Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (16 page)

What he needed for himself was something else, something more. Lying on his desk was an envelope with the crest of Queen’s University embossed upon its thick vellum. Inside was his acceptance into their law school. He didn’t know how he was going to make it work, he only knew he must.

Chapter Fourteen
The Bog Woman

Casey whistled to himself as he trod across the thick carpet
of white flowers and gorse that carpeted the north end of the bog straddling the line between his own property and that of Lewis Guderson.

It was a fine Saturday in early June and the air had the untroubled clear blue tint to it that often meant the day would go down bathed in sun, as well as having emerged in it. His current building was going up on time and, more importantly, on budget and he hadn’t had another visit from Mr. Spectacles and his partner—though he wasn’t fool enough to think they wouldn’t be back at some point.

For today he would leave the concerns of work behind. He had left Pamela happily rocking Conor, the two of them blissful in the quiet of the early morning. Before leaving he’d bent to kiss her, and could still taste the oatmeal and honey flavor of her mouth. He smiled softly to himself. Having a family suited him well, and it felt like a warmth that surrounded him from morning to night and through the dark hours of bed and sleep. At the same time, such happiness was frightening. The worry that something might happen to any of his loved ones haunted his three o’clock in the mornings on the rare occasion he could not sleep. Today he would leave even those worries behind. Working with earth always freed him, his boot against the lug of the spade, its haft anchored firmly inside his knee, his spirit one with the thick, sodden, life-giving earth. It was good and simple work, paid readily with glowing winter fires that took the chill from a man’s bones.

He reached the area he planned to work, and placed his bag of biscuits and hot tea upon the ground to the side. The scent of comfrey rose as the bag crushed the green juices from it. He would have to remember to pick some and carry the roots home to Pamela. She made an ointment from them that worked a wonder on bruises and cuts.

He eyed the area with a turf cutter’s squint, judging where to start the bank exactly to inflict the least damage and yet maximize the amount of peat that might be pulled from it. The one thing he knew for certain was that he would have to dig well away from the ancient hawthorn crowning a slight rise in the land. The tree stood alone, more than forty feet high, though he knew the species rarely soared above thirty. It was in full bloom now, with great snowy corymbs of flower reaching to the ground. Such lone trees were said to mark the entry to the fairy realm and were best avoided unless one wanted to find oneself lost in the world of the Good Folk. Besides, even if he didn’t have reservations himself, surely the neighbors would be after his head were he to meddle with such a thing. When he was just a lad himself, a man a few streets over had hacked down a small, stunted specimen that he claimed was a blight on his plot. The neighbors had been horrified and had shook their heads sadly when first the man’s dog died and then shortly after he broke his back falling from a ladder. The Good Folk were not to be made light of and it was a fool man who did so in the face of such knowledge.

He set to work with the morning sun upon his back, laboring well toward noon before stopping for a rest and a cup of tea. A soft breeze blew across his body, drying the sweat from his t-shirt and carrying with it the scents of hawthorn blooms. It was an odd scent, and not one he’d ever cared for, as the Irish had always considered the hawthorn to hold the scent of death. Branches of it were hung over doorways during the Famine to indicate that someone inside the home was dying or dead. And to be certain, it did have an oddly decayed scent.

He leaned his head back against the trunk of the tree, feeling a mite drowsy. But just as he was about to close his eyes, a flutter in his peripheral vision caught his eye. He sat up quickly, casting about for a weapon and then felt immediately foolish, for it was only a bit of cloth the wind had caught. It was tied to the hawthorn tree, caught fast in its branches above a cluster of blossom. Odd that, for there wasn’t a spring nearby, nor a well to his knowledge. These rags had once been common at holy sites, bits of material dipped in the sacred water of the well and then tied to the tree as an offering to the Goddess or nature spirit that was thought to guard the well. The hairs on the nape of his neck crinkled a bit, as though a pair of eyes were set fast upon him.

The cloth looked very old, a faded blue cotton without pattern of any sort. He reached out to touch it and shivered when he realized it was damp. He pulled his hand back sharply, looking around as a chill went arrow-sharp up his spine. It hadn’t rained in days, and the breeze had been fair and warm that whole time. There simply wasn’t any reason for the cloth to be damp. He backed away and picked up his spade. He would get back to work. A good sweat ought to banish the strange, shivery feeling touching the cloth had given him.

He set to digging with a grim determination not to give in to the feeling that someone here watched his every move. He dug for a good half hour, but the sensation didn’t budge. Then, just as the sun ducked behind a puffy set of clouds, his spade stopped short, almost causing him to topple over into the wet earth.

He frowned to himself. The earth was soft enough but the feel was wrong. There was something obstructing the shovel and it wasn’t bog. A strange chill feathered out from his spine and he considered moving away, digging elsewhere, ignoring whatever it was against which the tip of the spade now pushed. Curiosity, however, got the best of him, and he levered the spade up a bit, removing more of the wet soil. He knelt down, hand scraping away the thin layer that was left. Water oozed up through the peat, obscuring his view, but he thought he felt fur, smooth as an otter pelt, beneath his fingers. A dead animal? He had heard of whole cows being found, preserved as though they had dropped into the bog only the day before, though they had died hundreds of years earlier.

He scooped out two more soaking handfuls and then froze. It was definitely fur, but not upon the back of an animal anymore, for with the last handful of soil the outline and raised knuckles of a very human hand revealed itself. A woman’s hand, the bones were too fine for a man. The fingers were wrapped around an object. He sat back on his heels, uncertain how to proceed. But curiosity once again took precedence. He couldn’t simply leave it lest she had been the victim of foul play.

Another half hour of careful work revealed that the fur she was wrapped in was dark with age, though when the sun peeked over his shoulder he caught a hint of chestnut in its depths. Otter or elk perhaps? He wasn’t certain, only that the skins must have been very fine and well cured, for the cloak was still intact. It was large too, and must originally have belonged to a man, for the woman’s slight frame was dwarfed by it.

Skin, pale as ivory but taut as leather, revealed itself once the fur was moved aside. Strange that it should remain so white. After all this time in the bog it ought to have sustained discoloration. Her face, through the fine scrim of soil, was high-boned with no marks upon it, her hair a sodden stream of copper twined within the dark fingers of the earth. She had been a beautiful woman; even time could not hide that fact.

He turned his attention to the object in her hand. He was afraid to touch the fingers, to unfurl the bones that awaited only a breath to disintegrate. The object was small and stone, shaped by a rough chisel. It looked primitive in design, and yet—it seemed to give off a powerful emanation, as though the air around it pulsed with a potency that knew neither the constraints of time nor space. Crudely made, yet he recognized it for what it was—Sheela-na-gig, the Trickster Hag, the Crone, the archway into and out of life itself.

He had always held the beliefs of his childhood sacred, of a loving Christian God, and yet he would be lying if he said he had not always sensed something more behind that, something far older and darker in aspect. He knew what his wife would say—that it was the face of the Goddess that he glimpsed. The land itself had always seemed to him to respond to a more feminine rhythm rather than a masculine one. The Sheela—small, stone and vulgar—was one face of that ancient Goddess and a symbol of both the fertility and the power of the female. She was a figure of the in-between realms, of neither here nor there, but her power felt real nonetheless. He moved his eyes away from the squat stone figure, not wanting to acknowledge how much it disturbed him.

Against the woman’s throat lay a necklace, a barbaric-looking piece with great chunks of amber, dark with wintery suns. He touched one of the pieces of amber carefully, for the workmanship was very old and delicate. It felt oddly warm for having lain so recently in chilled, streaming earth. He leaned forward, squinting to make out the details better. Between the nodules of amber were tiny flowers wrought in silver, perfect blossoms, some with out-turned petals, others curled in upon themselves with a small cluster of berries under the shade of each flower. Beside each triplicate set of berries was a thorn of silver, darkened with age. They were hawthorn, blossom and fruit and thorn together. In all the old tales, this was a way of knowing that one had crossed into the world of the Others, that both flower and fruit should reside together on one branch. Who had she been? One marked as ‘other’, that much was clear. No one else, with superstition as rife as it would have been in the countryside even a hundred years ago, would have dared to wear such a piece of jewelry. He laid the amber back in the shadowy hollow of her throat and set to clearing the rest of the soil away from her.

It was a long and arduous job for he did not want to damage the fragile corpse. He knew that brought to the surface and exposed to oxygen, bodies could begin to disintegrate very quickly, as though it were light and air that held the keys of decay. Strangely, the only thing he could smell emanating from her was the sharp green of herbs, as though she’d been preserved in them or had used them to such an extent that they had become a part of her very essence.

There seemed no marks upon her skin, leastwise, as much as he could tell. She looked as though she had simply lain down in the bog and fallen asleep, never again to waken in this world.

Now why had he thought that? That somehow she had managed to awaken elsewhere, but not in this world, or at least the world that human eyes could see.

“Who were ye?” he whispered quietly, even that small a sound sending a ripple through the air around him. He shuddered. The day had turned to twilight while he had been clearing the wet soil away from the bones and he should have been long gone home to his tea. The wind caught a lock of the woman’s hair, a tendril already dried from the bog waters. It gave the illusion of movement to her face, and in the fading light it seemed she looked directly at him.

It was time to go home. He wrapped her carefully again in her fur cloak and returned the sods so they braced the frail cage of her bones and covered her skin. He didn’t want animals getting at her. In fact, he felt guilty about leaving her alone as it was, but then, something about her didn’t seem to welcome company.

He shook his head. His fancies and the fading light were getting the better of him. He gathered his tools and his lunch bag and after making the sign of the cross, strode from the bog, the feeling of eyes on his person never once leaving him.

Chapter Fifteen
August 1973
Internal Relations

In the late summer of that year, Casey’s grandmother
on his mother’s side, Lucy Murphy, passed away peacefully in her sleep after a full day of working in her garden. Pamela had only met the lady twice, once shortly after their wedding when she had come to Belfast, ostensibly on a shopping trip but really to check out the bride, then again after Conor’s birth when Casey’s Aunt Fiona had brought her down to see this great grandchild. Technically, ‘The Aunts’, as Casey and Pat referred to them, were not actually aunts, but their mother’s cousins. However, the tangle of Murphy relations didn’t observe the difference between siblings and cousins, as Casey had explained to her, for Deirdre and Devlin had spent as much time in their cousins’ house growing up as they had in their own and vice versa.

Casey’s grandmother had seemed a little frail on that last visit. Much of her time had been spent in the rocking chair, which Casey had brought down from the nursery and placed by the Aga so that she would be both warm and in the center of the kitchen’s activity. She had only been able to stay a few days before being whisked home by a brisk Fiona, and then the call had come two months later that she had passed away.

And so they found themselves, in the wee hours of an August morning, loading baby paraphernalia and themselves, plus Patrick, into the car on their way to her funeral.

Casey and Patrick both looked resplendent in their dark suits, Patrick in navy blue and Casey in a deep charcoal grey lightweight wool. Casey was always twitchy in formal wear, preferring the comfort of his workaday clothes, but today he seemed more agitated than was usual.

“Whatever is the matter, man?” Pamela asked as they cleared the limits of Belfast and were on the windy road to Ballymena where the majority of the Murphy clan dwelt and his Grandmother Murphy had spent the last sixty years of her life.

“I’m just a wee bit nervous about the day,” he said, shifting in his seat and cricking his neck as if he was in a deal of discomfort.

“Why?”

“Because this side of the family is insane, that’s why,” Casey said grimly, sticking his finger inside the starchy white collar and pulling it like it was choking him. She reached across, loosened the knot of his tie, and undid the top button of his shirt. He sighed with relief.

“As opposed to the Riordan side? These Murphys must be real corkers.”

“Ye’ve met Devlin, an’ he’s mild-like compared to the rest.”