An Unjust Judge

by Cora Harrison

  ‘England, Ireland. It’s going to be like England and Wales, you know. After all the Welsh struggled for a while, but now most Welshmen count themselves as English, the civilised ones, anyway. You, my dear Mara, I beg your pardon, my dear Brehon, could almost pass for an Englishwoman with a few alterations in dress and perhaps a hood and veil, for modesty’s sake. I have heard you speak in English to my friend and patron and I can assure you that you do it very well. I remember—’

  ‘I think it would be a grave mistake on your part, Boetius, to remind me, or to remind the king of the time when you brought that man, Stephen Gardiner, into Ireland. Let him never show his face here again. And I can tell you this, Boetius,’ said Mara, pleased to hear how firm and dispassionate her voice was sounding. She allowed a pause to intervene, waited until he had turned an inquiring face towards her and then repeated, ‘I can tell you this, that if it turns out that you have had anything to do with this matter, then I shall immediately request the king to banish you from his three kingdoms and to make it a lifelong banishment this time.’

  She gave him a moment to digest this and then she said affably, ‘If you are at a loose end, why not accompany us up to the Pooka Road. Fergus, your uncle, was telling us that he was up there, on that moonlit night when Brehon Gaibrial O’Doran was murdered.’

  He gave a start. She could have sworn that. And there was a short, but a very noticeable silence before he said, in a voice which he strove to keep even, ‘I don’t suppose that his testimony is too reliable.’

  ‘All testimony is of interest to me,’ said Mara. ‘Even a dumb animal can sometimes give testimony. I remember a case where I convicted a man of stealing a cow on the evidence of a dog. The dog,’ she explained, ‘did not bark. He was a savage guard dog, half-wolf and he barked at everyone, all except at his owner and at the man who bred him and that, of course, identified the thief.’

  ‘You are trying to divert me,’ he said with his unpleasant smile. ‘We were talking about Fergus. There is no way that his testimony can be worth anything.’

  ‘As I explained to you, earlier, Boetius, Fergus has not been assessed by any court and therefore I will look at any testimony from him just as I would look at testimony from, say yourself. I would assess the words, assess the person who spoke the words, look for corroboration and in the end, I would use my judgement. And now, could I ask you to join the singers ahead. My scholar is just coming and I wish to have a private word with him.’

  He was not best pleased, but he moved on and caught up with Fergus who hailed him with great delight and presented him as his nephew to Donal. Mara stayed where she was, waiting for Cian to catch up with her. Out here, in the open air, voices carried easily and the further she was away from Boetius the better. She could see the jutting beard as he looked over his shoulder from time to time, but Donal, probably dreading a repetition of accusations, started singing the song again, urging Boetius to sing with him, this time repeating each line three times in the traditional way and Fergus joined in with him.

  ‘Did you see her?’ asked Mara quietly as Cian slowed to a stop beside her.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he said. ‘And yes, Brehon MacClancy was out that night. And he was where he said he was. So he could have seen Donal. Gobnait sent her husband out after him. And Fergus was perched on one of those boulders. Gobnait said, “Himself got the fright of his life when he saw him up there, just for all the world like one of the Pooka come back to the earth again.”’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara. There was no doubt that Fergus had the slightly strange, fey look of a denizen of the otherworld. It was getting near to the season of Samhain, that time when spirits from the underworld passed readily into this one. There were always a lot of superstitious fears and horrors being aired at Samhain. She made up her mind to have a word with Gobnait and to impress upon her that Fergus must be kept indoors on that night. If he was seen up there on the Pooka Road or emerging from one of the many caves around the cliffs, then there might be trouble with some drunken young people. She nodded her thanks to Cian and moved quickly to catch up with the singers.

  Fergus, she noticed, now seemed to be on great terms with Donal, patting him on the back, congratulating him on his singing, telling him what a good kind lad he was, someone who would not hurt a fly.

  ‘No, he wouldn’t!’ Fergus turned to Mara, his face puzzled and upset all of a sudden. ‘That boy wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ he said, pointing to Donal, who had taken out a small wooden pipe from his pouch and who was blowing it energetically, stamping the time with his boots on the limestone flags of the roadway. ‘No,’ repeated Fergus with the air of one who had made a great discovery, ‘that boy wouldn’t hurt a … wouldn’t hurt one of those things … you know those things that …’ He made a flying motion with one hand, looked dubiously at Cian and muttered something to him and then went on ahead of them.

