Cross of Vengeance (A Burren Mystery)

by Harrison, Cora

  ‘No, Blad, I must be off now,’ said Mara, climbing up on the mounting block in his yard and waiting until one of the stable lads brought across her elderly mare. Brig had been the first present that King Turlough Donn had given to Mara ten years previously, and it would be a sad day when the horse grew too old to carry her mistress on her legal affairs throughout the length and breadth of the 100-square-mile kingdom of the Burren. Her old dog Bran had died a few years ago and she had not really been able to face replacing him yet. Brig, named by Mara after a female Brehon who was able to show a young male judge where he went wrong in his judgements, was now twenty years old and next year would probably have to be turned out to grass. I’ll keep her in the orchard, thought Mara, planning a new stable for her old friend, but her heart was sore at the thought of the inevitable loss.

  As she rode meditatively down the road towards the west, her mind speculated upon the information which had poured out so freely from the widowed woman called Bess. Was any of it of any use to her, she wondered? She noted Hans Kaufmann’s reported comment about the loss of other relics of the true cross and guessed that he might have been involved in their destruction. He had been kind to the terribly scarred Grace, but there probably was no more to it than that. She thought it unlikely that he would offer marriage.

  And it was even more unlikely that any one of the three women would have had anything to do with his death. Even heavily drugged, he would have been a great weight to lift. She reckoned that Slevin was correct; in life the German pilgrim would have tipped the scales at a couple of hundredweight.

  There was no sign of Art when she arrived at Cliona’s farm, but Cliona herself was busy in the barn with a couple of sick sheep and came out when she heard the mare’s hoofs on the cobbled surface of the yard.

  ‘How is Art?’ asked Mara. She did not dismount. Once on the ground it would be hard to get away quickly. Cliona was very hospitable and would be disappointed if her offer of refreshments were refused.

  For once, however, Cliona was not thinking of proposals of hospitality. There was a frown of anxiety on her forehead.

  ‘He seems to have a bit of a fever,’ she said with a worried air. ‘At first I thought that he was still a bit upset – Fachtnan told me all about it, said that all the boys were shocked but that Art vomited so you said to take him home – so I took him out with me to tend the sheep, but then he started shivering and when I felt him he was burning with fever. He’s asleep now and he seems cooler – just one of those things that children get, perhaps. How is Cormac?’ she finished.

  ‘Badly behaved,’ said Mara with a slight grimace.

  ‘Perhaps it’s the shock,’ said Cormac’s foster mother comfortably. ‘He’s like that, Cormac. You can never get him to admit that he’s upset. He just gets bad-tempered or cheeky. What did he do?’

  ‘Rude to one of the pilgrims – not that he said anything that I was not thinking myself,’ admitted Mara, ‘but he’s going to have to learn that he has to keep his thoughts to himself and to behave properly when he is on legal business. And then when I made him apologise, he was very – well, you know what he’s like, he made a bit of a mockery out of it. We’re all going to the bog tomorrow and I was half thinking of saying that Cormac shouldn’t go.’

  ‘I wouldn’t deny him of that, if I were you.’ The words came impulsively from Cliona, though she added hastily, ‘You know your own child best, of course, but I think that it would upset him badly – he’s very proud and that would shame him in front of his friends.’

  ‘I won’t then,’ said Mara. ‘But I hate him being badly behaved when I’m working – it doesn’t matter so much around the law school.’

  ‘Perhaps you might be expecting too much of him,’ said Cliona gently, looking up at her anxiously. ‘He’s only nine, you know. He acts big, but he’s still a little boy inside.’

