An Unjust Judge

by Cora Harrison

  ‘The thing is, Turlough, the crime has been committed in Corcomroe and I am Brehon of the Burren. I have no jurisdiction here.’

  ‘Yes, of course, you have,’ roared Turlough. ‘Who is it that says you haven’t? Tell me who said that and I’ll have a quiet word in his ear.’

  ‘No one has said it, but this needs to be officially done. Could your steward ride to the blacksmith and to the mill and perhaps first of all to the Fisher Street alehouse? Look, I’ve written out something.’ She delved in the satchel hanging by the horse’s side and pulled out the piece of parchment, handed it to Turlough to read and then pulled out a quill and an ink pot, passing these to Art. ‘Unscrew the lid, Art, and hold it steady for the king,’ she directed and then looked back at Turlough. To her annoyance, he was not reading her carefully phrased lines, but was gazing down the road.

  ‘Was that Boetius?’ he enquired, adding, ‘Oh, well, I suppose that you can keep an eye on him. He’s probably more scared of you than he is of me. Anyway, I’ll leave you a few men.’ And then, accepting the pen from Art, he scrawled his name at the bottom of the page and handed it over to his steward.

  ‘You should read things before you sign.’ Mara felt her face relax into a smile. Turlough had a knack of making everything seem very simple.

  ‘You’re better at all those legal terms than I am. Here, Murty, take this thing off down to the alehouse, read it to them and then get someone to tell you where to find the nearest blacksmith and mill and after that then you can follow us. Pick out a few men and quarter them at the alehouse and then the Brehon can find them whenever she needs them.’ He looked up at Mara and nodded his head. ‘My uncle, the Gilladuff, God have mercy on his soul, taught me that trick,’ he said, without lowering his voice. ‘He reckoned that the men would always be looking for an alehouse if you quartered them anywhere else, but once they were there just beside the beer barrels, well, they just stayed put.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ said Mara gravely and was glad to see the grin on Art’s face. He had been looking rather miserable since term started. He was missing his foster brother, her son Cormac. They had been so close since the time that they were both tiny babies and now Art was left without a brother and a best friend.

  ‘You go on now,’ she said to her husband. ‘I won’t delay you any longer.’ She leaned down in her saddle and kissed him. She had in the past felt slightly embarrassed about doing that in front of his men, but she knew that it hurt him if she allowed him to go with just a formal farewell. He was a man who never considered his dignity, but was, nevertheless, a natural ruler and one who had brought peace to the three kingdoms of Thomond, Corcomroe and Burren.

  ‘I’ll come and tell you how this works out,’ she promised, ‘and, of course, then you’ll be coming across to us for the Samhain celebrations.’ She added that knowing how much he minded parting from her and how he wished that she could just be a wife to him. She waited while the cohort turned around and waved her farewell and then turned her horse back towards the sea, beckoning to the steward and to the six men to follow.

  ‘I think,’ she said in loud clear tones to them as they approached the spot where Domhnall waited, ‘I think that we’ll ask Boetius MacClancy, the nephew of the former Brehon of Corcomroe to accompany us to the alehouse and then you can take him on to the blacksmith and to the mill. He will be a witness to the king’s proclamation. I need to get back to the physician and give directions about the body.’

  Fisher Street was a small settlement of fishermen’s cottages and an alehouse. It was quite near to Crab Island and to the cliff where the body was found. It was only a few minutes’ ride away and was the obvious place to make a proclamation. However, the alehouse itself was of interest to Mara. After the judgement day many people would have gone back there for an evening’s drinking and discussion of the controversial verdicts. It may also, she thought, be the place where Boetius was lodging. When he arrived back from London, he would have found that Fergus’s previous home was then in the hands of the newly appointed Brehon and Fergus himself was lodged in a small house by the cliffs and was in the care of a married couple. The most likely place for Boetius to go would have been the alehouse at Fisher Street.

