The Celtic Riddle

What Byrne did like to look at were two things: the weapon collection and his maps. The weapons were, I decided, very old and reasonably consistent with a particular period, although I wasn't sure what that period would be. That is to say, Byrne did not collect weapons in general, he collected a specific period. There were no muskets and pistols, for example, no Prussian r mets or war medals, just very old swords and sp points.

Maps were everywhere in that room, framed on t walls, spread out on a worktable, lying about the roc in the form of large atlases. There were also sevei rolls in the corner of the room, and I'd be willing wager that they, too, were maps. As well, there was cabinet with long shallow drawers that would probab house more.

I've had old maps in the shop from time to time an at that time was beginning to look for more of ther for a new customer who was an avid collector. Essen tially, most of the maps you see on the average wal these days are prints pulled from old atlases, and mos of them date to the middle and late nineteenth century Botanicals, botanical prints, have been very trend) lately, and prices have soared, but I've found maps tc be a nice steady item. A lot of people buy them because they look nice on their panelled den walls, decorator art I call it, but there are serious collectors out there who look for the rare and unusual and are prepared to pay for it. These people are particularly thrilled by sheet maps, that is maps that are not cut out of atlases, but were printed or, in really rare cases, drawn, on individual sheets of paper or textile.

My customer, a normally amiable fellow by the name of Matthew Wright who collected early maps of the British Isles, would have killed, or at least seriously maimed, for a couple of Byrne's. Matthew has told me that Britain and Ireland were known to the ancients, due to a flourishing trade with the islands, and that as august a personage as the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy had mapped that area in the second century A.D. All of Byrne's maps were of Ireland, and a couple of them at least I recognized. One was a Speed map, John Speed having been a mapmaker in the early seventeenth century. It was not entirely accurate, in terms of its survey of Ireland, but it was undoubtedly the best of its time. Byrne's was dated 1610, and while it was not necessarily a first edition, because Speed's maps were usually dated then, but were copied for a long time afterward, I was reasonably sure it was an original.

Another map was attributed, according to a bronze plaque on its frame, to William Petty, who, if I remembered correctly, had produced the first atlas of Ireland sometime in the seventeenth century. There was a third map, under glass on top of the map cabinet, that was rather charming, with the lines of sunrise and sunset over Ireland for several points during the year depicted, along with drawings of monsters arising from the sea around Ireland's shores. The rest of the framed maps were also good, although not as unique as the Speed and the Petty, but an impressive collection indeed. I could see why Byrne had seen fit to leave it to Trinity College, and I expected they'd be more than pleased to have it.

What was interesting, if one were inclined to try to understand Byrne from this collection, was that in addition to the framed maps, there were hundreds of others, none of them, to my relatively untrained eyes at least, valuable, attractive, old, or particularly noteworthy in any way. There were current ordnance maps, Michelin road maps, maps of all shapes and sizes. This said to me that while Byrne collected the weapons for their antiquity, he collected maps for a different reason, one that I thought at the time I would probably never know.

After a few minutes delay, no doubt to serve the family first, Deirdre wheeled in the tea service on a little trolley, handing cups of tea all round. I thought a sip or two of the legendary Irish whiskey would have been a considerable improvement, but understood that the occasion called for solemn sobriety.

"He died right there," Deirdre said, after handing me my teacup. "Right where you're standing." Involuntarily, I jumped, almost dumping my tea on the oriental carpet. "We had his bed set up in here," she went on, not noticing my distress. "He couldn't get up the stairs at the end. Lung cancer," she added. "Came on sudden. Very bad, it was. He liked it here, though, with his books and his maps, and the view of the garden and the sea. We put the bed where he could look out. He was alone. Sad really. The night nurse hadn't come in yet and the rest of them," she said, tossing her head in the direction we'd last seen the family, "were at dinner. And Breeta long gone." Deirdre looked even more morose, if that was possible. "In the prime of life, he was, not old at all. I thought he'd last till Christmas, you know. Lots of people do, hold on until Christmas, I mean."