  ‘You’re probably right. I think, perhaps, that I might be a bit hard on him because he is my son,’ said Mara with an effort. It cost her something to say it, but she knew that Cliona would not have disagreed with her unless she was very sure of herself. ‘You see, everyone around the place spoils him a bit – Brigid is his slave and you know how sensible she normally is with the boys and how she makes sure that they mind what she says. Well, she just seems to laugh at Cormac, and all the men around the farm encourage him to think that he is clever and are just amused when he shows off. I feel that I have to be stern with him …’

  ‘It’s difficult for you, but I suppose it’s difficult for him, too,’ said Cliona sympathetically. She said no more, but didn’t go back on what she had said and Mara admired her for that. In Cliona’s creed, the child came first.

  ‘Well, I must go. I’m going down to the physician’s place so I’ll tell her about Art and his fever. She might send something up by one of the apprentices. In any case, she will know if there is some sickness around, or whether the shock upset Art. He’s a sensitive boy. Keep him until you think he is back to himself again, Cliona.’ Mara raised her hand in farewell and rode off, resolutely keeping her mind away from Cormac and fixed on the murder that needed solving as quickly as possible.

  The farm of Rathborney was at the bottom of a steeply spiralling road, and Mara dismounted from her mare and led her carefully on the soft grass at the side of the worn limestone surface of the road until they reached the flat ground of the valley. Nuala had inherited this land and house and had made very good use of it, building a small hospital beside the fast-flowing stream and adding a building to house her apprentices.

  Nuala herself was taking a break from her work, walking with her two little girls in the herb garden. The elder of the two, four-year-old Saoirse, was picking off the heads of the lavender flowers and popping them into a basket, while the two-year-old Orla chased butterflies around the sweet-smelling enclosure. Mara watched from the shelter of an elderberry bush at the gate for a moment. She knew that the instant she appeared Nuala would switch from being a mother to being a professional physician – concentrated, precise and totally focussed. Mara wanted to go on watching her being a mother for a change. It was lovely to see the girl who was almost a daughter to her so happy and relaxed, enjoying a few moments of utter pleasure with her children. Should I have kept Cormac at home with me, just as Nuala kept her two, she wondered? Would that have been better for both of us? Brigid would have looked after him, and I could have enjoyed odd moments with him throughout the day, just as Nuala is doing now, moments when we became close. I love him so intensely, she thought, just as intensely as Nuala loves her little girls … but he? These days Cormac seemed to have grown up and grown away from her. Their relationship seemed to be of teacher and pupil, rather than mother and son. And his relationship with his father, of whom he saw relatively little, was more of a benevolent grandfather and over-indulged grandson. There was no doubt, she had to admit, that Cormac’s real parents were those who had fostered him: Cliona and Setanta. And yet, thought Mara, I made the decision for his own good. Cliona had been his nurse, had fed him and Art at the same time. The boys had a close relationship, and a decision had to be made whether to part Cormac from his foster brother as well as his foster mother when Cliona decided to marry the fisherman Setanta and move out of Mara’s household and back on to her own farm. Mara sighed to herself. It was stupid, she knew, to worry about what was past and gone. The decision had been made eight years ago and probably the same decision would be made again if she were given the opportunity of going back into time.

  ‘Mara!’ Nuala had spotted her, and almost as if she were waiting in the background the children’s nurse appeared and took the two little girls away, the elder carefully carrying her basket of herbs.

  ‘Training up Saoirse to be a physician?’ asked Mara, smiling.

  ‘I’ve given her a mortar and pestle and she loves squashing the lavender flowers and making medicine for headaches,’ said Nuala, and then instantly banished her daughters from her mind and said promptly: ‘You’ve come for
the report of the autopsy.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mara sank down on to the bench and hoped that Nuala would not insist on her viewing the dead body – or even worse, the innards. She felt tired and discouraged. This murder seemed insoluble, yet it did need to be solved quickly. How on earth was Hans Kaufmann stripped of his clothing, murdered and then carried from the church to the tomb? Still, she thought, one step at a time, that’s the way that crimes are solved. She settled herself to listen and turned attentive eyes towards Nuala.

  ‘I like to see you with the little girls,’ she said with a smile. ‘I hope you take lots of little breaks with them. Don’t work too hard. Enjoy them. They’ll grow up quickly and then things get more complicated. I could see that you were having a lovely time with them just now.’

