Brigid of Kildare (18 page)

A man kneels some distance off, his bow readied. At the very sight of her, he reels to standing and awkwardly drops it. His stark brown robes reveal him to be a religious man. Poor monk, she thinks; he believes he has stumbled across one of Gael’s rumored warriors and is attempting a feeble defense.

From his proximity to Cill Dara, she assumes he journeys to the abbey, seeking sanctuary. Brigid draws back her hood and smiles, wanting to assure him that she bears no threat. Approaching him slowly, she is on the verge of introducing herself as the abbess of Cill Dara when he suddenly stammers in nigh incomprehensible Gaelic, “Do you know the way to the Abbey of Kildare?”

She understands him well enough to answer—in Gaelic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, or whatever tongue is native to him, for that matter—but some aspect of his person causes her to stop and take stock. He seems different from the typical Cill Dara refugee, who hails from former Roman lands overtaken by barbarians, not from Rome itself, and he bears none of the downtrodden aspect of the persecuted. This monk gives her pause. Placing her hands on her hips, she stares the unusually tall monk up and down. His hair and eyes are black, his skin olive not from sun but from birth, and his nose aquiline—an unmistakable Roman from the Western capital itself.

She answers in her native tongue, “Cill Dara?” As if she corrects his pronunciation to better grasp his meaning.

He seizes upon the phrase: “Yes, Cill Dara.”

Keeping to Gaelic, Brigid explains that she indeed knows the way and beckons him to follow. Panting as he tries to keep her pace, he asks a few inept questions about Cill Dara and its abbess, the absurdity of which nearly make her laugh. The monk clearly believes her to be a peasant woman and not an educated religious, and she enjoys playing the role.

They climb a precipitous mound near Cill Dara, and she points down at the breathtaking abbey. The monk’s face reveals his astonishment. At first, Brigid feels pride at his stunned reaction, but then he ruins the compliment by saying, in Latin, “It looks near to a Roman village.”

In an instant, the rejection of her mission by the Roman Church
wells within her. Brigid can hold her tongue no longer; she will not allow herself and her people to be viewed as boorish simpletons incapable of self-rule. In Latin, she answers, “So they say.”

The monk turns to her in shock. “You speak Latin?” His words incite her further.

“I do. Some of us Gaels are not as ignorant as rumored.” As she speaks, Brigid watches his crestfallen expression. She realizes that, though his motives may be suspect, his heart is not entirely corrupt.

Still angry, Brigid rushes down the steep incline, knowing that the monk cannot match her stride. The guards race out to greet their abbess; Cathan must have alerted them to her absence. She passes under the gate’s stone archway with the monk far behind and allows herself to be ministered to by her waiting, concerned nuns.

Before the nuns usher Brigid into her quarters, she looks back. She watches Ciaran shepherd the monk toward the refectory and the interrogation that all newcomers must face after receiving repast. The monk catches her eye, and she turns away. As Brigid leaves the tepid daylight for the candlelit darkness of her chambers, she allows herself a small smile. In her crushing despair, God has sent her a new chance, or so she thinks. She prays that it—he—will yield fresh hope rather than certain ruin.

Alex had divulged
nearly
all to Declan, an unlikely confessor for her sins. She’d told him about the Order of Saint Brigid commission, Sister Mary’s oral history of the relics, her own assessment of the chalice and paten, and the manuscript’s hiding place in the reliquary. But still, she’d said nothing about the other two books.

With each admission, Declan’s face had grown more excited. She knew that her words confirmed his suspicions and more: Not only was her manuscript indeed the legendary Book of Kildare, but it predated the Book of Kells by hundreds of years. Alex wasn’t so certain.

Darkness began to overtake the room as night fell over Saint Stephen’s Green. Declan pushed back his chair from the worktable. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We need to celebrate just a little.”

“We’re a long way from celebration, Dec.” Alex’s superstitious nature wouldn’t allow her to tempt fate. “But call it a sanity break, and I’ll happily grab a drink with you,” she said as she wrapped the manuscript back in its protective sleeve and placed it carefully in her bag.

Declan practically skipped down the two flights of stairs to the landing. Linking his arm with hers, he dragged Alex down the block to his local pub, the Pearl. He settled her in a nook and dashed up to the bar to get two pints of Guinness.

