Hostage

“Our men surrendered,

and doing so, believed they dealt

With a gallant foe.”

Timothy Daniel O’Sullivan

Dunboy and Other Poems



Niall hated embroiling Meg in yet another family crisis, but he had to admit that if he’d chased after Adam himself it would have made the situation worse. Honestly, having Meg volunteer to speak to Adam was a relief on many fronts—he’d already had to duck away from the excavation too many times and left Gemma and the others to clean up Kieran’s messes. It was part of his responsibility to keep everyone getting along.

He waited until Meg had crossed the bridge, then walked to where James was scraping the last of the spilled soil back into the bucket and clapped him on the shoulder. “All right, James?”

“No, I’m bloody not. Kieran’s out of control.”

“I’ll speak to Graeme again and get it sorted, only it might be easier to take the instruments over to the Kilmichael cemetery this afternoon for the sake of keeping peace.”

“That’s giving in to blackmail.” James flushed red and glared at Niall. “Anyway, what’s the bloody point? We’d have seen if there was a mass burial—that many graves from the same period or one large one. And someone would have remembered. There’d be a place name, a mention somewhere. But all Kieran has is an idea because he doesn’t want the bodies to have been thrown over the cliff. Or he’s trying to delay us finding anything until after his father’s nominated in case we find something that proves it was Carew’s men who did it.”

“That may be,” Niall said, stifling an exasperated sigh. “But if you go out with the metal detector and find nothing unusual, it will be easier for me to stand my ground.”

“He still won’t be satisfied. There are still thirty-odd acres of land that belonged to St. Michael’s. He’ll insist we have to scan those, too, and he’ll say we should use the GPR in case there wasn’t any metal in the graves, and he won’t stop until we’ve done what he wants. Then we won’t have time for proper documentation or spot excavations where we really need them before the season’s finished.”

“Assuming there’s anything to find elsewhere.”

“There is,” James said, his eyes gleaming. “I feel it.”

He turned away as though that were the end of the conversation—and in his own way, he was no less stubborn than Kieran. He’d been treated as a prodigy so long, he expected his opinions to be taken as gospel, but unlike Kieran, he had the track record to back it up. As usual, Niall was left scrambling to know how to appease them both when neither was willing to give an inch.

“Go to the cemetery this afternoon—for me, James. Have a poke around. Do another quick walk through the fields. Then when you don’t find anything, you can at least say there’s nowhere to start and we’ll be able to move it back down to the bottom of the list. The old tunnel’s meant to be out that direction anyway, if it was ever there. You could take a walk toward Corr Áit and see what you think.”

“Fine,” James huffed, and he picked up the bucket and walked toward the far side of the tent where the big sifting screens had been set up. Every square inch of soil that was removed from the ground had to be sifted. Teeth, bone, and bits of wood wouldn’t have pinged with the metal detector and could be too small for the volunteer to notice.

Niall rubbed the back of his head and watched him go, then he took time to do a walk through the dig site and try to lighten the mood. At last, he hiked over to one of the more reliable spots of mobile signal and left a message for Graeme O’Neill to ring him.

Heading toward the laboratory tent, he heard Gemma and Liam arguing by the sieves and veered off in their direction. He’d barely rounded the corner when they fell silent.

“Something I should know?” he asked.

Gemma’s face went crimson. “Nothing. Sorry, boss. Sorry about this morning, too. But I can’t take much more. He’s a bloody menace. He’s lucky Liam pulled him up and kept him from falling in the sea. Should have let him fall, that’s what I say.”

Niall wandered over to the screen where Gemma had been sifting dirt and ran a hand over the contents that had been caught inside, bits of roots and rock, nothing special. “I’ll need you both to put in some public relations effort getting the volunteers back on our side after this. But first, I’d like you to tell me what happened—from your own point of view. How you came to stumble.”

Gemma’s hair was blowing in her face, curled strands the color of the red copper that had once come out of the Beara copper mines. Despite her best efforts with hat and sunscreen, the freckles on her cheeks and nose had darkened in the past five weeks so that she had twice as many. “What d’you mean?”

“You’re within your rights if you want to write up a report. All three of you are.”

“Because he pushed us?” Gemma asked.

“Is that what he did?” Niall kept his face expressionless.

Gemma had gone still, and then she looked from Niall to Liam and back again. “He pushed me twice, actually.” Her voice was thoughtful. “The first time might have been an accident. The second was deliberate. He shoved both me and James, and he meant it. That should have a report, shouldn’t it?”

