Authors: Heather Terrell
Obviously, Sister Mary’s reliquary was not that described by Cogitosus—her smallish box could not possibly hold Brigid’s body—but if a lavish shrine had existed as early as the seventh century, was it also possible that Sister Mary’s reliquary had been created in the sixth century, as she claimed? If Alex could pin the reliquary to the sixth century, she’d pull off quite a coup; the oldest known book shrine dated from the eighth century. And if the reliquary dated from the sixth century, perhaps the chalice and paten did as well.
Alex said nothing of her hopes to Sister Mary. She didn’t want to excite her unduly if the theory proved incorrect—and she didn’t want the prickly nun to know she’d questioned her assertions about the relics’ dates in the first place. She waited patiently as Sister Mary undertook the slow process of removing the relics from the altar safe. Or so she thought.
“Antsy today, aren’t we, Miss Patterson?”
“Just anxious to start working. It’s a real honor to study your pieces.”
Sister Mary nodded in agreement, but she scanned Alex warily as she did. “Well, I’ll let you get down to brass tacks.” She pulled out two keys from her crammed key chain and said, “I’ll be back a few times before nightfall. Are you all set?”
“Absolutely.” Alex couldn’t wait for Sister Mary to leave the shrine so she could get to work.
“All right then. I’m off.”
Alex paused until she heard the sound of Sister Mary locking the church doors behind her. Then she set upon the reliquary, intent upon examining it with fresh eyes rather than her usual skeptical vision.
Scrutinizing every design, every material, and every nuance of the exterior with her equipment, Alex determined that her theory was indeed
possible
. She would face criticism—doubters would say that the materials were too exotic, the style too inconsistent, and the Virgin Mary all wrong—but her hypothesis that they indeed hailed from the sixth century was
possible
.
Alex finished her inspection by gingerly lifting up the reliquary’s lid to examine the inside once again. The simple interior left her no reason to rethink her theory, so she closed it. She thought about the many legendary false bottoms in her line of work. Such devices were rare, though not unheard-of, with reliquaries. After all, the designer—and the owner—wanted to protect, even hide, the precious saint’s remains above all else, especially if they bore magical properties, as so often claimed. But Alex had never come across one herself. An impulse overcame her to run her sterilized fingers along the border between the ornate lid and the simpler, wide base. Deep inside a decorative filigree knot in line with the Virgin Mary, she felt a groove. Reaching for her pliers, Alex gently pressed the little furrow with her instrument. The bottom of the reliquary flung itself open.
Almost afraid of what she might uncover, she looked inside. Instead of a decaying finger bone or a rotting scrap of a burial shroud, a leather-bound manuscript lay within. Just as she reached for it, she heard the fast clip of footsteps across the church’s marble floor. Acting on instinct, Alex slipped the manuscript into her black bag.
Her hands trembled violently as she unlocked the door to her room at the Silken Thomas. Alex couldn’t believe what she’d done. She tried to tell herself that she’d only borrowed the manuscript for further study. But she knew better; hubris—her belief that she alone could uncover the relics’ full story—had pushed her to jump from the periphery into the abyss.
How she’d managed to make it through the day, she didn’t know. She’d gone through the motions of photographing and examining the three pieces as she’d planned, all the while obsessing about the manuscript secreted in her bag. Sister Mary’s watchful gaze had had to be navigated, as she’d unexpectedly returned—and stayed—more frequently than normal throughout the day. What did she sense, Alex wondered? Or suspect?
Locking the hotel room door behind herself, Alex grabbed the desk chair and lodged it firmly beneath the handle. Intellectually, she knew that no one was going to come barreling through her door, but emotionally, she couldn’t help herself. She knelt next to her bedside and placed her black bag on the chintz coverlet. Slowly, Alex unzipped the bag. She’d carefully wrapped the book in a protective
sleeve during a rare moment alone. She slid the book out of her bag and then out of the sleeve, onto some plastic sheeting she’d spread out on the bed. It was larger than she’d remembered, nearly twelve by ten inches.
