A Fatal Inheritance

by Cora Harrison

  ‘This morning, Brehon, before I went to work; I saw her this morning. I made the porridge and I had some and then she came in and I went out.’ So the poor old fellow made his own breakfast. There was a neglected look about him. His cloak was threadbare and inexpertly patched and his léine was filthy, not just with the mud of the present day, but with the deeply engrained dirt of years. He was very thin, his skin scaly and there were patches of some white powder around his mouth.

  ‘And did she say anything to you before you left?’

  ‘Not a thing, Brehon, not a thing?’ There was an uneasy note to his voice and Dullahán lifted his great head and looked at him. Aengus averted his eyes from Mara and began to run the dog’s floppy right ear through his fingers and Dullahán licked his boot.

  ‘She didn’t tell you her plans for the day, did she?’

  He looked astonished and bewildered at this question and the thought came back to Mara that he might be slightly simple-minded, despite Ardal’s opinion. However, there was the beginning of a grin on Cian’s face and a look of sympathy on his sister’s. No doubt the twins shared the same thought – that Clodagh was most unlikely to discuss her day with Aengus.

  If he were telling the truth, then the chances were that he had sidled out through the door as soon as she appeared.

  If, on the other hand, she had sat down at the table, uttered some insult, made some threat, then that could be the moment when he had turned back, put his hands around her neck, while her face was averted, and squeezed as tightly as he could. Nuala’s report would be of interest. She could usually tell the hour of death and also the length of time that had elapsed since the last meal.

  ‘So you make the porridge,’ Mara said chattily. ‘My housekeeper, Brigid, makes great porridge. Can you make porridge, Cormac?’

  ‘Easy,’ scoffed Cormac. ‘All you do to make porridge is to put the oats and the milk into the pot and let it cook through the night. And then put loads of honey on it in the morning. I can cook better than that. You didn’t know, but that pie you had the other night, well, I cooked the pastry. Brigit said it was as good as her own.’

  ‘Boys are quite good at cooking,’ said Cael in a lofty tone that indicated that an ambitious young woman law scholar, such as herself, had better things to do.

  Aengus muttered some protest about the little lordling doing women’s work, but Mara talked him down.

  ‘So did you get the supper yesterday evening, Aengus, when you came down from the mountain? What did you and Clodagh eat?’ Did he resent being forced to do ‘woman’s work’, she wondered.

  ‘Potage,’ he said after a minute.

  The traditional fallback of the poor – a mix of vegetables and herbs from the hedgerows, boiled up afresh every day, with the occasional rabbit thrown in from time to time.

  ‘And you didn’t see Clodagh alive after you went to work this morning?’

  He shook his head, wordlessly.

  Mara waited for a moment and then asked gently, ‘Do you have any idea who might have killed her, Aengus? It must have been someone who hated her very badly.’

  Once again he shook his head. He didn’t appear to consider the question with any interest. ‘She was a very clever woman, Brehon,’ he proffered hopefully, looking at her with his mild blue eyes. ‘I didn’t know half the plans that she had. I’m not good with that sort of thing. Don’t know anything much about stone.’

  ‘Clodagh had plans, what sort of plans?’ Mara tried to give her voice a note of friendly, relaxed interest, but he shook his head sadly.

  ‘She didn’t talk to me about her plans, Brehon.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara and then she glanced across at her son. ‘Cormac, you’d better wake up Dullahán, time for his dinner. Come along all of you, we’d better be going.’ She cast a quick glance at Fachtnan and he ushered the others out, managing to close the door unobtrusively during the excitement when Dullahán raced, barking wildly, across the stable yard, no doubt trying to resume his friendship with the strawberry roan horse. Mara waited for a moment until the shouts and barks began to die down and then she looked across at Aengus with interest.

  Aengus hardly seemed to notice that she had stayed. He didn’t look worried. He didn’t even look enquiringly at her as if he wondered what she wanted from him. He was gazing sleepily into the fire. He looked, she thought, rather ill. She could not let the occasion pass, though. The question had to be asked sooner or later, and sooner would be better for him.

