‘Tell me about how Clodagh persuaded you to be her witness when she laid claim to possess her father’s house and land.’ It might, she thought, be easier for him to begin with that, though she had every intention of probing more deeply.
He rose from his seat, almost shot out of it, and went across the room in two long strides. He stood by the window; for a moment the noon sunlight shone on his white face and then the next moment he had jerked the curtains closed.
‘I have weak eyes,’ he said, when she looked at him with surprise, ‘the light hurts them.’
‘Too much study,’ she said affably, though that was not something she believed to be true. Her own eyes were still excellent and, goodness knows, there had been no lack of studying on her part. ‘But, you were just going to tell me what induced you to stand out in public, side by side with Clodagh, and to bear witness for her. Weren’t you afraid that it might set tongues wagging again?’
She thought that he would deny it, but somehow he seemed to be suddenly weary of this sparring.
‘She forced me,’ he said with a half groan. ‘She was always able to make me do what she wanted. The Lord knows, I tried to escape from her often enough.’
Mara sat very still. This had been easier than she had expected. The priest was resting his forehead on his linked hands. His eyes were shut and his mouth compressed.
‘I asked and asked the bishop to give me another parish, but he always refused. He disliked me and he liked to torture me. Or perhaps he thought that it would strengthen me. I don’t know.’
‘So you continued to be lovers?’ Mara felt a certain amount of surprise. Clodagh had not acted like a woman who was having a love affair. She was an angry, bitter, abusive woman. She dressed badly, her hair went uncombed and her cloak, according to Brigid, was more than thirty years old and was stained and threadbare in places. It looked as though no attempt to clean or to mend it had ever been made.
For a moment it seemed as though she had not been heard. He still held his head within his hands. Now his splayed fingers grasped his head as though in an effort to avoid it splitting open. His eyes were opened very widely, but they were dead and blank, almost as though his internal thoughts blotted out anything that was happening outside of his own head. And then suddenly life came back into them and he swivelled around to face Mara.
‘What did you say?’ He muttered the words and she felt impatient with him.
‘So why did you do her bidding?’ And then her conscience made her add, more gently, ‘Was she blackmailing you? Did she threaten to go to the bishop?’
He shook his head. ‘That would not have troubled me. I told the bishop about her. I went to confess to him again and again, and I begged him to spare me this trial, to allow me to go away, to have pity on me.’
Mara knew a moment’s astonishment. So this man had confessed to the bishop, confessed his guilty passion. She had not expected that. It was all very well for Brigid to say that Clodagh had been a fine-looking girl in the past; the fact was that she was certainly not ‘fine-looking’ for many a long year and nothing but the eye of true love would have discerned anything that would arouse a man. And yet, he was still quite an attractive-looking man, himself. If he found it difficult to keep his passions under control there were probably plenty of women who would not have minded a love affair with him. Still, she told herself, there was no accounting for tastes. Perhaps to him, she was still aged eighteen, still had a head of glorious red hair, still had the slimness of youth and her cloak of many colours was still as resplendent as ever. She had a moment’s compassionate thought for the girl who had gone out into the lanes and the market places for dye and who had soaked and boiled the wool, dying the different sections, spun it on her spindle, woven the brightly-coloured squares and then stitched them to make a cloak that would stand out among the cream and grey cloaks of her neighbours.
‘But if you loved her, why didn’t you defy the bishop and take her into your house? Aengus would have given her a divorce if she had applied for it. And even if he refused, the fact that she was childless after thirty years of marriage would have guaranteed it.’
Though she would have been past the days of bearing a child for quite a number of years, thought Mara, nevertheless, the law set no date and upheld the right of a woman to have a child, no matter whether she had to leave her husband and go to another man in order to become pregnant. Moreover, once pregnant, the woman could then choose to return to her husband and no reproaches could be made. ‘Why not take her into your house if you loved her still?’ She repeated her words because he was staring at her as though she were speaking some foreign tongue, unknown to him.
‘Are you mad?’ he demanded with an intensity that almost made her recoil from him. ‘Are you mad? Loved her! I loathed and hated her.’
