Deed of Murder

by Cora Harrison

  So Eamon had left Ballinalacken Castle last night – probably at midnight. It looked as if he had taken advantage of the splendid moon to begin his journey to Thomond, carrying the deed for the new lease of the flax garden in the Aillwee Mountain.

  But why had he ended up eighteen hours later in the middle of the Burren? It was not on his route. There had been no reason for him to go there.

  ‘Looks like he had a deed with him,’ said Moylan after a minute. ‘Was it the deed for the lease of the flax garden, Brehon, do you think? He was due to take it to Thomond today, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mara. ‘I wondered about that as soon as I saw the satchel.’

  ‘Strange though . . .’ Moylan looked at her in a puzzled way. ‘I thought . . .’

  Mara did not reply. She, like he, had thought that it had been an amorous adventure; that Eamon and Fiona had gone for a midnight ride, and that, perhaps, Fachtnan had followed them. