The Celtic Riddle Read online

  Alex looked over at Breeta’s rather large departing rear and shook his head disapprovingly. I stifled a smile. Alex was, for many years, a purser in the merchant marine, no less, but I have never heard an obscenity pass his lips, nor have I ever heard him swear. I, on the other hand ... But so much for stereotypes.

  Tweedledee nervously cleared his throat as a signal that the more formal part of the proceedings was to begin. “Most unusual,” he began. “I suppose it is necessary for Miss Breeta Byrne to attend?” he said, looking over at Tweedledum.

  “Highly unusual. Should be here,” Tweedledum replied. Tweedledee shuffled papers uncomfortably for a moment or two, as Deirdre pulled open the curtains. I could see Breeta heading down through the garden toward the sea.

  “May I suggest we all take a short break,” Tweedledum said. “Perhaps Deirdre,” he said, turning to the maid, “you would bring us some fresh tea, and Mr. Davis,” he said, thinking better than to ask John to do anything too taxing, seeing as how he’d backed out of the room several times during the proceedings, “you might go and ask Miss Byrne to oblige us by returning to the house.”

  The fabulous five in front of us arose as if one unit and in single file, left the room. Needless to say, no one bothered to suggest we join them or have a tour of the house or anything, leaving Alex and me and Padraig Gilhooly’s lawyer to fend for ourselves, while Tweedledum and Tweedledee fussed with papers and envelopes. Gathering that we were to stay where we were, I gratefully unfolded myself from the uncomfortable chair, and being no longer obliged to watch out for the tortoise, Breeta having taken the creature with her, stretched and looked about me as Michael Davis, visible through French doors on to the patio, jogged off in the direction where we’d last seen Byrne’s youngest daughter.

  It perhaps goes without saying that the reason I am in the antiques business is that I love antiques, and once I’d adjusted to the chaos in Eamon Byrne’s room, and freed from the acid glances of his family, the place was a real feast for the eyes and the soul for someone like me.

  You can tell a lot about people from the art they collect, and while I was sticking with my snap analysis that life for Byrne was a battle of some kind, I began to see a thread of coherence in what he’d amassed. I decided after a few minutes that the paintings were the anomaly. They’d probably been in the family, his or hers I wasn’t sure, for a long time, and they’d been positioned where Byrne, sitting at his desk, wouldn’t see much of them.

  What Byrne did like to look at were two things: the weapon collection and his maps. The weapons were, I decided, very old and reasonably consistent with a particular period, although I wasn’t sure what that period would be. That is to say, Byrne did not collect weapons in general, he collected a specific period. There were no muskets and pistols, for example, no Prussian helmets or war medals, just very old swords and spear points.

  Maps were everywhere in that room, framed on the walls, spread out on a worktable, lying about the room in the form of large atlases. There were also several rolls in the comer of the room, and I’d be willing to wager that they, too, were maps. As well, there was a cabinet with long shallow drawers that would probably house more.

  I’ve had old maps in the shop from time to time and at that time was beginning to look for more of them for a new customer who was an avid collector. Essentially, most of the maps you see on the average wall these days are prints pulled from old atlases, and most of them date to the middle and late nineteenth century. Botanicals, botanical prints, have been very trendy lately, and prices have soared, but I’ve found maps to be a nice steady item. A lot of people buy them because they look nice on their panelled den walls, decorator art I call it, but there are serious collectors out there who look for the rare and unusual and are prepared to pay for it. These people are particularly thrilled by sheet maps, that is maps that are not cut out of atlases, but were printed or, in really rare cases, drawn, on individual sheets of paper or textile.

  My customer, a normally amiable fellow by the name of Matthew Wright who collected early maps of the British Isles, would have killed, or at least seriously maimed, for a couple of Byrne’s. Matthew has told me that Britain and Ireland were known to the ancients, due to a flourishing trade with the islands, and that as august a personage as the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy had mapped that area in the second century A.D. All of Byrne’s maps were of Ireland, and a couple of them at least I recognized. One was a Speed map, John Speed having been a mapmaker in the early seventeenth century. It was not entirely accurate, in terms of its survey of Ireland, but it was undoubtedly the best of its time. Byrne’s was dated 1610, and while it was not necessarily a first edition, because Speed’s maps were usually dated then, but were copied for a long time afterward, I was reasonably sure it was an original.

  Another map was attributed, according to a bronze plaque on its frame, to William Petty, who, if I remembered correctly, had produced the first atlas of Ireland sometime in the seventeenth century. There was a third map, under glass on top of the map cabinet, that was rather charming, with the lines of sunrise and sunset over Ireland for several points during the year depicted, along with drawings of monsters arising from the sea around Ireland’s shores. The rest of the framed maps were also good, although not as unique as the Speed and the Petty, but an impressive collection indeed. I could see why Byrne had seen fit to leave it to Trinity College, and I expected they’d be more than pleased to have it.

  What was interesting, if one were inclined to try to understand Byrne from this collection, was that in addition to the framed maps, there were hundreds of others, none of them, to my relatively untrained eyes at least, valuable, attractive, old, or particularly noteworthy in any way. There were current ordnance maps, Michelin road maps, maps of all shapes and sizes. This said to me that while Byrne collected the weapons for their antiquity, he collected maps for a different reason, one that I thought at the time I would probably never know.

  After a few minutes delay, no doubt to serve the family first, Deirdre wheeled in the tea service on a little trolley, handing cups of tea all round. I thought a sip or two of the legendary Irish whiskey would have been a considerable improvement, but understood that the occasion called for solemn sobriety.

  “He died right there,” Deirdre said, after handing me my teacup. “Right where you’re standing.” Involuntarily, I jumped, almost dumping my tea on the oriental carpet. “We had his bed set up in here,” she went on, not noticing my distress. “He couldn’t get up the stairs at the end. Lung cancer,” she added. “Came on sudden. Very bad, it was. He liked it here, though, with his books and his maps, and the view of the garden and the sea. We put the bed where he could look out. He was alone. Sad really. The night nurse hadn’t come in yet and the rest of them,” she said, tossing her head in the direction we’d last seen the family, “were at dinner. And Breeta long gone.” Deirdre looked even more morose, if that was possible. “In the prime of life, he was, not old at all. I thought he’d last till Christmas, you know. Lots of people do, hold on until Christmas, I mean.”

  “Why don’t we have a look outside?” Alex said, taking my elbow.

  “Fine idea,” I said gratefully, and Alex and I, throwing caution to the winds, risked the ire of the Byrne family by opening the French doors and stepping outside to the flagstone patio at the back of the house. We stood there soaking up the sun while we waited, carefully sipping cups of tea so strong and hot you could feel it corroding your insides on the way down.

  “What a place!” I exclaimed when we were out in the fresh air. Alex nodded.

  “What did Byrne mean when he said you’d given him a second chance?” I went on. Alex had told me he’d known Byrne many years before, that’s all. In fact, I’d found him a little cagey on the subject, an attitude I was soon to find out was due to a promise he’d made Byrne so long ago.

  Alex gestured to me to move away from the house. “I’m not sure how much his family knows of this,” he said quietly, “so
let’s make sure we’re well out of earshot.” We moved into the gardens, pausing to enjoy the scent of a profusion of rosebushes. “The first time I saw Eamon Byrne he was holding up the bar in a seedy dive in Singapore,” Alex began. “My ship was in dry dock for repairs, and so I and the lads had a bit of shore leave. Eamon was drunk, of course, the proverbial drunken Irishman, and a little morose, to boot. Not a happy drunk, but a talkative one. You know how it is, people who want to talk whether you want to listen or not. Went on and on about Ireland, how beautiful it was, but none so fair as the woman he loved and lost, that kind of thing. Real drivel, I thought. In fact, I’d have to say he was a crashing bore. But I went back the next night, same place. The booze was cheap, and they didn’t water it down too much. Eamon was there again, just as drunk.

  “This time he wasn’t nearly as talkative. Just stood there holding up the bar, downing glass after glass of cheap Irish whiskey, crying into his glass. Hard to say, isn’t it, which is worse: a talkative drunk or a morose one. The only thing he told me was how he’d let his family, his mother, I think, down. He was a disgrace, really. Smelled bad, and it was not just the booze. Hadn’t bathed in days. I just wanted to get rid of him.

  “One minute he’s got his head on the bar, then, in a flash, he’s straightened his back, as if he’s reached some resolution, some conclusion, and he staggers off the bar stool and out into the street. I have no idea why I did it, he was so unpleasant, a sixth sense maybe, but I followed him. He walked down to the water and stood for the longest time on the pier, brooding, staring into the water. I was about to pack it in, when suddenly, quick as a wink, he threw himself in. Even in the dim beam from the light at the end of the pier, I could see he couldn’t swim. He didn’t even try. Just sank like a stone. Well, what was I to do? Just stand there and watch him drown? I went after him.”

  “Are you saying he couldn’t swim, or that he wouldn’t?” I interrupted.

  “Probably couldn’t. A lot of sailors refuse to learn to swim. Figure if they go overboard in the North Atlantic, or somewhere like that, they might as well go straight to the bottom as struggle hopelessly on.”

  “But you’re saying he was trying to kill himself. That it wasn’t an accident.”

  “It was no accident, of that I am certain. It was really hard to find him in the dark, and I can’t tell you how heavy he was, but I managed to haul him out. The poor sod was trying to fight me off, but he was too drunk. I dragged him back to a filthy little hotel, him cursing at me—his daughter comes by her choice of language honestly, I must say—put him to bed, and watched over him while he slept. The next day I made him wash, and we had a little chat about life, the one I had from time to time with the young lads on the ship who went somewhat astray, shall we say. We had a terrible row, actually. Somewhat comic, I’d think, in the overall scheme of things, if it wasn’t so desperate. Here I was trying to think of reasons why he shouldn’t kill himself, and him arguing with me.

  “I told him a life was a terrible thing to waste, and he told me his wasn’t worth saving. Then I told him he was a coward, doing what he did, no matter what had happened to him. He said it was his life, and up to him what he did with it. I wasn’t making too much headway until I noticed he was wearing a small cross around his neck. I told him he’d roast in hell if he died by his own hand. I remember he just looked at me, then said he’d roast in hell for much worse things than that. But it seemed to do the trick. He pulled himself together. In the end, he forgave me for saving him, I guess. He said something to the effect that it wasn’t my fault because a man could only go when he was called, and that he hadn’t been called that day in Singapore. Nice fatalistic touch, really, the idea that your day of death is preordained. Superstitious people, the Irish, in many ways.”

  “No hint of what he’d done that was so terrible, then?” I asked.

  “He said he’d broken something actually, although I can’t recall what it was.”

  “Just a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me he tried to kill himself because he’d knocked over the family’s favorite Royal Doulton figurine, or something?”

  “It would be more likely to be the Waterford crystal here in Ireland, don’t you think?” Alex smiled. “No, I think it was something more like a taboo. He used a word I didn’t recognize, it wasn’t English. I wish I could remember it, because someone around here might be able to tell me what it was. Maybe it will come back to me. The memory isn’t what it used to be, unfortunately. Old age, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s still better than mine,” I replied. “So then what? Obviously you were successful in talking him out of suicide.”

  “I got him a job as a deckhand, and for the next few months we sailed together. It’s backbreaking work, you know, on those ships, but it was what he needed, I guess, and he was a good worker. When we got back to Europe, he took his wages, which he’d managed not to drink, and left the ship. He made me promise I’d never tell anyone about what he called his moment of weakness, and I never have until this very moment. And I don’t think I’ll tell his family now, quite frankly, even though it doesn’t much matter, I suppose, now that he’s dead.

  “I can’t say I really got to know him, we’d never be close friends, and we lost touch soon after. I’d never seen him again until today. If you count that video as seeing him, that is. That and his picture in one of those business magazines about five years ago: he was being touted as a big success in one of those international roundups or whatever they call them. I recognized him, although he looked a whole lot different. To be honest with you, I have no idea why he should remember me in his Will, really. I did very little for him, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to be given anything when he died.”