  ‘What did he say?’ Mara asked the question in a low voice, though she doubted whether Fergus would take any notice.

  ‘Well, he was just raving, saying, “But I saw the knife. I saw it cut through the man’s throat …” I don’t suppose he knows what he is saying or whether he could really remember even if he did see something.’ Cian’s voice had a compassionate note in it. Mara nodded at him and then moved up to join Fergus.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Fergus,’ she said reassuringly. ‘You are retired now, aren’t you? Just leave it to me, won’t you?’

  Fergus looked at her with a puzzled air, and then his face lit up.

  ‘Boetius MacClancy, that’s the man that I saw,’ he said triumphantly and Donal took the pipe from his mouth and stared incredulously from one man to the other. ‘That was the man that I saw that night. He had a knife in his hand. It was bright in the moonlight.’

  Mara sighed. There was not the slightest resemblance between Donal the songwriter and Boetius the lawyer. Donal was probably no more than about nineteen years old, slightly built, very slim, not tall, with dark hair worn quite long and the merest beginnings of a moustache. Boetius must now be in his middle thirties, heavily built, a great mountain of a man with red hair and a red beard, cut like a short spade in the English fashion. His clothes, also, were different. He was dressed in a doublet and hose, wearing the colours of scarlet and green while Donal wore the usual cream-coloured léine, made from the flax that grew locally and his cloak was woven from the grey wool of the sheep that grazed the mountains at their backs. He looked different, he walked differently, his voice was light and musical and he spoke rapidly, quite unlike the slow, pompous delivery of Boetius. It would have been difficult to find two men less alike.

  Still the accusation had been made and they might as well go ahead and see where Fergus had been perched that night. And who knows, she thought, with a moment’s hope, Gobnait’s husband, she could not remember his name, but could visualize him, a quiet, sensible-looking man, who knows, but he may have seen someone on the headland or by the cliff edge. Somehow, she had a feeling that Fergus did see someone and that the sight of Donal on the cliff had resurrected that memory. He had sounded very convinced about the knife.

  The mid-autumn sun had moved into the south-western sky above the sea by the time that they climbed the steep slope leading up to the Pooka Road. A bar of thick, jagged black cloud ruled a line across the setting sun, concealing half of it but allowing a vaporous orange haze to escape below and to light up the sea so that water and sky seemed to merge. The dry limestone pavement shone in patches of pale and darker grey and the setting sun threw black shadows to the sides of the enormous boulders making them look almost as though they were slightly raised from the ground.

  Ahead of them, Mara saw Fergus look over his shoulder a few times and then he detached himself from the others and came back to her.

  ‘I’m so glad, Brehon O’Davoren, that you have come to assist me in this secret and unlawful killing,’ he said in formal tones. ‘I must say that it is one of the most difficult cases that I have dealt with during my yea
rs here. And the fact that the murderer may be a relative of mine, well, that makes everything very much more difficult, does it not?’

  Mara watched him carefully. Did the confused old man now imagine that Donal was a son or nephew? But then she followed the direction of his eyes and saw that they were fixed on the podgy figure of Boetius. She looked back at Fergus and saw him frown.

  ‘He’s putting on a lot of weight, isn’t he? I don’t think that he used to be like that.’ His tone was querulous and he twisted his hands before him in an uneasy fashion, scowling at his nephew in a puzzled fashion.

  Mara considered what to reply. Her memory of Boetius on the first day when she had seen him, over thirteen years ago, on the day when her son Cormac was born, was that even then he was quite an overweight individual. He had just graduated from law school, she remembered, so was a young man then. Perhaps he had been slimmer in his boyhood, she thought, and then noticed that Fergus’s eyes were moving between Boetius and Donal and his brow was wrinkled into lines of indecision and doubt.

  ‘But I saw him,’ he muttered, more to himself, than to her. ‘I saw him, I saw his knife. I saw him cut the throat of the man tied up in the creel.’

