‘Now what is it that you wish to look at among my poor belongings, Brehon? You are welcome to see all that I possess, with the exception of one thing. The documents of the Holy Inquisition are not open to profane eyes.’
‘Very well,’ said Mara quietly. ‘But I wish to be assured that the name of the dead man, the name of Hans Kaufmann, does not appear in them. I know Spanish, but my assistant, Fachtnan, does not. You may show him the individual pages with confidence that he will not be able to read any secrets and let him check that the name does not appear.’
She waited until Fachtnan stepped forward and then watched carefully to make sure that all of the pages were displayed in front of him.
It was a very cursory glance that was permitted to Fachtnan, but after his nod Mara felt reasonably satisfied that nothing was written down in these which dictated the murder of the German pilgrim. That, of course, did not mean that Father Miguel had not decided to do the deed after the destruction of the relic. He was a big man, much older than Hans Kaufmann, of course, but he might have been able to move the dead body. But how did he manage to strip the clothing, leaving no marks or bruises, unless, of course, the German pilgrim was unconscious after the administration of some drug?
There was nothing of great significance among the Spanish priest’s possessions – his clothes were of a poorer quality than those of the Italian, there were no jewelled crosses, but there was a big batch of prayers. Yet nothing about ‘God is not mocked’. Could he have had that prayer, and if so, could it have been placed on the brow of the corpse on the ancient tombstone?
One by one, Mara turned over his belongings and then asked to see his knife. While she was carefully inspecting this, and checking, by the light of the candle, for any sign of bloodstains, a voice from behind suddenly piped up.
‘I think that the Inquisition is abominable. Imagine burning someone to death because he did not share your view about God,’ said Cormac O’Brien, the youngest of a long line of the kings of Ireland; the voice of his ancestors – of Turlough of the Triumphs, Brian of the Battles and of Teige the Bonesplitter – gave to his childish tones a confidence which made his words ring to the rafters.
Father Miguel wheeled around, fury inflaming the skin over his cheekbones, and causing him to clench his fists. ‘What did you say?’ he growled.
‘Cormac, go and wait outside,’ said Mara coolly. ‘Wait until I come out to you.’
‘I might as well help Sorley with replacing the thatch on the roof of the round tower while I am waiting for you; that’ll be interesting, at least,’ said Cormac defiantly as he strolled to the door. To Mara’s fury she saw him exchange a wink with Finbar, who sniggered. Domhnall moved a little nearer and glared at Finbar so Mara said nothing. There was, she thought, some excuse for the twelve-year-old, who was so lacking in confidence and who now hoped to have his first real friend during his time at the Burren; for her son, Cormac, there was no excuse. He had been a member of the law school since he was five years old and knew that he had to keep silent while accompanying the Brehon on legal business.
‘What is your opinion, Father Miguel, about the death of Hans Kaufmann?’ she enquired, deciding to ignore Cormac’s intervention. He was a hard, cruel man, and to apologise to him for her son’s behaviour might make him feel that he had the upper hand.
He paused for a moment before answering; it seemed as though the question took him aback. She could see the denial, the assertion of ignorance trembling on his lips, but she kept her eyes fixed on him, and after a minute he gave her an answer which in turn took her slightly aback.
‘God is not mocked,’ he said defiantly. ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’
Mara looked at him steadily. ‘I find that an interesting quotation,’ she said sternly. ‘Were you the person who placed that quotation from St Paul on the forehead of the murdered man?’
She waited for a moment for the answer, raising an eyebrow when none was forthcoming.
‘Come now,’ she said. ‘The question is an easy one. Surely you can answer it.’
The silence in the church was intense and it seemed to last several minutes. Glancing momentarily across at her scholars, she could sense that Domhnall seemed to be holding his breath. But almost immediately her eyes returned to Father Miguel. There seemed to be a struggle going on in the dark-skinned, dark-eyed face before her. For a few moments she almost thought that he might be going to confess to the murder. But then he glared at her.