  “He said you’d refused compensation before,” I said.

  “He sent me a letter about ten years after we’d parted company with a check for ten thousand Irish punt in it—his fortunes had clearly improved over the intervening years—but no return address. I never cashed it. There was no reason for him to do that, really.”

  “It makes perfect sense to me,” I said. “As he said, you gave him a second chance. He even named his house and property Second Chance, didn’t he? It was an important moment, a watershed of some sort in his life.” Alex shrugged. “I wonder where this Rose Cottage of yours is,” I added. “I hope it’s nice.”

  At this moment Michael Davis hove into view. “I didn’t find Breeta,” he said. “I looked everywhere. What’ll we do?”

  Michael’s news required a major consultation on the part of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but in the end they opted to proceed with the reading of the Last Will and Testament of Eamon O‘Neill Byrne of County Kerry, Ireland. There were no surprises, except perhaps to learn that both Deirdre and John had two names, like the rest of us: Flood in Deirdre’s case, Deirdre Flood, and Herlihy in the case of John. Michael Davis looked suitably grateful for the gift Eamon had bestowed upon him, John Herlihy surreptitiously poured himself a congratulatory drink from a crystal decanter on a side table, and even Deirdre of the Sorrows showed something akin to a small smile when she heard what she would get. They were reasonably generous sums, Deirdre’s not being as large as John’s, which I took to mean she had joined the staff at Second Chance rather later than he had. The lawyer for Padraig Gilhooly sat stone-faced through the whole affair, and shoulders stiffened once again when Tweedledee came to the part about Alex and Rose Cottage. The sons-in-law squirmed with pleasure when their wives’ inheritance of Byrne Enterprises was confirmed and Margaret looked suitably shocked, as her husband had predicted, by the mere pittance, though plenty by most standards, that he’d left her. There were the usual puts and takes: an unbelievably complicated formula on how, if any of them died, where the remaining funds were to go, and so on. I confess I didn’t pay much attention.

  Then came the moment, considered unorthodox even by Byrne himself, when the two lawyers went about the room handing all those named in the Will, an envelope with their names on i
t scrawled in a shaky hand: Eamon Byrne‘s, no doubt, written with one last dying effort. Margaret got one, as did both Eithne and Fionuala, and also, surprisingly, since this was to have been a family exercise, Alex, Michael, and Padraig Gilhooly’s lawyer. Only one envelope remained unclaimed: Breeta’s, since she wasn’t there to receive it. Tweedledum took that one and, with fanfare, locked it in the safe in the wall of Byrne’s office.

  Everyone sat looking at their envelopes, nice creamy linen ones with the initials EONB embossed on the flap, as if opening them might set off a letter bomb. All except Alex that is. He opened his immediately and stood up. “I’m not sure I approve of this,” he said, “but, in the interests of getting it over with, mine says ‘I am the sea-swell.’ ”

  The rest of them all sat there for a moment staring at their hands, not looking at Alex, nor anyone else for that matter. Then they got up, every last one of them, and clutching their envelopes, unopened, hastened from the room.

  Chapter Two

  THE FURIOUS WAVE

  “NICE,” I sighed. “Very nice,” I added. “Lovely people. I think I’ve had about enough of this place for now. How about you?” I said, turning to Alex, who like me was watching the family beat their hasty, and nasty, retreat. “Why don’t I buy you a drink back at the Inn?” I went on. “Rob and Jennifer are probably back from sight-seeing by now, and we can hear about their adventures. There isn’t anything you need to do here right now, is there?”

  “I don’t think so, although I suppose I should ask,” he replied, tucking the envelope and its obscure contents into his jacket pocket. We looked about us, but Tweedledum and Tweedledee were nowhere to be found. “I can always telephone later,” he said. “A drink sounds like a very good idea.”

  We were well along the driveway and almost to where I’d parked our little rented car, when we heard footsteps hurrying across the gravel, and turned to see Michael Davis approaching us. “Mr. Stewart, Ms. McClintoch.” He waved. “Wait for a minute.”