A Fatal Inheritance

by Cora Harrison

  ‘This is where Pat’s new land, the land from our uncle, ends and Finnegas’s land from our uncle begins.’ He pointed at a boundary stone, engraved with the name of Danu in the ancient ogham script, the lines cut so deeply that even the yellow lichen had not managed to obliterate them after the centuries. Some ancestor, also called Danu, had caused that stone to be erected and his name to be engraved upon it.

  ‘So Finnegas’s new portion is not the old family land,’ she commented.

  ‘No, our uncle Danu was a very clever man, a very clever man. He was a carpenter as well as a farmer. He could make chairs and chests and anything you wanted. He used to take things to Galway and sell them for silver and then he bought this extra land – it was one of the last things that he did before he dropped into second childhood. I think myself that he hoped to find lead on it, just as Finnegas had found on his land from our father, but Danu never had a chance. He turned forgetful and got old very fast, poor man. Look, over to the right there, just over that wall, is the land that Finnegas had as his share of our father’s land and over there is his lead mine.’

  ‘What am I thinking about?’ Mara shook her head at her forgetfulness. ‘I meant to have marked in the boundaries. Well, let’s at least do this one. Art, get the measuring rods out and we’ll make a start beside this wall. Where does Finnegas’s land, the land he got from your father, where does that end, Gobnait? Show me the boundary line between that and the land owned by Clodagh’s father.’

  ‘Over there, just at the end of the rough road, and the wall marks it out on both sides, it’s quite a small piece of land, just one big meadow, reaching as far as the sea cliff. I’ll go and get Finnegas and tell him that you’re here, Brehon. I’ll tell him about the maps too. That’ll interest him. He’s a clever fellow, Finnegas. The brains in our families, they say, sank down to the bottom pair of brothers.’ And with a cheerful wave, he went off.

  It was very different land here to the land in the Burren. Mara looked at it with interest as Art handed out the measuring rods and Domhnall marshalled the scholars into a line, each three paces away from the other. The field was dotted with pools of standing water. On the Burren the porous limestone absorbed even the heaviest rain and stored it in vast underground lakes and caves until saturation point was reached and then the water welled up. The vegetation here was different, also. The grass was interspersed with large patches of winter-brown rushes and brass-yellow king cups, marsh irises and dark purple marsh orchids flowered instead of the cowslips of the dryer pasture on the Burren.

  ‘We measure from this boundary to the next boundary, to a point nearest to the entrance to the mine, Brehon, is that what you want?’ said Domhnall in a low voice and with an eye on the departing figure of Gobnait.

  Mara would not be surprised if he had followed her thoughts and had understood the real reason for her interest in mapping the land here, close to the boundary with north-west Corcomroe. Domhnall always had his wits about him. She gave him a quick nod, and Domhnall made an almost imperceptible signal to the scholars to stay with him as she went forward to join Gobnait and Finnegas, map in hand.

  Finnegas listened with interest to Gobnait’s garbled explanation of the meaning of those straight and curved lines that represented the familiar landscape of stone walls and winding roads and Mara put in a word here and there while observing from the corner of her eyes how Domhnall set the scholars to work with low-voiced instructions. Domhnall seemed to be working quickly and efficiently, the scholars forming a straight line, each ensuring, by means of the pole, that they were an accurate three paces distant from the next and then rapidly the last in the line became the first and so on until the entire meadow, from the boundary to the lead mine entrance, had been measured. She allowed him plenty of time and did not intervene until she saw that Art was replacing the measuring poles in the tarpaulin bag. Then she beckoned them to join her and to see the wonders of the lead mine.

  ‘I’m so very grateful to you, Gobnait, for bringing us across. I’m afraid that I will have wasted about an hour of your morning by the time that you get back,’ said Mara. It had, she reckoned, taken them about half an hour to get across and she noticed that Gobnait had not disagreed with her estimate, just protesting how much he had enjoyed himself and what a privilege it had been to be associated with the drawing of maps. It would, she thought, have been just about possible for Finnegas to murder Clodagh and return to the mine – and, of course, Ug, the sheepdog, intelligent though he was, could not relate whether he met Finnegas at the mine, or just halfway across.

