The Sin Eater (24 page)

‘A cautionary note: the tale related in Chapter Ten of these pages is anonymous as to the name of the participant. However, it is a true tale and should serve as a warning to the inquisitive. The devil's lures are everywhere.'

Michael turned to Chapter Ten. As was customary for that era, there was a subheading, describing the section's contents. This read: ‘My difficult decision over one of my ordinands – N.S.'s ill-starred association with the man known as the Wicked Earl of Kilderry'.

Michael read this twice, foraged in his wallet for his reader's ticket, and checked the book out on loan. After this he carried Fergal McMahon and his monastic memories back to Oriel College.

His rooms were cold because he had forgotten to switch on the thermostat. He remedied this, put the Abbot's memoirs temporarily in a drawer where Wilberforce could not get at them, and closed the door on the world. Then he checked his diary, seeing with relief that he had no tutorials until five that evening, and headed for the kitchen to heat some soup for a belated lunch. While it was warming up, he lured Wilberforce off a pile of third-year essays on stanzaic form by means of opening a tin of Wilberforce's favourite cat food. After this, he sat down at his desk and took Fergal McMahon's book from the drawer.

It took all of his carefully acquired academic discipline not to turn straight to Chapter Ten and the tale of N.S. and the Wicked Earl. Instead, forcing his mind to a scholarly detachment, he opened the book at the start, putting a notebook and pen to hand so he could write down any pertinent names or places.

To the accompaniment of Wilberforce wolfing down jellied tuna and herring chunks, he began to read Fergal McMahon's memoirs.

‘I
t was a great source of pleasure that the small, quite obscure monastery I helped found grew to be such a wonderful place for God's work,' wrote Fergal McMahon. ‘On the day in the early 1860s when we first opened the doors, our total funds amounted to one shilling [editor's note: an Irish shilling is equivalent to a British shilling], but years later, during the Great Famine, we were able to help many unfortunate people.'

The writing was vivid and lively, although Michael found the depictions of the Great Famine somewhat depressing. The Abbot conscientiously described for his readers the memories of his youth – the grey, hopeless faces of the farmers and what he referred to as ‘the peasantry', as they saw their crops fail year after year. Michael had just reached a description of the pervasive stench of potatoes rotting in the ground – ‘And the putrefaction fumes strong enough to stay in your nostrils for days' – when there was a sound of angry hissing from the kitchen and the smell of burning. He dived into the kitchen to rescue the pan of soup, which he had forgotten about, and which had boiled down to an unpleasant brown mess, with mushrooms stuck to the sides. Michael swore, switched off the cooker, left the pan to cool, and returned to Fergal who was now describing the exodus of so many Irish families, and applying considerably more optimism.

‘They went off to seek their fortunes in other lands, and there'd generally be a bit of a
craic
the night before they set off,' wrote the Abbot, and Michael was about to search his shelves for a Celtic dictionary, because
craic
sounded like a lobster recipe which surely could not be right, when he realized it was an Irish word for party.

‘Jars of poteen always circulated freely,' explained Fergal, who sounded as if he might have partaken fairly robustly of the poteen himself. ‘And most of it supplied by that rascal Fintan Reilly from Kilglenn.'

Fintan again, thought Michael. Eithne mentioned him, as well – in fact it sounded as if she'd had a love affair with him, not to mention a couple of children. This was not conclusive – Ireland's west coast was probably littered with people named Fintan – but Declan's story had also referred to Fintan, so this seemed to provide another shred of evidence in favour of Benedict's odd visions being real.

‘But no one much cared if they were caught drinking poteen, and them off to Dublin the next day, bound for England on the Liverpool ferry, although they'd have a dreadful old journey below decks in steerage. They didn't care about that though, for their sights were set on the glittering cities of America. Ah, America – “Wide as Shakespeare's soul, sublime as Milton's immemorial theme, and rich as Chaucer's speech”,' wrote Fergal, enclosing the sentence in quotation marks so that Michael, delighted with the Abbot's exuberant rhetoric, wrote the words down to trace to their source later.

