In the Shadow of the Trees (12 page)

‘Yes, I can understand that. But they used tree magic for healing and stuff too, didn’t they? How did that work?’

‘That depended on the tree. There were the Seven Trees held sacred by the ancient Irish, all part of the Druid beliefs.’

‘And what were they?’

‘Let me see now. Mistletoe was the most revered. All heal and golden bough it was called. It ruled the winter solstice, Christmas time, or Yuletide as it was then.’

‘People kiss under mistletoe berries, don’t they?’

‘Yes. Originally the berries were used in love incenses and potions, but they’re very poisonous. Mistletoe isn’t strictly a tree, grows on the bark of the apple tree, which was also sacred to the Druids. Apple is useful for healing, gets rid of warts.’

‘Like, an apple a day keeps the doctor away?’

‘Of course. Where do you think some of those old sayings come from? You heard the old superstition of “whistling up the wind”. Well that’s another sacred tree, the alder. Whistles made from alder wood were played to entice air elementals.’

‘And what are they?’

‘Elementals? Oh, they’re the personified energies of nature, creatures of fire and water and earth. Now the ash tree you would understand. It has a very straight grain, ideal for carving magic wands.’

I loved the idea at once. I could make a magic wand, etched with pentagrams and stuff. I could already see myself on a hilltop at sunrise, waving it about and chanting magical incantations. But Liam was still speaking.

‘That’s mistletoe, apple, alder and ash. Then there’s willow. You know the Irish are famed for their poetry and story telling. Willow groves were considered so magical that the priests and tribal leaders, the poets and bards, all sat among the trees to gain eloquence and inspiration.’

‘I know oak trees are supposed to be special.’

‘That’s right, the oak has been considered sacred by just
about every culture that has encountered it. But it was held in particular esteem by the Celts. It was called the King of Trees. It can be used in spells for strength and protection. Magic wands were made of its wood. Oak galls, known as serpent eggs, were used in magical charms and acorns gathered at night held great fertility powers.’

‘One more. You said seven.’

‘Ah now, that’d be my favourite, the rowan. Some call it mountain ash or witchwood. It’s sacred to the Goddess Bridgit. It’s such a graceful tree with its bright red berries to feed the birds in autumn. The berries have a tiny pentagram, that’s an ancient symbol of protection. Sticks of rowan used to be carved with runes.’

‘They’re like Norwegian letters, aren’t they?’

‘Norse, to be strictly accurate. I must take you to see Fleur, one of those travelling people I was telling you about. They’ll be here in a few days. She’ll show you the runes. And tell your fortune if you like.’

‘Hey, that would be cool.’

We were still tramping through the bush, heading back down towards the lake.

‘What about these trees?’ I said. ‘Do they have magic powers?’

‘I’m sure they do. But that’s beyond my knowledge.’

‘And what about the new trees, the pines?’

He stopped to look around at me, his face feigning shock and horror. ‘There’s nothing new about the pines. I’ll have you know that pine trees covered the hills of Europe long before man was even thought of. The Druids called it the sweetest of woods.’

‘I always associate it with disinfectant and school toilets.’

‘And so you should. It’s always been used to purify. They used to mix the dried needles with juniper and cedar and burn it to clean the home and purify the area for worship. The cones
and nuts can be carried as a fertility charm. Any evergreen has special life-giving qualities.’

‘And how come you know so much about all this?’

He smiled and winked and said, ‘It’s all part of being a humble Irish handyman.’ I should have known better than to ask.

We were nearly back home by then. I was exhausted. He walked so fast, despite the wheelbarrow, that even Bramble had slowed down.

‘Look, we’ve got to pass the cottage to get to the woolshed,’ I said. ‘I could pick up my laptop. There might be a reply from your friend by now.’

‘On one condition. You must promise to come to the fair with me. I’d like you to meet my friends. Besides, I think you need a break. You look awful.’

‘Oh, thanks very much.’

‘Well you do. Look at you. You must have lost a stone in weight that you can ill afford. There’s no colour in your cheeks and your eyes look like you haven’t slept for a month.’

His words felt like a sharp slap in the face. I knew he was right and for some reason I felt guilty about it. Perhaps that’s why I agreed to go.

‘Day after tomorrow then. I’ll call for you in the morning. We’ll take your truck.’