  On the other hand, there was no doubt that he would probably have been missing for at least an hour, more probably an hour and a half, from the lead mine and if that were true, his workers would know of the fact.

  ‘So the lead comes from these ordinary-looking rocks, does it?’ she asked, looking around her with interest and noting that the mine ran from north to south, certainly in the direction of the land Finnegas had received from Clodagh’s father, Danu.

  ‘That’s right, Brehon. Years ago, when I started first, I just took the stuff from the rock beneath the soil. I could see that there was lead there by the way nothing would grow, the land was poisoned, but by the time I was at it for a couple of years, that seam was used up, so I moved down the hill and hacked my way through that passageway that you can see there. I had a few men working for me by then, but I had a terrible disappointment in the beginning because there was no lead in the rocks. I nearly gave up. I thought there might just have been a little bit of lead there and now it was all gone, but I took a chance at it. We just kept hacking away, day after day, week after week, using the broken rock to build up props at the sides of the passageway, come and see.’ He broke off and led the way, showing the supporting pillars, one on each side and one in the centre, and pointing up to the boards that spanned the gaps, above their heads. He made a good story of it; Mara was reminded of Dinan’s tales of the gods in this dramatic recital of one man’s battle with the sullen, dark hued, heavy grained rocks, so unlike the lighter, more friable limestone.

  ‘Perhaps, one of your young lads would like to have a go at splitting one,’ suggested Finnegas. He was very at ease, no trace of guilt or of anxiety that he might be suspected of his cousin’s murder showed in him, and yet the fine would be a big thing to a man without cows, as it would have to be paid in hard-earned silver. An easy conscience, or a firm belief in his own cleverness; Mara could not decide.

  ‘Cael,’ suggested Cormac mischievously.

  ‘Not me, thanks.’ A year ago Cael would have accepted the challenge, but she had grown up a lot in those last twelve months and now she smiled kindly on Cormac and said, ‘Don’t strain yourself,’ in a motherly fashion as he grasped the pickaxe.

  ‘No, no.’ Finnegas was calmly determined that the king’s son should not run any risk. ‘Another few years and you’ll be better than any of them but you still have your growing to do. We’ll try the big lad here.’

  Domhnall made a few perfunctory efforts to chip out the dark seam from within the reddish-coloured rock, but soon put down the pickaxe.

  ‘Not my sort of thing, I’m afraid,’ he said without a hint of embarrassment. ‘You have a go, Slevin.’

  Slevin, with his farm-trained muscles, made a better job of it than Domhnall, the son of a prosperous merchant in the city of Galway. During the noise from his thunderous blows Domhnall said, very quietly, right into Mara’s ear, ‘Just over forty strides from the entrance to the boundary.’

  Mara made no answer, but intervened to stop Cian seizing the pickaxe, promising that he and Cormac could come back, if Finnegas permitted it, when they had finished their growth spurt and diverting them by asking whether they could explore the mines.

  ‘We’ll divide you up,’ decided Finnegas. ‘Oscar, here, will take you four to see the place where the lead is melted and the two big boys can come with me and the Brehon.’

  Finnegas was well used to showing the mines and he made
an interesting story of it. Domhnall had been discussing the subject with his father and knew a lot about the use of lead piping to convey water to the fish market in Galway and he kept Finnegas busy with well-formulated questions, while Slevin, to Mara’s amusement, was keeping slightly to the rear of the others, stepping the distance out in long-legged strides.

  ‘And here’s how far we’ve gone to this day,’ said Finnegas genially when they reached a forbidding rock face straight in their pathway. He lifted a lantern and showed them the dark seams. ‘But you come back in a couple of weeks, and you’ll see we’ll have gone another few feet through here. Step by step it has to be done, the supports have to be built, the ceiling put into place before we have too much hacking at the walls. Now come and see the bole and I’ll take the others along to see what you have just seen.’

  While Domhnall was cross-questioning Finnegas about the bole, Mara fell back until she was beside Slevin who was thoughtfully tracing a lead seam with one well-kept finger and then ruefully examining the welts on his palm.