‘It was not everyone who was bound for America, though,' continued the Abbot. ‘The streets of London, paved with the fabled gold of legend, also drew my countrymen. I was never in London in my life, although I believe it was a fine sight with all the splendid streets and shops and palaces, and the Queen riding past in her carriage.

‘St Patrick's Monastery was growing apace and after four years we were delighted we could open a seminary for young men called to serve God as priests. There was much contentment in shaping these eager souls, some scarcely more than eighteen, for service in God.

‘And then the young man I shall refer to only as N.S. came to us in 1870, and although I could not have known it at the time, his arrival heralded the reawakening of an ancient evil.'

‘N.S,' thought Michael. Will it be Nicholas Sheehan or not? It must be. He read on.

It was Autumn when N.S. came to St Patrick's. A bronze October morning, scented with rain and chrysanthemums – the kind of morning when I always felt God was smiling.

I never knew N.S's parentage, but we all thought he was from the old aristocracy. A bastard son of some ancient line, perhaps. Not that these things matter.

He was a good-looking boy, dark-haired, with a glint of arrogance about him, and eyes the colour of the ocean – that clear grey you so seldom see, rimmed with black. But the day he walked through our doors, I thought, “Oh my, we're going to have trouble with this one.”

Even so, for the four years of his studies he was a diligent and biddable student. But I think – no, I am sure – that there were nights when he slipped out of the monastery and made his way to one of the little nearby towns. Ladies were what he sought, of course, and with the way he looked, I dare say he'd have little trouble attracting them. Ah well, once upon a time I was not entirely blameless in that direction myself. As a young man in the seminary in Dublin, I, too, struggled with the vow of chastity, and I did not always win the fight.

As well as charm and good looks, N.S. possessed imagination, and that's a dangerous thing in a priest. A little is fine and good. Too much and your man starts to believe in the medieval tales of demons, and of horned and cloven creatures crawling and trawling the world for souls. Those creatures were made-up stories – weapons to keep people within the Church's teachings, of course. I never believed in them myself.

I believe in evil, though. It was planted in the world long before men walked in it, and it's still there, deeply buried but lethal, like the iron-jawed snares farmers set for predators. Take a wrong step, and
snap!
you're caught in Satan's mantrap. He's a sneaky, subtle creature, the Prince of Darkness, and his evil can tear lives apart and shred souls.

It was Fintan Reilly who started the black chain of events. Whether Fintan could actually read or write I never knew, and perhaps it doesn't matter, for he could paint a picture with words the like of which you never heard. And on a night in 1878, when I was still a relatively young man, Fintan painted a picture that harrowed up my soul to its very marrow.'

Michael, coming up out of Fergal McMahon's world, was starting to suspect that the Abbot might have missed his vocation – that he should have pursued a career writing nineteenth-century gothic fiction. So far there was nothing in the memoirs that provided any working facts – no place names or firm dates that could be tracked to their source. He was undecided whether to show this account to Benedict Doyle. He did not precisely think Fergal was making this up, but he was keeping in mind Owen Bracegirdle's comment about the Irish being the storytellers of the world.

But it was half past four, and unless he wanted to be late for his five o'clock tutorial, he would have to put Fergal aside for the next two hours. He shut the book in the desk, then remembered he had not eaten since breakfast, so he crammed a wedge of cheese and a couple of biscuits into his mouth, after which he assembled his notes and his thoughts. He had set up a small discussion group of first years and today they were going to consider the use of diaries and letters as narrative in nineteenth-century literature. They were a bright, enthusiastic bunch and it was a lively session, although a note of high comedy was provided halfway through by Wilberforce finding the unwashed pan of mushroom soup and dislodging several plates in order to get at the remains. The plates fell off the drainer, precipitating Wilberforce into the washing-up bowl, much to his annoyance. He retired crossly to the radiator shelf to dry off, and Michael swept up the broken plates and returned to the analysis of Ann Brontë and Wilkie Collins.

The students left shortly after six. Michael threw away the ruined saucepan, and returned to the Abbot and the entry into his story of Fintan Reilly.

