Condemned to Death (7 page)

Any goods found on the seashore belong to the owner of that shore unless it can be proved that they have come from beyond nine waves from the shore – in which case they will belong to the finder.

‘B
rigid! Sausages! You’re an angel!’

‘
Iontach!
’

‘And how’s the old place getting on without us?’ queried Cormac with the air of a traveller newly returned from a long sea journey.

‘Terrible, terrible, the whole place is going to rack and ruin! You won’t know it when you see it again.’ Brigid entered into the game.

‘Cumhal got drunk and ploughed up the home meadow again?’

‘The pig’s lost weight!’

‘Rats in the storeroom!’ Cael gave Brigid a sly look at that. She and Brigid had many a tussle over how a young lady should behave.

‘Haycocks have fallen down!’

‘And built up again in the wrong place! At least one foot from the place they’ve been put in for the last five hundred years,’ Séanín adroitly turned a sausage while putting in this piece of exquisite humour.

It was good to see them all in such good spirits, thought Mara. Even Cael had got over her annoyance at having to share a tent with Síle and was bandying jokes and sarcasms with the other scholars. Mara munched absent-mindedly at a sausage and gazed out to sea. Everyone was enjoying the change from fish. Brigid kept a supply of willow twigs which she always used when cooking sausages for the boys, so no plates were needed and they all enjoyed the informality. The fishing community, whose normal diet was almost entirely taken from their sea-catches, was praising Brigid’s cooking loudly and enthusiastically and the housekeeper’s cheeks were flushed with pleasure.

‘Brehon, who owns the shore grazing here at Fanore?’ asked Domhnall. He spoke in low tone and did not cease to eat, but his brown eyes were alert and thoughtful.

Mara was taken aback. It was a very good question, and a question, she acknowledged to herself, that she should have asked herself before now.

‘To be honest, I’m not sure, Domhnall,’ she said immediately. Her mind went to Michelóg, and yet there was that case of the bull. Had Michelóg owned the shore grazing then the community would have been on more unsure ground when they objected to the animal grazing there. Her mind went back to the case, sifting through the thousands of other cases with which she had dealt during her time as Brehon. It had not been a very noticeable, nor a very complicated case, she seemed to remember. The chances were small that it was Michelóg that traditionally owned the grazing. It had not been Fernandez; she was almost certain of that. And yet he above all men was one that would know the answer to this question. She half-rose to her feet, but then decided to leave her query until later on. She relaxed her back against one of the squared-off rocks and listened with amusement to the bantering between Brigid and her scholars.

They had been glad to see the housekeeper; Mara had been pleased to observe that. There was a relationship between Cormac, Art, the MacMahon twins and her housekeeper which was a sort of mother/grandmother tie that made them feel at ease with her, made them accept her frequent scolding and her right to see after their food, their welfare, their donning of clean clothes, and their moods of depression or anxiety. Brigid, she noticed, was paying particular attention to young Finbar, teasing him, making sure that he ate his sausages and his slices of newly baked soda bread spread with newly salted butter and that he finished his portion of strawberry pie and telling him that young Eileen in the farm had been asking after him. Finbar moved from one-syllable answers to giggles and seemed to make a good meal and join Cormac and Cian in their teasing of Brigid.

‘That’s an interesting question that Domhnall asked, isn’t it?’ said Mara meditatively to Cael. After Domhnall the girl was probably the most promising of her scholars and so she was not surprised when Cael wrinkled her brow and said thoughtfully, ‘You’re thinking that the gold merchant came here for some reason, something to do with his trade, perhaps, aren’t you?’ She looked around her carefully, but the law-school crowd were seated at some distance from the fishermen and their families. Nevertheless, Mara noted with appreciation how Cael lowered her voice before saying: ‘Perhaps there’s a possibility that he heard that someone had found some gold and that’s why he came here; that’s what you and Domhnall are thinking, aren’t you? And I know that if something is swept in from the sea, from beyond the seventh wave, then it’s
finders, keepers
but if it’s not, then it’s the property of whoever owns the shore-grazing rights – so that’s why Domhnall asked you who owned the shore-grazing rights.’

