A Fatal Inheritance

by Cora Harrison

  ‘And yet, he knows all about how the woman was killed, how the Fár Breige managed to do it. He was there.’ Dinan, encouraged by her interest, jerked his thumb at the sleeping figure so that she would know he meant the man, not the god. ‘He was there, peeping from his window, like he always does. Deirdre says that he saw it all. I’d love to hear what he has to say, wouldn’t you, Brehon.’

  ‘You know, Dinan,’ said Mara, ‘it’s not being able to write or to read that is the important thing. Any fool can do that if they are taught it early enough. It’s having the brains and the imagination to tell the tales; having the words that hold attention; a man who can do that is a man who will live in the memory of the people. Why don’t you get one of my young scholars, Cormac or Art, to write them down for you and they’ll make a book for you.’ She could see that he was taken by the idea so she hastened to use the opportunity to get rid of him.

  ‘Go and talk to them,’ she said authoritatively. ‘They’re waiting for me in the Dunaunmore enclosure, with the horses. Leave Father O’Lochlainn to me. He’d just be worried about the bishop if you ask him anything.’ It worked like a miracle. He was on his feet instantly, his face blazing with excitement.

  ‘You’re right, of course, Brehon. I should have known that for myself. Deirdre did say that he was going on about the bishop. He won’t mind about telling you. You’re more important than any bishop in the land.’

  And with that extravagant compliment, Dinan withdrew to go and confer with her scholars about his book. It would be rather a nice thing to do, she thought, as she heard his boots clatter on the paved road outside. One of her father’s most treasured possessions was the Book of Lismore, full of the tales of the past; perhaps the Book of the Burren might rival it. It would be good for Cormac and Art to have this as their special project. Art drew and painted pictures very well and Cormac had a fluent pen. They might make something quite beautiful out of it.

  And then she dismissed the Morrigan and the Fár Breige from her mind and deliberately shook the sleeping priest from his slumbers. It took her a while; she had a strong impression that he was resisting her, that he did not want to wake up, but wanted to continue to take refuge in sleep from the nightmare of guilt that filled his waking hours.

  ‘Tell me why you thought the bishop was responsible for the woman’s death,’ she said sternly.

  Thirteen

  Gúbretha Caratniad

  (The Judgements of Caratniad)

  A lord must care for his kin and his clan because they are of the same blood. He may lose his honour-price for a wide range of offences and failings such as sheltering a fugitive from the law, tolerating satire, eating food known to be stolen and betraying his honour.

  Likewise he loses his honour-price if he fails to fulfil his obligations to his tenants.

  Ardal was in the steward’s room when she arrived at Lissylisheen Castle. She was shown straight into the room, but then paused for a second, feeling slightly embarrassed. The table had a green cloth spread over one end of it and this was strewn with piles of small pieces of silver, with silver coins and even a few gold ones.

  ‘You’re busy,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all.’ Ardal, as always, was the soul of courtesy, rising to his feet immediately. ‘We’ve just finished counting everything. Come and look at our coins. We have quite a collection here. Look, there’s a gold angel from England. No king’s head on it. It’s surprising that the young king, King Henry VIII, still uses his father’s coinage. He must have become king about fifteen years ago, but there, you can see still the old coins: still St Michael slaying the dragon on one side and a ship on the other, the coinage of the old king, King Henry VII.’

  ‘Odd, that,’ said Mara, bending over the board and picking up various coins. ‘He’s supposed to be a very handsome young man. You would think it would have been one of the first things that he would have done: sat for an artist and then put the king’s head onto the coins of the realm. There’s Francis I of France and Charles V, Our Holy Roman Emperor, beloved of the Pope. They’ve all got their picture engraved upon their coins.’

  ‘I suppose he’s been too busy with all of his wars: the Italian war, the French war and now Scotland. I hope he decides to leave us alone. King Turlough thinks that while the Earl of Kildare remains, in Turlough’s words, the lackey of the king of England, then we’ll never get our country back, but for myself, I’m happy if he leaves my kingdom of the Burren alone.’ He spoke, she thought, as though he, like his ancestors, was the king of the Burren. And she wondered, not for the first time, how well she knew this complicated man.

