AS THE Mass progressed, an ominous pounding assailed the roof and the walls of the chapel—wind and rain. I wondered how poor dear Fiona was faring. Then I told myself that she was, after all, a hound dog and could take care of herself no matter what the weather.
I prayed fervently for wisdom in my relationship with my priceless wife—who, next to me, was softly singing along with the monks.
And she once thought that she had to be an accountant. Perhaps she still did.
I noticed that Inspector Murphy went up to Communion with us, as did a woman who had been in the chase car, obviously a woman cop,
After Mass, he stopped me in the vestibule of the chapel.
“More news from the boss, Mr. Coyne. It seems that Father Placid or one of his gombeen advisers took out an insurance policy on the concert. If it didn’t take place, they made a lot of money. Moreover, their contract with the Point required only a small fee if they canceled the concert. They would have had enough money left from the insurance to cover all their bad investments.”
“Yeah!”
“It is not absolutely clear that Father Placid knew about this arrangement.”
“If they had to cancel it, they would have had to return the money, wouldn’t they?”
“Certainly, to whoever asked for it. But I’m sure they figured that many Irish people would not mind the money going to the poor overseas. Don’t we have a long memory in this country when it comes to famines?”
“So, if there’s no concert, they pay off their debts and earn some money for their organization, too?”
“That’s what the boss thinks.”
“Why not just cancel? Cite ‘artistic differences’ with me wife?”
My wife, damn it all!
“Wouldn’t the insurance company have been a bit suspicious?”
“Wouldn’t the kidnapping have made them suspicious, too?”
“We’re not dealing, Mr. Coyne, with master criminals, are we now?”
“Dermot,” I said for perhaps the fifth time.
Outside, the squall had passed through and was now rushing towards London and Warsaw and points east. A sharp gash of blue cut the sky as low clouds scudded past us, as if trying to catch up with the rain. Waiting for us outside the chapel was one very wet and very unhappy wolfhound. I grabbed her just before she jumped on Nuala and destroyed altogether, as the locals would have said, her black suit.
“Did you think we were going to desert you, darlin’ girl?” I asked as I struggled to keep Fiona off my wife. “No, Fiona!” I said firmly.
Having been given her instructions, she relaxed and slobbered all over me.
We were led back to the room where we had scones and tea for our lunch. Fiona accepted several large bones and settled down just outside the door.
‘That was a very lovely liturgy, Father Abbot,” Nuala said diffidently. “Prayer slipping up to Heaven to God and catching him unawares.”
“Her,” I said.
She gave me one of her “Shush, Dermot” looks.
“Both male and female,” Brother Killian said briskly, “and neither male nor female. So, sure, can’t God be imagined either way?”
“Isn’t that interesting?” Nuala said respectfully—as if she hadn’t heard the same thing in almost the same words from the little bishop.
“I hope I didn’t offend you, Dermot, with my remarks about Maeve Doyle’s manager?” Maureen said uneasily.
Under the circumstances, herself was not likely to deny that I was her manager. Obviously, however, I was supposed to.
“I’m not herself’s manager, Maureen. She manages herself. By profession she’s an accountant. So she manages the two of us.”
The persona she was wearing forced Nuala Anne to ride to my rescue. “Sure, isn’t me husband a very successful commodity trader as well as a best-selling author? Isn’t it easier for me to keep the books because I’ve had a couple of courses in bookkeeping and he hasn’t?”
Yeah, sure, and we’d worked this arrangement out in careful conversation, hadn’t we?
In fact, she had simply taken over the bank statements when they came into the house.
We then went on a tour of the school, inspected the plans for a conference and residence center (for scholars in residence), and visited the dazzling Russian icon museum in a basement room converted into a cavelike structure, almost a catacomb. The icons were so beautiful that my wife wept softly.
With the return of good weather, faithless Fiona had deserted us and was doubtless out chasing cows and sheep and perhaps other dogs—or perhaps pursuing local children from whom she would demand attention and affection.