‘I must be about God’s business. The devil may still be present in that tower,’ he said wrathfully. With hands that seemed to shake, he crammed his belongings back into the satchel, picked it up, turned on his heel and left the church without answering her question. Her scholars stared after him, wide-eyed with surprise. They were so used to the deference with which everyone on the Burren treated their Brehon, so used to the fact that, as the king’s representative every courtesy was due to her, and her verdicts instantly obeyed, that this defiance by a Spanish priest shocked them.
‘Do you think that he is guilty, Brehon?’ asked Fachtnan after a moment.
Mara thought hard. ‘It is possible,’ she said. ‘What do you all think?’ she asked, looking around at her scholars.
‘What did he have to gain from the murder?’ asked Slevin.
‘Nothing, really,’ said Finbar tentatively. ‘All that money was left in Hans Kaufmann’s pouch. You’d think that the murderer would have stolen it from the satchel – though perhaps he had intended to do that, but didn’t have time to visit the church since we came so early in the morning and we discovered the body …’
His words tailed off. He was looking at Domhnall, whose face showed that he was deep in thought.
‘Well reasoned,’ praised Mara, but she also looked at Domhnall.
‘You can get satisfaction from doing something that is nothing to do with any monetary gain,’ said Domhnall slowly. ‘Like scoring a goal in hurling, or climbing to the top of a wall of rock.’ He looked, not at his fellow scholars, but at Mara, and she could see that he was considering the matter carefully. When he spoke again his voice was full of confidence. ‘I think that Father Miguel is the type that might get satisfaction from what he saw as his duty to God. He wouldn’t need to steal. He probably did believe that Hans Kaufmann was possessed by the devil and killing him might have given him … a sort of inward glow,’ he finished, and Mara burned with pride in him.
Domhnall O’Davoren, the son of her blue-eyed and fair-skinned daughter Sorcha – a girl who had no interest in the law, and who, though artistic, and talented in anything to do with the hands, had found difficulty with what Brigid called ‘book learning’. Sorcha had given birth to this boy who had inherited the brains and passion for the law from Mara’s father, his great-grandfather, the Brehon of the Burren. He had also inherited the dark eyes and black hair of the O’Davorens – not just through Mara and her father, but from his father Oisín, also an O’Davoren and a distant cousin of Mara. He had come to the law school at the age of eight, and from his first days in the schoolroom she had been sure that he would be a worthy heir to the position that his ancestors had held.
Cormac, her son by her second marriage, probably had a different future ahead of him, she thought sadly. He had plenty of brains, but so far didn’t appear to have a lawyer’s temperament.
‘You may well be right, Domhnall,’ she said aloud and looked across at Fachtnan, waiting to hear what he would say.
‘Revenge is probably only a valid motive if there is something slightly insane about a man – in my opinion, anyway,’ he said carefully. ‘The question is whether Father Miguel appears to be unbalanced.’
‘Yes!’ said Slevin fervently.
‘I agree,’ said Finbar quickly.
‘He could be unbalanced,’ said Domhnall after a short pause. ‘He talks rather wildly, doesn’t he? All this stuff about scrubbing the marks of the devil out of the round tower –
hard to clean stone at the best of times,’ he added judicially, and Mara concealed a smile. Her grandson had a practical and analytical mind and looked at all aspects of a problem.
‘Well, now,’ she said with a sigh. ‘We’d better see the prioress and her sisters. Would you fetch them, Fachtnan?’
‘The prioress is having a hysterical fit and her two sisters are tending her. They say that she is quite unable to rise from her bed.’
‘Well, I’ll have to go across to the inn then,’ said Mara. ‘Blad won’t mind.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I think, Fachtnan, I will interview the three women on my own, so it might be best if you took the scholars back to school now. The prioress may object to men and boys being present and I would not like to offend her needlessly. In any case, I feel that everyone should do some work today – I’ve promised Cumhal that we will all come to the bog tomorrow to help him load up the turf. Bring back their bags to the inn, boys, will you, and then collect your ponies and ride back to the school.’