  ‘I needed it, I was depressed,’ said Nuala. And then, before Mara could speak, she said hurriedly, ‘Not the autopsy, I don’t care about things like that. It’s Aoife, Muiris and Áine’s daughter. She’s dead. Her ninth child in ten years – Rory called me too late and she died of blood loss – exhausted, poor thing. She almost died with the last one and I told her not to have another baby, taught her how to count out the days each month, but Rory was too selfish; of course a bard like him can’t be expected to confine himself to twenty days in the month!’

  ‘Poor Aoife,’ said Mara compassionately. ‘I remember her ten years ago – a beautiful girl, madly in love with her poet. What’s going to happen to the children?’

  ‘Muiris and Áine swooped down and took them home with them; one of his shepherds has a wife with a year-old son – she’ll feed the baby for the moment. Rory,’ said Nuala drily, ‘feels that he has to go off to the mountains of Donegal and write a poem about Aoife. He thinks he might be away for a few months.’

  ‘The children will be better off with their grandparents,’ said Mara consolingly. It hurt her to think about the sorrow that they were all now undergoing. Aoife, the golden girl of ten years ago, had been the darling of her parents, and Muiris had been reluctant to agree to a marriage with a bard who relied on selling his poems at the fairs and market places. They would be heartbroken at her death. She looked at the dark eyes of her young cousin and said gently, ‘You don’t blame yourself, Nuala, do you?’

  ‘Let’s talk about the autopsy,’ said Nuala, and Mara knew that she would say no more about Aoife. Later on, though, perhaps with Fachtnan, who would, as always, give a reasoned and sensible judgement. Nuala could have done no more than warn Aoife and give to her the benefit of all that she had learned during her trips abroad and during her years of study.

  ‘Tell me what you’ve found about this German pilgrim,’ she said aloud.

  ‘He was killed about an hour after he had a heavy supper,’ said Nuala promptly. ‘He had eaten venison, probably some sort of rich pastries, very highly flavoured sweetmeats, and had drunk quite a lot of alcohol as well. He was a big man, but I would guess that he was quite inebriated at the time that he was killed.’

  ‘And drugged?’ enquired Mara.

  Nuala frowned impatiently and Mara recognized the expression. Even at twelve years old Nuala had frowned like that when her knowledge could not satisfy her curiosity about the human body.

  ‘Unfortunately, that is not something that I can tell you,’ she said, shaking her head with a slightly exasperated air. ‘You see, we physicians have no ways – none that I know of anyway – of testing what is in a person’s blood; only what is in his stomach. We are no better than butchers, really. We open up the dead man’s stomach and look, and smell …’ She smiled at the expression on Mara’s face. ‘You get used to it,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘This is something that I learned to do in Italy. We started with animals – pigs, usually – where we knew how long it had been since the last meal, then progressed to criminals who had been hanged, and then to suicides – drowned bodies fished out of the river – and so on. Now I can make a fairly good guess. So I can be confident when I tell you that digestion of the food had hardly begun so it was only about an hour after a heavy meal. I can tell you that he had wine and that he had brandy and that he had heavily flavoured food – there were spices and even scents, from the sweetmeats, I suppose; some of them were almost whole in his stomach. But there is no way that I can tell you whether he had opium from the poppies or not – all I can tell you is that I did not smell it.’

  ‘But due to the rich, spicy, fragrant food and the wine and the brandy, you probably would not have smelled it even if it had been present, is that right?’ Mara felt her heart sink. It didn’t look as though the autopsy, to which she had pinned her hopes, was going to be too much help, except in pinpointing the time of death.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nuala, economical with words as usual.

  ‘What does opium smell like – is it a strong smell?’ persisted Mara. She tried to think back to the church – were there any particularly unusual smells there when she and the boys had gone in, probably about twelve hours after the death of Hans?