Then we returned to the chapel to practice the motets Nuala would sing. All four were brief hymns to the Mother of Jesus, normally sung by the monks at the end of the day. What a young woman’s voice was doing in the cloister might be open to question. However, as Maureen pointed out to us, Ireland at one time had monasteries of men and women, though in separate enclosures. Hadn’t St. Brigid herself presided over one such?
That certainly made it legitimate, did it not?
“They weren’t Benedictine monasteries,” the abbot cautioned us. “Benedict was an Italian. If he knew about the Irish practice—and there’s no reason to think he did—he certainly would not have approved. Our idea, however, is to show that chant is a much more flexible musical rhetoric than most people, including many priests, think it is. One can combine male and female voices without doing it any violence. Indeed, when congregations sang chant—and some of them did, though we don’t know how many—men and women obviously sang together.”
“Nuala Anne seems to understand,” Maureen added, “exactly how to do it. She does not try to overwhelm the male chorus, as many sopranos would … not that she couldn’t do it if she wanted to.”
“Och,” my wife replied, “wouldn’t that be a terrible thing to do?”
Still the pious, innocent Galway lass.
I had whispered to her during our tour the information from our cop.
“Maybe,” she had replied skeptically.
“The chant,” said the abbot, “is called Gregorian after Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 to 640 and was a Benedictine of a sort He had been Prefect of Rome, Lord Mayor, I suppose, then went off to a monastery but was soon called back into the service of the papacy. Justinian had reconquered North Africa and part of Italy in his campaign to restore the old empire. Gregory became the Pope’s Ambassador to the Emperor in Constantinople. His charm, intelligence, and piety made him a success, and it was not surprising that he became Pope, though he himself much preferred the contemplative life.”
“It would be like Rich Daley becoming Cardinal Archbishop,” I said.
“Perhaps,” the abbot said, not quite understanding the metaphor. “He certainly supported church music, though there is no reason which we know why his name became identified with the plain song we now call Gregorian. He lived in a time of chaos. Germanic barbarians dominated what was left of the Western German Empire—Angles and Saxons in England; Goths and Franks in Germany, France, and Spain; Vandals in North Africa; Lombards in Italy. Most likely these invaders were only a veneer over earlier and perhaps Celtic populations. However, there was not much left of Roman political authority. The Church was gradually stepping into the vacuum because no one else was available. The tribes fought among themselves and with the Emperor. Plague swept the world, particularly Italy. The rural populations were drastically reduced. Famine was endemic. The Lombards periodically raided what was left of Rome. The Imperial legation from Constantinople withdrew to Ravenna, which replaced Rome as the civil capital of the Western Empire. Gregory, a member of an old Roman family, one of the last, sat there calmly among the disease and death and confusion and tried to act as leader of the Catholic world. He was the last one for half a millennium who could do so and the last one ever to preside over a theoretically united Christian Church.”
“Such chaos,” I commented, “is hard to imagine today.”
“It was hard for Gregory to accept, too. The old lines of communication were breaking down. It took a long time for the letters he diligently wrote to reach the bishops among the Franks and the Angles to whom he was trying to write. He soldiered on, however, halfsuspecting that the monasteries would be the Church for hundreds of years. Incidentally, he had a fight with our Columbanus, who demanded that the Pope enforce our dating of Easter, which Columbanus believed was the only correct one. Gregory seemed to have agreed, but he said he could not change a custom of long standing. Eventually the Romans imposed their standard on us.”
“Can we change it back now?” Nuala asked, the shy Galway lass becoming the Irish nationalist.
“I don’t think so,” the abbot said, smiling—and realizing for the first time how many different masks lurked in my wife. “The most important thing to remember about Gregory is not the music, though that’s part of it. He was what we would call a pluralist. He believed that there was room in the Church for diversity. He reversed the policy of his predecessor Innocent I, who three hundred years before said that everything had to be like the way it was in Rome.”