Back at the woolshed Liam sat with the computer. From the opposite side of the table I was able to see his face and watch the tiny eye movements as his gaze flicked over the screen.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I have a reply.’ A long silence.

‘And?’

‘And I’m trying to read it.’

Then his fingers clattered over the keys and another long silence. His eyebrows dipped together and he chewed at his
bottom lip. I was in agony, trying to sit still and say nothing. Just when I was beginning to think he would never move, he clicked over the keyboard again and shut down.

I jumped up and ran round the table to look at a blank screen. ‘So? What did it say?’

‘There was a letter for me. And yes, there was some information. It was on an attachment, which I’ve saved as a document file. You’ll find a folder marked “Sullivan”.’

‘But what does it say.’

‘A lot and nothing. You need time to read it and think about it. As I said, it’s something and nothing. Old tales, scraps of information—that’s how these stories arise. People making something out of a string of coincidences and exaggerations. But it might tell us something about the man, why he’s how he is.’

‘And what about the women?’

‘Now, you’re not to read too much into it and go off half-cocked. Just go home and look at it this evening and we’ll talk about it in the morning.’

Of course I switched the laptop on as soon as I was through the door. As before, the message had been deleted and the deleted items folder emptied. That’s as I expected. However, I found the new Sullivan folder easily enough and in it were two files. I read them through, then fetched a glass of wine and read them again. The line had moved quite a way down the bottle before I clicked on ‘shut down’.

W
HAT
I found in the first file was copied from a newspaper. There were two articles in fact, printed two years apart, both from the
Limerick Times.
The first was dated 15 March 1863.

Sullivan.
It is with deepest sorrow that we announce the passing of John Sullivan, eldest son of Patrick Sullivan, whose death was announced late last night. Mr. Sullivan was born in County Limerick in the year 1800, on his father’s estate, where he had resided throughout his life.

It is reported that his widow, Katherine Sullivan, and his eldest son, Thomas, were at his bedside during his last hours. Mrs. Sullivan, mother of his younger son, Michael, was Mr. Sullivan’s second wife.

A private family funeral will be held on Friday at the private chapel on the Sullivan estate and will be followed by the formal reading of the will. It is expected that all lands, deeds and entitlements will now pass to Thomas Sullivan, Mr. Sullivan’s eldest son from his first marriage to Emily McCormack.

Michael Sullivan, who is at present overseas, is still to be informed of his father’s demise.

The second press cutting was from 1865.

A reception was given last Friday by the Ladies’ Church Guild to mark the imminent departure of Mrs. Katherine Sullivan, widow of the late John Sullivan, for the Antipodes. The reception was held in the function rooms of the Royal Castle Hotel where Mrs. Sullivan was presented with a painting of Limerick City by local artist Sean Barrden, as a memento of her home town and in recognition of her good works among the underprivileged of the City.

Mrs. Sullivan is due to sail aboard the
Lady Grace,
departing from Liverpool next month. She will be joining her son, Michael, who left Limerick five years ago to settle in New Zealand. The citizens of Limerick wish Mrs. Sullivan a safe passage.

The other file contained what was obviously the main body of Liam’s friend’s investigation. This is what he’d sent.

How to find a Sullivan in late nineteenth-century Limerick? Dead easy, like finding a piglet in a farmyard. The place was littered with them! Ha, ha!

Anyway, I thought it might be easier to start at the other end of the question by trying to find a Michael Sullivan who went to New Zealand. That did narrow it down considerably. Thank God for the Internet and genealogy links. It’s absolutely amazing. You can access passenger lists for most of the vessels leaving the U.K. for the New World during that century. Of course the famine ships were crowded and records weren’t too accurate. But from the
information you gave I gathered we were looking a bit later than that so I moved straight to 1855 onwards. Came up with five Michael Sullivans.

The first, who was travelling on an emigration ship and claimed to be a baker, didn’t fit the profile—some question of a criminal record. But I kept him in reserve. Three were married men with a wife and several children, so I discounted those. However, I hit the jackpot with the fifth shot.

The S.S. ‘Lady Egidia’ left Greenock, Scotland on 12th October 1860, bound for Otago. In all, 438 emigrating passengers boarded, mostly Scottish, but quite a few from Ireland, including one Michael Sullivan. According to the passenger list he described himself as a farmer from the County Limerick. Although many were claiming assisted passage and travelled steerage, this Michael had paid the full fare and had a bit of comfort, although there were no private cabins. Apparently the voyage lasted 104 days and they arrived at the end of January 1861. Sadly the ship was 32 souls lighter (there was an inquiry about the competence of the medical officer). Your Michael Sullivan arrived in one piece so you should be able to track his progress from there.