Mara concealed her exasperation. ‘So why do her bidding?’
‘Because she threatened to force herself into my bed, if I didn’t.’ The words came out in an explosion, something between a sob and a grunt of pain. The man, thought Mara, seemed nearing a breakdown.
‘She was always coming to me, talking about the splendid house she was going to have, fit for a king, it would be, she said.’
‘When did she say that, was it after her father died?’ asked Mara.
‘I suppose so,’ he said after a short pause. ‘Yes, I suppose it must have been. I didn’t take any notice of her. I didn’t care what she did or where she went as long as she would just leave me alone.’
‘But she wouldn’t leave you alone, was that the problem?’ Mara held her breath. Was he going to confess to the murder?
‘She even forced herself on me in the confessional box, saying foul things …’
‘What things?’ asked Mara bluntly; more to stem the rising tide of hysteria than because she really wanted to know. Even the tough boys of the law school seemed shy of actually repeating Clodagh’s words of abuse.
‘She said …’ Now the priest’s face was totally drained of colour and he stared ahead as though seeing a strange and terrible sight. ‘She said that I was denying her what she wanted and there was only one man left who could satisfy her, only one man in whose embrace she could find release and that … and she screamed with laughter when she said this, she said that the only man in the place, the only real man, was no man but was the god of evil, the Fár Breige. Whenever I passed the place she would glue herself to it, pretend …’
Mara sat very still. The priest wore a haunted look on his face, the look of someone who has awoken in the grip of a terrible nightmare, afraid to move, gulping for air. He was a simple sort of man, like many priests. It almost seemed as though the life they led, isolated in every real sense from the concerns of adult men and women, made them childlike. Did that, Mara wondered, make them childlike in their desires, also; made their concerns or wishes to be of overwhelming importance to them, of such importance, that nothing else could interfere.
Such men, she thought, could kill.
‘And so you killed her,’ she said aloud. She spoke softly and felt sorry for him, but murder could not be justified. This man was not insane, not simple in any way. A clever and well-read man; a Caxton copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales lay open upon his desk and there were copies of Virgil’s great poem, The Aeneid, upon the shelf by the fire. Father O’Lochlainn had choices that he could have made, but weakness and cowardice had prevented him from decisive action.
There had been no answer to her question and for a moment she thought that he had not heard her, but then he lifted his head, looked across at her and shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, quite simply, almost as though he corrected her on some simple fact, ‘no, that’s not right. I didn’t kill her. Her own lusts killed her. The Fár Breige took his terrible revenge. He was like me; he could take no more.’
Aw, teach dar! thought Mara. This was a favourite expression on the lips of her younger scholars, expressing scorn and disbelief. It was, she thought, the only appro
priate response to the last utterance. He must think her totally weak-minded and credulous if he expected her to believe that.
Or else, he was, in fact, insane.
That would be the defence, no doubt, if the bishop, as she expected, engaged a young lawyer to defend his underling. His lordship could be relied upon to do that. He would have been better off moving the tormented man to another parish, before any crime was committed.
She looked closely at the priest. He sat listlessly, his eyes blankly staring ahead, his hands dangling loosely. And then, quite suddenly, there was a complete change. He jumped to his feet, jerked back the curtain from the window, replaced a book on the shelf, poked the fire and added a few more sods of black turf and then went swiftly to the door.
‘It’s Deirdre,’ he said and to Mara’s amazement, she saw that a half-smile had come to his lips and the large blue eyes were shining with pleasure. Before she could say anything, he had gone to the door and opened it.
‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘I thought I knew your step. Come in, you are welcome.’
‘I had just baked a few griddlecakes so I thought I’d run across with one while it was still hot; I know how you like it.’ Deirdre’s voice was soft and affectionate. She had not noticed the visitor and Mara remained seated in the dark corner beside the window, watching with interest as Deirdre removed the square of linen from the platter and revealed her gift. Not just a griddlecake, but a knife, a large pat of butter and a few spoonfuls of honey were on the plate. In a motherly fashion, with a smile on her lips, Deirdre had cut a generous slice, spread it with butter and honey, before she noticed Mara and then she gasped dramatically.
