Condemned to Death (4 page)

‘They must have taken his sandals off?’ said Cian eventually.

‘Perhaps he wore boots,’ said Slevin and this fitted so well that she half-wondered whether Domhnall had said anything to him. She didn’t think so, however. Domhnall was a boy of the utmost truthfulness and discretion and he had spoken as though the memory had just come to him.

So, yes, of course, thought Mara, the man had come from Galway City, he had worn English dress: a shirt, a doublet, breeches and nether hose, summer as well as winter, and doubtless a pair of leather boots. But someone had deliberately removed those very defining articles of clothes and just left the man in his shirt and under hose as though he was a fisherman or farmer, dressed only in the
léine
, or what could have looked like a
léine,
as though, she told herself, he could be a victim of the Brehon law punishment of
fingal
.

‘Here comes Art,’ said Cormac joyfully. He was very friendly with Cian and Cael, but his foster-brother Art and he were like twins, seldom happy out of each other’s company. ‘May I tell him, Brehon?’

‘Yes, but quietly.’ Mara had no thought of sharing her findings with the whole beach and she explained that to them all when Art and Cormac came back. Art looked pale, sallow beneath the summer tan, she thought, and resolved to keep an eye on him. He was a very sensitive boy, a good scholar, a hard worker, but one who always needed plenty of encouragement and praise. Things that other scholars shrugged off could upset him for days.

‘What do you think about the boat, Art?’ she asked. It was a question that she might put later on to the fishermen, but this fisherman’s son must surely have an opinion on it. He felt it carefully, and to her surprise was quite assertive in his belief that it could have stood up to an Atlantic storm.

‘Something light like this would ride the waves, Brehon,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s the heavier boat that would be more likely to overturn and sink.’

Mara nodded, but she was sceptical that this boat, as thin as a cockleshell, could have been swept all the way up from the coast of Kerry without sinking.

And if the man was from Galway then the south-westerly wind would have brought him up north to the coast of Spiddal or somewhere like that, certainly in the opposite direction to the Burren. And this was not the kind of boat that they used in Galway City. Theirs were bigger and more substantial.

In fact, this boat, she was beginning to be sure, was the one that she had seen the rabbit jump from a few days earlier, the one that had been abandoned on the sand dunes of Fanore.

And not only the fishermen, but her scholars, also, were aware of that fact and the uneasiness stemmed from that.

Now she had to wait until Nuala arrived to see what she thought about this man’s cause of death. She walked forward to meet Finbar and to listen gravely to his report that the boat could not be seen from anywhere on the beach until the rocks which surrounded it were scaled. She worried again about how pale and hollow-eyed he looked. She had hoped that the holiday and the excitement about the midsummer’s eve feast, the sleeping in tents and the fishing expeditions would have taken his mind off his father’s edict.

‘Let’s walk back to where your shelters are pitched,’ she suggested to the others and encouraged them to talk about sleeping out of doors for the last couple of nights and about how warm and comfortable they were. Cael related, rather drolly, an exaggerated account of Síle’s fears during the night while Cormac and Cian vied with each other about how many hours they had stayed awake. They were all very anxious to show her the tents and to display how well the tar-soaked canvas kept out rain, but she did not allow too much time to be wasted on that.

‘There’s something missing here,’ she said looking all around innocently, though she had immediately noticed the absence of the boat.

The others looked around, also, with blank faces. Cael had a slight frown between her brows, but she said nothing.

‘Don’t you remember that old boat that was wedged in over there?’ She pointed to the spot between two pointed grass-covered sand dunes. She waited for them to look at each other, but they didn’t – they looked straight at her with innocent and uncomprehending faces. Mara almost wished that Brigid was here with her. She could just hear her housekeeper, who had been her father’s housekeeper before and had almost forty years of coping with scholars. ‘
He had that puss on him like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth
,’ she would say.