Mara gave her an approving nod. ‘It’s interesting that the Romans also had that as one of their laws – whether they took it from us, or we took it from them, I don’t know, or perhaps it just makes sense that there should be a law about that,’ she remarked, but she said no more as she saw Setanta, Art’s father, approach, walking down the beach towards her.

‘Is it all right if we go off now to catch an afternoon’s fishing, Brehon?’ he asked. ‘There should be a good moon tonight – I think that the weather is set to remain fair for a few days now.’

‘That should be all right, Setanta,’ said Mara. It would probably be at least midnight before the tide would be right for them to moor their boats against the pier. ‘I and my scholars will be busy here for the afternoon,’ she went on, ignoring the disappointed and dismayed looks from her pupils. They had been hoping to go out in the boats again, but by now they should know that law-school business had to come first. If ever they were to become Brehons, this lesson could not be learned early enough. ‘I will return tomorrow morning and then I may have some questions to ask. Hopefully this matter will soon be unravelled,’ she finished to Setanta and saw a tightening of his mouth and a flash of concern from his eyes.

Mara waited until the fishermen departed and then called her scholars to her and walked across to where the Caher River entered the beach. Brigid had set Séanín to work in gathering various kinds of seaweed from the rocks and piling them onto one of the flat table-like stones so that the sea water could drip from the fronds. The housekeeper was a great believer in carrageen moss for sore throats and cough syrup and kelp was used in soups and in stewed mutton. The wives and children left behind were busy with their smoking fires, so that this corner of the beach was as private as the school house at Cahermacnaghten could be.

‘Domhnall and I were discussing this matter,’ she began and then stopped, momentarily disconcerted by a flash of irritation from the very green eyes of her son Cormac. Could he be jealous of Domhnall, she wondered – there had been no sign of it previously. Cormac had always accepted Domhnall as the head scholar of the school and had shown no signs of resenting a boy five years older than himself. However, the immediate concern now was to solve this murder so she hastily put the matter aside, telling them of the map of Fanore which Ardal O’Lochlainn had seen in the possession of the gold merchant and of how he had noticed that small pieces of jewellery, necklets, bracelets, brooches and rings were marked on various parts of the strand, on either side of the River Caher.

‘It may be that there has been a history of finding these objects on Fanore beach and that might be why it is named the as “the slope of the gold” – because, as you can see, the sand is not as golden as on other beaches along the coastline – that it is, in fact, rather more a dark orange colour than golden,’ she concluded.

‘A treasure hunt!
Iontach!
’ exclaimed Cael.

‘I was wondering whether some gold objects might have been washed in from the sea,’ said Slevin, ‘but Domhnall came up with the idea that it was more likely that they had tumbled down the hill when the river was in flood – and I must say that I think he is right. The gold would be too heavy to float. A cask might have been picked up the waves but the necklets and rings would have been more likely to be swept further out to sea, or to remain on the seabed.’

‘And it has to be just one or two every few years,’ put in Domhnall. ‘Otherwise, we’d have heard about it. Just something that a fisherman saw, picked up, took to the gold merchant in Galway, sold, and said nothing about. It makes sense that the gold merchant became suspicious and started to question the fishermen as to the exact spot where they had picked up the pieces of jewellery.’

‘Yes, and then he put two and two together.’ Cael was bubbling over with enthusiasm.

‘He would have had no right to it,’ said Finbar in a low voice and Mara gave him an encouraging smile.

‘But who does own the rights?’ said Domhnall coming back to the point with his usual pertinacity.

‘I should have asked Setanta.’ Mara felt annoyed with herself, though in the face of the hesitation shown by all of the fishermen, she had been very wary of disclosing anything.

‘I think I know.’ Art spoke out so seldom that all heads turned towards him immediately.

‘Not Fernandez,’ said Cormac.

Art shook his head. ‘No, not Fernandez,’ he said. ‘He just bought that land. That Cathair Róis is just new. He comes from south of the Burren, not from around here.’ He looked across at Mara. ‘I believe that it is Brendan,’ he said, his voice steady and confident, though the words were tentative. He would be right, thought Mara. Art did not speak until he was sure of a matter, unlike her volatile son who chattered continuously and gave vent to a thousand theories every day.