  ‘Rather like the incense that the priest shakes from the thurible at High Mass.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara with an impatient sigh. ‘Just the sort of smell that you could really easily pick out in church!’

  Nuala smiled. ‘You’re tired. You always get ironic when you’re tired. Why is this business about a drug so important?’

  ‘Well, you saw the body yourself, Nuala,’ said Mara impatiently. ‘You saw how difficult he was to lift on to your own cart. How could he have been stripped of his clothes in the church, murdered, and then carried out and placed on the tomb? I know it’s a very low one, but even so. He was a big, heavy man. And who did it? And there are so many questions attached to this death! Was burning a piece of the wood, supposed to come from a fifteen-hundred-year-old cross, enough of a motive to take a man’s life? But if that was not the motive, what was the point of stretching him out on the tomb so that he looked like crucified Christ himself? Or did someone …’ Suddenly Mara thought of the lozenge taken from Brother Cosimo.

  ‘Did Fachtnan send down that lozenge we took from the Italian monk?’

  ‘Not opium.’ Nuala shook her head firmly. ‘Mainly chamomile and a few other herbs – harmless and not particularly strong.’

  ‘So no possibility of one of those lozenges drugging the young German to the degree that he could have been undressed without a struggle,’ said Mara. ‘That seemed to be the only possibility in the luggage of the pilgrims. There was nothing in the three women’s bags, nor in the bag belonging to the Spanish priest. And their rooms have been searched also.’

  ‘You’re sure that he was murdered in the church?’ It was just like Nuala not to speculate on names or motives. She dealt with proven facts.

  ‘I can’t be sure, but we did find a soaked spot on the carpet, bottom step of the altar. It was very wet.’

  ‘Sticky?’

  Mara shook her head. ‘No, just wet. Soaking wet. And the holy water font was completely emptied. I know it was full earlier in the day – I did the usual dip and flick into it on my way out of the church. And the container below it was empty also.’

  ‘Any stained cloths?’

  Mara shook her head. ‘The boys searched very thoroughly.’

  ‘Any smell?’

  ‘Finbar thought it smelled holy,’ she said, and Nuala smiled for the first time.

  ‘Shows the power of suggestion,’ she said. ‘So you think that he was stabbed there on the steps. The murderer scrubbed out the stain where he bled – would have been a lot of blood, of course, there was some still on the capstone of the tomb. And then, in some way, the body was carried – perhaps thrown across the back of a horse – right out to the tomb.’

  Mara sighed and got to her feet. ‘I must go back,’ she said. ‘It’s getting late; you’ll need your supper. And I must see that the boys get to bed early. We’re going to the bog tomorrow morning. Cumhal wants to set off at about five o’clock in the morning so that the main work is done before it
gets too hot. We’ll be back about noon, and then go across to Kilnaboy again. Nechtan O’Quinn has asked us all to stay for the night and I think that the boys will enjoy that and perhaps I’ll get more inspiration when I am on the spot. I’ll walk around the church a couple of hours after sunset and sit there and try to reconstruct what happened.’

  Twelve

  Cáin Iarraith

  (Law of Children)

  The relationship between a felmacc, pupil, and his master is similar to that of a foster father and his dalta, foster son. The felmacc must be taught board games, such as fidchell, chess, and must be instructed in all aspects of the profession of his master. The master is responsible for the safety of the felmacc.

  When the party from the law school set out to go to the bog the following morning, only three boys, Domhnall, Slevin and Finbar, accompanied Mara.

  Art had not yet returned. With a pang of guilt Mara had remembered as soon as she got back that she had forgotten to ask Nuala about possible feverish and stomach complaints. But her mind was fully occupied with another matter.

  Fachtnan had been a student teacher and then a full teacher at her law school for over seven years. During all of that time he had managed the pupils, even those not too much younger than himself, with a mixture of common sense, tact and quiet, firm authority. He very seldom complained of a scholar, but usually preferred to deal with matters himself.