Condemned to Death (15 page)

‘What about there,’ said Cael, instantly, pointing to the far side to the river, to the place where the Farmer Michelóg’s land began.

‘I’d say you are right,’ agreed Cian. ‘Have we searched that side of the river properly? Has anyone gone there? If we haven’t then we should start on it straight away.’

‘Cael and I will do it,’ said Cormac. Mara was surprised that her son wanted to give up on his special discovery of the old house with the pot beneath the slab. However, it was typical that he got bored easily. Sifting endless grains of sand was not an occupation that appealed to him, though, she thought, if they persevered they would have come to bedrock. No one would have built a house on sand. And then when she thought about the building of the house, she remembered the custom on the Burren, when building a new house, of placing a broken iron pot beneath the flagstone in front of the fire. Then during a
ceilidh
, the best dancer would be given the honour of that particular spot where the sound of his or her feet echoing above the music of pipe or fiddle would keep the time for less accomplished performers.

That would, thought Mara, be the explanation for the pot beneath the slab and she was glad now to see Cormac directing his attention in another direction. She seated herself on a rock, taking out Niall Martin’s map again and studying it carefully and then looking all around her, trying to picture the gold merchant’s last hour.

Not night time, she thought. Even moonlight, adequate for fishing, would not be enough for a search for buried treasure, but sunrise would be an ideal time, and, no doubt, a bed of hay in the roof space of an old house would not be a great place for an elderly man to spend the night.

And why did he do it?

Michelóg had said to her with an appearance of candour that gold was of no interest to him, that he had neither wife nor child, and wanted, in the way of cattle and land, no more than he already possessed. But surely if that was true, the same applied to Niall Martin.

Or did the glamour and lure of gold act upon all men, irrespective of whether they needed it or not? Mara was inclined to think, despite Michelóg’s words, that it did.

So Niall Martin emerged from his uncomfortable sleeping place at night, came out upon an immaculate beach of orange sand, made his way to a place not yet searched, and found the gold, stood contemplating it. And then? And then, another person who could not sleep, so far faceless in Mara’s mind, came upon him and struck him down and fled with the gold.

But who was the person appointed to take him back to Galway? It was ridiculous that she still had not found that out. It would not have been Michelóg, she guessed. He would not undertake long trips to Galway when he had cattle to see to, so it must have been one of the others.

At that moment there was a shrill scream from Cael, followed by a whistle. Mara got to her feet quickly. Domhnall and Slevin emerged from the underground passageway of the ruined enclosure and Finbar, Art and Cian came running down from the promising bend in the river that they had been investigating.

‘I saw the footsteps,’ shouted Cael. ‘I was the one that saw them first. And Cormac thought that they were just belonging to Michelóg, but I said that they were too small and they have no hobnails in them like farmers always have and the fishermen don’t wear boots – they wear
cuaráin
.’ Cael, as usual, presented her evidence in a cool, succinct manner. Only the glow of her eyes showed her excitement. She waited until everyone’s attention was on her and then said, ‘But that is not all. Look!’ Walking carefully well to the side of the footprints she made her way up the steep slope towards Michelóg’s farm. As they got nearer they could hear the muffled thump of the hammer on the bark of the exotic tree trunk, but no one spoke and the noise went on without hesitation.

Outside the farm, just at the spot where there was a field of delicate grass, just where the land was watered by the River Caher and enriched by thousands upon thousands of baskets of seaweed, heaped over it by generation after generations, there was a bank that formed the boundary. It had been dug to form the base for a wall and a ditch showed where the sandy earth had been taken. Part of it looked newly turned over, but the section where Cael was now scooping over with her hands was heaped up with a pile of sand that looked as though it had been taken from the nearby dune. It only took her a moment to move it aside.