‘Oh, Brehon, oh, I’m sorry; I didn’t see you. I just came across to give …’
‘Looks delicious,’ said Mara. She watched with interest as Deirdre put the griddlecake aside. Her presence had spoiled a cosy little interlude. Deirdre, she thought, would have been a cosier armful for the amorous Father O’Lochlainn than the wild and harsh Clodagh O’Lochlainn. However, she was not to be deterred from her interview with a suspect by this neighbourly visit, so she said firmly, ‘I’ll be dropping in to see you in a while, Deirdre, but in the meantime …’ She left her sentence unfinished, hoping that her meaning was plain and Deirdre immediately moved towards the door.
‘You’ll be very welcome, Brehon. Now I must be off. So much to do in this season! Terrible weather, isn’t it?’
Father O’Lochlainn half-rose as though to detain her, and then sank back onto his chair. Petulantly he pushed the untouched cake aside and glowered at Mara, reminding her rather of a resentful three-year-old who didn’t have the spirit to make a more vigorous protest. It surely would not be too difficult a task to get out of such a man whatever he knew about the death of Clodagh O’Lochlainn. She got up, went to the window and peered through the rain. It was almost impossible in this weather to imagine the valley and its hills as it would be on a sunny day – fifty shades of green and the cliffs sparkling silver. Today the hills were screened from her view by low clouds like mounds of grey fleece and the rain-washed valley grass was dull and monochrome.
But even through the veil of mist, Mara could see the towering figure of the Fár Breige, the stone god. She knew now why the priest wanted to keep the curtains of his room closed.
‘Did you notice at what time the figure of Clodagh appeared in front of the stone pillar?’ She asked the question in conversational manner and without looking back at him.
‘I’ve told you, Brehon, she was always there. She would look in the window, or tap at the window as she passed, and then when I looked, I would see her, right up next …’
‘I see,’ said Mara. And she did see. There was something rather wicked about the way in which Clodagh had taunted this stupid man. It would certainly be something that she could have dealt with if he had brought a complaint to her. And yet, she had to admit, a complaint of that nature, heard in public, would have caused a lot of sniggering and probably made his position of parish priest almost untenable.
‘But yesterday morning,’ she went on, hardening her heart and now looking back at him, eyeing him keenly, ‘yesterday morning, Clodagh was dead. That made a difference, didn’t it? If you looked out yesterday morning you would have seen a dead figure tied to the pillar, not moving, like a live figure.’
He gulped hard and suddenly she could see his eyes sharpen. An apprehension of danger had restored them to normal appearance. Was that mystical appearance feigned or did he, as she suspected, withdraw into a world of his own when reality threatened?
‘I did not look out of that window yesterday morning, Brehon. I was busy at my desk preparing my sermon.’
‘But your desk faces the window,’ she pointed out.
‘I did not look up from my work.’ His tone was curt and decisive and slightly disdainful. He might, thought Mara, when he had his wits about him, be a difficult man to shift in a court of law. Even a confession, unless witnessed, might be challenged by whatever lawyer the bishop managed to find. There was a strong conviction among the followers of Rome that a cleric should be above the law. It was not, however, something that Mara felt like tolerating, and she knew that King Turlough would back her on that.
If this man was guilty of murder then she was determined that he would face the people of the kingdom, confess his crime and pay retribution. The fine, unlike Clodagh’s land which had to revert to the near kin group, would be paid out to poor old Aengus and would keep him comfortable in his old age when his joints became too stiff to roam the mountainside with his beloved sheep.
‘I feel that you are not telling me the whole truth about what happened yesterday morning,’ she said as she rose to her feet. ‘I want you to think it over very carefully, to think of the consequences of not telling the truth to the king’s representative.’
In the meantime, she thought, she would just go across the road and sample one of Deirdre’s freshly baked griddlecakes, if possible without honey; but if it had to be with honey, she hoped that her sense of duty and devotion to the law would enable her to swallow the nauseating stuff. She looked at him keenly, but he had bowed his head, staring down at the wood of his desk, his face a mask of pain, and his hands joined as though in prayer.