Niall felt guilty even raising the issue. The moment the problem was even mentioned, it would set a chain of events in motion. True, Kieran had pushed all three of them in front of witnesses, but what if it had been James who had lost his temper? Would any of them consider documentation at this stage? On the other hand, if Niall didn’t get the situation sorted, he’d be responsible if anything worse went wrong.

“If you feel you want to write it up, it would be a good idea,” he said.

Liam lowered his chin and folded his arms, the thick black bands of his tattoos standing out across his biceps. “You want a report for when you talk to Graeme O’Neill, is that what you’re saying? Something to give you leverage?”

“It’s difficult, and it seems excessive, but there are rules.”

Gemma plucked a small, pale rock out of the sifting screen and rolled it between her fingers. “And Kieran hasn’t listened, however many times you’ve talked to him.”

“But if we report it, I’d hate having him in the house with Gem after he finds out.” Liam put his arm around Gemma’s shoulders, his usually gentle expression replaced by something fiercely protective.

“It might not be for long, but we could clear out part of the other cottage, if you’d rather,” Niall said. “We’d need to shift the storage and lab equipment, but that could be done.”

“Don’t be daft, the pair of you.” Gemma’s eyes flashed, and she glared at Niall and Liam. “Kieran’s not going to hurt me, and I think I can just about manage to keep from stabbing him in the eye with my knife. Worry about James if you want to worry about anyone. He’s reached the end of his tether.”

Niall sighed again and gave a reluctant nod. “We’ll figure it all out. Now go get a start on that PR campaign. Smiles and cheerful conversation, you both know the drill. And hope like the devil there’s something good that comes out of the ground today.”

He’d no right to hope for that at all. Together with the small horde of coins and jewelry, the slave shackle James had found buried near the place that the locals called the Place of the Massacre, Áit an Fheoir, was already a better find than anything he’d expected. The kind of important find that museums would salivate over, though there was still a lot of work left to do in the lab before they proved exactly how important it would be. Nevertheless, maybe the gods were finally smiling down at them, because it wasn’t an hour later that Ailsa Cameron, of all people, called Gemma over to check an oddly shaped stone near the inner keep.

Gemma knelt to work the object out of the soil, and then she sat back on her knees with a queer expression. Niall was already on his way over before she called out, “Niall! You’ll want to come and see this!”

Resting on a plastic bag in her palm, the object was about two inches by a half inch deep, oval in shape, with rounded planes on the front and back. Four small protrusions were evenly spaced along what might have been the right, left, top, and bottom.

“It’s man-made, isn’t it?” Ailsa asked, standing with her hands on her knees outside the shallow trench to watch Gemma work.

Niall crouched alongside Gemma. “Good eye, yes. The shape’s too regular to be natural. Could be a piece of jewelry—a pendant or a brooch maybe.”

“Want a go, then?” Gemma handed the bag over to him with the artifact cradled on top while she took a couple of additional photographs. Then she extracted soil from the area around where the item had been found and placed that into a second bag.

Niall turned the object over, his blood quickening as it always did when he held a fragment of history, a missing piece of an intricate puzzle that finds like this and modern science were only now beginning to fill in. He handed it back to Gemma. “It’s all yours. I’ll record while you do the assessment. And Ailsa, good job spotting this. You might as well come along and see the lab work in process.”

The timing was an enormous bit of luck, and Niall seized the chance to gather the volunteers around. “This may turn out to be one of those rare moments when the ground offers up a glimpse of something that hasn’t been seen in a few hundred years,” he said. “You witnessed tensions running high this morning, and I’ll admit that happens more often than we’d like. We spend too many days working with little to show for the effort, so people get anxious. That’s why, when we do make a find, it’s important to take a minute out to celebrate. And I want to use the opportunity to thank you all for your hard work. In this case, we have Ailsa Cameron to thank for her keen attention, but a find belongs to everyone—to all of you.”

Gemma took the artifact back to the lab and after a bit more consultation, they agreed it was too risky cleaning the object with anything but a dry, soft brush. They couldn’t afford to damage it or lose any clues to what it was, how it had gotten left in the ground, or who had left it there. Even the dirt embedded around the item might hold traces of blood, and metal in it could have picked up useful contaminants.

It was the first potentially significant find of the current five-week session, so Niall split the volunteers into smaller groups and let them take turns watching the cleaning progress. Gemma worked patiently, using one-directional strokes with a paintbrush and letting the deposits fall onto a white cloth she’d laid out on the table. The earth packed around it was relatively soft, easing away to reveal a silver and gilt pendant with glass affixed to the metal surface on both sides.