Fintan, it appeared, had the habit of turning up at St Patrick's unexpectedly, generally when he was broke, hungry, running from an irate husband, father or brother, or – on a couple of memorable occasions – running from the law. And there had been a particular night midway through a tempestuous November evening in 1878 when he had arrived at the monastery, his appearance unannounced, as it always was.

‘A dark and wild night it was, with the rain lashing against the windows and rattling them like the bones of the restless dead, and the wind screeching across the ocean like the voices of souls trapped in purgatory,' wrote the Abbot, and Michael read this with delight. Oh, Fergal,
why
didn't you take to writing purple fiction, he thought. Or maybe you did. Maybe you were really Bram Stoker or Sheridan Le Fanu. He considered this concept of allotting shadow personas to well-known novelists for a moment in case it might make an interesting essay subject for his students, then resumed reading.

We had two guests that night, for N.S. was visiting us as well. N.S. had left us three or four years previously, to take a curacy in a parish on the outskirts of Galway. He had written to me, describing his work with enthusiasm, and I was starting to hope my early fears about him had been unfounded. This was the first time he had returned to St Patrick's, however.

It was after supper when Fintan unfolded his tale. Fintan always told a tale when he was given food; he considered it a form of payment, I think.

‘I've a tale to spin,' says Fintan, on this November night, and there was a small, pleased murmur. The ordinands – we had six at the time – looked up hopefully.

‘Once upon a time, and a very long time it was,' says Fintan, ‘the devil, walking the world in his greedy, prideful way, thought he'd put some of his powers of persuasion into the rocks and stones and gems of the world. “Aha”, thinks he, “there'll come a time when men will chisel out these rocks and stones, and make objects to adorn their houses and their shelves. And I'll be inside those things, and that'll be yet another way for me to get into their souls.”'

Here Fintan paused and took a refreshing draught of the mulled wine at his elbow. (Readers will be familiar with St Paul's dictum about a little wine for the stomach's sake, although to be fair, Fintan's measures could not be called little.)

‘I've a friend now, in service at Kilderry Castle,' says Fintan. ‘A very particular friend she is, and a good girl, diligent and willing.' This was a perfectly acceptable remark for any man to make; the trouble was that Fintan accompanied his words with a sly wink to the monk seated next to him. The monk happened to be our cellerar, Brother Cuthbert, who was seventy-five if he was a day, and although he'd know in theory about willing girls, he'd been in the monastery for fifty years, so the practice would be a dim memory.

‘My girl at Kilderry Castle has a deep concern,' said Fintan, and for the first time since I ever knew him, his voice had a serious ring to it.

Somebody further down the table observed that there would always be a deep concern about anyone inside Kilderry Castle, for wasn't the Earl known as the boldest sinner ever.

This was putting it kindly, for the Black Earl, as he was often called (although not in his hearing) was said by some to have trafficked with the devil. People said that, like Faust, he had sold his soul to Satan for power over men and women. Mesmerism, they call it nowadays, and it's a subtle power and one you'd certainly expect Satan to have in his gift.

‘That's as maybe,' says Fintan, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. ‘But the Earl's been good enough to my girl and he's been good enough to other servants as well.'

There was a slightly awkward silence at this, for Gerald Kilderry's particular brand of ‘goodness' was generally believed to take a very particular form, although if only half the rumours about him were true you'd at least have to admire the man's energy.

‘So now,' says Fintan, ‘there's this room in Kilderry Castle lined with books and manuscripts and all manner of fine things for learned gentlemen to browse among of an evening. And in that room, also, is a set of chessmen – you'll all know the game of chess, of course, you being learned people, never mind monks.'

A murmur of assent. I saw N.S. lean forward, his eyes bright and alert.

‘The chessmen,' says Fintan, lowering his voice the better to infuse it with a thrilling note, ‘were hewn from those very rocks that old Satan threaded through with his evil charm – and it's a charm that will talk men into doing whatever Satan wants. Imagine how it might be if an ordinary human got hold of that power. If men – even women – were able to crook a finger and point to a victim and say, “You. You come to me on such and such a date, at such and such a time”.' He demonstrated by crooking his own finger and several of the monks looked startled.