Free Ancient Appetites by Oisin McGann Page B

after him next.

VII
A GRAVE DISAGREEMENT
ABOUT BONES

    F rancie 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