‘Of course!’ she said. The fact that Brendan did not have a herd of cows had prevented her from thinking of his name. But, of course, Brendan and Etain’s father before them did have cattle. It was Etain, she thought, who had started the business of gathering samphire for sale in the nearby Galway City and this had proved so lucrative that Brendan had given up keeping the cows and had turned his attention towards getting a better boat and becoming a full-time trader. It suited his personality better, she thought. Both he and Etain were sociable, talkative people. The life of a cattle farmer was restrictive and solitary.

‘There’s Etain now; shall I run down and ask her,’ volunteered Cael.

‘Are you calling Art a liar?’ Cormac’s tone was angry and aggressive.

‘That’s a little unnecessary, Cormac,’ said Mara coldly. ‘Art himself said that he was not sure. But I think we won’t say anything about rights to things found on the shoreline, yet, Cael. It’s just as well to keep our thoughts to ourselves at the moment, don’t you all agree? We don’t want to start people talking and speculating about this matter before we can solve it. A secret and unlawful death in the community always makes people feel deeply uneasy and the last thing we want is to set tongues wagging.’

She had talked on at length in order to get over that awkward patch. She felt a little sorry for Cael. As the only girl, she had felt somewhat excluded from the others when she had been refused permission to camp with them and she had expressed her fury and, boy-like, the others, including her brother, had perhaps banded against her. It was the first sign of awkwardness that Mara had seen between Cael and her fellow scholars and she hoped that it would soon pass.

‘You see,’ Mara said earnestly, lowering her voice so that they had to lean a little towards her, ‘it looks as though we have a few mysteries to solve here. Niall Martin, the elderly gold merchant, would be most unlikely to visit this spot unless something attracted him. I wondered about a rumour of gold in the mountains here, but a long-buried treasure is a much more likely reason. But then we have the problem of who took him here, to search for gold. And, did he find the gold?’ She paused for a moment and Domhnall said seriously:

‘The chances are strong that he did so, Brehon. Otherwise his death is hard to explain.’

Mara agreed with him, but said nothing, allowing the others to have their say. After a few minutes she produced from her satchel the rough sketch map that she had made the night before, handing it to Cormac, as the youngest scholar, and telling him to take it round to the others.

‘Say nothing until everyone has had a good chance to look at it,’ she told them. ‘And then, I think, we should be able to discuss where I went wrong but also where it is likely that something could have been washed out by the river when it was in flood after the storm of the other night.’ She could see herself that she had exaggerated one curve of the river and had omitted another.

‘I think you did very well,’ said Art politely.

‘It’s difficult to remember everything,’ said Slevin, ‘but …’

‘Yes, go on,’ said Mara and listened with an appearance of gratitude as one by one they pointed out her mistakes. Some she had not seen herself and she thanked and praised them, taking care that her voice bore no trace of condescension.

‘There’s one place that I think it might be,’ said Domhnall, pointing up the hill to where there was a flash of yellow. ‘Just up by those flowers there’s a group of rocks.’

‘Couldn’t be there,’ said Cormac immediately. ‘The river doesn’t go near it.’

‘It did the other night; the flood has completely gone down now. Shall we go up there, Brehon?’ Slevin was eager to start and Mara thought that the place Domhnall had picked was a good one. They climbed up alongside the river, now tamed to its channel and flowing demurely downhill on its bed of stones.

The rocks themselves were a disappointment, though. The sheltered side, away from the sea, was covered in flowers as intricately woven as a wall carpet, with scarlet pimpernel, mauve storksbill, and large clumps of yellow wall pepper. Could these fragile blossoms have withstood the onslaught of the mountain stream only five nights ago? Mara was inclined to agree with Cormac when he said scornfully, ‘See; I told you it couldn’t come over as far as that.’

Slevin searched around in a half-hearted way, more out of loyalty to his friend than with any real conviction. Mara set the others to look afterwards but was not surprised when they all returned to her shortly with downcast expressions. The trouble with the young, she thought, was that they expected results instantly. It was one of her hardest tasks as a teacher to keep their spirits up and break down the work into manageable parts. It was no good handing a seven-year-old a book filled with over three hundred triads and telling him that he had three months to memorize them. On the other hand, three of these three-line aphorisms a night were an easy task and with the mixed ages in her school, the triads were being continuously chanted by someone or other during the education of a scholar.