Having got a name and a date it was then easy to extract references from newspaper articles of the corresponding period. That’s how I came up with the press cuttings (see the other file attached). From there I was able to research the family from local records and of course the university archives. Putting it all together it does form a picture and a very strange one it is.

As far as Michael was concerned, being the youngest son of a wealthy landowner, his choices were limited. Obviously it was Thomas who was about to inherit the family jewels, or in this case all the land, which would
have left Michael out on a limb. Traditionally the Army or the Church were the only recourse for the youngest son, but in the 1800s Australia and New Zealand offered an attractive alternative to many young adventurers from upper-class families.

The first thing I found was the record of Thomas’s mother, Emily. Apparently she and John Sullivan were married in 1826. She died three years later of fever, according to the death certificate, following the stillbirth of her second child. She was aged 27. John remarried in 1830, this time to Katherine, who outlived him and followed her son, Michael, out to New Zealand.

And that’s all there was. Which, in those days of large and extra large families, was in itself unusual. It seems the Sullivans have never gone in for intensive breeding, just the one or two children, all of them sons. And this Emily died fairly young, though that wasn’t unusual for the time.

However, you did say you remembered something about a family in which the women died after having produced an heir. So I started searching our folk history data and came up with some weird stuff. But first let me tell you about John Sullivan, what little there is to tell, which, in itself, is rather odd.

The family owned vast acres of land in County Limerick, to which John Sullivan was the sole heir. His father, Patrick, died, leaving the young man with estates of farms and woodland, and a sizeable sum of money also. John lived there and managed his inheritance. He married twice, had two sons and then he died. And that, apparently, was the sum total of his life. He never travelled, or went in for politics as most landowners would, took no interest in civic matters, joined no committees, no social life, not even the local hunt. Nothing. His second wife was very active among the ladies of Limerick, involving herself with various charities
and good works. Probably the only way the poor woman got out of the house.

What John did do was grow rich, or even richer than his father. And that’s where the stories started, because no one could account for his wealth, or indeed the wealth he’d inherited. The Sullivans just accumulated land and money and had always done so. There were, of course, all sorts of speculation (no need to tell you about the Irish imagination). But the question remains unanswered. How did the Sullivans make their money? One can only assume that the land itself was very well managed. Large areas were sectioned off and let out to tenant farmers and cottiers and these would net a considerable rent. And therein, as they say, lies another tale.

The Famine struck, as we all know, in the mid-1840s, and of course County Limerick fared as badly as anywhere else, worse in some ways. Now, we have to remember that this wasn’t like your usual famine in which there’s a shortage of food. In Ireland there was plenty of food, just no potatoes. And as the poor ate only potatoes it was the poor who died, while the field next door was ripe with grain to feed the cattle and export to England. Of course many landowners, especially those who weren’t actually present, continued to demand their rent, leaving the poor nothing with which to buy food. When the rent money was used to keep body and soul together and they couldn’t pay up, they were evicted to die on the roadsides. The Church, as usual, was of little help, being more interested in counting souls than bodies.

There were, however, some landlords who showed concern for their tenants and did what they could to alleviate the situation. It could well be that John Sullivan was of that mind, which would account for the survival of his tenants and workers. But that’s not the version told by
their descendants, and the story that’s been passed down is a strange one. It’s said that the potatoes grown by the tenants on the Sullivan estate didn’t succumb to the blight. The people who lived on his lands, and there were several hundred, all survived, well fed and healthy.

Now, they could have told tales of John Sullivan’s generosity, or the leprechauns and fairies leaving baskets of food at the doors, or St Patrick himself bringing loaves and fishes. That I would understand as being the typical Irish way of embroidering a mystery onto an explanation. But the potatoes on the Sullivan estate didn’t succumb to blight? When the spores came overnight, carried on the wind, and every potato plant in the country was black and rotting in the ground by morning? No, I don’t think so. There’s something not right here.

And that was about the sum of information I’ve been able to find on the life and times of John. So I started looking back further, at stories, folk tales, local gossip, and yes, I found just what you were looking for, a recurring theme.

