The Secret Scripture

chapter fourteen

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Driving into work this morning I passed a previously u

But there were the windmills, suddenly. It is a hill – more of a mountain I suppose, if we have such things in Ireland -called Labanacallach, and there is a wood also, called Nugent's Wood, going up to the frostline. Who Nugent was or why he planted a wood is anyone's guess, or at least there would be only old codgers who know these things. I was driving along in my Toyota, feeling quite wretched, with the same drumming recrimination going on in my stupid head, when I saw the windmills silverly turning, as one might say, and my heart lifted like a quail from the very bog. It lifted. They were so beautiful. I thought of windmills in paintings, the strange emotions still attaching even to their memory. Don Quixote maybe. How sorry I always used to feel when I saw a ruined mill long ago. Magical buildings. These modern versions of course are not quite the same thing. And of course they are strongly objected to. But they are beautiful. They made me optimistic, like I could still achieve something.

I had woken in the night with an appalling sense of shame and disquiet. If I could itemise the attributes of my grief, and print them in a journal, I might do the world a general service. I suspect it is hard to remember grief, and it is certainly invisible. But it is a wailing of the soul nonetheless and I must never again underestimate its acidic force in others. If nothing else I will hoard this new knowledge in the hope that when it passes I may still retain its clinical anatomy. Thank God for those windmills.

But in the small hours of the night I awoke. I think it was that mysterious knocking again, whose source I still don't know. It is Bet beseeching me to remember her. She needn't worry. I looked over what I had written about Rosea

When the late Pope died I had also odd emotions then. I was deeply moved by the death of a man who had not been helpful to those of my patients who are religious, but also gay, or God help them, women. While he lived it seemed the apogee of existence was just what he was himself. But in his death he was magnificent, brave. In his death he became more democratic maybe, because death includes everything, likes everything human -can't get enough of it. Death be not proud. Well yes, but death is mighty and dreadful. The Pope made short work of it.

Too much thinking on death. Yet it is the music of our time. As the mille

The more I look at Fr Gaunt's deposition, the more I seem to believe it. It is because he writes well in a sort of classical way, no doubt taking his syntax and his skills from his training in Maynooth. He has a very Latinate style it seems to me, of the kind I remember distantly from struggling with Cicero at school in Cornwall. His desire, almost his anxiety in psychiatric terms, to tell the story illuminates it.

He is unburdening himself, as he might a sin. Certainly his text is far from sacred. But he does not flinch. He is staunch. He is fearless. Fr Gaunt conscientiously details it all.

As a rule, a policeman in Ireland was never stationed near his own home town, one presumes so that there would be no question of favour to people among whom he had grown up. Rosea

Her father it seems had the capacity therefore to be very aware of things happening in the town. Perhaps he was able to pick up information casually in a ma

Rosea

How Fr Gaunt knew all these details is not clear, and indeed as I read it over now I am puzzled by his omniscience, but then that was the ambition of a priest in his time.

At any rate her father had the coffin disinterred the next morning, Fr Gaunt himself in attendance, and in the coffin was found not a body but a stash of guns, items very hard to get in the war of independence and gathered with great hardship, indeed often by means of taking one from the corpse of a slain policeman. And so it turned out, many of the items in the coffin were indeed police issue, and the haul from ambushes and raids. So from Rosea

The newly cut name on the gravestone was Joseph Brady, but no one of that name had died in the town.

Unbelievably, the men had also buried with the guns notes of secret meetings, including, by some foolish miracle, various names and addresses, including certain individuals wanted for murder. It was a wretched bonanza for the police. Before anyone knew what was happening, some of the names were arrested, and one of them was killed 'evading capture', a man called

Willie Lavelle, whose brother later played a part in Rosea

The recapture of the guns and documents and the killing of the man caused a subterranean furore in the circles involved in hiding them. Orders were issued no doubt for any and every possible act of reprisal against the police. But this did not happen immediately, long enough for Rosea