  ‘Aengus,’ she said as gently as she could, ‘there is a question that I must ask you. Did you kill Clodagh?’ If he confessed to it now it would be within the statutory twenty-four-hour period and that would mean that the fine would be half of that payable for a secret murder. The fine was payable to the dead woman’s nearest relations, and would be divided between the four brothers. She was hopeful that she could induce them to be compassionate, nevertheless they were poor men and they might argue that most of the fine would come from the clan, rather than from Aengus who had very little of his own. Ardal, she was sure, would not grudge paying the fine for his shepherd, knowing how greatly he had been goaded into that action. She looked keenly at Aengus, willing him to have the courage to confess now within the twenty-four-hour period and save his clan the expense of twenty-one ounces of silver, or twenty-one milch cows. However, he just gave a quick and almost indifferent shake of the head and continued to gaze into the fire. He seemed, she thought, like a man who has had a terrible shock and whose mind has stopped working, leaving the body to carry on, just as a ball will roll down a slope without guidance or propulsion.

  ‘It would be best if you told me now, Aengus,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what happened and I’ll sort things out. You were, perhaps, very angry.’

  He looked at her in puzzled fashion, as though he did not know what she was saying, as though her words were just drifting past him like the clouds on a blue September sky.

  ‘Tell you what, Brehon?’

  ‘About the killing of Clodagh,’ she said.

  He still looked puzzled. ‘But I don’t know about that at all, Brehon; I was up the mountain all day,’ he said. When she said nothing he added, ‘It was your own young scholars who told me all about it.’

  ‘And you got a surprise,’ she said, looking closely at him but he responded very naturally.

  ‘It was a terrible shock to me, Brehon. I would never believe that such a thing could really happen.’

  ‘Who do you think killed her?’

  She had thought that he would immediately deny all knowledge, but he looked at her in a puzzled way, almost as though he didn’t want to be rude, but felt that she should have known the answer to the question. After a minute, he said tentatively, ‘I understood that it was the Fár Breige that did it, Brehon, strangled her, that’s what young Art said.’

  ‘I think that Art told you how she was found, that’s right, isn’t it?’ Art, whatever his private beliefs and superstitions, was a well-trained law scholar, and would not have given any opinion on the cause of a murder without direct sanction from the Brehon. ‘Art told you that Clodagh’s body was found tied to the stone pillar, the Fár Breige, is that what he said?’

  He nodded readily. He did not shudder, but then the whole thing might well have lost reality for him by now. ‘That’s right, Brehon. Strangled, she was. Strangled with a rope around her neck.’

  ‘I wonder where the rope came from?’ Mara did not look at him, but uttered the question in a meditative way.

  ‘He’d be having all these sort of things.’ He was presumably referring to the god and she thought she should steer him away from this fantasy.

  ‘You can’t think of anyone else who might have strangled Clodagh, someone, man or woman, who hated her, or who wanted something that she had, can you?’ she asked and saw him look at her sharply. She had an impression, although he drew his brows together, as in puzzlement, something had changed in those pale blue eyes, almost as though some unwelcome idea had
come to him. He licked his lips and she saw that the white powder seemed to come from his mouth: his tongue was coated with it.

  She gave him a long moment, but he seemed to have forgotten about her and had turned back to staring into the fire.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you now, Aengus,’ she said moving towards the door. She had gone as far as she could; too far, perhaps, said her legal conscience. Her duty now was to solve the question of who had killed a woman of the kingdom, to judge the case impartially, to allocate blame, to ensure that the culprit made full and open confession in front of the people of the kingdom, and to fix the fine.

  Five

  Bretha Déin Chécht

  (The Laws of the Physician Déin Chécht)

  All physicians must know these matters:

  1. The twelve doors of the soul where a blow can cause death.

  2. The seven most serious bone breakings.

  3. The classification of teeth.

  Brigid, Mara’s housekeeper, was at the gate when they came riding down the road towards the law school at Cahermacnaghten. They could hear her voice calling instructions to the two girls who helped her in the kitchen and to the stable boys, and she was there when they dismounted, words pouring out volubly, as usual.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, what a terrible thing to happen, what’s the world coming to at all?’

  ‘Cormac and Cian told you the news,’ said Mara resignedly. It would, she acknowledged, be a difficult story for the boys to have kept to themselves. Brigid did not even bother to nod, just addressed herself to the scholars.