Young women married into the family, produced an heir and then died suddenly. There are numerous stories, or maybe numerous versions of a few stories, scattered over several centuries. Nothing officially recorded, nothing that can be authenticated, just tales whispered by the hearthside. ‘It was a dark and stormy night and the rain beat on the old castle walls…’You know the sort of thing. All manner of tales about accidents that befell young mothers. Strange and sudden illnesses. Suicides. Search parties up in the hills.

It was said that a team of brothers kidnapped their sister and kept her prisoner to prevent her marrying the lord of the manor. There’s even a gypsy’s warning to a bride, ‘Marry the Sullivan gold and your wedding dress will make your shroud.’ Naturally she was dead within two years, leaving
an infant son. I can send you copies of all this, but, as I say, I doubt if anything can be substantiated.

What records do show, however, is that the Sullivan family had possessed the same plot of land for at least 1200 years, probably long before that too, and the boundaries had widened year by year as new fields and woods were acquired. County records refer to a castle or some form of fortified structure which disappeared long ago, but there’s an ancient stone circle still standing. A large house was built in the fifteenth century and it had been subsequently extended and refurbished. Apparently in its heyday it was quite a grand establishment with servants’ quarters and stables. Not that it was ever used for entertaining on a grand scale and certainly was never occupied by a large family.

Unfortunately nothing of the family fortune remains today. It seems that the son and heir didn’t live up to expectations. Young Thomas Sullivan ‘went to the bad’, as they say, after his stepmother left for New Zealand. He never married but continued to live in the house and there were more tales; this time it was drinking sessions, gambling and loose women. The farmlands first went to waste, then were sold off piecemeal to finance his chosen lifestyle. He died a bankrupt shortly before WWl and what little was left of the property was sold off against his debts.

Eventually urban sprawl ate up the countryside. The house stood empty for years, then was pulled down in the eighties to make way for a shopping centre. A motorway now runs through what were the grounds. The stone circle is still there, of course, being an historic monument, and the conservation people have charge of it. I think it’s open to the public at certain times of the year.

And that’s about all I’ve managed to find up to now, but it’s a fascinating family history. I’m intrigued to learn what
prompted this ‘urgent investigation’ as you put it. I’ll try to find out more. In fact, I just might take a trip over to Limerick and see what else I can dig up.

I closed down the laptop and headed straight back for the woolshed. Did Liam seriously expect me to wait until tomorrow and discuss this calmly over morning coffee? He saw me coming, probably heard me, too, crashing through the ferns. He stepped back from the woodpile to wipe his face on a discarded shirt.

‘Oh, you’ve read it then?’

‘Of course I’ve read it. What the hell is going on?’

‘Probably nothing. As I said, it may be all stories and coincidences. The result of overactive imaginations. You have to understand it’s a different culture, a different psychological make-up, that creates that kind of mythology.’

‘And what sort of psychological make-up created those three bodies up the hill back there?’

‘Look, I told you not to jump to conclusions. People die all the time. There’s nothing to link what went on in Ireland with those women here.’

‘Isn’t there? Well, you seemed to think there was or you wouldn’t have sent someone looking for evidence half a world away.’

‘It was just…it rang a bell, that’s all.’

‘That’s all, is it? A family of recluses? Generations of women dying mysteriously? Then the same thing starting up here? Three times at least, and probably four.’

‘Four? And who’s the fourth one?’

‘Jason’s mother, of course.’

Liam swung away, whirling his shirt through the air like a whip and sending puffs of dust spiralling up from the beaten ground. ‘Jesus Christ and all the saints in heaven, will ye listen to the woman!’ He rounded on me, his eyes flashing sparks of rage. ‘Don’t you ever think before you open your mouth? You know
nothing of Jason’s mother. You know nothing about the women up there! You don’t know what they died of or who buried them there or why!’

‘Yes I do! Anne fell off her horse and bled to death. Mary stayed out all night and caught pneumonia. They both got some sort of postnatal depression that sent them wandering off into the hills. Strange illnesses, he said. Accidents that befell young mothers. Think about it, will you. Michael comes to New Zealand. He marries Anne and they have a son, David. A year later she’s dead. David marries Mary and they produce another heir, Tom. She dies before she’s thirty. Tom marries Jane, then John’s born and she dies. John marries and Jason is born, an only child and he’s been without a mother since he was four years old. That’s what you call a coincidence?’

‘I never said there was nothing to it. But you can’t go round accusing people of…of…’