“How can you be so sure it’s the Book of Kildare?” she asked as soon as he returned to the table with their drinks.

“The similarity to Giraldus’s description has been bothering me, and its likeness to the decorative scheme of the Book of Kells has been nagging at me as well. For example, both codices open with a full-page illustration of all four symbols of the evangelists and then introduce each specific Gospel with a separate page bearing the author’s unique symbol. To be sure, the artistic style varies quite a bit. After all, it’s done by the hand of a different scribe. But certain discretionary elements are almost identical—elements that aren’t necessary to communicate the iconographical message of the Gospels.”

“Like what?”

“Like the appearance of tiny mice figures holding communion wafers hidden within the elaborate borders.”

“Couldn’t the scribe of my manuscript have just copied the Book of Kells?”

“Sure, the practice was common enough back in the eighth and ninth centuries. That’s why the date is so critical. Your sixth-century evidence—the dating of the Kildare communion vessels and reliquary and Sister Mary’s history—helps establish that it is the Book of Kildare, and that it’s earlier than Kells.” He paused while he downed his drink. “I guess, in some ways, it doesn’t matter whether your manuscript served as a model for the Book of Kells or not.”

“Why?”

“It’s a masterpiece regardless. To be sure, it’ll enhance its value if Ireland’s magnum opus modeled itself on your earlier manuscript. But if you want to leave behind crass topics like the exact euros your book will fetch and move into the scholarship, what really matters is proving that date of creation”—he smiled—“and your Virgin Mary, of course. That’s where we’ll really change history.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Madonna and Child seen in the Book of Kells has long been thought to be one of the earliest known representations of the Virgin Mary in Western art. One of the great mysteries of the Book of Kells is why this image first appears in ninth-century Ireland and how it spreads to continental Europe, fueling the cult of the Virgin Mary. If,
indeed, that’s how it happened. After all, Christ’s Mother was barely a biblical footnote for several centuries after the death of Christ. Imagine how shook up the crusty old academics will be if the first Virgin Mary dates from the sixth century rather than the ninth.”

They debated Declan’s theory over another pint and some dinner until two broad-shouldered men crashed into their nook. She’d instinctively grabbed her bag and started to run when she heard Declan laugh. “You bastards, get off me!”

“Just like you showed us mercy on the rugby pitch last week?” joked the man in the blue jersey who was continuing to pummel Declan.

“Gentlemen, play nice. You can see I am here with a work colleague.”

The two men stopped their mock beating and looked over at Alex, as if just noticing her.

“Colleague? Is that what they’re calling it these days?” the other man, also in a blue jersey, asked with a smile.

“So I’m told,” Alex said with a laugh as Declan introduced her to his friends: Owen Daly and Dermott Rolley.

“It’s nice to see Declan sharing a pint with a young lady rather than drinking and eating all by his sorry self at the bar like he does most nights,” Owen said.

Although they all chuckled, Alex could swear that Declan reddened. She sat back and listened to the old Rathmines schoolmates torment one other over their rugby losses, but Owen’s taunt kept running through her mind. Maybe the rogue was just a part Declan played.

After they finished their pints, Dermott said, “What do you say we sample the ales at Shanahan’s?”

“Allowed out so late on a school night? I thought Helen and Sally kept you two on a tight leash,” Declan teased.

“Ah, Dec, you know we always get a free pass from the wives on rugby match nights,” Dermott said.

“Then by all means, we will join you,” Declan said. As they rose, he moved toward Alex and slipped his hand behind her back to shepherd her toward the door.

“I think I’ll just head back to my hotel.
I
have an early morning tomorrow,”
Alex reminded Declan, hoping it might prompt him to call it a night as well.

“I’ll walk you to the Shelbourne. It’s just on the way to Shanahan’s.”

Owen inserted himself between them. “We’ll
all
walk you to your hotel, Alex. Dermott and I want to find out more about what ‘colleagues’ do these days.”

A bleary-eyed Declan greeted her at the door the next morning. Resisting the urge to tease him, Alex handed him one of the two coffees she’d picked up on the way to his place. Owen’s remark had softened her toward him a tiny bit.