  In the meantime, she thought, as they rode down the hill towards the portly figure of Boetius, she was going to enjoy the look on his face when he saw her escort. She still felt a shiver of disgust and almost of fear when she saw him and she told herself that she must overcome this. The events of ten years ago must be buried and forgotten. For now he was just a man with a possible connection to the murder case she was about to investigate.

  ‘Come with us, Boetius,’ she said when they arrived at the place where he and Domhnall waited. With an effort she kept her voice cool and neutral. ‘Let’s ride quickly. The physician is waiting for me and I have much to do in order to solve this crime and to find the person who was responsible for this terrible death.’

  The innkeeper was alone when they arrived at the alehouse. He listened, gravely nodding, to the words read out by the steward.

  ‘Not a man who was greatly liked,’ he said to Mara when the proclamation had been read and the steward was scrolling the vellum.

  ‘You would have heard talk last night,’ prompted Mara. The small room was filled with the scent of the ale. There had been great drinking on the previous evening, she reckoned.

  He shrugged. ‘Wild talk. I don’t take too much notice. It’s the froth on the beer, my poor wife, God have mercy on her, used to say that.’

  ‘A wise woman,’ murmured Mara.

  ‘She was that. Let them talk, she used to say. Let them talk and drink and go out to … well, you know, she used to just say this to me, private-like, but she used say, They’ll piss the bitterness away and then they’ll all be best of friends. That’s what she used to say.’

  ‘But last night,’ said Mara suppressing a smile as she noticed a shocked look on Art’s face, ‘but last night the one that they were so bitter against, well, he wasn’t here, was he?’

  ‘Just as well,’ said the innkeeper. He cast a curious glance at Boetius. There was a measure of speculation in it, noted Mara, but thought she would question him in private later on. In the meantime, she needed to get back to Nuala and to allow the steward, his men and Boetius to move on to the blacksmith and to the mill.

  ‘You had a full house, last night, then,’ she said as she moved towards the door. He sprang to open it for her.

  ‘Twenty, I counted at one stage.’ He had a pleased look on his face. Judgement days were good for business. ‘Including the gentleman who is staying here. At least I saw him a few times at the back of the room, but you know what it’s like,’ he added lowering his voice, ‘I was that busy that I couldn’t have eyes in the back of my head. Ah, but I miss my old lady,’ he said raising his voice. ‘It’s she that could tell you everything that was going on.’ And with that he bowed respectfully and she heard him asking Boetius what time he would be back for his dinner.

  ‘Wish we had her here, his old lady. We could do with someone who was keeping an eye on who was inside and who went out,’ muttered Mara as Domhnall held her horse and helped her to mount.

  ‘Twenty or more people,’ said Domhnall thoughtfully. ‘And that place would be quite dim by late afternoon. There was quite a wind got up yesterday by midday. He’s just got the one small window and that would be shuttered. And only three candles in the whole place. I had a good look around when he said that there were twenty people there. It would be hard to be sure how many people, wouldn’t it? They’d be people coming and going. Having a drink and leaving or else staying longer and going outside, as he put it. Plenty of bushes behind the place. No one would know, would they, what was going on?’

  ‘It must have been light, though, for the man to be tied up and gagged, wouldn’t you think?’ Art moved his pony up to ride on Mara’s left side.

  ‘It’s a different matter, though isn’t it, if you were on top of the cliff
, just near the sea? You’d get the last few rays of sun from the north-west up there. Inside a small alehouse, with that low roof and a shuttered window crowded with people, it would be dark long before. And those candles would have flickered. And the door would have been opening and closing. Even if the landlord counted twenty people at one stage, there is nothing to say that it would have been the same twenty fifteen minutes later.’

  Five

  Cáin Adomndáin

  (The Law of Adomndán)

  Duinetháide (secret killing) is a crime as serious as causing another’s death by magic spells.