‘It’s strange that you don’t remember the boat,’ she remarked. ‘Finbar, would you go back and wait by the body and send Slevin up to me. In the meantime,’ she said to the four remaining scholars, ‘let’s just cross over and have a look around.’

The sand was held firm by the coarse green blades of marram grass and it was easy to walk on. She went down the hill to the small hollow where the three tents for the boys were grouped around one large fireplace. They were anxious to show her their sleeping places, but she put them aside. She was beginning to feel a little annoyed at their efforts to divert her from thoughts of the boat that held the corpse. Cormac, she guessed, was at the back of this. His loyalty to his foster-father and to the fishing community was great, she knew, but his first loyalty, if he was ever to make a lawyer, should be to establishing the truth about a crime as serious as murder – and she was beginning to think that this body in the boat was going to be a case of murder.

There were no marks in the sand to show whether a boat had been dragged out towards the pathway, or even to show its resting place when she had noticed a rabbit leap from it, but now at midday there was a breeze coming in from the ocean and the fine, very dry sand of the dunes was continually in motion, little flurries stirring and rippling. It had been blowing hard the night before; she remembered noticing from her window, just before she had blown out her candle, how the ash tree across the road from her house was bending and swaying.

‘Slevin, come over here, will you?’ she said over her shoulder as she saw his tall form appear on the roadway beside the dunes.

‘Someone’s taken away the old boat, then,’ he said instantly the moment he joined her, and then before she could say a word he blew a whistle through his pursed lips.

‘Of course,’ he said immediately. ‘That’s the boat that has the corpse in it – I bet that’s what it is.’ Slevin’s voice was breaking and it rose quite high as he spoke. Mara, looking back at the younger boys, saw that they had heard, but at that instant Cormac shouted, ‘Rabbit!’ and the attention of all was distracted as the grass was parted by the long-legged and agile leaps. They chased exuberantly after it only giving up when it dived into a burrow.

‘Saw it a minute too late; otherwise we’d have had rabbit stew tonight instead of more fish,’ said Cormac, twisting his hands to show how he would wring the animal’s neck. He and Cael began to argue with each other as to which had killed the most rabbits during their short lifespan and eventually Mara tired of them and suggested they return to their work on the beach.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘Fernandez is probably relying on you and it’s not fair to deprive him of seven pairs of hands. Tell him that I’ll just keep Slevin until Domhnall comes back with the physician.’

They went readily and she sensed that they were glad to have something to do. At the moment, until and unless it was confirmed by Nuala that a crime had taken place, there was little to do and certainly not enough for them all. Now it was more a matter of quiet speculation and the summing up of possibilities.

When they had gone she turned back to Slevin. ‘If the boat that was here last night …’ she began and then he interrupted her. ‘No it wasn’t,’ he said immediately. ‘The boat wasn’t here last night. I remember now. It was here when we saw the place first, before we went to stay in the castle before the wind blew itself out, but I don’t think I saw it when we were actually camping. You could ask Domhnall when he comes back with Nuala, but that is my memory.’

‘I see,’ said Mara. But surely, she thought, that body could not possibly have lain in the boat on the beach for three days and three nights. Even after the fishing boats had set out to trawl for mackerel and herring, the women and younger children had stayed behind to build up the fires. The beach would have been scoured for every trace of driftwood and dried seaweed. There was no possibility that they could have missed something so startling and so obvious. According to Cormac, little Síle began to scream as soon as she was on the rocks above the small strip of sand.

Nevertheless, Slevin had a good, clear mind and a very accurate memory so she had no doubt that he was right. She looked back at the rounded shape of the castle with its magnificent view of the ocean, the far islands of Aran and the dark orange sweep of the sandy bay of Fanore. ‘Where did you all sleep?’ she asked idly.

‘Domhnall and I slept in the main guard hall, Cael with Síle in one of the wall chambers and the others,’ his grin broadened, ‘the rest of the boys, Cormac, Art, Cian and Finbar, they decided to spend the night in the dungeons and Fernandez allowed them, but made them promise that when they got tired of it they would come up and join us.’