  ‘What’s that angel coin worth?’ She had changed the conversation rather abruptly, she knew, but she did not want to talk about any invasion or about the Earl of Kildare, who was the sworn enemy of Turlough. Her husband was war-like and adventurous, but he was getting a little old for warfare now and she wished that she could induce him to stay at home and not to be always in the forefront of any opposition to the Earl of Kildare and the troops from England.

  ‘Just about half a sovereign.’ Ardal did not elaborate. He was a sensitive man and knew that she had visited him for a purpose.

  ‘Lock the coins into the small chest, Danann,’ he said. ‘We’ll take them to Spain when we go there next month. I’ve a mind to purchase a stallion with Arab breeding and I think that I know just the horse. It won’t be cheap, but the foals will pay for the sire, over and over again. Now, Brehon, I’m at your service. Will you have a cup of wine with me? I’ve just got a small half barrel of wine from Bordeaux and you shall be the first to taste it.’

  ‘That sounds tempting, Ardal, but no; thank you. I feel like a little fresh air. I sat in a cave out in Oughtdara for what seemed like hours.’ And then she told them both the story of Fachtnan’s accident and of how Aengus had saved little Orla. Ardal smiled with satisfaction, merely remarking, ‘He’s a good fellow. I must remember to have a word with him. Perhaps get him something, a good warm rug for his room, Danann, or something like that. What do you think? Whatever you think he’ll appreciate – I’ll leave it to you, Danann.’

  ‘Aengus will be pleased about that. He has a very high opinion of you. As do all of your clan,’ she added lightly. She waited until the young steward had locked away the coins and handed the key of the strong box to his master. ‘Let’s walk down the road, Ardal,’ she said and saw him look enquiringly at her. She said nothing, however, until they were out on the road. There was a strong wind blowing, but the sky was a clear blue and there was a perceptible deepening of the green on the roadside grass.

  ‘First of April,’ said Ardal. ‘March has done its worst.’ He surveyed his fields on either side of the road with a professional air. ‘Soon see an improvement. I can almost hear the grass when it begins to grow in those valley fields. I’ve been looking at them long enough, I suppose. I’ve been looking at them now for well over fifty years, winter, spring, summer and autumn.’ He ended with a slight laugh, but Mara could see how affectionately he regarded his land.

  ‘I was thinking the other day about the year when Domhnall’s mother, Sorcha, was born,’ said Mara meditatively and saw him smile with a look of amusement.

  ‘That’s an odd way to refer to my own daughter, I know,’ she said, ‘but somehow that’s the way I think of her, as the mother of my grandchildren. She was married to Oisín more than twenty years ago and the years when she was a child were short years, such busy years for me. Brigid did a lot of the mothering of Sorcha. I’m not much of a mother, I suppose, always too busy with the law.’

  ‘You were a very young mother when you had Sorcha,’ he said. ‘What were you, fourteen, no, fifteen years old – that’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said with a sigh for her stubbornness. Her early and disastrous marriage was her fault; her father had done his best to persuade her against it. ‘And you became taoiseach a month after I became a mother. I think you were more able for your responsibilities than
I was.’ It had been a difficult time for him, she thought. His father had persuaded the clan to pass over the eldest son and, according to the law, to pick the fittest of all the descendants of the great-grandfather for the position of tánaiste, not realizing how soon the eighteen-year-old would be called upon to shoulder the whole burden.

  ‘You were just eighteen,’ she said.

  ‘Too young,’ said Ardal.

  ‘You were equal to it,’ she replied.

  ‘If my wife had lived,’ he said and then stopped. She was surprised. It had been over ten years at least since he had alluded to that early and tragically short marriage.

  ‘If your wife had lived then I think that the balance would have been more even between your life as a private person and your life as a taoiseach. Your clan would have always been important to you, but there would have been other interests, other matters to keep everything in balance. But so far as your land and your position of taoiseach was concerned, I don’t suppose that you could have done better. You brought wealth to yourself, but also prosperity to your clan.’

