She wondered for a moment whether he would deny it. It all made sense to her but the evidence so far was flimsy with only Father O’Lochlainn’s word for it. If he did deny it, then she would have to seek more corroboration; it should be easy enough. The taoiseach was not a man who could move unseen and unnoticed.
‘It was not intended, you know,’ he said eventually.
‘I could guess that,’ she said quickly, conscious of a great feeling of relief that he was prepared to confess and of thankfulness that she did not have to ask among his tenants and his workers, did not have to go through the wearisome procedure of asking for sightings of their taoiseach on that morning, and tempting loyal followers to lie and prevaricate.
‘Tell me what happened.’ They had reached the brow of the hill. Ahead of them lay the Carron Valley, territory of the O’Brien of Leamaneh Castle. Not as green and well-tended as the valley that they had left behind; lots of hazel scrub occupying valuable grazing land and most of the walls were ill-tended and had large gaps where cattle had knocked stones onto the ground.
‘I went across to see her at the request of the bishop – it was a bad morning with the heavy rain, but I had already wasted quite some time as I wished to allow Aengus time to be out of the way.’
That had been kind, thought Mara. Other men might have interviewed man and wife together, implying that it was the husband’s duty to keep his wife under control.
‘By the time that I got to Oughtdara the rain had eased but a dreadful mist had risen up in the valley.’ Ardal’s face took on a remote look, as though gazing back into some nightmare. He stayed silent for a moment and then turned to her as though to explain. ‘I was worried about my horse as I could hardly see my hand in front of my face, so I dismounted when I came to the trackway leading down and I tied the horse to a tree. And then I went on foot down the rest of the way as far as the church. I was going to go to the house inside the Dunaunmore enclosure; I thought that she would be indoors on a morning like that, but then I heard a sharp crack. And then a voice, shouting at the top of her voice.’
‘Clodagh?’ Ardal had half-turned his face away from her, his eyes were no longer on the Carron Valley, but were turned towards Mullaghmore Mountain, its swirling layers of white limestone burnished to silver by the setting sun in the west. At the end of the month, on the eve of Bealtaine, after judgement day at Poulnabrone, all the people in the kingdom, except the very young and the very old, would climb that mountain and build a great bonfire on the peak. It was a very special place for him, she reckoned; she had never known him to be missing on those occasions. The O’Lochlainn, king of the Burren, hundreds of years ago, would have regarded that mountain as the most sacred place in his kingdom.
‘What was the crack?’ she asked, bringing him back to his story. A tap with a stick on the window of the priest’s house, she thought. Clodagh up to mischief; no doubt tormenting her long-lost lover. It was a pity that Ardal had not identified the sound. It might have saved him from committing the crime if he had realized that there was a witness.
Ardal shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think anything of it. I just followed the direction of her voice. She had once been an intelligent girl; I remembered talking to her all those years ago, persuading her into a respectable marriage, and I thought that I could talk to her again, perhaps influence her to bridle her tongue for the sake of decency; I was even prepared to bribe her to be silent in public, or to consider a sensible separation. After all, she had just inherited the land belonging to her father – I had found her keen-witted and well-informed on that occasion when I valued the land and checked on whether a will existed.’
‘But on that morning …’
‘The woman acted as though she were insane. I never heard such filth as issued from her mouth.’ There was a harsh note in Ardal’s voice. ‘She acted as though she were possessed by the devil. I wouldn’t offend your ears, Brehon, by repeating what she said. That unfortunate man!’
‘Her husband?’
‘He also; I was thinking of Father Eoin, such a pious man. She tormented him, would not leave him alone.’
Had Clodagh confined her foul-mouthed obscenities to the subject of the priest and her husband, or had she made sexual advances to Ardal himself, as well? Judging by the look of distaste she guessed that the latter was true. It accounted for the fury with which he attacked her.
‘I just felt that I had to stop her, to stop those words coming out of her mouth; I just felt that I could not listen to any more of that stuff,’ he said, almost as though he read her mind.