‘And they were all right?’ Mara was glad that she had not known, but she supposed that there was no harm in it.

‘Well, I must say that I slept like a top that night – and Domhnall, too. We had really comfortable mattresses stuffed with heather and it was nice and warm by the fire. Anyway, when we woke in the morning, there were the other four, lying down on their mattresses with their eyes tightly shut. Strange being in a castle with no men-of-arms there – in fact, most of the time there’s nobody there but Fernandez and Etain, themselves – no servants, nothing. They have the whole big place to themselves – never even lock the front door, either.’

This could change if the young man was elected by the clan to be their
tánaiste
, thought Mara. In the meantime, the young couple probably enjoyed the peace and seclusion – she rather envied them as she and her husband, King Turlough, always seemed to be surrounded by large numbers of people, whether they were at the law school, Ballinalacken Castle in the Burren, or in Turlough’s main castle, Bunratty Castle, by the River Shannon. Still, it would have been unlikely that either Domhnall or Slevin would have noticed any movements in the sand dunes – after a day in the wind and sun, hauling boats around and building fireplaces, they would have slept soundly all night. The other four might have seen something when they left the dungeons in order to lie in front of the fire, but they would have had the trouble of hauling their mattresses up the narrow spiral staircase and probably would not have bothered to glance out of the windows at the beach below.

‘Let’s go up to the spot where we both remember the boat was lying,’ she suggested and led the way up to the gap between the sand-dune hills.

‘It would have been here,’ said Slevin with a quick glance around him before pointing to one spot. ‘Look, Brehon, you can see there’s very little grass growing in this spot, just between the sand peaks.’

‘I wonder how it was taken away. It was very worn and thin in the timbers, but it still would have needed two men to carry it, I would have thought,’ said Mara.

Slevin bent down low and then straightened himself. ‘I’d say it was dragged, look at those broken bits of grass, Brehon, but not dragged onto the path. I’d say that it was dragged in the opposite direction, down towards the Caher River. Look at this, and this.’ Slevin pointed towards the dunes leading to the north of the beach and went excitedly ahead of her, following the trail.

Mara obediently bent down and examined the narrow, brittle shafts of blue-green grass. It was a marvellous grass for knitting the sand into a bank – its roots spread and entangled each plant with the others around it, but its very brittleness made it vulnerable and the narrow keel of the small boat had sliced the stems and leaves, leaving the broken edges to mark the path between the top of the sand dune and the channel of the Caher River which wound its way through the mountains and discharged its fresh water into the ocean. The puzzle of how the body got to the sea was now solved.

The physician has an honour price of seven
sét
s and this does not increase for any reason so a master of the profession has the same honour price as an ordinary physician.

Before a physician is allowed to practise in a kingdom, he (she) has to have public recognition. This is bestowed by an examination of the candidate’s training and proficiency by two recognized physicians.

A fine is exacted if the physician does not cure a curable illness, either through lack of knowledge or because of malice.

N
uala was with them half an hour later. She had brought her apprentice Liam and a man who worked on her farm with her and all three had panniers suspended on either side of their horses. Domhnall conducted the horses across the firm sand and courteously helped her to dismount before organizing the others into various tasks which allowed Mara to speak to Nuala in private. She was glad to see the physician, glad to have her professional advice in this case, which had started off as a sad occurrence, and now, in her mind, had changed into a puzzling case of murder.

‘I thought that I could probably do an autopsy here on the beach rather than bring him all those miles through the mountain back to Rathborney,’ Nuala said in an undertone to Mara as she surveyed the dead man in the boat. ‘I can put up a screen, we’ve brought a tarpaulin and there will be plenty of sea water to wash away the marks afterwards. We’ve brought a bucket, but I thought we could probably get some more from the fishermen, if necessary, and I’ve got my tools here. The boat will do as well as a table, or we can use one of the flat rocks. In any case,’ Nuala took a quick look at the damp, firm sand beneath her feet and nodded, ‘yes, it’s certainly tidal up to here. By the next low tide all marks will have been washed away. An ideal place for an autopsy; I must tell some of my colleagues about this.’ She gazed thoughtfully at the body, bending over and examining the tongue and then straightening up.

