A MASS FOR THE DEAD

by Susan McDuffie

  * * * * *

  We woke early, too early, I thought, groaning, as we washed and dressed hurriedly in the growing morning light. The cold water helped to wake me, and the hot oatcake with honey and butter did as well. The Beaton served no ale with breakfast, just water, but the thirst was on me after last night’s feast and I found that it refreshed me. Seamus had more trouble rousing himself. The strong drink of the night before had gotten the better of him, unused to it as he was. He looked as pale as the sand on the Strand, and only shook his head when the Beaton’s daughter offered him a bannock.

  “He’s taken too much drink,” I said to her.

  “Fine I can see that,” she replied with a little edge to her voice. She went over to the hearth and I watched her uncork some vials and pour some liquid, along with some hot water, in a mazer. She muttered a charm over it while she stirred what was in the cup.

  She had a graceful way of moving that was easy to watch, and her long yellow braids hung down as she bent over the fire. I guessed her age to be about twenty, not that much younger than myself. “Here,” she said, returning to where we sat, “tell your friend to drink this.” She looked at me critically. “And I think you could be using a sip or two of it as well.”

  “Thank you,” I muttered, sounding churlish even to myself.

  I handed the cup to Seamus, who downed most of it, making a mouth at the taste of it. He handed it back to me, and I drank the last few swallows. It tasted bitter and dark, but something in it did me some good. After a minute I was noticing I felt more alert, and that Seamus did not look so green and actually was eating his oatcakes.

  At this point the Beaton entered the house, looking wide-awake for all the early hour.

  “Let’s be away, then,” he commanded, and we gathered our belongings and made to leave. I was surprised to see his daughter also put on her brat, blue it was, I remember, and striped with green, and then gather some things together in a satchel

  “Is she coming with us?” I demanded. She shot me a look for she had heard me. Her eyes were blue, like her father’s.

  “Aye, and whyever not? We’ve no patients to see to here, and Mariota has a good eye, and a good mind as well. She serves as my assistant,” explained her father, and we left the house.

  We met Eachann and Gillecolm at the causeway, along with last night’s harper, wanting a ride to Colonsay. Gillecolm had a fine smile on his face but said little of the reason for it. Yesterday’s drizzle had blown away with the night and the sky was crisp blue with fine tendrils of clouds caressing it. The sweet scent of the wild flowers filled my nose and for a moment, as Mariota passed, I smelled a sweeter scent, of elderflower mixed with something else I could not place.

  Chapter 3

  The Beaton replaced the sheet covering my father’s battered face. I looked at him demandingly, but his eyes gave no clue to what the body had told him. Some herbs burning in a brazier, there in the stone room off the infirmary, filled the air with a sharp smoky fragrance. They almost covered the scent of decay, which emanated like incense from the body on the plank table, while light from the open doorway and a window high in the wall had picked out the details of my father’s injuries rather more clearly than I would have liked.

  “And what were you seeing?” I finally asked the doctor.

  “The blow to his head was not what killed him,” the Beaton replied.

  “No?” I was puzzled. I had assumed that great blow to the back of the head had been my father’s death stroke. “What was it then?”

  Before he could answer his daughter interrupted.

  “Did you no see the fine line on his throat? He was strangled with something.”

  The Beaton again removed the sheet, the better to show me the mark. I saw it again, a faint impression around the neck, partially obscured by the pecking of the gulls and the marks of abrasions and blows. I had not understood the meaning of that sign the first time I had viewed my father’s corpse, as shocking as the sight of it all had been to me.

  The Beaton gently held open the lid of the one of my father’s eyes that the gulls had not pecked at.

  “Are you seeing those tiny flecks of blood in the whites of his eyes? And these here, on his face?” the Beaton asked me. “I have seen that before, when men are strangled. The humors explode in the small vessels.”

  I swallowed.

  “And then the bluish tinge to the face. That also is a sign of strangulation. The bloody humors do not return to the heart in these cases, but rest in the head.”

  “What do you think made the mark?” I asked after a moment. “What did they use to kill him?”

  “A fishing line perhaps. A bowstring? Any cord would have done it,” replied the Beaton to my question. “They stunned him, first, and then wrapped the line about his neck. But they did not leave the line around his neck for long. That is why, perhaps, you did not recognize what it meant at the first. It is much deeper when a man dies from hanging.”

  He looked at me. “It would have been quick,” he said. “Your father did not suffer for long.”

  “But then why choke him, as well, with the sand?” asked Mariota, with what I thought a decidedly unfeminine interest in the gruesome subject. “The man would have been dead enough by then, what with the blow to his head and all that.”

  I shuddered, and must have gone pale. She saw me.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized after a minute, in a more subdued voice. “It’s your father we’re speaking of.”

  I muttered something, I cannot remember what exactly. The Beaton replaced the linen again over my father’s corpse, and I told Brother Aidan it could now be readied for the burial mass.

  We prepared to leave. It was time for me to be about my business, or rather the MacDonald’s and Gillespic’s business, which had in some confused way become mine. I had to find my father’s murderer.