And there was a pile of clothing and a small empty leather bag with two handles and a lock. There was a hat of black silk – and it had two purple tassels remaining on it. There was a tunic of black broadcloth, thick and expensive, and trimmed with velvet, finely knitted black nether hose, and a pair of smallish leather boots with smooth soles. Typical clothing for a well-off merchant. Mara had little doubt that she was looking at the garments worn by Niall Martin on the morning when he was murdered. And, of course, Cael was right. The fishermen wore these light foot coverings, made from a piece of raw cow hide or bull hide, still with the hair on it – these were comfortable when kept wet and were perfect for their work: light in the boats and flexible as bare feet on the rocks. No fisherman wore boots.

So who had buried the clothes here? Mara looked speculatively in the direction of the farmer’s house. The dull sound of blows had ceased, but a minute later the snarl and squeak of a saw filled the air and drowned the voices of the scholars.

‘Was the gold near here, then, Brehon, do you think?’ Domhnall kept his voice low and gestured with a downward motion of the hand to Cael when she began to speak in a high, excited tone, and she immediately obeyed him despite her exhilaration, clapping a hand guiltily over her mouth.

‘It all makes sense, Brehon,’ she whispered then. ‘Look, that’s the place over there, across the river, where Séan’s grandfather’s boat was dumped, just there between those two sand dunes. The murderer stripped the body of his English clothes, carried the boat over, wedged it with a stone, perhaps, and then lifted the body in and launched it at high tide.’

Mara looked at her only girl pupil with respect. That was quick and clever reasoning from a twelve-year-old.

‘When was high tide on midsummer’s eve?’ Automatically Slevin looked at Art who immediately said: ‘Would have been about an hour before midnight.’

‘And that was the night that there was all the thunder and lightning. Etain was worried about you lot out down in the dungeons. I heard her talking to Fernandez. And there was I stuck in that wall chamber with dear little Síle,’ Cael added with disgust.

‘Pity that we were so far away from the river,’ said Cormac, ‘otherwise we might have caught a murderer red-handed.’

‘Except that there was no blood,’ said Cian smartly.

‘Let’s go back to those clothes,’ said Mara. Art looked a little pale. When he was younger the sight of blood always upset him and though she thought he had outgrown this, it might be still there, though hidden through shame or fear of teasing. ‘I think that Michelóg and Brendan must be asked about them. They are just on the boundary to Michelóg’s land and Brendan’s is not far away. Domhnall and Slevin, would you go and ask them, very politely, to spare me a moment. Michelóg, first, I think, Domhnall and then when he is on his way with Slevin you can go across to Brendan’s place.’ She need say no more, she knew. Domhnall would guess that she wanted to space out the interviews – to confront first one man, and then the other with the sight of the dead man’s clothes and to note their reactions.

Michelóg, she could have sworn, was stunned at the sight. Stunned and slightly frightened, she reckoned. He was a man who, like the fisherman, had a deeply tanned skin even during the winter and now, in midsummer, was a dark mahogany brown. But he definitely paled at the sight, his skin turning a dirty shade of yellow and his faded blue eyes staring with horror.

‘Someone is trying to get me into trouble, Brehon,’ he said eventually and she had a feeling that he was almost pushing the words out. ‘They’re trying to blame me for that death. They deliberately buried the clothes on my boundary. I swear I had nothing to do with it, they’ve got it all stitched up between them. They want me to be forced to sell up this place in order to pay the fine – what would it be, you tell me that, lad, you’ll know?’

He addressed his question to Finbar who turned red, then white and then said shakily, ‘It would have been twenty-one milch cows if you had acknowledged it within twenty-four hours, but now that has doubled and you would have to pay forty-two cows and the man’s honour price added to that …’ He stared dumbly and miserably at Michelóg who immediately retorted:

‘Well, there you are now. My entire herd is only twenty cows. How can I pay that without selling my land and my house and all that belongs to me?’

‘No one has accused you of anything at this moment, Michelóg,’ said Mara crisply. ‘What I have asked you is whether you have any knowledge of how those clothes came to be buried here in your boundary ditch?’

He stared at her with the baffled and angry look of a tethered bull. ‘You know I don’t,’ he said. ‘Why not ask those fishermen? Or Brendan?’