“He wouldn’t be elected Pope today,” I said.
“I don’t think so either,” the abbot said with a shrug. “Gregory told Augustine of Canterbury to take over the wooden houses of worship of the Angles and turn them into Christian churches. He advised Augustine to adapt every custom that was not opposed to Christianity. The missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons even took over the name of the feast of their goddess of spring and the dawn, whose name was Eoster, for the celebration of Our Lord’s Resurrection, complete with the bunnies and lilies and eggs which were Eoster’s symbols of fertility and new life. That was Catholicism at its most open and most generous. We’ve not always been that way, much to our shame.”
“And that’s what we’re trying to do in Ireland today,” Maureen added. “We’re rediscovering the Celt in each of us and marrying it to modern post-Vatican Council Catholicism.”
“As your man said, Here Comes Everyone.”
“Couldn’t you imagine that Gregory and Columbanus and Augustine are here in the abbey with us today?” Nuala remarked, her eyes wide and solemn.
I almost looked around to see if the three sainted monks had entered the chapel.
“Columbanus,” said Brother Killian, “would be furious that we were celebrating Easter on the wrong date. Not all the Irish have been pluralists.
“Gregory,” Brother Killian added, concluding our little lesson in things Gregorian, “was either the last of the Roman popes or the first of the medieval popes, depending on your point of view. Soon the Pope would be the Bishop of a ruined city, cut off from Africa by Islam and from Byzantium by increasingly acrimonious theological and political conflicts. All he had left were the Germanic tribes in northern and western Europe.”
“And Ireland,” I added.
The four real Irish laughed.
“Sure, there’s always been Ireland, hasn’t there now?” the abbot agreed. “But on its own terms.”
Nuala insisted that she needed fifteen minutes of practice with Maureen before the monks joined us. Alone.
The abbot, Brother Killian, and I wandered outside.
“Dairy country,” the abbot said, gesturing at the rolling fields. “West Tip and Limerick have always been dairy country, Kerry too. The famine didn’t hit as hard here as up by Connacht, where they lived off the potatoes planted high up in the hills or on the edge of bogs in land that the English didn’t want.”
“During the Troubles everyone burned down the creameries, the Black and Tans and then the Irregulars,” Brother Killian continued. “You destroy the centers to where the dairy farmers bring their milk, you destroy the economy of much of Munster.”
“Killian is a native of Limerick,” the abbot explained. “His father owns a creamery—a very modern one, I might add.”
“The Irregulars were very active out here, I understand,” I said, hunting for folk tales about the Troubles.
“Indeed they were,” Killian replied. “Unlike your men down below in Cork, they had fought against the Tans, too. Bloody times out here in those days.”
“Revolutionary violence,” the abbot said with a sigh, “is less common among the really poor—your folks up in Galway and Mayo—than among those who have something to fight for and want more. The Kerry men were the most prosperous and the most bloody.”
‘They really killed Kevin O’Higgins, then?”
The two men stopped to look at me in surprise.
‘That’s not what DeVere White says, is it?” Brother Killian said cautiously.
“Another version,” I persisted, “says that it was not planned at all. A kind of accident, like the death of the Big Fella. Three Kerry men with guns happened to pass him in their car and seized the opportunity of the moment.”
The abbot nodded. “That’s what we have always been told out here. The last of the four Whelan brothers.”
Fiona had joined our threesome, panting heavily.
“Too much running around, is it now?” I asked her.
Then to the two monks, “The Whelan brothers?”
‘Tommy, the last one. Jimmy, Danny, Stevie, and Tommy. They were terrible, reckless and cruel men. They burned creameries and homes, ambushed Gardai and soldiers, robbed banks, shot their enemies in the back. They fought the English and fought the Free State, fought anyone they could find to fight, mostly because they loved the robbing and the burning and the killing. Respectable parents, too.”