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it? Very hard work, though. My hands have gone soft with wielding the pen, not the axe. I’ll have blisters tomorrow,’ he said aloud, and then in a low voice, he added, ‘Sixty strides into the cliff face.’

  Sixty strides. Even if Slevin’s strides were slightly smaller than Cumhal’s measuring rods, it seemed without doubt that Finnegas had been mining under the land belonging to his uncle Danu and then to his cousin Clodagh, long before the woman’s death had made that land his own.

  This seemed to solve the puzzle of why Clodagh had declared at Poulnabrone that she was going to be rich and why she was looking for men with stone-working skills. Clodagh had worked out that the lead that was being mined now was being taken from her own property. She had envisaged her successful cousin’s mine would be handed over to her. The law was quite clear on the subject, thought Mara. It said that minerals in the ground belonged to the person who owned the land above it.

  If Clodagh had suspected that her cousin’s mine had encroached upon the land that she now owned, then she would have checked the position with poor old Fergus, who would, no doubt, have immediately trotted out the words from Bretha Étgid that he had committed to memory over sixty years ago. Clodagh, according to Brigid had been a clever girl, and no doubt had kept that sharpness of intellect.

  Deep in thought, Mara followed Domhnall and Slevin up to the bole where an immense fire burned within a beehive-like structure that cleverly used an existing circular gap in a cluster of rocks, filling some of the gaps with a mixture of clay and small stones to provide shelter, while the filtered strength of the Atlantic wind fanned the flames to a high temperature. There was a little runlet hacked out from a limestone slab ending beside a pool of spring water and the liquid lead poured down this and into the pool, where it cooled and turned into solid lumps. One man tended the fire and another picked out the lumps of lead and placed them in baskets.

  ‘It melts easily again,’ said the man called Oscar. ‘It’s great stuff; can take any shape. Easy to use and never rusts. More use than gold.’

  Mara watched with her eyes, but her brain was busy. Finnegas now had a strong motive, but she still was not sure that he had an opportunity. It was possible, she thought, that Clodagh had some sort of showdown with him, had perhaps offered him a share in the profits if he would continue to run the business for her. She may have given him time to think about it and appointed a time to meet him, two mornings ago – at perhaps an hour or so before noon, when Aengus would be well out of the way, up the mountain caring for Ardal O’Lochlainn’s sheep.

  ‘I suppose you are very busy all day long,’ she said to the man who was taking the lumps from the pool. ‘Do you always do that job?’

  He straightened his back, glad, she thought, of an excuse to pause in his labour.

  ‘We all do a bit of everything, Brehon, just as Finnegas orders us,’ he said politely.

  ‘So what would you have been doing at around this time the day before yesterday morning?’

  ‘The day before yesterday, Brehon, oh, yes, I remember. Myself and Oscar were helping the master in the tunnel, bringing in some of the waste stone and piling it up ready for building the new supports. We got a couple of feet built by the end of the day.’

  ‘Hard work,’ commented Mara. ‘Did you keep at it all day without a rest?’

  ‘Except for just an hour or so in the middle of the day when we went in the cart with the load to Doolin Harbour; the master wanted us all to go so that it could be got loaded up quickly. He had promised the boat owner to give some extra help this time.’

  ‘How long would it take for the cart to go to Doolin Harbour from here?’ asked Domhnall in a nonchalant fashion.

  ‘How long would you think, Oscar?’

  ‘Best part of an hour, I’d say,’ said Oscar.

  This would give Finnegas barely enough time to keep an appointment with Clodagh, to kill her, and then to return to his mine, but these men would have very little notion of what exactly was an hour’s length of time. They would use the word ‘hour’ as an approximation; it might easily have been an hour and a half, or even two.

  ‘And I suppose that he was jumping up and down waiting for you when you arrived back eventually,’ said Slevin with a chuckle that sounded very natural.

  ‘Not a bit of it; he’d gone for a stroll himself and we were already at work when he came back. But there you are, no pleasing him. A face on him that would cut you in two. Driving us as though the sky was going to fall in.’