‘So you put your hands around her neck.’
‘I shook her first, just trying to stop her. And then she turned her head and spat at me, right in my face. I was mad with fury. I just didn’t know what I was doing. I just had to stop her; I had to silence her.’ Ardal picked up an angular pebble and flung it with all his strength. It hit a standing stone about a hundred yards away and a startled hare bounded out from the grass nearby and went leaping down the hill propelled to great speed by his powerful back legs.
‘I can understand that you were angry, that you lost control, but I find it hard to understand why you did not come and tell me what had happened, make open confession, offer to pay the penalty …’
He threw up his hand in an odd gesture, almost an appeal for mercy, she thought, but she waited. She had to be impartial. No one was above the law.
‘I couldn’t bear it,’ he said eventually.
‘And yet others had to bear the burden of suspicion.’
‘I would not have allowed any injustice.’ His colour had flared up and his blue eyes were angry.
‘You must have known how the weight of suspicion would fall upon her husband, poor Aengus, and upon her cousins.’
‘I tell you that I would not have allowed any harm to come to them. I would have compensated them.’
‘That was not good enough, though, was it? Murder is a terrible deed and no amount of benevolent paying of a fine would compensate for the lifelong burden of a false accusation, of the mark of Cain in the eyes of kin, of clansmen and of neighbours.’
He said nothing, did not even look at her, just stared intently at the mountain. She waited for a moment, but knew that he would say no more. And she had no more questions. He had killed the woman. Out of sheer rage and disgust, he had put his hands, the strong hands of a horseman, around her neck and throttled her. And then in an effort to hide his crime he had bound the body to the stone pillar and had disappeared back into the mist. Pride, of course, had prevented him from acknowledging his crime. And perhaps there was a certain thread of arrogance woven into the decision to remain silent.
‘I shall want to hear this case as soon as possible,’ she said abruptly. There had been too much talk, too many superstitious fears aroused. All needed to be explained to the people of the Burren and the wild rumours laid to rest. ‘I would like to hold the hearing on the day after tomorrow.’ This would get the matter over before Turlough arrived back, and before those celebrations of her fiftieth birthday.
‘You will be there?’ A half nod in response.
‘If you wish to plead innocent, you may desire to have a lawyer to represent you, an aigne. I can give you a list of suggestions if you wish.’
He shook his head. He would not plead innocent, she thought. That terrible, overweening pride that had prevented him from acknowledging his crime would now prevent him from denying it.
‘I will be there,’ he said, his voice so low, so broken that it was almost impossible to identify it as his.
The stone-paved field of Poulnabrone was almost empty for judgement day. The notices had been read at all the churches, at the inns, at the blacksmith’s shop and at the mill – all as the law directed, but when the Angelus bell sounded, the only member of the O’Lochlainn clan who was present, as well as the taoiseach, was Aengus, and he was only there because Mara had sent Fachtnan, leading the law school cob, to make sure of his
presence. There were a few members of the O’Connor clan, one of two MacNamara men from Carron and otherwise only the O’Brien farmers and tenants from the nearby townlands. The O’Lochlainn clan remained faithful to their highly esteemed taoiseach and did not want to witness his humiliation.
The English had derided Brehon laws, castigating them as a free licence to kill, for those who had the silver to pay the fine. But no one seeing the face of Ardal O’Lochlainn and noting the sunken eyes, the mottled pallor of his cheek, the stooped shoulders, would have felt that this man was getting off too lightly as, step by step, the Brehon took him through the morning of his crime and got him to describe the actions that led to the death of Clodagh O’Lochlainn. He acknowledged his guilt with bowed head and husky voice.