  Nuala had not wasted her time while they were absent. Ulan, her apprentice, was writing industriously as Nuala moved around the body of the dead man, calling out her observations from time to time. She gave an irritated nod when Mara told her that officially she was now in charge of the case and that she appointed Nuala as physician with powers to examine the body. Nuala went ahead with her curt observations while Mara waited patiently.

  ‘You can take him back now, Ulan,’ she said eventually. ‘Get him onto the marble slab ready for the autopsy if you arrive before me.’

  ‘One thing for you to be going on with, Mara,’ she said when Ulan had gone ahead, driving the cart. ‘I am fairly sure that the man was alive when he was tied up and put into the lobster pot.’

  ‘Yes, I thought so,’ said Mara.

  ‘I’m talking about scientific proof, not guesses.’ Nuala swung herself onto her horse with an ease that Mara envied. What it would be to be twenty years younger, she thought as Nuala went on: ‘I’ve examined the scratches and abrasions on the hands and they are very consistent with being done before death. And, although it’s not conclusive, there is heavy bruising to the upper arms which possibly occurred when the man was held while his wrists were tied. Not utterly conclusive,’ said Nuala in her lecturing voice, ‘but in my experience, bruising that occurs after death, is usually at the lowest part of the body. In this case, there are bruises around the knees and the calves and these are probably post-mortem. The ones on the upper arms are probably pre-mortem.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mara humbly.

  Nuala’s grin flashed out. ‘Don’t try to soft-soap me, Mara. You always get your own way in the end and you always manage to get everyone to work for you. I hope you find the man who did this, though. It was a very ugly way to kill anyone.’

  ‘What did you make of that? I mean the possibility that the man was alive when he was placed inside the lobster basket,’ asked Domhnall as Nuala rode off.

  ‘I’m not surprised. I always thought the gag was meaningless if the man was already dead. Now I think that we should go back to the innkeeper and question him again. I didn’t want to say much in front of Boetius, but I would like to try him with a few names, including that of Boetius himself.’ Mara stared around the hillside and then back up at the Brehon’s house at Knockfinn. What had happened on the previous evening? According to Niall’s story a group of men, seen only from the back, had been shooting on the Brehon’s lands. Gaibrial O’Doran had jumped up and hurried out, to read the law to them, his apprentice had said.

  ‘Where’s Niall?’ she asked. She had not noticed his absence before.

  Domhnall looked all around. ‘The pony is still here, tied up over there,’ he said with a frown.

  ‘Wretched child. As though I haven’t enough to do.’ Mara stared towards the cliffs with a worried frown. The waves still crashed against the rocks of the inlet and a long pillar of spume still rose into the air looking quite like one of those fountains in the books that her father had brought back from Italy.

  And then she saw him. His head appeared first and then his shoulders rose above the jagged edge of the cliff.

  ‘Niall,’ she called authoritatively and he hurried across to her. He was looking better, she thought. There was a tinge of colour in his cheeks and his eyes were brighter.

  ‘There’s a pathway leading down there,’ he said breathlessly, ‘not to the beach, but it leads into a sort of cave. You can see light coming through it. The walls are all full of little pools and there are pieces of seaweed lying around on the rocks. The sea must come quite far in at high tide. The seaweed is fresh and it’s wet, soaking wet. That means that someone could have murdered him and escaped that way, perhaps in a boat.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mara. She did not think it likely, but it was good to see Niall being active rather than standing around with a sick look on his face. ‘Now tell me about yesterday evening, Niall, the time when your master saw the men hunting birds and went out after them.’

  ‘There were five of them,’ repeated Niall.

  ‘Did you see their faces?’

  ‘They had hoods over them.’ Niall had a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘Cloaks?’

  ‘No, just jerkins, but hoods, I think, something covering their heads, I think.’

  Mara gave him a moment. The boy seemed to be thinking hard. Eventually he spoke.

  ‘Do you know, I think, they were like the mummers’ hoods. Do you have mummers, here? We had them in Ossory. Ríanne and I went to see them once, at Bealtaine, before she was married, I mean.’