There were broad smiles at that reminder. It was an annual treat going to the bog on the tableland between the mountains to the west of the law school. It was always an immensely sociable day where the whole neighbourhood helped each other to get the dried sods of peat loaded on to the carts. Nechtan, she had noticed when going into the church, had already drawn his turf and his men were busy unloading it from the huge, high-sided cart and wheeling the sods into the barn where they were stacked to a cottage-sized heap so that they would dry over the next four seasons.
Sorley had left his gravedigging – all was ready for the body – and he was now busy putting another layer of thatch on to the roof of the round tower. The renewing of the top layer of thatch on houses, barns, sheds, dovecotes and other farm buildings was an annual early autumn task throughout the Burren. On the whole, unless there had been damage by storm winds or by rodents, the bottom two layers of the thatch – measuring up to two feet in thickness – were left untouched, and neatly-tied bundles of freshly dried reeds were pegged on top, using hazel sticks to pin them in place, just as hairpins fastened braids to the head. When it was finished the thatch would be immensely thick and completely rainproof.
Cormac was dashing to and fro from the cart and handing up the sheaves to Sorley. Father MacMahon and Father Miguel, grim-faced, were deep in conversation at the bottom of the short ladder that led up to the doorway to the desecrated shrine. While she watched them, a couple of maidservants came out from Father MacMahon’s house, bearing long-handled brooms and carrying buckets of water. As they drew near, Mara could smell the odour of a strong solution of the lye soap and see the flat grey bubbles on the top of the buckets. She suppressed a smile and accosted the priests politely.
‘I see that you are about to purify the place,’ she said to Father MacMahon.
He nodded gloomily. ‘Though we will never be able to afford a relic like that again,’ he said. He raised his voice slightly as Nechtan drew near. ‘Kilnaboy Church has held the relic of the true cross for almost three hundred years,’ he said clearly and distinctly. ‘The O’Quinn family presented it. Ah, Nechtan, I was just telling the Brehon that it was your great ancestor, Cathal O’Quinn, who brought the relic back from the Holy Land and presented it to the church of his ancestors.’
Mara looked at Nechtan with sympathy. How would he answer that? Would he turn it aside with a jest? He was not, she reckoned, a particularly rich man; Cumhal, her farm manager, had hinted that he had a poor steward for his lands, and that Nechtan himself did not properly supervise the work. Certainly Roughan Hill, behind the church, appeared to be almost covered with gorse bushes and brambles. There would be meagre grazing on that. And the turf that his men were stacking appeared, by its very black colour, to be poorly dried. He said nothing in reply to the priest, but the slight flush of shame and his lowered eyes gave him a guilty look.
‘How does one go about obtaining a relic?’ asked Mara in an interested tone. ‘Do they all have to come from the Holy Land, or do we have any relics here in Ireland? After all, we have plenty of Irish saints and also plenty of holy wells, don’t we? There’s one over there, associated with the daughter of Baoith, a very holy woman,’ she informed the Spanish priest, adding her contribution to the discussion in order to give Nechtan time to recover.
‘A well,’ said Father Miguel, and in his voice was a note of derision.
These wells, thought Mara, feeling annoyed by his scorn, were venerated by people from ancient times, venerated with various ceremonies. The well of the daughter of Baoith was decorated throughout the year with tiny scraps of cloth which were tied to the branches of a thorn tree that grew beside it. She would not be surprised to learn that the custom was an extremely ancient one, and she guessed that the ceremonies of going around it ‘sunwise’ fifty times when asking for a favour might well have distant druidic roots. In any case, it was probably very soothing to a worried or despairing person and certainly did no harm, nor caused needless expense, as did those pilgrimages to far-flung lands. However, she said nothing, just inclined her head.
