Chapter 43: A Body in the Charter

Father Byrne opened the church door at half past one in the morning in his nightshirt with a candle and did not say a word. He looked at the safe mud on my boots and the charter in my arms and the two of us standing on his steps like drowned things, and he stood aside and let us in.

We put the ledger and the charter and the page on the table in the vestry. He read the page first and then the ledger and then he sat back and looked at the ceiling.

"The page is a record of the vote of 1921," he said. "It gives the number to the family of Maeve and it makes her Alpha and it says the ring is the seal of the seat. And the ledger is eighteen years of rent paid to a man who owns the shore." He put his hand flat on the table. "There is a thing in the ledger that you have not seen. Look at the first page again. The sum of one hundred pounds on the first of May 1962 and the signature of Ahern. And then turn to the back and look at the last page with writing on it."

I turned to the back. The last page had two entries on it, dated 1979. The first said, "Received from the Alpha of Dún Aonghasa the sum of two hundred pounds in settlement of the account to this date." The second was in the same hand and it was dated the ninth of October 1979, and it said, "The account is closed. The lease is at an end. The shore and the waters revert to the co-op on the death of the Alpha or on the surrender of the seat."

I read it three times.

"The lease is at an end," I said. "It says the shore and the waters revert to the co-op on the death of the Alpha or on the surrender of the seat."

"The Alpha in 1979 was Eileen," Father Byrne said. "Ahern closed the account and wrote that the shore reverted to the co-op on her death. And Eileen died in 1983. So by the terms of this ledger, the shore has belonged to the co-op since 1983 and there has been no lease and no rent and no owner but the co-op since then." He looked at me. "And Mairéad has been paying Korkut out of the co-op's money for fourteen years on a lease that ended before he was ever the enforcer of this region."

Declan had gone very still in his chair.

"Then the deed of gift she is putting on the boat on Saturday is a deed to a thing she does not own," he said. "She is giving Korkut the shore and the boats and the hall and the shore is already the co-op's and the boats are already the co-op's and the hall is already the co-op's, and she is doing it because she does not know the ledger says the lease ended in 1979."

"She does not know because she has never seen the ledger," I said. "She has been paying a man for a lease that ended and she has never once asked to see the paper. And Korkut has been taking the money and saying nothing because a man who is being paid does not look at the lease." I sat back. "Father. If we put this ledger on the table in front of the co-op, the deed of gift is dead. She cannot give away a thing she does not own. And the rent is theft and the page is proof that the ring is the seal and the seat is a vote, and the vote of 1921 was for Maeve and the vote was never held for Eileen and the vote was never held for Mairéad."

"There is one thing more," Father Byrne said. "The page says the ring is the seal of the Alpha. A ring is not a seal unless it is used to seal a thing. There is wax on the clasp of the green charter. Look at it."

I opened the clasp of the green charter. There was a disc of red wax pressed into the leather under the clasp and there was a mark in the wax. It was a crescent moon.

"The seal of the Alpha," I said.

"The seal of the Alpha. And there is a thing I have been keeping for twenty two years and I have never known what it was for. When your sister brought the box to this church in 1989 she gave me a second thing and she said, Father, keep this with the box and do not open it until the box is opened." He got up and went to the bottom shelf and brought out a small tin and put it on the table. "It is the seal. It is the seal of the ring of Maeve. She took it off the ring in 1989 and she gave it to me to keep because she was afraid the Alpha would take the ring and the seal with it and there would be nothing left."

I opened the tin. There was a small disc of bronze in it with a crescent moon cut into the face, and the moon on the face of the tin was the same moon that was on the ring under the hearth in my sister's cottage, and the same moon that was on the ring in the frame in the hall, and the same moon that was on the wax on the clasp of the green charter.

"Then we have the ring and the seal and the charter and the page and the ledger," I said. "We have everything. We have the whole of it and it is all in this room."

The church bell began to ring.

It was not the hour. It was half past two in the morning and the bell was ringing and the bell did not ring at half past two in the morning unless there was a fire or a death or a thing the whole village had to be got out of its bed for. Father Byrne was on his feet and at the door and I was behind him and Declan was behind me, and we came out into the church and the bell was going and there were lights in the village and voices on the shore road.

We went out onto the steps and Tom was coming up the lane at a run with a lamp in his hand and his face red and his mouth open.

"Father," he said. "There is a body in the harbor."

Father Byrne took the lamp off him. "Whose body?"

"We do not know. It came in on the tide and it is in the slip by the boathouse and it is a woman and she is in a black coat and she has been in the water a while." Tom looked past him at me and his face did the thing every face in this village did when it was frightened. "And there is a thing in her hand, Father. She has a thing in her hand and she is holding it so tight that we cannot get it out."

I went down the lane with them. The whole village was at the slip and the moon was up and the water was black and there was a woman in a black coat lying on the stones at the edge of the slip with her wet hair over her face, and I knew the coat and I knew the boots and I knew the small neat shape of her before I saw the red hair.

It was Bridget.

She was dead and she had been in the water an hour and there was nothing on her face but salt and the peace of a thing that has stopped. And her right hand was clenched and in her right hand there was a thing that would not come out, and Tom was right and the whole village was right, and I knelt down on the stones beside her and put my hand on her cold fingers and looked at what she was holding.

It was a key. It was a small brass key with a paper tag on it and the tag had been written on in ink that had run in the water and there was enough of it left to read.

It said: "The hall. The frame. The back of the charter."

And underneath it, in a different ink and a different hand, there was a single line.

"She has my mother. Do not let her have the vote."