‘What is it that you want to know, Mara?’ she asked.

‘The cause of death, certainly; and I suppose,’ continued Mara, ‘I am wondering whether this is a death from exposure – a man who was judged in some place south-west of here and who was set upon the tide as a murderer of close kin and was abandoned to the wind and the ocean waves, or whether,’ and here she could hear her own voice hardening, becoming direct and focused, ‘or whether,’ she continued, ‘this man was killed somewhere near here, and that the appearance of a death by the sentence of
fingal
has been faked and the corpse should be investigated as a secret and unlawful murder.’

‘Last meal – time of death, you’ll need to know all that sort of thing.’ Nuala, as always, was brisk and professional. Even when she was twelve years old she was so accomplished in medical matters that it was whispered in the Burren that the child was a better physician than her father, Malachy, and was, in fact, a reincarnation of her grandfather. Many people sought the advice of the daughter rather than the father and this made tensions and divisions grow between them. Now, twelve years later, after long years of study under the supervision of the physician at Thomond and travel to Italy to learn the latest methods and knowledge of the human body, she was the envy of many kingdoms. Mara was her godmother and trusted absolutely the young woman’s skill and knowledge.

‘I think that once I know how he died I may want further information, but at the moment, I think I just want to know the cause and the time of death,’ she said now and Nuala gave a brief nod.

‘I’ll send Liam for you, then, as soon as I have anything to tell you,’ she said and began to take some fearsome-looking implements, saws, knives and pincers, from her leather pannier. Domhnall and Slevin, at her command, had led the three horses back up the sands towards the fresh water of the River Caher and after tethering them to a couple of stakes were standing there. Mara retreated from the curtained-off space, walking first up towards the smoking fish and then changing her mind and turning aside to walk towards the northern end of the beach, to the place where her two eldest scholars stood, still by the horses, but obviously, even from a distance, deep in earnest conversation with each other.

The River Caher ran on stony ground, down from the mountain, through the sand dunes and then across the open beach. Not deep, thought Mara, looking down at it and wishing that the beach was empty and that she could shed shoes and stockings and paddle through the rippling water. She bent down and put her hand and arm in until her fingers touched the bottom – not much more than a foot deep in places, she thought, but, of course, it was now dead tide. She took out her hand and licked the tops of her fingers – still quite fresh, she thought, but no doubt at high tide the river would be flooded with salt water and a boat could easily be slid down this waterway and into the sea.

She looked affectionately at Domhnall and Slevin still deep in talk. They were a nice pair, she thought, Slevin, tall and leggy, Domhnall, though a year older, not quite as tall as his friend, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned serious boy, contrasting with Slevin’s fair hair and skin and lively, fun-loving temperament. They had entered her law school at the same time, at the beginning of the Michaelmas term when one was eight and the other seven years old, and they had immediately been best of friends – Domhnall, quiet, studious, her grandson by her first marriage, son of her daughter Sorcha and of Oisín a merchant from Galway, and his best friend, Slevin from Mayo, more extrovert, a very good musician and a talented dancer. She walked down to meet them and could see that they were glad to see her. They cherished their privileges of being the leaders of the law school and now they probably guessed that she wanted to talk about this puzzling affair before the presence of the younger scholars brought irrelevancies and silly jokes into the proceedings.

‘Advise me,’ she said to them seriously. ‘I’m wondering what to do when Nuala has finished with the body. Domhnall, how sure are you that this is a gold merchant from Galway?’

