A Fatal Inheritance

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Would it be possible to go to your house while we are waiting for the physician?’ she enquired and Pat immediately flushed a dark red, but Deirdre seemed to welcome the idea and cheerfully promised hot ale. Mara took one look at Domhnall, Cian and Cormac and decided to take them also. This was the second time today that they had been soaked with rain and they looked cold and miserable. Pat’s house was not too far from the stone god and the road ran past it. The grisly remains of Clodagh should be safe from any interference. Cian and Cormac could take turns at the door, watching for the arrival of Nuala, while Domhnall could write down the statements.

  As soon as they entered Pat’s house, Mara was struck by how very fine everything was. The house was full to bursting point with furniture, well-built examples of carpenter’s craft, chairs, stools, settles, even an elaborate dresser. The walls had hangings woven in well-dyed scarlet and green wool, all of them covering the bare stone. And the well-carved chairs and benches which filled the room were softened by cushions. Very few farmers had anything like this on show. Danu, the father of Clodagh, had the reputation of being a rich man, though mean. Clodagh, herself, had married a poor shepherd with no land of his own and Mara had heard it rumoured that her father had done nothing for them. It looked as though, even if Danu’s house itself was in bad repair, its furnishings had ended up here in Pat’s house.

  ‘Let’s get something warm to drink and something to eat.’ Deirdre seemed to be in her element as she bustled off and Anu followed her meekly towards the kitchen. Mara handed her satchel over to Domhnall and he quickly and unobtrusively seated himself on the windowsill and took out the lidded inkhorn, a pen and a large leaf of parchment. Cian had waited at the doorway to keep the first watch and Cormac, with a quick, mischievous grin at his mother, went after the women into the kitchen. He would, thought Mara, probably be more use there than with Domhnall. Cormac, at twelve, had grown tall and strong, a very good-looking boy with red-gold hair and green eyes and he had all of his father’s charm and ability to get on well with everyone. And, of course, he was young enough for the women not to guard their tongues while he was around.

  ‘I’ll have more questions to ask you when I know from the physician the time of death,’ began Mara. She had taken a seat beside the fire and Pat sat opposite to her, while Gobnait, Finnegas and Dinan sat squashed side by side on the long settle facing them. ‘However, in the meantime, I would like to know now everything that you can remember about this morning. You found the body of your cousin, Pat. What time was that?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been long before I came for you, Brehon,’ said Pat cautiously.

  Mara nodded. She had expected that answer, had seen the little group from her bedroom window in the castle. About half an hour before noon, she reckoned.

  ‘So where were you during the rest of the morning?’ asked Mara briskly. ‘Could you just give me an account of your movements between the time that you got up until the time that you found the body?’

  He was a slow-witted man, she thought and yet both his father and his uncle had been reckoned to be shrewd, clever men, and his cousin Clodagh, she had thought a couple of weeks ago, was sharp and intelligent with an excellent memory. Pat spent a long time trying to remember what he had been doing; it seemed to her like a morning used up in meandering around various parts of his land, checking on animals; he appeared to be having difficulty in trying to recollect which task he did first. Only when Mara put in a question about the stone pillar did he show alarm.

  ‘I never looked at it at all, Brehon. I never even seed it. It’s something that I take no notice of.’ His voice was trembling and his breath came fast. Mara noticed that Finnegas looked at him sharply, appraisingly.

  ‘Yes, of course, I understand that,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s just part of the landscape for you. It must be visible from almost every part of your property. I can understand that you would not be aware of it …’ She paused, watching his face carefully as she finished, ‘Unless, of course, there was the dead body of your cousin tied to it. Surely you would have noticed that, wouldn’t you?’

  He looked at her stupidly. ‘And then I came to fetch you, Brehon. Gobnait thought it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Mara and gave Gobnait a gracious nod. ‘Very wise.’ She allowed him to bask in this praise for a moment and then said swiftly, ‘But what I can’t understand, Pat, is how you did not see anyone approach with Clodagh’s dead body, or that you did not see a struggle, hear her cries for help before she was strangled. Your land, both your own land and the land that belonged to Clodagh’s father, surely is within sight of the stone pillar?’ She would not, she resolved firmly, ever refer to it as a god. The idea of the murder being attributed to the Fár Breige did not appeal to her, and she would do her best to quench all such talk. ‘I’m surprised that you saw nothing – perhaps took no notice at the time, but now, thinking back, you may remember that there was some sort of unusual movements going on down there near the entrance to Dunaunmore.’