‘I certainly will ask everyone,’ said Mara mildly, ‘but now I am asking you. And do I take it that you deny all knowledge of how those clothes got here?’

He seemed subdued by her tone and nodded his head. ‘I swear I know nothing about them, and nothing about the killing of that man from Galway.’

She thanked him gravely and watched him walk away. He wore, she thought, the demeanour of a worried man, but not, unless her instinct failed her, that of a guilty man. Her eyes met Slevin’s but it was Cael who said, rather unhappily, ‘I don’t think he did it, Brehon. I think he is stupid and stupid people lie in a stupid way.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Mara and then she hushed them as she could hear Domhnall’s voice chatting about the samphire season in an amiable, but slightly loud tone of voice. She smiled to herself. He was certainly quite a diplomat. He was giving her warning of their approach and the chance to formulate her questions. This time, she thought, she would have a different approach, a different approach for a very different man.

‘Stand in front of the ditch, all of you,’ she said quietly and immediately they all lined up: Cormac, Art beside him, then Finbar, then the MacMahon twins, with Slevin standing slightly ahead of the others and taking the eye with his tall figure.

Brendan, she thought, was puzzled. He eyed the line of scholars and then looked at her interrogatively.

‘Yes, Brehon,’ he said. ‘Your young lad said that you wanted me to look at something.’ He gazed all around, looking she thought, over at the other side of the river in a slightly furtive manner.

‘That’s right, Brendan,’ said Mara. She turned and then appeared to be surprised at the line behind her. ‘Stand aside, all of you, please,’ she said mildly and then watched him intently when the scholars moved away.

Well, she thought, he’s surprised, but he’s not in any way as surprised and as shocked as Michelóg had been. She kept her eyes on his face and seemed almost to see his mind shuttling through ideas and coming, she was puzzled to note, to some conclusion. Then he said blandly: ‘Don’t tell me those are the clothes of that poor man.’

‘I was hoping that you would tell me since you have often taken him from Galway to Fanore,’ said Mara coolly. ‘I’m sure you remember his clothes.’

‘He dressed very fine; I don’t remember these, but they could be the sort of thing that he would wear,’ admitted Brendan with an air of one who is willing to tell all that he knows.

‘So you don’t recognize them, but you think that they may have been his,’ stated Mara.

‘That’s right, Brehon. They look like the sort of thing that he would wear,’ repeated Brendan. He seemed at a loss for a moment and then bent down and touched the boot. ‘And I’d say these might be his; I remember thinking once that he had very dainty little feet for a fairly tall man, God have mercy on him,’ he finished piously.

And, at that moment there was a sound of loud deep barking and an enormous dark grey wolfhound came flying across the dunes, cleared the river with one bound and launched himself at Cormac, barking hysterically and licking every inch of bare skin he could discover.

And after him, breathless and apologetic, came Séanín. ‘I didn’t mean to bring him, honest, Brehon, I didn’t mean it, I just couldn’t get him to go home again. Every time I chased him away, he just took a shortcut through a field and there he was again, running behind the cart. I did everything I could, but in the end I just had to leave him, or I wouldn’t be here for a month of Sundays.’

‘Oh, Dullahán, Dullahán,’ said Cormac fondly. ‘You’ve been missing me, haven’t you? You’re such a faithful boy. It’s great that he’s here, Brehon, isn’t it, because me and Art have been training him as a tracker dog, haven’t we, Art. Dullahán will find anything you tell him to look for.’

Mara stared at the dog with exasperation. Dullahán was now almost two years old and she had almost given up hope that he would ever turn into a reasonable dog, never mind a highly trained one. He had been originally named Smoke by Cormac, but in a moment of fury, when witnessing a row of flourishing cabbages uprooted by a pair of flying paws, Cumhal had named him Dullahán, a wicked god of the Celts, and the name had stuck and suited him.

As for his ability to find objects, well, if the amount of large holes which he regularly dug in her beautiful garden was any indication then Cahermacnaghten must be filled with buried treasure, which Dullahán sought with immense industry and perseverance.