“Anarchy does that to people,” I said. “Or maybe more likely brings it out.”
“If you believe the stories—and in Ireland stories improve with time—the Free Staters,” Brother Killian explained, “caught the Whelan gang after they had ambushed one of their columns and killed several of their men. At that time late in our Civil War, O’Higgins had persuaded the cabinet to give the army authorization to execute such men. So the Free Staters shot them all and left them for dead.”
“The irony of it,” the abbot said as we arrived back at the door of the chapel, “is that they say Tommy was powerfully affected by O’Higgins’s forgiveness. He reformed completely. He became a member of the Dáil in Dev’s party and advocated the same tough policy against the IRA in the late nineteen-thirties. His grandson is a junior minister in the ruling party’s cabinet today.”
Bingo!
“Stay, Fiona,” I ordered as the three humans entered the chapel.
She didn’t look happy about the command but curled up at the door and went promptly to sleep. So there, too!
Nuala was ready to sing. The monks’ schola cantorum had assembled.
‘The first motet,” my wife announced, “is the final monastic hymn of the day during Lent. It’s called ‘Ave, Regina Coelorum,’ ‘Hail, Queen of Heaven.’ It anticipates the joy of Easter.”
She sang the first line, and then the monks joined in. As before, her voice blended easily with theirs.
“ ‘Ave, Regina coelorum,
Ave, Domina Angelorum,
Salve, radix, salve, porta,
Ex qua mundo lux est orta.
Gaude, Virgo gloriosa,
Super omnes speciosa,
Vale, o valde decora,
Et pro nobis Christum exora.’ “
(Hail, Queen of Heaven,
Hail, Mistress of the Angels,
Hail, root, hail, portal,
From which the world’s light has risen.
Rejoice, Virgin glorious,
Above all others most beautiful,
Farewell, O most gracious,
And for us to Christ entreat.)
“The next hymn,” Nuala explained with cool confidence, “is the ‘Easter Good Night’ song. Mary represents the mother love of God. She suggests that in the center of everything is love like that a mother feels for her newborn child. In this song she is told to rejoice because her son is not dead. Life is always stronger than death.”
“ ‘Regina coeli laetare, alleluia!
Quia quern meruisti portare, alleluia,
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia!
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia!’ “
(Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia!
For he whom you were worthy to carry, alleluia,
Has risen, as He said, alleluia!
Pray for us to God, alleluia!)
“If you live on the ocean like I did when I was a child and you learn to fear the terrible storms that batter your house and threaten the lives of your friends who are fishermen, you know what it’s like when you look out and see a star. It says that the storm is over. Those who are still out on the bay can follow it safely to shore. In this next hymn we hail Mary as the star of the stormy sea of our life.”
Nuala was, I thought, not without some prejudice, getting better and better.
“ ‘Ave, Maris Stella,
Dei Mater alma,
Atque semper Virgo,
felix caeli porta.
“ ‘Sumens illud ave
Gabrielis ore,
Funda nos in pace,
Mutatis Evae nomen.
“ ‘Solve vincia reis,
Profer lumen caecis,
Mala nostra pelle,
Bona cuncta posce.’ “
(Hail, Star of the Sea,
Loving Mother of God,
And Virgin immortal,
blissful Heaven’s portal!
Receiving that “Ave”
From Gabriel’s mouth,
Establish us in peace,
Reversing “Eva’s” name.
Break the chains of sinners,
Bring light to the blind,
Our evils do drive away,
All good things do ask for.)
“I don’t know about you,” I said to her as we drove back to Garrytown, “but I found that a very moving religious experience.”
“It exhausted me altogether,” she sighed, curling up in a knot next to the already-sleeping Fiona.
Since both my females were asleep, I turned my attention to sorting out the various mysteries that were rattling around inside my head—ruling out any consideration of the mystery of Nuala Anne.