Alex was as afraid to look at it now as she had been when the base sprang open, though for a very different reason. What if the find didn’t meet her wild dreams of a late-sixth-to ninth-century illuminated manuscript? The text was probably just some seventeenth-century printing-press Bible inserted by some superstitious nun long after the reliquary’s completion.
She stared for a long moment at the manuscript’s red binding and its thick, tooled leather cover. Spirals and knots and swirls—typical for La Tène art—so densely blanketed the entire front that not a single empty area remained. Mustering up her courage, she opened it the tiniest bit and heard a crack. Alex winced; she knew it to be the sound of a book spine, untouched for centuries, expanding dangerously.
Slowly, she opened the book a little farther. A breathtaking female face stared out at her from the very first page. Four delicately wrought angels and an intricate border of emerald green, cobalt blue, bright yellow, deep gold, mauve, maroon, and ocher surrounded the image. The backdrop was so distracting that it took a minute for Alex to realize that she recognized the central figure. It was the enthroned Virgin Mary, with the Christ child on her lap, the same image as the reliquary lid.
Mesmerized, she kept turning the vellum folio pages. Ethereal angels, symbolic evangelists, Eucharistic emblems, and images of Christ leaped out at Alex, all wrapped and woven and interlaced with the distinctive and colorful La Tène and Hiberno-Saxon patterns. Even the text pages, covered with biblical words rendered in plain brownish iron-gall ink, contained bold decorative letters and icons. Each folio was more arresting than the last—except for the first. In Alex’s estimation, the Virgin Mary image surpassed all that followed.
Alex could translate only a few words of the insular majuscule Old Latin script. Her work required only that she decipher the names and places critical to appraising early liturgical vessels, and she knew her
gifts were visual, not linguistic. Yet she also knew that a proper translation would give her the quickest sense of the text’s age and import.
Regardless of the gaps in her knowledge, her professional instinct told her that the reliquary had been created to house the manuscript. And that this manuscript was the priceless relic.
Alex rose at five
A.M
. She went through the motions of greeting and chatting with Sister Mary the next morning. Uncertain as to her next steps, she allowed the nun to lead her to the place she’d requested access to the day before—the basement storage housing the convent’s archives.
Sister Mary had assured Alex that this would prove fruitless to her appraisal, that the convent had preserved no documentation earlier than the mid-1800s. Still, Alex felt honor-bound to complete the typical next stage in her provenance search, to ascertain whether the records contained any reference to the artifacts. She was grateful for the silence and the solitude of the subterranean space. She needed the mental and physical room to decide what to do with the manuscript.
Pawing her way through countless musty cardboard boxes, she began to believe that Sister Mary was right. The Order of Saint Brigid had saved only a scant few documents from earlier than the late 1800s. Perhaps the secretive nature of the order in the midst of all the Catholic persecution had mandated sparse evidence of the convent’s early existence. The nuns had relied on oral tradition to keep their long history, after all.
Regardless, Alex felt compelled to look through each box with methodical
care. She paged through decades of detritus reflecting the convent’s mundane daily activities: the convent’s financial accounts, inventories of supplies necessary to feed and clothe the nuns, lists of donations received over the years, and records of the order’s ever-diminishing numbers. Prayer pamphlets and religious literature she found aplenty, and these too she thumbed through with her usual attention to detail.
The dim basement light and the jet lag began to hit Alex, and she yawned and rubbed her eyes as she knelt down to examine yet another cardboard box. She was sifting through the unorganized piles of old financial records when her hand brushed up against a leather object buried within the papers. Reaching in with both hands, she pulled out not one but two small leather-bound books tied with cords.
Her exhaustion evaporated as she held the books up to the flickering fluorescent light: the leather looked and felt old. Certainly nowhere near as ancient as the cover and binding of the manuscript she’d found in the reliquary, but far older than the nineteenth-century documents contained in the boxes. Possibly even centuries older.
Normally, Alex would have held off on opening the books until she was in a more protected environment, but her heart beat fast at the thought that the books might contain some provenance evidence for the relics. And her experience of finding the manuscript made waiting impossible.