Deirdre was certainly a much more appetising prospect for a man looking for affection than Clodagh. In her forties, Mara reckoned, but fresh-faced with clear skin, still-brown hair and eyes as darkly blue as the May-flowering gentian flowers, she was also still slim and active. She seemed to live her life in a whirl of activity. While Mara sampled the bread, she energetically churned some goats’ milk, rapidly ladling out the lumps that would be turned into the small round cheeses, chopped some cloves of wild garlic, mixing them in deftly, then drained the skim milk into a bucket and scoured out the churn. Mara munched as slowly as she could, noticing the longer that she took, the more relaxed the woman was becoming. It was, she thought, excellent bread, with a nutty flavour and a light texture. And Deirdre had been flattered by the statement, hastily attributed to Brigid, a notable housewife in the area, that only poorly baked bread needed to be spread with honey.
‘You must have got a terrible shock yesterday morning when Father O’Lochlainn told you about Clodagh,’ said Mara, while Deirdre poured fresh water into the huge black pot suspended from the iron crane in the chimney place. Purposely she spoke with her mouth half-full of cake, something that she would reprimand her scholars for, but which she felt would lend her question a more informal air. For a moment the flow of water seemed to stop and then it continued on, but there was no doubt that Deirdre started at the question.
‘Oh, but, Brehon, it was Pat that told me about Clodagh,’ she said after a moment.
‘But the priest had come to you first.’ Mara purposely made this a statement, not a question, and heard with satisfaction how firm her voice sounded. ‘He was telling me about looking out of the window and seeing Clodagh beside the stone pillar.’
There was anoth
er moment’s silence. Deirdre spread a well-laundered linen cloth over what remained of the fresh water in the bucket. Mara said nothing more. She could see that the woman was thinking hard.
‘Well, to tell you the truth, Brehon,’ she said eventually, ‘I never take too much notice of what the poor misfortunate man says to me. He suffers with his nerves, something terrible,’ she added.
‘So he came babbling to you about Clodagh and the Fár Breige; is that right?’
There was a reluctant nod. Deirdre had given up all pretence of busying herself with her household tasks. Her eyes were wide and very nervous, and the colour had gone from her cheeks. There was no doubt that the woman was fearful about something; fearful for someone, Mara corrected her first thought. But was this fear for the odd, and slightly child-like priest? If that were so, then she would lie to protect him. Still, her memory of Pat and Deirdre together made her feel that their relationship was a good one. Pat was a nice fellow – it was sad that they had no children, but they had the satisfaction of building up a prosperous farm of goats, one of the biggest in the kingdom, she thought, and remembered Brigid saying that they had been lucky with them. ‘Lucky’ was Brigid’s way of saying ‘successful’, a common saying; it was a slightly oblique way of propitiating the gods of the Tuatha Dé, the sidhe. The belief in the presence of ‘the old people’ was very strong in this part of the kingdom; even she, the most sceptical of persons, almost felt aware of their presence here amongst the ancient walls and bawns, presided over by the immense stone figure.
I must, Mara decided, trust that the relationship between husband and wife was stronger than that between woman and priest. Deirdre should realize that her husband was in danger of being named as the killer of his cousin Clodagh.
‘The trouble is, Deirdre,’ she said, in a confidential, woman-to-woman fashion, ‘it is easy for someone like me to suspect that the killer is the person that has the most to gain. I always try not to take the easy way out, but I need to know everything. That’s why I ask so many questions. Only when I understand everything, know where everyone concerned was at the time of the death, know what everyone said and did; well, only then can I solve the mystery. If I don’t get the information, then I have to start guessing and I don’t want to do that, don’t want to take any easy way.’ She watched Deirdre as she spoke. There was intelligence in those darkly blue eyes and then came a reluctant nod. Pat, of course, as the eldest of the three brothers, the one who could choose first, would benefit most from the distribution of the property that had belonged to Clodagh’s father.
A Fatal Inheritance Page 9