1.
Any man who kills, without justification, a dog who guards a man’s flocks must pay a fine of five cows, supply a dog of the same breeding and also replace any livestock killed by wild animals until the end of the year.

2.
He who kills a dog of ‘four doors’, that is a dog which guards the dwelling-house, the cow-shed, the calf-pen and the sheep-fold, must pay a fine of ten cows and supply a dog of the same breed.

3.
A man may divorce a woman who neglects her husband’s dog and does not feed it, thereby imperilling its life.

W
ednesday dawned fine and heralded by a bright and clear sunrise without a trace of red in the blue sky – giving the promise of a dry day. Mara rose very early, washed and dressed and went quietly down the spiral staircase, opened the large oaken door and went out into the clear morning air. She was not the first up in the castle. Etain she saw in the distance clambering over the rocks in search of samphire. It had been a late night of celebration at the castle. Unfortunately Fernandez had invited several members of the clan and their wives, their sons and their daughters to an elaborate feast in her honour and there had been no opportunity for her to talk in privacy with her host. She reminded herself to return to the castle before Fernandez left it. Etain, she thought, must have sensibly slipped off to her bed when she returned from Galway and now was up early and hard at work. Today would be Brendan’s turn to make the journey. What would Brendan do when Etain’s pregnancy advanced to a stage when she was unable to climb rocks and sail a boat? He would have to get someone to help him with the budding industry that brother and sister had set up. Síle was still too young to be much of a help. In fact, thought Mara, compared to the fishermen’s children, Síle was rather spoiled by the two who had been mother and father to her.

Mara stood for a moment after she had quietly pulled closed the door behind her. There was a wonderful view out to sea from the steps to the castle. She could see the tide coming in and the orange strand half covered with lazy, rippling waves, as she strolled down the steps from the castle, breathing in the very fresh air. She noted that the tents snugly situated in the hollow between the sand dunes were still closed up and that none of the stone fireplaces in front of them were in use. There was one extra tent and a long paw stuck out from it and Mara smiled with amusement, imagining how little room there must be for the original occupants of the tent now that the enormous Dullahán had joined them. Cormac may have been politely requested by the others to take himself and the dog off to the new tent and allow the others to have a more peaceful night.

And then she frowned with concern. There was one boy not in a tent. He was walking along by the seashore, kicking moodily at the waves, and she recognized the thin form of Finbar. If it had been any other of the boys, if it even had been Cael, escaping from the childish chatter of young Síle, she would not have felt uneasy, but she had been anxious about Finbar all of yesterday. When she looked back on the day, he had hardly said a word, although he had been excited and pleased by his visit to Galway and had been full of talk for the first few minutes when he met his fellow scholars, but then for the rest of the day he had been silent. She wished now that she left him to stay in Galway. However, her duty was to inform his father, who had placed the boy in her care, and get parental permission for this big change in the son’s life.

She wondered whether to abandon her plan and to go down to the beach to join him, but decided against it. There was something about that hunched back and the bent head which showed that he did not want company. There was nothing more that she could say, which she had not said already. No one could alter the fact that this boy’s father had disowned him for something which was not his fault. In her reports she had always emphasized to the Brehon of Cloyne that Finbar worked as hard as he could; the ability was just not there. She felt impatient with the man. He, like she, must know that only the exceptionally clever scholars, those blessed with excellent brains and retentive memories and powers of logic, reasoning and understanding, eventually managed to qualify after the long and arduous years of study. There was no disgrace in not making the grade. Better to find this out early enough to make the change to a less demanding way of life.