  Mara strolled off to meet the party coming back from the tour of the caves. She turned the matter over in her mind as she went. On the one hand, it did appear that Finnegas might just have had time to rush across to Oughtdara, murder his cousin and then rush back. However, on the other hand, she had to admit that it was an unlikely crime for him to undertake. How did he know that the law position was as Clodagh had stated it to be? Quoting the elderly and senile Fergus MacClancy would not impress this practical man of business who lived so close to Corcomroe and would undoubtedly have heard of the mental state of its Brehon. He, unlike Mara, was not to know that Fergus’s memory, for some odd reason, held tightly the sum and substance of the laws that he had learned in his youth though all else fell away from him like water from a leaking bucket.

  No, she thought, Finnegas would not have been hasty. She would have thought it would be more likely that he would stroll over to see the Brehon of the Burren and ask her some pertinent questions about rights of landowners. After all, the entrance to the mine was definitely on his own land and so was at least half of the tunnel. He wouldn’t see the justice of Clodagh being able to seize the fruits of his hard labour. Yes, from what she had seen of Finnegas, she would expect that he would come to see her at the law school, would ask her advice. And if she confirmed Clodagh’s words, he probably would want to compromise with his cousin, rather than murder her.

  Unless, of course, he had already made an offer and had been rejected.

  She would take no further steps today, she decided, but turn the matters over in her mind. Finnegas, though, would now go onto the list of suspects. He had means, opportunity and motive.

  Ten

  Cóic Conara Fugill

  (The Five Paths of Judgement)

  There are five paths along which a case must be pursued by a Brehon:

  1. fír (truth)

  2. dliged (entitlement)

  3. cert (justice)

  4. téchtae (propriety)

  5. coir n-athchomairc (proper enquiry)

  ‘Did you see Fachtnan, Anu?’ asked Mara when they returned. She had forgotten about him while at the lead mine and only remembered him when they were almost back at Oughtdara. There was no sign of him when they arrived so she addressed her question to Gobnait’s wife, while still looking around for a sign of Fachtnan. She was conscious of some annoyance and tried to suppress it, but she could hear a crisp note in her question.

&nbs
p; ‘I did, indeed, Brehon,’ said Anu. ‘He came in here not too long after you left. He came into the house and had some buttermilk, he and his little girl. I gave him your message and he said that it was too far for the child to walk and he couldn’t take his horse across that rocky land so that he would meet you when you came back. He hasn’t gone, though. His horse is still over there with the rest of your horses, grazing in the enclosure. I saw it a while ago when I went to pick some cress.’

  ‘Perhaps he went to join Pat,’ suggested Gobnait.

  ‘Or Dinan,’ was Anu’s suggestion.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ said Mara firmly. She already felt guilty that she had taken up a couple of hours of Gobnait’s time and didn’t wish to delay the couple any longer. They would want to be checking on the lambing sheep and all the hundred and one tasks of busy farmers.

  ‘Perhaps he went into the church,’ suggested Cael. ‘If I know Orla she would start to whine if Fachtnan made her walk more than a hundred paces. She’d have something to sit on in there and he could keep her occupied by lighting candles or else telling stories.’

  I wish he’d leave that child at home, thought Mara, though she was conscious that her exasperation was a little unfair. There was a time when the Cahermacnaghten Law School did admit five-year-old children, but it wasn’t always a success. For the first few years they were only capable of learning by rote while they solidified their skills of reading and writing. When her son Cormac and his foster brother, Art, had been successfully taught to read and to write by Art’s mother she had allowed them to attend for just two hours in the morning and together they had memorized large numbers of law triads and mastered the early stages of Latin nouns and verbs, reciting verses from the Latin Grammar, written by William Lilly, High Master of St Paul’s School in London and presented to Cahermacnaghten Law School by St Nicholas’s Grammar School in Galway City. If there had been a second child of similar age to keep Orla company, she might possibly have considered it, but Orla, as the only five-year-old in the school, would inevitably demand much of her father’s attention, and had, in any case, little desire to learn.