it had been torn to shreds, a jumbled pile of newspaper cuttings, and some old photos, faded with time and weather. The top photograph, sticky with honey, showed a young woman. From the clothing she wore, the picture seemed to have been taken some time ago. Nora closed the suitcase and looked for initials, a tag, anything that would tell her whose belongings these were; but the warped cardboard shell gave up no clue, just fell apart where the hinges were coming loose. She continued looking around the cramped attic room, strewn with old junk, rusted nails, and wire. Maybe Charlie was digging up artifacts like the disc in the drawing, and that was what Ursula had been on to. According to Niall Dawson, digging up antiquities without a license was a criminal offense—but would such a thing be worth killing for?