Finbar, Mara decided, would be all right once he began work in Galway – that’s if his father gave permission – and in the meantime he was better with the exuberant company of the younger scholars, not to mention the lunatic dog, Dullahán, who, no doubt, would soon rouse the sleeping camp. She decided to give Finbar his privacy and she turned her attention towards the mountain that rose up behind Fernandez’s castle. The River Caher wound its way around this mountain, flowing through a small valley, rich in flowers and sweet grass. The climb was not a difficult one. The slopes of the mountain were terraced, by the hand of God, people around said reverently, and, indeed, it would take a God-like power to move those heavy boulders, to chip and sculpt the limestone slabs. Here and there, though, man had added to the work of the deity, placing stones to help to make a stair-like progression up the hill. The neat, small cattle of the locality used these as well as men, and the goats, with their kids, wandered at will, relentlessly devouring any embryonic hazel sapling or holly bush that dared to spring up in the earth that collected in the grykes.

Still we must have been a giant race in the past, though, thought Mara as she clambered up the steep slope and looked at some of the man-placed steps. How could mortal men have managed to shift those stones, many of them the size of a small house? And then there were the walls. Running the length and breadth of the mountain there were miles and miles of stone walls, most of them formed by leaning slab against slab, though some, she noted, were more elaborately built with a double row of the stones, filled in the centre with smaller stones. Every one of them had their own crossing place. A stranger would have found it difficult but Cumhal had taught Mara how to look for the built-in stile, sometimes a gap filled with a rounded stone of granite, not limestone, arrived from where, only God knew, and which could be rolled out of the way and then replaced and sometimes a slab jutting out horizontally to form a step, decorated by a grayling butterfly; some just a gap in stacked uprights, cleverly made part of the wall; others a v-shaped notch, too high for a cow. Mara recognized all of the crossing places and she progressed, hand resting lightly from time to time on the sun-warmed stone, until she had attained enough height to look down into the Caher Valley and to see the river as the birds saw it – just a twisting line that snaked in and out. From here, she thought, she could make a better map and regretted that she had not thought to bring with her the satchel that contained her pens and her securely stoppered inkhorn. The scholars, of course, also had their satchels with them and she wished now that she had asked Domhnall and Slevin to come with her. Still, they may have been awake late the night before – she had seen the embers glowing and heads close together in the firelight from the dunes when she herself had gone up to bed.

Mara seated herself on the ledge of an enormous boulder, carefully avoiding the wiry black stems and tender green leaves of the maidenhair fern, and looked down. This twist in the river that was directly beneath her was higher up the valley than any of them had searched before. Her mind, and the minds of her scholars, had been fixed on the idea of the sea and the sand, and the fact that the boat had been lodged between two sand dunes close to the beach had misled them all. And then, of course, there was the find of the dead man’s clothing, once again near the beach. If Fernandez’s castle had not been so near to the side of the mountain she would not have thought of coming up here and would not have looked at that part of the river.

But a boat, she reminded herself, could be almost as easily dragged upstream as downstream. The difficult thing was the body, but if the boat were taken to the place where the body lay, then loaded, the water would bear the weight of the dead man. The clothes could have been dealt with afterwards, once the boat was safely floated down on the river water and launched upon the outgoing tide. She stood for a moment staring down to where the river wound around the base of the mountain. The sun was getting stronger every minute and its light shone down and suddenly she saw below her, on the bank of the river, a glint, a gleam of silver.

After a moment she realized what it was. There was a seam of calcite in the limestone rocks down there and the light had picked out the mineral – an odd seam, a strange streak, shaped like an arrow, or a lance head, which she felt she would recognize when she saw it again. An idea suddenly came to her. This treasure of gold would have been hidden in a time of unrest, a time of clan warfare, but it would have had to be hidden in a place where it could easily be found again – after months, or even longer. If that was the hiding place, the person who had buried the treasure could have memorized that odd streak of calcite; it would have formed the marker for the place where the treasure lay, a place to which, perhaps, he never returned. It could be that he was killed in a battle, died before he could reveal the secret. The treasure could have stayed hidden there for centuries upon centuries.

Until it was uncovered in times of storm when the river flooded.

Not completely uncovered, but little by little, a ring perhaps, such as she had found lower down, or perhaps most wonderful of all a torc, that gold necklet so prized by the Celts in the legends and stories. More likely, she thought, some small articles.