  I left the Beaton and his out-spoken daughter at the Priory; the bìrlinn would take them on to Scalasaig, as they were to stay a day or so with my uncle at Dun Evin. We would put the story out that they were here to see to any island folk needing a physician, but I felt sure their part in my own inquiries would quickly become common knowledge on Colonsay.

  For myself, I set out to find Alasdair Beag.

  True to his name, Alasdair Beag was not a tall man, bent short and wizened. He lived alone in a hut on Oronsay close to the Strand, and fished for oysters, clams, limpets and whelks. Most went to the Canons, but he sold a few to the masons at their village on Oronsay as well. The story was that he had once been a lay servant at the Priory, but many years ago had moved to his solitary hut hidden among the rocks, where he watched the tides come and go and searched for his shellfish. As he had been the one to find my father’s body, it seemed the logical place to start.

  I found him sitting outside his small stone hut mending a net.

  “Oh, and it is Muirteach,” he greeted me. “I was thinking I would be seeing you. The Canons themselves were telling me the MacPhee had been sending you to Finlaggan.”

  So there was no need to explain myself.

  “Well, so, you were finding my father, were you Alasdair?”

  The old man squinted up at me, and answered matter of factly. “Yes, just as the sky was getting light it was that I found him. The tide had been in, but was going out when I found him lying there.”

  “And his hand touching the great cross there?”

  “Indeed.” He bent and worked on his net a minute. “But I am thinking that the water had moved him a bit. Perhaps he did not touch it as he died.”

  “And were you seeing anything else? A cord there, like a fishing line, or the rock he’d been struck with?”

  The old man thought a minute. “Aye,” he said, considering. “There was a rock there, by him. A big one that the tide could not be moving so easily. And there are not so many rocks there in the middle of the Strand, so perhaps that is what they used for striking him.”

  I nodded in agreement. “I will l
ook for the rock. Is it still there?”

  “I am thinking it will be there. But the water will have washed it clean. So His Lordship himself is wanting you to find the killer?”

  I said that that was true and Alasdair beamed. Then nothing would do but that I tell him something of His Lordship’s castle at Finlaggan. The old man listened, rapt. “Well now, that is a fine thing indeed I am thinking, you working for His Lordship,” he finally pronounced. “I was not thinking you would ever amount to that much.”

  It did not seem so fine a thing to me. I wished that the whole affair was over and done with, and myself back in my house at Scalasaig. “You were not seeing anyone unusual that night?” I asked. “Or hearing anything?”

  The old man shook his head. “No, just that Tormod, from the masons’ village. He is always down by the Strand, after his work is done. He will be taking that old coracle, if the tide is in, or walking if the water is out, over to the coast. I am guessing that Tormod is a fine one for the fishing. So he was there, earlier that evening. I am certain it was him, for I recognized that old plaid cloak he is always wearing, green and brown it is, with a pattern of wide stripes. But that was before the Prior would have gone to Sheena’s.”

  “Did you see Tormod come back that evening?”

  “I did not see him, Muirteach, but I ate early and fell asleep. My back pained me that day.”

  “And my father? Did you see him?”

  “I was asleep, as I just told you Muirteach. But he would have gone to her after Compline. He would stay with her, and then return to the Priory by Matins. That was his way.”

  My father had installed his mistress, Sheena, in a fine hut across the strand, near Port `a Chapuill on Colonsay. It was far enough away from the Priory not to cause much comment but close enough that he could see her when time permitted with no great bother. A practical man, my father had been.

  I walked the track leading to the strand, glad for the chance to be alone. The tide was out, and little rivulets of water ran among the sands and seaweed that divided Oronsay from Colonsay. I started across, the sands cold on my bare feet, and passed the large cross, where my father had died. It stood closer to the Colonsay shore, water lines marking its carved stone surface. A bit of seaweed dangled forlornly from one of the arms and of a sudden I felt a lump in my throat. I swallowed it and looked around, seeking the rock Alasdair had spoken of.

  There, close by, lay the large black stone, sharp and heavy enough to have been used as a weapon. Alasdair had not lied, the water of the tides had washed it clean and I saw nothing on its wet and glistening surface that told me who had wielded it on my father. But I took it out of the sand and with me to the shore.

  When I reached the shore I hid the rock in a place I could find again, and walked the short distance over the rocks towards Sheena’s hut.

  Sheena had been my father’s mistress for some years, an island girl, with family and brothers here as well. We knew each other slightly, although I avoided her as much as I could, for her connection to my father, and Sheena kept herself to herself. Her parents had died some years ago, but her brothers I knew somewhat better, from drinking with them, mostly. Angus and Alasdair, quick to anger they were and they might well have killed Crispinus at some imagined slight to their sister. And, knowing my father, I had no doubt that there had been many such slights, not all imagined.

  Sheena’s hut sat tucked in amongst some hills overlooking the sand, not a prepossessing location I thought at first, but as I neared the place and turned to look out towards Islay and Jura, I saw the place had a fine enough view for all that. The sound of a baby wailing fretfully from inside carried outside, and I saw two young children, my half-brother and sister, no less, playing like dirty puppies among the black rocks. They stopped and stared at me as I approached their doorway.

  “Maire, come here,” called their mother from inside.