Drawing closer to the faint available light, Alex untwined one of the books and opened it up. Ancient Latin script on vellum pages much older even than the antique leather cover stared up at her, scribed in a hand familiar to her from the reliquary’s hidden manuscript. And the second book bore the exact same qualities. With sudden clarity, Alex knew what she must do.
Sitting on the church steps, she rehearsed her excuse for Sister Mary over and over again. Even though she didn’t think of herself as religious, she hated lying to a nun. But she wanted to piece together the hidden tale of the reliquary, the manuscript, and the trunk’s books more than anything, and she could not be certain that Sister Mary would grant her that honor.
The loud jangle of Sister Mary’s keys made its way up the steps before she did. The forewarning gave Alex a moment to compose herself and stand up before the imposing nun arrived.
Before Alex could offer her greetings, Sister Mary said, “Done so early today?”
Alex eked out a smile at the nun’s attempt at banter. “Actually, I waited out here to tell you that I need to go to Dublin for a few days to do some research.”
“So urgently? You didn’t mention a peep about a trip when I left you this morning.”
“I was hoping to deliver you some good news today. But as I reviewed my notes at midday, I realized that I need to tie up some loose ends first.”
“Good news?”
“I’d really feel more comfortable sharing my assessment when it’s finalized.”
“Ah, you’re not going to make an old nun like myself wait, are you? Who knows how long the good Lord might grant me?”
Alex almost guffawed. For a daunting figure like Sister Mary to play the part of an ailing woman of God was laughable. The smile disappeared from Alex’s face, however, when she remembered that she was about to tell a lie of omission. “If you insist, Sister Mary. I have come to believe that your chalice, paten, and reliquary box may come from the sixth century. This would make them the very oldest Irish communion vessels.”
Sister Mary looked confused. “But I already told you that they were made in the sixth century.”
“You did indeed, Sister Mary, and I wish I could take all my clients’ representations at face value. But my job as an appraiser is to reach my own conclusions. My assessments would be meritless if I didn’t approach my work with some modicum of objectivity.”
“I understand,” the nun said, though her face revealed her disagreement.
“I tend to agree with your order’s history that the pieces were made in the sixth century. If my final bits of research pan out as I hope, my appraisal will describe your relics as literally priceless.”
“Priceless, you say?”
“Priceless. Not to worry, though. I’m sure we’ll be able to put a price tag on their pricelessness, and I’m certain we’ll find a very willing—but respectful—buyer.”
The nun paused and then gifted Alex with that saintly grin. “Well, then, let’s get you on that train to Dublin. And may God be with you.”
Brother
,
My bag grows heavy with the weight of my unsent letters to you, letters that might ease your undoubted concern over your long-missing brother. I have accepted that my words cannot reach you, that no Roman messenger will ever appear on these hills, but I keep writing. The words save me. On my sea voyage, our imagined conversations were my only authentic exchanges during long days of playing the fellow outcast, and since I took my leave of that kindly band on the Gaelic shores, our invented talks are my only companion.
Other than God, of course. Strangely, our Lord has begun to seem more visible to me here in this simple country than He did on the long trek through the marginally more civilized Italian and Gaulish countryside or in the chop of the seas of Britannia. I marvel that Lucius felt tempted in this land where He feels so near.
Perhaps His presence can be explained by the natural lushness of this island so untouched by the hand of man. As soon as I left the crashing surf of the rocky beaches and stepped onto firm soil, landing alone on a rare sunny morn, I experienced the most curious sensation. I entered a landscape so awash in shimmering green that I felt as
though I were diving deep into God’s emerald waters rather than emerging from them.
This peculiar impression did not leave me, even though nature and man conspired to shake it free. I found that the stormy days of stinging rain and ever-blackening skies only enhanced the feel of deep waters. Even when I passed a rare long-abandoned gray stone ring fort or an enigmatic circle of boulders scrolled with concentric circles, my sense of submersion only increased. I swam through a landscape of green grass, moss, and leaves.