  ‘Who put him there?’ asked Mara and he whirled around as though startled, as though he had forgotten that she was there.

  ‘I don’t know, Mara,’ he said. ‘I don’t know at all. I came up onto the Pooka Road and I looked out to sea and then I looked over at the water …’ He hesitated, visibly struggling to find the word, and then shook his head. ‘You know, the water …’ He jerked his hand upwards, miming the action of the waterspout. ‘And that was when I saw him.’ This time he definitely pointed towards Boetius, not to Donal who was trying to teach Cian to sing a two-part melody. They were both laughing, but Boetius hung back, looking, from time to time, over his shoulder at his uncle and at Mara.

  ‘What was he doing when you saw him?’ asked Mara.

  ‘Creeping,’ said Fergus, his voice now quite definite. ‘He was creeping along with a knife in his hand. Yes, that was what he was doing.’

  ‘Did he do anything else?’

  ‘He … you know … he …’ Fergus mimed bending over. He moved his hand from left to right as though slitting a man’s throat and then went on quite fluently, ‘I saw his knife. I’m sure that I saw that knife. I saw it move. I’m sure that I remember how I saw it flash in the sun, no in the moonlight, that’s what it was,’ he repeated with satisfaction, ‘it was moonlight. I remember now. Sometimes, my memory isn’t too good, but then it just comes back in a flash.’

  ‘What was he doing?’ asked Mara.

  ‘He was fishing, I suppose,’ said Fergus dubiously. ‘No, I’m wrong. I know that now. Fishing is not the right word. There was a killing, Mara, did you know that? Gobnait told me. There was a killing. She tried to frighten me, she tried to tell me that I can’t go out at night because there are men with knives around at night and they are looking for people to kill. She’s a kind woman but very silly.’

  Mara looked at him. Each year, during the month of August, the Brehons of Ireland met to talk over cases and to ensure that the law, as administered in one kingdom, did not deviate from the law in other kingdoms. There had been an interesting discussion about witnesses and how much reliance could be put on the evidence. She remembered that the elderly Patrick MacBerkery spoke fluently about the unreliable witness. ‘Beware the man who is too fluent, who has an answer to everything. Give me the honest man who hesitates and says from time to time: “I am not sure.” What, she wondered, would Patrick make of dear old Fergus? He was honest, but could any reliance now be put upon his evidence?

  ‘Yes,’ she said aloud. ‘Yes, you are right, Fergus. There was a killing. But don’t you worry about it. You are having a holiday now. I’ll take care of everything. The king has decided that would be the best thing. He didn’t want to trouble you on your holiday.’

  ‘God bless him,’ said Fergus and to her relief that seemed to make him quite happy. ‘Look, Mara, do you see that over there?’ He pointed to one of the boulders. ‘Look, that’s mine,’ he said. ‘I climb up there and I sit up on top of it and I can see everything. I feel very well when I do that, Mara. My head gets very clear when I sit up there.’

  ‘Cian,’ called Mara and he came back to her instantly.

  ‘May Cian climb up there?’ she asked Fergus and he nodded eagerly. ‘Cian, yes, that’s his name,’ he said with a certain childish pleasure as though his memory had identified this boy. ‘Come around the back of the stone and I’ll show you how to get up.’

  From a distance the giant boulder had looked smooth, but when they came nearer they could see that the surface was deeply fissured, cut with lines where the rainwater had explored weaknesses and had dissolved the limestone. And at one spot, there was, indeed, a line of small hollows, deep enough to hold small puddles of water in wet weather, but now in this dry spell almost seeming like roughly chipped-out steps leading up to the summit of the huge rock.

  In a moment, Cian had scrambled up, agile and sure-footed, he did it without even touching a hand to the stone, but Mara could see that even old Fergus, if he kept a hand ready to clutch some of the protruding knobs, could easily climb this boulder. So far his story seemed to be true.

  ‘I sat up there and looked at the moon. It was very peaceful and then I looked over at the water flying up from the cliff,’ said Fergus, smiling at the memory.

  ‘It was high tide, wasn’t it,’ said Mara. Never lead a witness, just encourage him to tell his story; make some innocuous remark about the weather or the surroundings. Her father used to say that and she had passed on those words of wisdom to her scholars.