She was interested to see from Slevin’s startled glance that Domhnall had said nothing about this to his friend. Very discreet, she thought with a flicker of amusement, but better to be too discreet than someone who tells before being given permission to do so.

‘Yes,’ she said to Slevin now, ‘Domhnall thinks that he might have recognized him, that he could be a gold merchant from Galway, and, of course, that would fit in with your conclusions that the man wore English dress – Slevin thought,’ now she addressed Domhnall, ‘that the man was wearing an English shirt, linen, but made in the English style with buttons down the front, and hose, and could well have had the doublet, cloak, boots and nether hose stripped from him as part of attempt to make a case of murder appear like a judicial sentence of
fingal
.’

‘
Iontach!
’ exclaimed Domhnall. ‘It’s all beginning to come together, isn’t it, Brehon. I had another look at the man’s face while you and Nuala were talking and I’m sure that he is a goldsmith from Galway. I was used to seeing him all dressed up – he was a fancy dresser, and seeing him there, all bedraggled – just dressed in a
léine
or a shirt and covered with seaweed, he looked so different, but the more I looked at him, the more I thought that he was, indeed, the goldsmith from Galway City.’

‘Do you know his name?’

‘Niall Martin,’ said Domhnall without hesitation. ‘Niall Martin. I’m sure that was his name. Mind you, my father would know more about him than I would.’

‘And was he married?’

‘Not that I remember.’ Domhnall sounded a little unsure, thought for a moment and then resolutely nodded his head. ‘No, he wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I remember my father talking to him, well, Brehon, you know my father – he was giving him advice, telling him that he could expand his business, get a bigger shop, take on some workmen, or an apprentice, make his business more profitable. My father had all sorts of good ideas to give to him, and Niall Martin listened to them all, but in the end he just shook his head. And he said that he had neither wife nor child and no near relations and that he preferred to manage everything himself. I’d say myself that he was content with what he had – that he didn’t want anyone else to have a nose in his affairs. He had a little shop at the bottom of Red Earl’s Lane; you know the place, Brehon, don’t you, and, well it didn’t look anything great, but he did his business there.’

‘I see,’ said Mara. She was thinking hard. Domhnall was only sixteen years old, but he was astute and reliable, and above all, because of his father’s connections with the merchants of Galway, he knew all there, spoke perfect English as well as fluent Gaelic, and would be able to make his enquiries acceptable to all. And Slevin, as usual, would make an excellent second-in-command to his admired friend. Should she go herself to Galway to make enquiries, or send these two as her deputies? The key to the mystery of this death, she felt quite strongly, would lie in the Burren rather than in the English city of Galway.

But in the meantime …

‘But in the meantime,’ she said aloud, ‘I have to decide what to do about the body. If it turns out, as I suspect, that this is not a case of
fingal
but is a murder of a man from the city of Galway, then should he be sent back to Galway, or buried here?’

‘It depends on how long he has been dead,’ said Slevin in a practical fashion of the son of a farmer who would have had many dead bodies to dispose of in his time. ‘If he has been dead for only a day, then it wouldn’t be too bad to take the body to Galway City, but if he has already been dead for longer, and myself I would guess that he has been – well, given the heat of the sun, and the length of the journey and then finding a priest and a graveyard …’

‘Better to bury him here,’ put in Domhnall. ‘There are plenty of men to dig the grave and if any relatives turn up, they can always come and pray there. After all, if he died at sea, he would be buried at sea.’

‘You’re right,’ said Mara, cheered by the matter-of-fact philosophy. ‘We’ll bury him here at Fanore, that’s settled. So what do you think that this man, Niall Martin, if it were he, was doing here on Fanore Beach? It is, after all, a long way from Galway City.’

‘Not that long,’ said Domhnall with a cool deliberation in his voice. ‘After all, Brendan, the samphire-gatherer, goes to Galway every day and comes back every evening.’

Mara met his eyes. ‘That’s an interesting point,’ she said slowly. ‘It does, does it not, provide a link between Galway and this place.’