  This is putting ideas into the head of the witness, she told herself crossly, but the man was beginning to annoy her with his hesitancy.

  He stared at her uncomfortably and her heart softened. Better slow, but honest, she told herself reprovingly.

  ‘Let’s start from the time that you rose this morning, Pat,’ she said encouragingly. ‘You got up from your bed …’

  ‘I looked out and it was still raining,’ he said unexpectedly and then with a slight alarm, he continued, ‘I didn’t look at the Fár Breige. I have no memory of that, at all.’

  ‘No, of course, not,’ she said soothingly. ‘So you had your breakfast.’

  His mind, however, was still on the stone pillar. ‘Terrible, dirty weather,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘That’s right.’ And then she remembered that ‘dirty weather’ didn’t just mean lots of mud, but was used locally to mean something that you couldn’t see through, like a dirty window, perhaps, a day with a thick mist, or rain so dense that it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. It hadn’t been like that at the law school, but it may have been different in this valley near to the ocean. Cahermacnaghten was very much higher up.

  ‘And when you went out, after breakfast,’ she prompted him.

  ‘Me and Deirdre went to the Cave of the One Cow.’ He looked at her anxiously to see whether she was following him and she nodded. She had heard of this cave. It was to the north-west of the valley, just where the limestone cliff began to soar up above the random rocks and stones. There was some sort of legend attached to it, she remembered and hoped that she could escape being informed about it. Luckily he went on more cheerfully: ‘We had a nanny goat shut in there, away from the foxes—’

  ‘Terrible, the foxes around here,’ put in Gobnait.

  Pat nodded. ‘That’s a fact, Brehon. Well, the nanny was just about to give birth so we stayed with it – just as well, as there were a pair of them, in there; a pair of kids and they were all tangled up, the legs twisted around each other and, well, you can ask Deirdre, Brehon, but we had a time of it. Let me tell you …’

  Pat’s brothers were listening with fascinated interest, so Mara felt unwilling to hurry him along. Domhnall, she noticed with amusement, had made a brief note of a few words and now was sitting looking out of the window, his brow creased in thought.

  ‘And after Deirdre had milked the goats and had gone back to the house, what did you do, then, Pat?’ It would probably have taken about an hour to help the nanny goat to give birth to her twins, she thought, and then, probably another half hour, or even hour, for the milking. She would ask Deirdre afterwards, any woman who cooked normally had a better idea of how the day was going than farmers who just went by the strength or the weakness of the light.

  ‘Well,’ said Pat in a slightly helpless way, ‘I had a look around, just checking, like.’

  ‘Checking?’

  ‘Seeing which of the nannies were near her time,’ explaine
d Pat.

  ‘And when did you see the body of your cousin?’ put in Mara, noticing from the corner of her eye how Domhnall straightened and turned his head towards Pat. Deirdre and Anu came in carrying trays, followed by Cormac, chewing vigorously. The two women went very quietly to the table and placed the hot drinks and cakes on it and Cormac crossed the room to sit beside Domhnall on the window seat.

  ‘It was when I went back up into the Cave of the One Cow,’ explained Pat. ‘I just wanted to check that the two little kids were feeding and their mammy was happy and so they were, God bless them.’

  ‘So you saw nothing on your way in?’ asked Mara. She hoped that no one else, except Domhnall, would notice that Cormac’s shoulders were heaving with an effort to control his giggles.

  ‘That’s right, Brehon, it was when I came out that I saw something fluttering. I thought first that it was Deirdre, but then when I blinked I saw that it was coming from the Fár Breige and I knew that Deirdre wouldn’t go within sight or sound of him.’

  ‘So the mist had cleared a little, had it?’ That would have been about the time that she and her scholars were approaching Ballinalacken Castle.

  ‘That’s right, Brehon. The wind had got up. It was blowing nicely. Coming in from the sea.’