  ‘And then I saw him.’ This time Fergus pointed directly at Boetius who looked back with a heavy frown on his face.

  ‘Saw me do what, you old …?’ Boetius caught back the word, but his face was purple with fury.

  ‘So it wasn’t me after all; it was the stráinseir,’ said Donal. He gave an exaggerated sigh of relief. ‘I was a bit worried for a while,’ he confided to Cian who nodded in a neutral fashion.

  ‘That man is not a stráinseir,’ said Fergus severely. ‘That is Boetius MacClancy and he is my nephew and he’s going to be the new Brehon of the kingdom. That’s right, Boetius, isn’t it?’

  Mara looked from Boetius to Donal. The young songwriter seemed to be looking quite carefree, now, and Boetius nodded vigorously.

  ‘That’s right, Fergus, now you are making sense, aren’t you?’

  ‘But you can’t be a Brehon if you have murdered a man, can you? What do you think, Mara?’ said Fergus. He sounded quite indifferent and then, leaving his stick on the ground, he climbed with great agility up to the top of the boulder and gazed across to the cliff on the other side.

  ‘I can see a fox, Mara,’ he called down. ‘A young fox, I’d say. He’s a beautiful sight with the sun on his fur.’

  In an instant, Cian, sharp-witted as ever, had scaled the boulder. ‘Yes, I see him, Brehon MacClancy. You’re right. He’s a very fine fellow, isn’t he?’

  Mara nodded as Cian came rapidly down again. Two questions in her mind had been answered: Fergus could climb that boulder and yes, he could have seen a man on the other cliff on that moonlit night. His eyesight had remained to him as his mind crumbled. The third question was, however, still unanswered: who did he see?

  ‘I think that we have to try to settle this matter now,’ she said, addressing herself to Boetius and to Donal. ‘Brehon MacClancy thinks he saw someone on that night and I am afraid that I must ask both of you to go over there with my scholar, Cian. At least, let’s get this matter sorted out and don’t worry, either of you. I do realize that Brehon MacClancy’s memory is not good so his evidence would not be accepted in a court of law. Nevertheless, I think that it is fairer to both of you not to leave this matter as it is. Cian, will you go across with Boetius and Donal? I’ll wait here and see what he says.’

  It didn’t take the
m long to cross over by the harbour and after a few minutes she saw Donal approach the area where the water burst through the cliff. He had a knife in his hand and he was making threatening gestures with it, as though mimicking the slitting of a throat. Fergus stayed perfectly still and eventually Mara said, ‘Was that what you saw that night, Fergus?’

  He looked down at her in a startled fashion. ‘No, no, not at all. What put that into your head?’

  ‘I must have made a mistake,’ said Mara apologetically. ‘You do remember seeing a man coming and the cutting of the throat, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Fergus indignantly. ‘I know my memory is not good, but that’s not the sort of thing that anyone could forget, is it?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Mara looked across. Really, even on the ground where she was standing there was a very good view of the other side. She saw the red hair and even the jutting beard of Boetius as he approached.

  ‘Was that the man, Fergus?’ she asked. And then, when he did not answer and a moment later Donal followed, she continued, ‘or that young man there?’

  Fergus looked very carefully. He spent some time, even raising a hand to shield his eyes, although the sun was behind him. After a minute, he gave a long sigh.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mara,’ he said. ‘Do you know, I just can’t remember.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Fergus.’ Mara tried to make her voice as reassuring as she could. ‘It’s of no consequence, really.’ No judge in the land could convict on the evidence of this poor man, she told herself, and yet, there was a niggling feeling that there had been a ring of truth and of conviction in his earlier statements.

  His face brightened as he took in her words.

  ‘Do you know, Mara,’ he said in a low and confidential tone, ‘I think that we should drop this matter. After all, he’s no loss, is he? He was a bad husband. That poor little girl! Did you see that terrible bruise on her cheek? He did that to her, you know. And poor Peadar! What a terrible sentence. There’s no worse fate, is there, to be banished from your kingdom. I would go mad if anyone took me away from here and shut me up where I couldn’t see the cliffs and the sea. Don’t let anyone shut me up, Mara, will you?’