  ‘So you knew Ríanne before she was married.’

  Mara made her voice sound casual, but the boy bit his lip. ‘I should have said that the household went. She’s the daughter of O’Kennedy.’

  And one of the MacEgans was Brehon to the Kennedy family and there was a law school somewhere on their lands, thought Mara. There was a good chance that Niall and Ríanne had grown up together and knew each other very well. But why try to keep it a secret? What had Niall to hide? Still, the important thing at the moment was the question of those men who went hunting across the Brehon’s land, deliberately in full sight of the Brehon’s house, it seemed, just on the evening after the unpopular and unjust sentences at the morning’s judgement day. Was it a way of drawing him out of doors?

  ‘Mummers’ hoods,’ she said aloud. ‘Yes, I’ve seen them. Some young men in the Burren were wearing them at the Samhain celebrations just over a year ago.’ She did not say that she had immediately ordered them to remove the disguise. These boys, she had thought at the time, would be drinking fairly heavily as was the custom and what with the drink and the excitement of the bonfire and the talk of the souls of the dead and wild stories about the emergence of the old gods from the caves, Mara had instantly decided that wearing those hoods over face and head would have emboldened the young men to break the law in various ways and had confiscated them, politely inviting the wearers to collect them from the law school on the following day. Fergus, she had heard afterwards, had allowed them to be worn in his kingdom and there had been lots of complaints afterwards. It was very likely that many of those mummers’ hoods had remained in this locality, tucked into the bottom of chests, or stuffed to the back of the shelves. Those that Mara had collected, she suddenly remembered, were still at the back of her cupboard in the schoolhouse. Still, that would have nothing to do with the present case.

  ‘But you thought, Niall, that one of them might be Peadar, the man who was accused of neglecting his father; that’s correct, isn’t it? You did think that you might have recognized him, didn’t you?’

  Niall looked uncomfortable and unsure, so she added, ‘What made you think that one of them was Peadar? Were you at the door?’

  ‘No, at the window,’ he said. ‘I might have been mistaken. You could ask Ríanne. She was there, too.’

  ‘Let’s go back and look at the lands from the window,’ said Mara. ‘Where were the hunters when you saw them?’

  ‘Just about where we are standing now, I’d say.’ Niall looked back up at the Brehon’s house and then down towards the sea. He looked uncertainly from Mara’s face to Domhnall’s and then fell back to walk beside Art as they all climbed up the steep slope, leaving their horses tied to the lone tree.

  The Brehon’s house was perched on a height, overlooking the sea. A lovely place to live and to
work in, Mara often thought, though her recent visits had been clouded with sadness as she realized how much Fergus’s memory was deteriorating. He retained his power of judgement and his knowledge of the law but he was, he had to be made to understand, unfit for the task of ruling the portion of Corcomroe that had been assigned to him. Wrongdoers and their families soon got to know that Fergus forgot a judgement almost as soon as he had uttered it and this led to trouble between neighbours and clans. Eventually, Turlough, though full of compassion for the old man, had acted decisively, finding a new home for Fergus, a couple to look after him, and a man to replace him all in the space of a few days.

  And now that man was dead.

  Little had been changed within the house. Of course, Gaibrial O’Doran had only lived there for just a few days. Nevertheless, he had a wife with him and Mara would have expected that Ríanne would have brought some of her own wall hangings, some articles of furniture, some new candlesticks to replace the tarnished pewter of the ones left behind by Fergus. The same unsteady table made from oak occupied the centre of the paved floor, the wall facing the window was still covered with the almost completely faded stitched picture of a lady on a bench outside a window. It had been old over forty years ago when she was a girl, Mara reflected. Fergus had bought it from a Spanish ship in Galway. Distressingly, in his last years of occupation of this room he had insisted on telling her that story again and again, with the very same words, the very same gestures, even a laugh at the very same place in his tale and now she averted her eyes from the wall hanging.