  ‘And then you came down, saw your cousin’s body, signalled to Gobnait whom you saw on the hill, with his dog …’ Suddenly Mara turned towards Gobnait.

  ‘Did you see the body?’

  Gobnait wasn’t as agonisingly slow at giving his evidence as Pat. He and his dog Ug, after they both had their porridge, had gone up onto the hill of Caherdoon to check on his sheep. They found one giving birth and stayed with it as foxes were prowling around. Ug, doing his duty, dispersed them, killing a couple, according to Gobnait, and then came back.

  ‘Did you see anyone when you went up there?’ asked Mara, thinking that she should have asked that question of Pat.

  ‘I saw Aengus, Clodagh’s husband, same as I see him every morning. He was going up to Ballynahown, and then on to the mountain to see to the taoiseach’s sheep. That would have been about when the light was coming, the early morning.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara. Of course, both men were climbing, looking ahead to the north of the area and in Gobnait’s case, he was looking after Aengus who would have been ahead, to the north-east of him. They would have had little reason to look behind them, but even if they had, the chances were that, around dawn, the valley was filled with mist.

  ‘And you stayed up for the morning?’ She was frustrated by not knowing the time of death but any information gathered now while she was waiting for Nuala’s arrival would be time saved later on. She was beginning to get a picture of a very lonely valley. Pat and Deirdre had no children. Neither had Gobnait and Anu, and Dinan had never married. Finnegas, the only one of the four to have a family, had moved out of the valley and into Ballyryan, which was on the edge of the sea, and quite near the border with Corcomroe.

  ‘That’s right, Brehon. Ug disappeared for a long time and I was mortal afraid that he would have got himself caught in one of the fox traps that we’ve set among the stones. I was searching everywhere, calling and whistling for him.’

  ‘That’s a fact,’ confirmed Pat. ‘I could hear him and the mountains were giving back the word, like they do.’

  It could have been quite a clamour, thought Mara. These hill men had powerful voices and the echoes added to the sound of the wind and the rain might have drowned out any cries from the victim. She tried to remember whether the structure of Dunaunmore would have blocked the view of the Fár Breige from the eyes of someone on those north western slopes. She rather thought it would, but that was something that she could check, or that her scholars could find out for her.

  Dinan had spent the first part of the morning cutting rods from the sally bushes that grew in the wet openings to the caves that riddled the limestone cliff to the north of Oughtdara. He explained that he needed them to weave baskets for holding the sheared wool in early summer and after he cut them, he had left them to soak in a deep pool beside the Bones Cave. After that, like his two brothers, he went to check on some of his sheep. It was, he explained, important to know which ones are about to lamb as there was a great menace from foxes that built their dens in and around the remains of the ancient fortified duns. Foxes, he told Mara earnestly, were the souls of the evil members of the ancient Tuatha Dé people, turned out of hell for their wickedness and doomed to roam the earth and to be hated by man and beast. Cormac, who had sniggered at Pat’s sentimentality about mammies and babies, was looking quite interested in this statement, Mara noticed, before signalling him to go and relieve Cian.

  There was a little bit of a fuss when Cian came in, with Deirdre, in a motherly fashion, taking his wet cloak to shake the rain from its felted surface and then to hang it by the kitchen fire and leaving Anu to feed him with honey cakes and warmed ale. Domhnall read through his notes and added in a few words here and there. And then he looked across the room attentively at Mara. For an eighteen-year-old he had great patience and great self-control, she thought. These initial hours in an enquiry were always slow where, after the early drama of finding a body, there came hours of meticulous note-taking. Still, these were notes whose significance often was only seen well into the enquiry and she was interested to see how carefully Domhnall had scanned them.

  She began to question Deirdre but nothing new emerged, and although she had been working in the kitchen, getting hot drinks and cake for her visitors when her husband, Pat, had given his evidence, she confirmed all that he had said about the early part of his morning. She had come home before he did as she had work to do and so she had left him and had come back to the house by herself. While she was cleaning her beautiful home and making her tasty cheeses, she had been alone except for a visit from Father O’Lochlainn and he had been with them when they discovered the body. He had, she informed Mara, given extreme unction, the last sacrament of anointing with oil, and then had departed for his church to pray for the soul of the dead woman.