‘There is, of course,’ said Father Miguel to his fellow priest, disdaining to address Mara on the subject, ‘a big difference between the relics of the first class and relics of the second class. Pilgrims want to see relics that are associated with Jesus and his holy mother – relics of the first class – not just relics of obscure saints – second- or even third-class relics.’
Mara felt a surge of partisanship for the obscure native saint of Kilnaboy – daughter of Baoith, she was known as; her own name had not come down through the centuries – but nevertheless, she held her peace. Her business was to solve the murder that had occurred on her territory, not to engage in religious disputes. In the meantime, she would speak to her son. Discourtesy from a scholar of her law school could not be tolerated.
‘Cormac,’ she called. ‘Come here, please.’
He came reluctantly and there was a challenging look in the pale green eyes which he turned on his mother.
‘Yes, Brehon?’ he said haughtily.
‘I think you owe Father Miguel an apology,’ she said firmly. ‘What you said was rude, impertinent and, actually, none of your business.’ She spoke in Gaelic, but then added, ‘And in Latin, please. And do make sure that I won’t have to feel ashamed of you again.’
She listened critically as the apology flowed fluently from Cormac’s lips. Certainly she need not blush for the nine-year-old boy’s prowess in Latin; he bore the air of one reciting a lesson and she knew this was deliberate. There was nothing penitent about him as he stood very straight and fixed his eyes on a spot just slightly above the priest’s left shoulder.
‘Now go back over to the stable and collect your pony. You will return to school with the others,’ she said when he had finished. The Spaniard had listened, scowled and then turned to talk with Father MacMahon again. For a moment she was almost as angry with him as with her son – after all, the boy was only nine years old – he could at least have acknowledged the apology. And then she sensibly decided that the manners of the priest were not her business, whereas her son’s manners were. She would not let this matter rest, she decided. Cormac was behaving in a spoilt and arrogant manner and he could not be allowed to go on like this. He was, after all, the most junior member of the law school. She watched him cross over towards where Fachtnan was standing, and every inch of that straight back seemed to show that he was deeply offended.
Father Miguel was now haranguing the rather exhausted Father MacMahon about the advisability of sprinkling holy water on the walls and floors of the round door so as to make it fit for the relic that some kind person would present to the church in place of that which had been destroyed. Nechtan looked embarrassed and frustrated as the glances of the two priests continually slid in his direction, so she invited him to walk across to the inn with her.
‘I must see the prioress and her two sisters,’ she said to him as they went through the gate and into the river meadow th
at surrounded the inn. ‘Isn’t everything looking beautiful here,’ she said cheerfully as they walked on the well-trodden path through the grass.
Blad had no use for hay so the grass had been allowed to grow after its summer cropping and the field was like a woven tapestry, where the seedheads of foxtail, yellow oat grass and long-haired grasses formed a beautiful background for the clumps of creamy froth from the meadowsweet, the jewel bright purple knotweed, and the dramatic spires of crimson loosestrife. A slight wind had sprung up causing the flowers and grasses to ripple almost like the waves of some exotic sea. Mara pointed out its beauties to Nechtan and was relieved to see his depressed expression lighten as they moved further away from the gloomy priests and the desecrated tower.
‘I’m sorry that you have such a long ride to and fro from the other side of the Burren, Brehon,’ he said with his usual friendly good manners. ‘And I suppose that you will be coming over again tomorrow morning?’
‘Not tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow is “bringing home the turf day” and my scholars will not wish to miss that. They always have that treat at the beginning of the Michaelmas term, and this year it’s lucky that they’ve started back early because the turf has dried out well enough to be moved in early September due to the fine weather.’
She had thought briefly of not going to the bog, of abandoning the scholars to the care of Fachtnan and returning herself to Kilnaboy first thing in the morning, but so far she felt herself completely puzzled by this almost inexplicable murder. Perhaps a morning spent away from everything would clarify matters for her.
Cross of Vengeance (A Burren Mystery) Page 13