“What do you think?” Gemma bristled with energy that she tried to hold back as she finally set down the brush.

Niall felt his own pulse quicken as he turned the object over. It was double-sided, two small paintings—or possibly two objects—covered in protective glass, and he’d seen something similar to the first image in the collection at the Royal Irish Academy, a face blurred by an obscuring cloth.

“I’d say it might be a personal reliquary, if I had to make a guess. It could even be a double reliquary, and there’s a symbolism to those. This covered face could signify that it’s meant to contain a piece of the Turin shroud on one side—”

“The actual shroud that Jesus was wrapped in?” Gretchen Falsberg’s face held a reverent hush.

History and religion didn’t always play well together, so Niall was careful in how he phrased his answer. “I would doubt it,” he said, “but whoever wore it almost certainly would have thought so. Relics were big business back then—holy objects, splinters of the true cross, bits of bone from various saints. The validity of the claims would have been impossible to prove but faith made them worth a lot of money to the people who believed.”

“And the other side? That could be the Virgin Mary, couldn’t it?” Gemma asked, turning the pendant over, but the image there had faded and darkened more, making it harder to see. It looked—possibly—like the figure of a woman in a veil, with her head bent. A trace of blue in the veil remained, but blue colors often faded more slowly than others.

“If it’s another reliquary, I wouldn’t even want to guess who the figure is meant to be. We’ll need more tests to find out if there is anything inside—or ever was. With an object like this, we may never know anything for certain, not unless we find a written record.”

Ailsa Cameron shifted closer, peering down at the object with one fragile blue-veined hand clutching the chain of the necklace at her throat. “It’s important, though, isn’t it? Whatever it was?”

“No doubt.” Niall was surprised at how much she seemed to need affirmation—she was one of those women who came across as if they had all the confidence in the world. “Something like this would have belonged to someone with money. We know Owen O’Sullivan’s wife was held hostage here for Owen’s part in helping the English and betraying Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare. She was freed by Carew’s men when the fort surrendered.”

“Then it was a hostage rescue before the massacre?” Ailsa asked.

“Carew wouldn’t have wasted a single soldier on that. He meant to destroy Donal Cam’s last refuge, but Owen provided the intelligence that let them take it. Whatever happened to the other people on the island later, we know she was released and the soldiers who surrendered after the fortress fell were taken to Dunboy for execution.”

“He means Sir George Carew—Kieran Stafford’s ancestor,” Gemma added. “He was Lord President of Munster and acting for Queen Elizabeth.”

“The massacre was either done by his men or troops under Sir Charles Wilmot, the Governor of Cork, who came through in December of that same year. The records aren’t clear.”

“But Wilmot’s mother was a Stafford, too,” Gemma said, her eyes glinting with malice. “They’d still be related.”

Niall sent her a quelling look, and she gave him a defiant shrug, then bent to sweep the debris that had come from the pendant into a plastic bag. The nape of her neck was flush with sunburn where her hair fell on either side.

In the excitement of the find, Niall’d had moments when he’d been able to let what had happened that morning slip to the back of his mind. Meg and Adam had returned, and they stood together near the entrance of the tent, neither one of them appearing the worse for wear. If anything, Adam looked marginally less in danger of exploding. James had taken the metal detector out to Kilmichael, but there’d been no sign at all of Kieran. Graeme hadn’t returned Niall’s message, either, but on checking his phone, Niall realized he had no signal. And it was going on three o’clock.

He studied Adam across the room, then pulled Gemma aside, out of earshot of the volunteers. “I know I shouldn’t have brought Kieran up,” she said. “But I won’t apologize. No one would even care if he and his father are related to George Carew—if he wasn’t making a point of insisting it was Irish men who’d done the killing.”

“I’m not here to be your conscience, Gem. I wanted to ask a favor. Adam needs a bit of fun, and I need to get somewhere with better mobile coverage to speak with Graeme.”

“You want me to hold the fort again?” Gemma gave him a wide, elfin grin.

He couldn’t help smiling back. “As long as that’s the one and only time you use that joke.”

She glanced across the tent at Adam. “Yeah, go on, then. We’ll be fine here, and I’d like to have a look around where we found this and see if there was a chain that went with it.”

Her voice was level, but their eyes met and he recognized the sense of mingled excitement and awe in her, the enormity of holding history in their hands. “I know it’s not the bones you were hoping we would find,” he said, “but it’s a start, isn’t it?”

“Maybe James’ certainty is contagious, but I’ve a hunch this is only the beginning,” Gemma answered. “I think things are looking up.”