  ‘Terrible upset, he was,’ said Deirdre comfortably. ‘I thought the poor man would faint on me, but he wouldn’t even have a drop of ale or anything. Nothing would do him except to go off to the church and to pray for the repose of her soul, poor creature.’

  Mara raised an eyebrow at that; she would have thought that a priest would be well used to death, but was just as glad that she did not have to deal with Father O’Lochlainn. She had completely forgotten about sending for him, as she should have done, and so was pleased that he had been on the scene earlier and all had been done for the dead woman’s soul. There was, she knew, some sort of belief that the holy oil had to be administered in order for the soul to be able to leave the body, so it was good that all that ritual had been attended to. She dismissed the priest from her thoughts and then she turned her attention to the last of the four brothers.

  Finnegas O’Lochlainn had inherited his family’s share of brains and drive. Mara’s housekeeper, Brigid, had told her how, when a boy, Finnegas had noticed that there was a place on his father’s land, just on the boundary with Corcomroe, where little grew and where often a rabbit, or even a fox was found dead for some mysterious reason. According to Brigid, young Finnegas had pestered everyone in the neighbourhood, even the sailors and passengers on ships that pulled into Doolin, asking them all if they knew of any reason for this strange occurrence – and then one day suddenly said no more. Finnegas, sly young fox, Brigid called him, became a model son, seeing to the sheep, selling the wool, but above all, trying out his muscles in breaking up tons of stones, the stones that were lying around the valley and its highlands, and building, seemingly for his own amusement, a pathway. By the time that he was seventeen years old, he had, unaided, built a magnificent road in the poorest part of his father’s land, in the townland of Ballyryan. And not a soul nor a sinner, according to Brigid, had realized that this road linked the road to the harbour with that spot of bad la
nd, where nothing would thrive and where unwary animals met their death by drinking the water. All that anyone thought was that it might be handy for the wool, but they wondered why he had bothered. Wool, even large baskets of it, could be easily carried by a man, or a donkey equipped with panniers, across uneven ground. And then had come the death of the father and the dividing of the land. Finnegas had waited while Pat and Gobnait had taken the better areas and then, to everyone’s surprise, he had chosen the land at Ballyryan, including the place where nothing grew. A year later, carts were going down that splendid new road, laden with baskets of lead, chipped out from the rock, and burned in fire until the metal ran liquid.

  Finnegas, thought Mara, must by now, be a very rich man. There would be no need for him to kill his cousin in order to get hold of those rushy, waterlogged fields that were his portion when Danu’s land had been divided amongst them all. That lead mine of his, on the land that had been his father’s, must be worth a fortune. He had no need for grazing land. Still she went through the motions of asking him to account for his time this morning when Clodagh was killed.

  Finnegas was clear-headed and helpful in his account of his movements. ‘I spent most of the morning weighing and checking the loads that the men brought out from the mine, Brehon,’ he explained. ‘There’s a boat going from Doolin to Galway a couple of hours before sunset so I wanted to make sure that everything was right for that. You probably know, Brehon, how almost all of the houses in Galway have window glass and those little diamond-shaped panes all need the strips of lead to hold them in place. And then there are the roofs – no thatch allowed in Galway these days because of the risk of fire, so lead is needed between the slates. We do a great trade in the city with the lead.’

  ‘So you were in sight of your men all of the time.’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you that,’ he said, with a slight note of impatience. ‘I go in and out of the mine, in and out of my house, of the sheds and the storerooms as the case may be and wherever I’m needed. And then I had some dinner when they went to the harbour. But I can tell you one thing I wasn’t doing, though, Brehon, I wasn’t over here this morning and I wish I wasn’t here now, because, to be honest, I have plenty to do. There’s nothing that I can help you with, Pat,’ he went on, looking impatiently at his eldest brother. ‘The unfortunate woman must be buried, but surely you, and the priest, and the others can sort it out between you – and Aengus, of course,’ he added and once again Mara realized how much they were all forgetting about the husband of the dead man. ‘So if you’re finished with me, and if you don’t mind, Brehon, I’ll be off, now.’