  He looked at her enquiringly, but continued to walk, matching his step to hers. They strolled in silence; following the narrow road as it went climbing steeply upwards. They had left the valley now and were going up onto the High Burren. The well-kept fields on either side of the road had gone and now there was the true Burren, ‘the stony place’, in the old language. To their right the field sloped steeply towards the sky, lines of pale grey rock, looking like miniature buildings, protruded from the ground and small, sturdy winter bullocks nosed out tufts of grass from among the cowslips.

  ‘Not like my valley fields, are they?’ Ardal broke the silence.

  ‘No,’ said Mara. She looked around at the rocky fields, at the orange tip butterflies hovering amongst the pale purple lady’s smock flowers. ‘But I like the hills myself,’ she said. ‘The air is so good on the hills. The valleys get the mist. I don’t like mist; I suppose there is something slightly supernatural about it. Something evil.’ She paused, leaning on a gate and from the corner of her eyes, saw him hesitate and then come to join her.

  ‘Dinan has some great stories about the mist,’ she said and then without a pause, she continued, ‘Were it not for the mist, I suppose Clodagh would not have been murdered. What do you think?’

  He made no reply to that, but he was standing so close to her that she felt rather than saw him stiffen.

  ‘The impulse of a moment might have evaporated if it were not for the way that the mist cloaked all.’ She let the sentence hang in the air for a few minutes, but he did not reply. He was a man who had great control over his tongue.

  ‘You see,’ she went on, ‘I was misled for some time about this murder. The fact that it had followed on from my judgement at Poulnabrone when Clodagh had been granted all of her father’s lands, well, that misled me. I had been looking into the four brothers. All of them had a motive. The land, as you pointed out, was not valuable in terms of cattle, but in terms of sheep and goats, well, it was valuable to them. And then when it comes to land, it’s not just the grass that grows on it, but what lies beneath it, and here on the Burren we have silver, a little gold and, of course, lead, which may in these days turn out to be almost as valuable. So Finnegas, as well as the other brothers had a motive.’ She looked sideways at him, but his well-cut profile was impassive, his lips firmly closed, his blue eyes fixed on the small black cattle on the hilltop.

  ‘So I was led along the road to investigate the four brothers, but in the end, I did not think that there was any evidence that any one of the four had done the deed, so I was forced to look elsewhere.’

  He turned to her then, a keen look and she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I moved on from considering the, well, I suppose, the cold motive of greed, to the hot motives of lust, anger, rage …’

  ‘Hardly a likely candidate for lust,’ remarked Ardal dryly.

  ‘Do you remember her at all?’ asked Mara with sudden curiosity. ‘Do you remember her when she was a young girl, about your own age, I suppose; at the time when the bishop came to see you, to tell you that there was a bit of scandalous gossip about the young priest at St MacDara’s church in Oughtdara.’

  There was a slight flash of irritation from his eyes. ‘I haven’t any recollection of her,’ he said brusquely and without reference to her he released his hold of the gate and began to continue their walk down the road.

  ‘But you remember the bishop,’ she said, joining him, but deliberately not trying to catch up with him.

  He glanced over his shoulder, slowed down and then grinned reluctantly. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that I was young enough to be flattered that he was the one who came to me.’

  ‘And you were able to do his business for him?’

  He would have been, too, she thought. Looking back at herself at a similar age, she was amazed at how much she achieved through sheer self-belief and youthful self-confidence. How sure I was, she thought. How certain that I understood all. Now, I am not certain of too many things. Everything, now, is more nebulous, more uncertain; more open to too many points of view.

  ‘It wasn’t too difficult,’ Ardal was saying. ‘Liam, you remember Liam? He arranged it all. He just went through our records; he was a great man to have everything written down. He picked out Aengus. Just about the right age. Not married. No female friends. Everything was right.’