‘According to The Great Ancient Tradition,’ said Mara, ‘the fine for killing a person is fixed at forty-two séts, twenty-one ounces of silver or twenty-one milch cows. This was an un-acknowledged killing and so is classified as duinethaoide and therefore this doubles the fine to be paid, so the fine is forty-two ounces of silver or forty-two milch cows.’ Normally, at this stage of the proceedings, she allocated a time limit within which the fine had to be paid. In most cases the culprit would have to call upon kin members or perhaps the whole clan to enable him to pay, but in the case of Ardal, an honourable man, she merely finished by hoping that sum would be paid as soon as possible. Aengus, she noted, looked stunned and acutely miserable. He sank down on a stone and put his head within his hands.
Aengus, as a man with no land, had no honour price of his own and so Clodagh, as his wife, had none, either. Nevertheless, this was a huge sum of money. Aengus could now become a well-off farmer. He would need, she noted, guidance and assistance in order to manage this fortune. Most of the people who had attended were now leaving, sidling past Aengus as though he were the culprit, not the victim. Fachtnan finished stowing away her papers and law scrolls in the battered leather satchel that accompanied her everywhere and Mara directed her steps towards the miserable figure of the shepherd, but Ardal forestalled her, walking over, putting out a hand and then pulling Aengus to his feet. The man swayed as though he were ill, but Ardal kept his hand firmly gripping the upper arm and walked with him to where the horses were tethered. He held the cob while Aengus mounted and then together they rode down the road towards the Carron valley.
Watching them go, Mara felt comforted. The law had done its duty, now was a time for healing. The Bible, of course, said that: ‘whoever sheds man’s blood, then his blood will be shed by man: for God made man in his image.’ Brehon law, on the contrary, was concerned that there should be no unnecessary bloodshed, so substituted a financial penalty, much to the disgust of England and of Rome.
However, even the bishop himself, she thought, would probably not allude to the matter again. He would, with secret relief, consider that God’s wrath had descended upon a woman who had mocked the man of God. And most of the people in the mountain valleys would probably secretly continue to feel that the Fár Breige and the Morrigan had something to do with it. And Ardal, she was sure, would make sure that Aengus knew how to handle his newfound wealth.
Fourteen
Bretha Nemed Toisech
(Laws Concerning Nobility)
The status of a briugu (hospitaller) depends on three things:
1. A never-dry cauldron.
2. A dwelling on a public road.
3. A welcome before every face.
On a day of bright sunshine, when the lambs raced in the fields and when primroses, violets and early orchids flowered in the roadside verges, Mara celebrated her fiftieth birthday. She woke early, conscious of having slept heavily after the exhausting evening of greeting her guests and half-expecting to see her husband by her side, but there was no sign of him. Surely he had not forgotten the elaborate birthday party that he had been so insistent on staging. Unlikely, she thought. He was surprisingly good at turning up when expected, even despite all of the trials and difficulties of journeys during these unsettled times. She stretched out luxuriously for a minute before getting up. The room was beautifully warm from the heat of the many charcoal-burning braziers, with an ewer of water simmering in a basin above one of them, and already the early morning sun penetrated the curtains. She went to the window, admired the lambs and the spring flowers, and then turned back to the task of looking like the king’s wife in front of all his invited visitors. Brigid, her housekeeper, had probably been in the room already as a lace-trimmed gown of soft dark green wool had been laid out ready to be worn for the morning. Quickly she washed, plaited her hair, enclosing the braids in a fine silver net at the back of her neck and then dressed, buttoning the long sleeves with care and pulling on soft leather shoes over her woven stockings.
‘Let me see you.’ Brigid was in the room, inspecting her with care, looking her up and down severely, checking that she was going to do honour to the Davoren family, whom Brigid had served for over fifty years.
‘And now you’re going to tell me that I looked better than this fifty years ago,’ said Mara resignedly.
A smile crept across Brigid’s stern face. ‘You were a lovely baby, the first baby that I ever looked at properly, I suppose.’
