Fidelma quickly explained the circumstances.
‘I think that Buan was becoming increasingly fearful and knew that I suspected her. The previous evening she had asked me to come to her chamber on the pretext of discussing her rights, which she knew anyway. I think that she was going to arrange my death there. However, Eadulf arrived and she had to abandon her plan. So the next day she attempted to push a stone on my head as we were leaving the workroom.’
‘But if only Sister Sinnchene knew you were going to be there, at the stone polishers’ workshop, how did Sister Buan find out?’ demanded Brother Cu Mara.
‘You told her,’ Fidelma smiled.
The young steward’s eyes widened.
‘I told no one,’ he denied hotly.
‘Not directly,’ agreed Fidelma in a mild voice.
‘I remember that morning,’ interrupted Sister Uallann. ‘Sister Sinnchene was delivering washing. I was standing with Brother Cu Mara and Sister Buan. Brother Cu Mara felt he had been too abrasive to you and felt he should apologise. He asked Sister Sinnchene if she knew where you were.
‘So Buan was able to get through the dormitories to the roof of the workshop in a matter of moments, pry loose the block and make her second attempt on my life.’
‘Thankfully it failed,’ Eadulf added. ‘Ever since I first met Buan I kept thinking that I had met her before. Her features seemed so familiar to me. I mentioned it to Fidelma. But it was not until Buan made her final mistake that it all came together.’
‘A final mistake?’ Abbot Erc was shaking his head, perplexed. Fidelma looked appreciatively to Eadulf.
‘She was trapped into making that mistake by Eadulf.’
All eyes turned to him and he shrugged modestly.
‘All along, Sister Buan had been pretending a lack of education. She claimed not to know a word of Latin, thus trying to assure us that she would not have had any knowledge of Cinaed’s work. Had this been so, we would have had to accept that she must have been innocent of the book destruction and that would have been a fatal flaw in our argument. However, as the daughter of a chieftain, raised by a chieftain, she would naturally have learnt Latin.’
Abbot Erc was still puzzled.
‘But I can vouch that she was no scholar. She had neither Latin nor Greek.’
‘No, she pretended not to, but made a fatal slip,’ contradicted Eadulf. ‘We were talking and I commented dura lex sed lex — the law is hard, but it is the law. And she turned and agreed with me without my needing to translate. And I knew then that she had been lying about her knowledge. Everything fell into place and I finally understood the significance of her resemblance to Uaman.’
Sister Fidelma nodded appreciatively.
‘Thanks to Eadulf, that was the point when the evidence tied into the knot that sealed Buan’s fate.’
‘She was ambitious to the point of blind evil,’ Abbot Erc sighed deeply. ‘What profit a person, if they gain the whole world, and lose their own soul?’
Fidelma nodded agreement at his quotation from scripture.
‘Publilius Syrus said…’ She paused, glanced to where Eadulf was waiting with a stoic expression for yet another of her many quotations
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Master of Souls sf-16 Page 35