“I’ve been thinking about our proof problem, Alex.”

“You have?” Alex said skeptically, putting down her paper cup to slip off the coat she wore over jeans and a blue cabled sweater. She found it hard to believe he’d thought about much other than rugby and Guinness during the eight hours since she’d left him at the Shelbourne’s doors.

“I have indeed.” He chugged his coffee and then left his cup with hers in the foyer before they entered his office. Neither one wanted a spill on the manuscript. Sitting at the worktable, he motioned for her to join him.

After they both put on sterile gloves, Alex pulled out the manuscript and opened it to the Virgin Mary folio page. She wanted another look at it under Declan’s bright work lights. The image—and its ramifications—had haunted her all night. Could she really be staring at the first portrait of the Virgin Mary in history? If Declan’s speculations were correct, why did her image appear in pre-ninth-century Ireland,
of all places, where Christianity was just beginning to take hold among the isolated warrior people?

Alex knew, of course, that the early church bore a traditional hostility to women, and thus the Virgin Mary was barely mentioned—even in the Gospels. Luke referenced her a few times: in her election as Mother to the Messiah, in her giving birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, in her presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and in her discovery of Jesus discoursing with the Temple elders. John remarked on Mary’s presence twice: once when she asked Jesus to assist the wine stewards at the Cana wedding, and once when she heard Jesus’s last words at the foot of the cross. Matthew and Mark mentioned Mary only once each, referring to her visiting Jesus with his brothers. In each instance, the allusion was fleeting.

Not until the Council of Ephesus in
A.D
. 431 did the church sanction veneration of the Virgin as Theotokos, Mother of God. Even still, it was centuries before devotional images surfaced and worship of her took hold; this didn’t reach a peak until the thirteenth century, when fervent “Mariolatry” helped raise women’s status above that of sinful daughters of Eve. Alex had always figured that the Virgin Mary emerged despite the antagonism of the early church because the people needed a mother figure. But no one really knew how it occurred.

“Do you have a solution to our proof problem?” Alex asked, finally snapping out of her Marian musings.

“I do, but I fear you might not like it.”

“Please don’t tell me it involves taking a sample off one of the pages and submitting it to a lab.”

“It does indeed.”

“Dec, it’s one thing for me to borrow the manuscript from Sister Mary for further research. It’s quite another for me to damage it.”

“So ‘borrowing’ is what we’re calling ‘stealing’ these days?” Alex cringed, and Declan backtracked: “I don’t mean to be harsh, Alex. But to my way of thinking, you might as well get what you came for.”

“Is there no other way?”

“So far, my translation of the biblical text has revealed nothing definitive. Your book contains the standard four Gospels seen in all the other illuminated manuscripts. There is nothing quirky in the language
or the writing style that permits authoritative dating. I don’t see any other way to be certain about the date.”

“But even with the sampling, the dating’s not absolute, is it?”

“No, but it’s as close as we can get.” He motioned for her to draw closer to him. As she did, she smelled last night’s beer seeping out of his pores, under the scent of soap from his morning shower. She found it oddly appealing. “I think I know a place from which we can take a sample and no one will be the wiser.”

Spreading open the manuscript, he turned to the very last page. The scribe had affixed an unadorned piece of vellum to the back of the thick leather cover. Declan pointed to the bare folio page. “I think I can remove a tiny sliver of vellum here, and it will be undetectable. Plus, it won’t affect the design or text in any way.”

She wanted to scream. How had she come to this point? Unimaginably, she’d taken an ancient manuscript from the owner’s possession and now she was considering allowing unauthorized invasive testing to be conducted upon it. It didn’t matter that she planned on giving the book back once she’d verified her discovery. So why did her gut tell her that the amoral act was the right one? Was it that she knew she could solve the mystery better than anyone else? Or was it just her ambitious desire for glory urging her on?

Alex hated to admit it, but Declan was right. If he used his knife skillfully, he could excise a minuscule piece of the plain vellum, leaving the decoration unharmed. It seemed that there was no other way to get closure on the date. She closed her eyes and made the sort of decision she’d never thought she’d be capable of. “All right, Dec. But I can’t watch.”