Ancient Appetites

the rigging carrying out maintenance, changing ropes and repairing sails. But he knew most of the crews would be in the pubs here and in town, spending their hard-earned money as fast as they could before they set sail again.

The ship he was looking for was still in dock, as he knew it would be. The Banshee was a clipper; a square-rigged merchantman about 240 feet long, with three decks, three masts and a spread of canvas in full sail that was nearly a hundred feet wide. Owned by his father's company, this was the boat that had brought him home from Africa. The company had many of these kinds of ships, but he had grown to love this one. His heart lifted at the sight of it.

The crew were a motley lot, rough but thoroughly competent. It was strange to see so many foreign-looking faces here – he had grown used to a more exotic mix on his travels, but Dublin was still such a small, insular place. Here on the quays, however, you could find all sorts. Ships' crews were often made up of all manner of races – captains took good crewmen wherever they could get them. Sometimes by force, if necessary.

The Banshee's captain would be loyal to the family, but the ship's second mate had become a close friend and Nathaniel was sure the officer would hide him on board until they had sailed far enough out that they couldn't turn back. He could be gone before the family found him.

And yet as he gazed up at the ship, Nate knew he couldn't leave. There was something rotten in the heart of his family; his brother was dead and he had to find out why. If he had two months before he had to depart for America, then that would have to be long enough. He could still cut and run after that. He had loved Marcus, but he would not spend the rest of his years living his brother's life. And besides, there was one other thing to consider: if Nathaniel were to take his brother's place, whoever killed Marcus would be bound to come after him next.

VII

A GRAVE DISAGREEMENT ABOUT BONES

Francie took the shortcut through the graveyard, running across the carpet of soft grass past one monumental gravestone after another. The Wildensterns didn't do anything by halves, and their headstones were no exception. Giant stone crosses, door-sized slabs of intricately carved marble, looming sculptures of angels with their wings spread, all marked with Roman numerals or Celtic scrollwork or decoration from any period of the family's six-hundred-year history in Ireland.

The memorials cast long, gothic shadows over the grass in the clear morning sunlight, and Francie was struck by the thought that all the family's ancestors, lying there beneath his feet, were somehow watching him. Some frightened part of him wondered if they knew what he and his father were about. There had always been talk that the Wildensterns weren't natural. Their towering manor was often talked about in the hushed tones that might normally have been reserved for the likes of the Tower of London… or perhaps a haunted house.

He looked up just as he passed under the shadowy wings of a stone angel and its empty eyes filled him with dread. He ran faster, eager to be free of these menacing shapes. As he passed along the side of the small church – built especially by and for the family – he slowed and turned to look back. Each of these huge monuments could have paid for the kind of house his family inhabited in Dublin. But here they were instead, as if the dead had tried to keep hold of their money for as long as they could after their deaths. He remembered how his mother had told him stories of foreign kings from the East, who were buried with all their wealth and all their servants. To serve their masters again in the afterlife.

Francie climbed over the fence and hurried down the hill. Hennessy would notice he was missing sooner or later; he had to be quick. At the bottom of the hill he could see the messy spread of a building site. Through the middle of it, on a raised bank of earth and stone, ran the railway tracks that would carry the Wildensterns' private trains to and from the underground station beneath the house. The tracks disappeared into the mouth of a tunnel off to his right. There wasn't much activity here now; the tunnel was just about finished and the tracks were almost laid. Francie had been astonished how quickly the navvies had put down the rails. Once the ground had been prepared, the sleepers were laid and then the rails positioned on top of them. A man would walk the line, making sure the gauge was right – that the tracks were the correct distance apart – and then they were nailed in place by a skilled team of men with hammers beating to a scattered rhythm.

Waving to some of the men he knew, Francie trotted past the lines of workers with shovels, or pushing wheelbarrows full of earth, making his way to the arching, brown-brick mouth of the tunnel. The rails along the centre of the gravel floor were shiny and new, gleaming in the sunlight. He followed them inside.

The daylight cut a lopsided semicircle into the darkness before giving way, and Francie carried on into the gloom. He found the man he was looking for about a hundred yards in, down a narrow side tunnel. His name was Ned O'Keefe and he was the foreman – a squat, tough, big-chested fellow with huge hands and iron-grey whiskers on a square, weathered face. He was standing with three other men around a trestle table and they were arguing over something. They were all dressed in the typical navvy get-up of double-canvas shirts, moleskin trousers and hobnail boots. The brawny men were cleaner than normal, suggesting that they had got little done that morning.

Francie moved closer, waiting to be noticed. He helped out with the horses down here when he could find the time, and the navvies had taken a liking to him. But Francie wasn't here for the horses today.

'… I hear what yer sayin',' O'Keefe declared, 'but yer talkin' through yer arse. There's no graves that deep. We've made sure o' that.'

'The sniffer's never wrong, Keefo,' another man put in. 'And nobody's on for diggin' up the dead.'

'I don't care what the sniffer says. The dead are all accounted for,' O'Keefe retorted. 'The family knows about every grave dug in this graveyard for almost the last six hundred years and they're all on this map. If they're not on the map, we don't worry about 'em. Now, yeh haven't done a tap all day, so yeh can get back on it quick as yeh like. Nobody's goin' on a randy tonight until this tunnel's broke through.'

There were a few reluctant moans, but nobody was about to give O'Keefe any lip with the mood he was in. The foreman gave each of the other men a stony glare to reinforce his decision and then turned to find Francie standing near him.

'Francie! How's she cuttin'?'

'All right, Ned. What was all that about?'

'Ach, the sniffer's been actin' up. The lads're sayin' it's found human bone.'

The sniffer was an engimal the size of a terrier that walked on stalk-like legs almost as long as Francie's. He had seen it at work and remained mystified by it. The creature could read the ground as if it were looking into glass.

One of the other men was putting it through its paces again and he watched carefully. The navvy gave its flank a light slap and it trotted off down the tunnel. Standing at the end, it stared at the wall of stone for a minute or two. Then it came back. There was a box sitting nearby and it stuck its nose into it. Francie had seen this bit before. There were different pieces of material in the box. O'Keefe stood in the middle of the narrow tunnel and the sniffer would lay out the materials that made up the ground that it had sniffed out. The closer the material to O'Keefe's feet, the more of it there was in the ground. Francie looked at the lumps that it had gathered. Closest was granite, then earth, then what looked like a lump of peat… and then a piece of bone.

'See?' the man said to Francie. 'Bone – plain as yeh like. Talk some sense into 'im, Francie; he's as stubborn as a pregnant goat. There's bodies in that ground that we don't know about. It won't do to go disturbin' those at rest.'

'I think you're all bleatin' like a flock of worried sheep,' Francie told them, because he knew they liked a bit of cheek. 'I'm here because my da wanted to know if you'll be workin' the day of the funeral. He's on for some cards.'

The navvies were skilled labourers who had honed their expertise on the canals and railroads in Britain. There were many from Yorkshire and Lancashire, some from Scotland and Wales, but most of them were Irish; the Wildensterns had brought this company of men back from England to build this private railway. And the navvies