  ‘Except that it wasn’t,’ said Mara. She could imagine nothing more disastrous. If Liam had looked to match up two men to go on a journey together in a state of amicable friendship and co-operation, he would not have chosen two people with such diametrically opposite tastes.

  ‘Well,’ he said with a shrug, ‘perhaps it did not turn out too well.’

  ‘So, the bishop paid you another visit; no, he summoned you this time, didn’t he?’

  He gave her a sidelong look, but decided that she had her sources and agreed with a slight nod.

  ‘He’s a lot older now, than he was then,’ he said lightly. ‘His days of journeying are over. He holds court now, and does not go on progress around his domains.’

  ‘This meeting, I imagine, would not have been quite so amicable. He would have pricked your pride, wouldn’t he? He would have either said or hinted that Clodagh’s behaviour in public was a disgrace, a disgrace to the O’Lochlainn clan.’ Mara thought back to Cian’s words: What if it is the whole family, the whole kin group, who decided that she had disgraced her kin by going on like that in public and that she was doomed to die, to redeem their honour. Mara had considered this, but had decided that the brothers were perhaps too down-to-earth, too humble, or too commonsensical to feel that anything Clodagh did would impugn their honour in any way. The honour of the clan, was, perhaps, a different matter: the O’Lochlainn clan who had ruled over the Burren from time immemorial, up to only a hundred years ago, the honour of that clan belonged to its taoiseach, and it was the whole life, the whole reason for living of that solitary, reserved man, she remembered thinking. The bishop, in his arrogant way, would not have spared him.

  ‘So he ordered you to do something to put a stop to this scandalous behaviour.’

  One of the tenant farmers on this high stony ground was moving his young heifers from one field to another, so Mara and Ardal stood in the middle of the road, in the time-honoured fashion, blocking access to the way that descended into the rich valley.

  ‘Lovely day, Conn, isn’t it; I think we’ll get the good weather now for a week or two,’ shouted Ardal once the gate was slammed closed on the lively young animals.

  ‘It is, indeed, taoiseach, and that will be very welcome after the bad March that we’ve had. God bless you, and the Brehon, too.’

  ‘You are so well liked by them all, every one of your clan knows you and every one of them feels honoured by your notice,’ said Mara in a low voice. ‘As soon as Conn gets back to his house, even before he takes off his cloak, he will tell his wife about meeting you and what you said about
the weather, and what you looked like and they will both bless you and feel grateful for your prediction. And you, of course, have made sure over the years that you will never disappoint, never visit a place without saying the right thing, without making contact, without giving an item of good news, even if it’s only the weather.’

  He looked amused at that, and then slightly embarrassed. ‘I don’t suppose that I think about these things at all,’ he said. ‘No more than you do, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I have the instinct to spread good news in the way that you do,’ said Mara, thinking about her often preoccupied murmur in answer to greetings. She added, ‘So when you were in the Ballynahown region today, you made a point of dropping down to Oughtdara and reassuring Deirdre that Aengus was well cared-for and happy and that you were looking after him. That was kind of you. But, of course, there was no mist today.’

  And then when he said nothing in reply to that, she added, ‘It is a great responsibility to place upon a man, giving him the status of God in the Old Testament.’ The God of the Old Testament, she thought, was a god of wrath, who did not hesitate to bring death and destruction down up those who angered Him. She thought about that for a moment and then continued, ‘Because there was no mist today, because you could be plainly seen, because there could be no confusion between a human figure and that of the grey stone pillar, the Fár Breige, then Father Eoin, the half-insane priest, peering fearfully through his window, could see the truth. He, in his own words, had thought that it was the god who had strangled Clodagh, had felt that it should have been the god, but now he realized that by talking to the bishop he had shifted the burden over on to your shoulders and that you had carried out the bidding of His Lordship. He saw it all, you know; that is the problem with mist, it comes and goes, thickens and clears in a matter of moments. He even saw how you had used the dead woman’s own rope to tie her dead body to the pillar, but the mist distorted his vision. When he saw you there today, a day with no mist, he realized that it had been you who had strangled Clodagh.’