‘I wonder what I would have done without you?’ said Mara. She owed a lot to her father who had cared for his motherless daughter, had allowed her to join in the lessons in the schoolhouse, had nurtured her talents and encouraged her on the ambitious pathway to become a lawyer and the only woman Brehon in Ireland, but Brigid had given her love and security, and confidence in herself, had supported her through that disastrous early marriage to the idle drunken law scholar Dualta, and then after her divorce, had cared for her daughter Sorcha while Mara, bereft of her father, struggled to keep the law school going and to manage the legal affairs of the kingdom.
‘I owe you so much, Brigid,’ she said softly. ‘Fifty years of looking after me!’
‘Would you listen to that!’ said Brigid, hastily. ‘What’s got into Cormac? He is like a seagull in a storm this morning. He’s been running up and down those stairs, screeching at the top of his voice, since dawn broke. And in his best clothes, too. Very fussy, he was this morning, his lordship. Nothing would do him, but his saffron léine and his new fur-lined jacket.’
‘It’s the king,’ said Mara, her sharp ear distinguished the word from the boys’ shouts. Despite her annoyance at his late arrival, she felt her lips part in an irresistible smile. She went quickly across to her window and the empty road was now full of sound and colour and movement. First came the standard bearer, the long triangular banner of blue and saffron linen rippling in the wind and then the men-at-arms. The mail-coated galloglass, battleaxes slung over their shoulders, formed the vanguard, as though they were going into battle, then came the lightly-armed kern with their bows, their throwing knives, wooden shield and short swords, and then behind them the mounted bodyguard and behind them came Turlough himself, and a group of his friends, a very large group, she noted, hoping they had room for them. But all would probably turn out well. It usually did with Turlough. Mara had contemplated receiving them in the Great Hall, but one look at Turlough’s face, eagerly scanning the tower house walls, made her change her mind. She snatched up her fur-lined cloak and went clattering down the stairs on the heels of Cormac and his friends.
The courtyard was thronged but the crowd opened a passageway for her and she made her way to the gates, pausing there for a moment and allowing her son and his friends to race up the road.
‘These boys get so excited,’ said Cael with an elderly sigh and Mara did her best to hide a smile. Cael was growing up fast, she thought, and almost felt a pang of nostalgia for the shorthaired little girl in the knee-length léine who had been so resolute that she was a boy.
‘Well, it is rather exciting, isn’t it, seeing them all coming down the road,’ she said apologetically. Who was that man, riding side by side with Turlough, she wondered. A young man dressed in a leather jerkin
of boiled bull hide, thrown carelessly open to reveal a saffron léine. His face was unfamiliar to her, a very tanned face, framed by a mop of black curls. She didn’t think that she had ever seen him before. As the boys came up to greet Turlough, he had stretched out a foot as a step, then reached down and hauled Cormac on to his horse, placing the boy in front of him and shouting some remark across to Turlough. Even from a distance Mara could see from Cormac’s very straight back and the toss of his red-gold hair that he was thrilled and excited by the notice taken of him.
‘Who is that man?’ asked Mara of the steward that stood beside her.
He opened his mouth, shut it again and looked at her in a slightly strange way, she thought, almost as though he had been about to say something and then had thought better of that.
‘I’m thinking that must be the MacMahon, the new young taoiseach, of Oriel,’ he said. Mara noticed that he, like herself, was watching with interest as the curly-headed young man bent down, saying something in Cormac’s ear and Cormac responded eagerly, twisting himself around and gazing up at the MacMahon.
‘Himself will have been talking to you about MacMahon of Oriel,’ said the steward tentatively and Mara did not reply, just inclined her head. He could take the gesture as he wished. No doubt this man featured in one of Turlough’s many stories related to her about ‘good fellows’, but there had been nothing particular mentioned, certainly nothing about Cormac and now every maternal instinct within Mara seemed to point to the possibility that this visit, all the way from the north of Ireland, by the taoiseach of Oriel, had something to do with her son. The steward’s tentative glances hinted at this also; these men would pick up the signs very quickly and there probably had been many muttered conversations about the king’s youngest son spending so long at school and not going out in the world to receive weapons training.
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