‘Though there appears to be no link between samphire and gold,’ said Slevin.

‘I wonder,’ said Mara pensively. She looked at the long line of rocks at the far side of the river. The sun had moved a little into the south-west and she could see the prominent vein of silver-white quartz which seemed to bisect one large flat boulder of black limestone. There had been a lot of excitement, she remembered hearing from Ardal O’Lochlainn when gold had been found on the west coast of Galway in a seam of this soft quartz. Men had laboured night and day but there had been only a small amount of gold found, and the interest had soon faded. She told the two boys about it and Domhnall nodded his head wisely.

‘Of course, if ever there was a man who knew the rocks of Fanore well, then it must be Brendan. He’s been scouring the rocks here for samphire ever since he was the height of a rabbit – or so he keeps telling me,’ he added and Mara smiled her appreciation of the dry humour and shrewdness of her grandson.

‘You’re right, of course. That makes a double link.’ She thought about the matter. This case, if Nuala confirmed what she suspected, could turn out to be unexpectedly complicated. She looked out to sea, turning over the various possibilities in her mind.

‘Dinner!’ shouted Cormac. ‘Dinner, everyone!’ He stuck his two fingers into his mouth and shrilled out a whistle in the direction of his mother and she smiled, raised a hand in acknowledgement and, with her two oldest scholars, made her way to the top of the beach where the cooking fires burned.

There was plenty of deliciously fresh fish for lunch and Brendan had generously added some of his morning’s gathering of samphire, though he had not stayed for the meal but had set off for Galway.

‘The tide is coming in and there’s a nice fresh, south-westerly breeze so he will be in time for the evening meals in the inns and pie shops in Galway,’ Etain explained to Mara. ‘They like to have the samphire as fresh as possible and, of course, it only takes minutes to cook – you put it straight into boiling seawater if possible, if not ordinary salt water, boil and then taste.’

Mara ate it with relish. If it were not for the dead body only a hundred yards away, she would be enjoying this out-of-doors meal, the fresh mackerel, the chunks of buttered soda bread and the delicious salty taste of the samphire.

‘You and Brendan have a good trade with the City of Galway, haven’t you?’ she asked.

‘Brendan has been very clever,’ said Etain enthusiastically. ‘My parents used to gather samphire, but they just bartered it for fish from the fishermen and the people around here were not that interested – they could easily gather their own seaweed. Brendan was the one that thought of getting a boat and taking some to Galway City where all of those rich merchants live – people who like to have their food tasty, who like to try different flavours, different dishes.’

And, yes, it had been clever, Mara thought. Surprisingly there was no provision for the worth of a merchant in the list of honour prices that Brehon laws provided, but yet, here in the sixteenth century, this buying and selling was a new livelihood, something which was as paying, as lucrative as the age-old trades of fisherman or farmer, of weaver or carpenter. An urban society such as Galway City was dependent on traders and merchants to supply its table. Traditionally the wines came from France and from Spain, the exotic fruits and spices from far-flung places, but the simple pleasures of oysters, fresh fish and samphire could come from the nearby Gaelic communities. Doubtless, this was a flaw in her beloved Brehon laws. There should be an honour price fixed for a merchant, something that echoed his or her status in the community, and there should be laws that regulated the trading of goods for profit and for a livelihood rather than a mere bartering of produce produced on the farm or lands. Brendan’s venture into the world of trade had been profitable to him. She could see the boat that he used these days, moored to the short new makeshift pier made from a line of rocks, well padded with narrow tree trunks, that jutted out into the sea, no fishing boat, but a Galway hooker or
bád mór
, a gaff-rigged boat about thirty feet in length, ideal for carrying goods swiftly and easily with its three brown sails. By sea, the journey to Galway City was less than half the length of the journey by land. And in a boat like that one, it would be accomplished quickly and easily and there would be no deterioration in the samphire, unlike if it was carried by cart along the dusty roads.