  “But ma, there’s a man come—” interjected the boy.

  At this Sheena emerged, blinking a little in the daylight after the dark of the hut’s interior, carrying her baby, still crying, on her hip. She was a handsome enough woman, with a fine well-rounded figure, somewhat worn now with childbearing and child tending. Sheena was tall, and her reddish-gold hair caught the sunlight, glinting like bronze. Her clothing looked nothing too fine, and nothing too neat as well this morning, a simple kirtle, of greenish wool, and a woolen mantle, woven in plaid design, thrown on against the wind.

  It seemed my fine father had done little to ease the life of his hand-fasted wife. Her skin was tan from being outside, but I could see under the tan a darker bruise on one cheek. Her blue eyes looked swollen and red, and I guessed she herself had been crying along with the bairn.

  “Oh, it is yourself,” she said, motioning me to sit on the low rock wall which surrounded the cottage. “Would you be wanting a drink, then?”

  I nodded.

  “Here, watch him for me. Mind he does not get into the muck heap.” And with that she deposited her youngest child at my feet and re-entered her cottage.

  I looked at my youngest half-brother, whose nose ran as he looked back at me. He opened his mouth and I feared he was about to wail again. Sean and Maire, surveying me silently, from a far corner of the yard, offered no help. The babe drew in a deep breath, gathering his wind, as it were, for his battle cry, and I grew desperate and gestured to his sister across the yard.

  “Maire, that is your name, is it not? He is about to cry again. Will you no tend him? It’s little I know of wee bairns, and I must speak with your mother.”

  The girl nodded solemnly and came closer, and I breathed a sigh of relief as the little one turned his head to watch his sister.

  “Mother says you are our brother,” the lass asked, looking at me with gray eyes, which looked suspiciously like my own. “Is that true?”

  “Aye,” I said, flushing uncomfortably under her direct stare. “It is true, for we have the same father.”

  “And he is dead now,” she said in a curiously flat tone, as she bent and wiped off the snot running from her brother’s nose with her hand.

  At this point Sheena re-emerged from the hut, her plaid somewhat more tidily wrapped around her, and pinned with a large ring brooch of silver, richly incised with a design of soaring birds and studded with smoky crystal. I guessed the pin must have been a gift from my father. Her hair was braided neatly and she carried a wooden mether full of ale.

  Sure, it was easy enough to see what it was that had drawn my father to her. The glance she gave me as she handed me the ale had an odd measuring look to it, with a challenge in it that made me uncomfortable, even as I had to admit it somewhat attracted me.

  “So you have heard,” I said, as I took a long swallow of the drink she offered, despite the sour taste of the ale, then handed the cup back to her. I watched her as she drank deeply, gulping down the ale before she sat down on the wall nearby and answered me.

  “Aye, I‘ve heard. My brother came with the news yesterday morning.”

  “Angus, or Alasdair?”

  “Neither. Columbanus.”

  “Columbanus?” I must have looked as confused as I felt.

  Her laughter had a mocking tone to it. “You did not know.”

  I shook my head, feeling shamed by her amusement.

  “Brother Columbanus, you would know him by,” she continued. “Did you not know he was my brother also? He was sent to the Priory years ago, as a boy. That one,” she nodded towards the baby, “is named for him. He brought the news yesterday, mid-morning it was when he came here and told me of it.”

  I felt foolish, then, for not knowing that, but Columbanus had always been at the Priory, and it had never occurred to me to ask about his family, or wonder about it. He had danced perpetual attendance on my father, and that fact alone had made me avoid him the years I had lived there.

  “And you have not seen him?”

  “Who? Columbanus? Was I not just saying he was here?”

  “No.
Crispinus. You have not seen the body?”

  “How can I go there? You of all people should know I cannot go.” Her voice held a sharpness in it, and she shuddered. “Nor do I wish to, perhaps.”

  It was true. The Prior’s mistress could not go to the Priory to see the body of her lover lying in state, prayed over by all the canons as a holy man, despite the whole island knowing of the relationship.

  “And are you knowing the rest of it?” I asked.

  “What? Oh, that you are to find the killer. Aye, I was hearing that as well.”

  “From Columbanus?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and wrapped her plaid around herself more tightly against the wind. “Perhaps.” She stood, turned away from me, and picked up the baby, who was crawling toward the midden. “Well, I know nothing to help you.”

  “You were not seeing him that night? The night he died?”

  “Oh, he came. After Compline, as was his habit. But he left here, hale and well alive, long before Matins.”

  “And was he giving you that bruise on your cheek?”

  She turned back towards me suddenly, gesturing towards her cheek. “Och, this? What if he was? For all that, I did not kill him.”

  “What of your brothers?”

  “Who? Columbanus?” She laughed again, a bitter sound in the wind. “Or Angus and Alasdair?”

  “Any of them.”

  “Angus and Alasdair were hunting on Jura. They were gone all the day before, and that night, and were not coming back until the afternoon, yesterday. They caught a fine deer,” she added, her chin jutting out a bit in defiance. “They were just giving me some of the venison. Stop by their place and ask them. Perhaps they’ll feed you with it.”