Free Brigid of Kildare by Heather Terrell Page A

Acting on instinct, Alex slipped the manuscript into her black bag.

xii
KILDARE, IRELAND
PRESENT DAY
    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 protectivesleeve 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 hergifts 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.

xiii
KILDARE, IRELAND
PRESENT DAY
    Alex rose at five A.M . She went through the motions of