  ‘Come in and get warm, and get some food inside of you all; go on, go straight into the kitchen. Nessa’s got some pork roasting in a pot on top of some roots. She’ll dish up for you. Now, Brehon, I’ve got something tasty ready for you over in your own house, so just you come over and have a rest. Cormac, don’t you take that dog into my clean kitchen. No good you looking all innocent! I know what you’re up to, young man! Cael, I’ve hung up all of your clean léinte, so just you keep them tidy now. Art, you’re looking tired, go straight in and get some food inside yourself. Now, Brehon, leave that horse to Dathi and come straight over with me.’

  Mara followed her with a smile. Brigid had been her nurse – her mother, after the death of her own mother – and, while showing the utmost respect and always insisting on calling her by the formal title of Brehon, she still treated Mara as if she were her nursling. She would, of course, also be intrigued to know all the details of the spine-chilling murder.

  Everything was ready when she went into her house. The Brehon at Cahermacnaghten Law School did not live within the wall of the old fortified enclosure, but separately from the scholars’ houses and the law school. Set a good one hundred yards down the road from the noise and tumult of the law school and the farm buildings, the Brehon’s house was spacious and comfortable, two storeys high and built of stone. There was a fire blazing; the room was illuminated by its flames and by one tall candle, its light golden against the blue-white of the limewashed wall. The scent from the apple logs filled the whole room. The table was spread with a snowy white linen cloth and one of Mara’s precious crystal glasses sparkled in the light. Cumhal, Brigid’s husband, and the farm manager, emerged from the cellar with a jug of wine and carefully filled the glass. From the small kitchen at the back of the house came a delicious smell and a minute later, Efan, one of Brigid’s assistants, came in bearing a dish of venison in a wine sauce.

  ‘Goodness, is this a celebration?’ The question was drowned in the bustle of orders to the girl and Mara did not repeat it. She knew the reason for it, anyway. Brigid was deeply jealous of the luxury at Ballinalacken Castle with its many servants and always, when Mara returned from there, endeavoured to show how much better things were at home. So Mara ate, sipped, praised and paid compliments and then when a perfect goat’s cheese, toasted on a griddle to a delicious perfection and garnished with the first watercress of the season, had been consumed, she said, ‘Did you know them at all, Brigid; Clodagh and Aengus?’

  ‘I knew Clodagh a bit, a long time ago. I used to see her when I went over to visit my mother, Lord have mercy on her. Clodagh was a good-looking girl, then, clever, too. Full of herself, she was. Wove the wool for that cloak of hers. She used every kind of dye that she could make, borrow or buy at the markets so that it was all the colours of the rainbow. It was beautiful when it was new. You’d see her coming down the mountain path from a mile away. Lovely hair she had, then, fox-red it was. She went grey early and she seemed to lose her looks then, got heavy and old-looking, but she was a lovely girl when she was young. She was the priest’s housekeeper when I knew her, very puffed up about it, too.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, why would you? You weren’t much more than a child, yourself, at that time. She didn’t last too long as the priest’s housekeeper. There was a bit of scandal about it, him being a young man and she a young girl. The bishop didn’t like the talk and he came and had a word with Clodagh’s father and the next thing that we knew was that she and Aengus were married. I’d say that the bishop had a word with the O’Lochlainn; Aengus was working for him even away back then. Myself, I think that it was all fixed up between the pair of them and that neither Aengus nor Clodagh had a word to say in the matter. Not suited to each other, they were. Not in a million years, that’s what people said, you know, at the time, and I’d say that they had the rights of it.’

  ‘They didn’t ever have a child, did they, Clodagh and Aengus?’

  Brigid’s eyes met Mara’s meaningfully. ‘There was talk of a child, in the early months after they married, but it came to nothing.’

  ‘I see.’

  And, of course, she did see. The probability was that the child was not fathered by Aengus, but by the priest. It would have been strange, otherwise, if the marriage had borne no other fruit, apart from that one early bud of promise. Sad that the child died, leaving Clodagh with nothing in her life to love. A feeling of anger against the bishop overcame Mara. Why interfere? Surely it was more natural that a priest, if he wished, had a companion, a mate. There were many married priests around; and many others who used the euphemism of ‘housekeeper’. Who cared? And surely a man who knew about women, knew about relationships, had children of his own, was a better human being and much more able to advise and sympathize with his parishioners.