But what if, after that tremendous rainstorm on the Sunday night before midsummer’s eve, when the downpour had been so heavy that, unusually, even the porous limestone of the Burren land had flooded and its fields had turned to temporary lakes. What if, on that night, the little Caher River had thundered down, slicing through the meander around that bend where now it flowed so placidly, scouring out the earth and the stones as it took a left-hand turn to travel on down to the beach, what if then it had uncovered the whole of the treasure, something carefully buried, perhaps a thousand years ago?

And, her mind went on, busily picturing the scene, trying to picture someone who walked where she walked now, someone who could have seen down into the river valley by the light of the sun, moon, or even by flares; she cast her mind back to the night when Niall Martin had been murdered. There had been a full moon on that night, but there had also been sporadic rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning. No torrential rain like the night before, a night without rain, a night when one might risk walking under the beam of the moon and surveying the landscape beneath.

And perhaps, Niall Martin, having sought his treasure up the length and breadth of the Caher River beside the sand dunes, had decided to go a bit further up and into the valley between the mountains and had seen a gleam of gold at that spot, that outcrop of rock which the river encircled?

But his presence there at Fanore had not gone unnoticed. A watch had been kept on him and he had been followed – was it by a man or by a woman? By the murderer? Whoever it was may have come up here in order to keep an eye on where the man was searching, an unobtrusive, unseen eye, because what man, looking for treasure, raises his eyes to the sky-high mountain? So had the murderer looked down upon Niall Martin’s progress, seen him scrabble amongst the rocks and then suddenly seen the flash of gold? The way down to the river valley would be steep and precipitous but the glow of gold would lend urgency and extra strength to the murderer’s feet. Murder may not have been intended, just a lust for gold which perhaps led to a fight, and then the fatal blow.

Or had it, she suddenly thought, been the other way around?

Mara took careful note of the site and turned to go back down to the castle. It was, she thought, significant that access to the mountain path that she had taken this morning led through Fernandez’s land and that the mountain reared up behind the castle walls.

Her scholars were all awake by the time she got halfway down. One of them was still down at the water’s edge. Poor Finbar, she thought, with a sigh. Even from a distance he had a lonely, miserable look. Then she heard little Síle’s high, childish scream, half-fear and half-delight, and Cormac’s voice shouting reassuringly: ‘Don’t worry, Síle, he’s a very friendly dog!’ Since Dullahán was the size of a small pony that, thought Cormac’s mother, was hardly reassuring to a nervous eight-year-old, who had probably been roused from her sleep by an inquisitive muzzle inserted under the canvas of the girls’ tent. She raised her own voice in a shout, calling authoritatively, ‘Dullahán, come!’ and remembering with regret her own beautiful and well-trained Irish wolfhound, Bran, the son of her father’s faithful companion and who always did what he was told and was, from puppyhood, a calm and obedient dog.

Dullahán occasionally did obey her and this time, whether it was because he liked exploring new environments, or whether he was, for once, in a compliant mood, he seemed to be coming to her command. Síle’s screams stopped and she heard the skidding of stones on the mountainside and waited, hoping that there were no sheep nearby. Dullahán’s nature was amiable and he was well used to farm animals, but his exuberance and the suddenness of his movements frightened animals not used to his rambunctious personality.

However, all was well. No sheep, not even a goat appeared. Dullahán came at full speed up to her, suddenly remembering that she did not like to be jumped upon, skidded to halt and sat, panting heavily, showing a fine set of gleaming white teeth, which had probably frightened the life out of Síle, roused from her sleep.

‘You bad dog,’ said Mara severely. ‘You are, let me inform you, the worst dog in the world.’

Dullahán wagged at her merrily, but she was conscious of a feeling of slight irritation. It was, she felt, rather a reflection on her dignity as Brehon to own such an unruly dog. When Cormac came up, scaling the mountain with ease, laughing and calling to his pet, she said to him severely: ‘Cormac, you promised to train that dog and he is getting wilder and wilder.’