  And of course, mused Mara, after Brigid had gone back to check on affairs in her kitchen house, Father O’Lochlainn had been around when the body was found. And, she remembered, he had quickly left the scene before the Brehon had arrived, as if he wanted to disassociate himself from the killing? Perhaps, however, it was natural for him to go to the church to pray after he had received a shock.

  Nevertheless, Father O’Lochlainn’s name should definitely go onto the list of suspects. Clodagh had paraded him in public on judgement day, acting as though he were under her command. Had she blackmailed him into allowing his name to be, once again, in some sort of way, publicly linked to hers?

  Restlessly she finished the last of her wine and stood up. She needed someone to sharpen her brain against, someone who would argue with her. Fachtnan had gone back to his wife’s house in Rathborney with the promise, according to Brigid, that he would bring news from Nuala as soon as she had finished. But the scholars would now have finished their meal, so she would go across and talk it over with them.

  Unusually, they were not playing hurling – the sticks and the balls were still standing under the shelter of the stable roof and there was light coming from the window of the schoolhouse and the sound of voices arguing vociferously.

  Mara pushed open the door and there was a sudden silence until they saw who it was, and even then they waited until the door was shut before they resumed. So they were using their free time to talk about the case. Mara felt pleased and proud of them.

  There was a piece of board against one of the walls, limewashed by Cumhal during each of the three s
chool holidays: after the Michaelmas Term, the Hilary Term and the Trinity Term. On it someone had written, with a piece of charcoal, the word: MOTIVE and a space away from that: OPPORTUNITY. Dullahán was snoozing in front of the fire, Cian and Cormac stood, one on each side of the chimneybreast, and Domhnall, who had been sitting on her chair, sprang to his feet, looking somewhat confused, and hastily putting a scroll back on the shelf of the press behind him.

  ‘We’re doing a judgement day, Brehon, and Cian is aigne for the prosecution and Cormac is aigne for the defence; Domhnall is the Brehon and Slevin and I are the people,’ said Cael in her most grown-up voice.

  ‘What a good idea, well, I’ll join the people.’ Mara sat on a stool beside Cael feeling genuinely pleased and half-sorry that she had come in and perhaps destroyed the atmosphere. It had been a long time since anyone in the Burren had bothered with finding an aigne, a junior lawyer to state the case, and she herself had never used one for the prosecution, but, of course, there were plenty of examples of this court procedure among the judgement texts that the scholars had studied.

  ‘They kept arguing about Aengus and then they started shouting; you know what boys are like so I thought this would calm them down,’ Cael whispered in an elderly fashion and Mara nodded understandingly and settled back to listen as Cian took a step forward.

  ‘This,’ he said impressively, ‘is not a crime motivated by fear, or indeed, by greed, but by anger, sheer and simple. This man, Brehon,’ he said, arranging an imaginary gown on his shoulders, with a courteous nod of his head towards Domhnall, ‘this man, Aengus, was tied hand and foot to a woman who made his life a misery, who continually disgraced him in the eyes of the people of the kingdom. Even the sheep on the mountains heard his shame. And for all that he appeared to be meek and submissive, he’s a man with a man’s feelings, a man who can be overwhelmed by anger. I, my lord,’ said Cian blandly, with his eyes fixed on a point above Domhnall’s head, ‘have seen this man, mad with rage, threaten to bring down his crook on the innocent and vulnerable head of a child who had just made a joke. And moreover, my lord,’ he went on quickly, ‘who could have had such ideal means of killing the victim as the man who lived in the same house. It is possible that the victim lay there all night, and then on a mist-filled dawn, with his anger still unquenched, the man decided on the ultimate revenge. He took the body of the victim, a woman who had perhaps denied her body to him, her lawful husband—’ Cian gave a quick glance at Mara’s impassive face and went on bravely, though his cheeks went scarlet – ‘and he placed her in the arms of the Fár Breige and bound her to the god’s stony breast and dangled from her wrist the key to the property.’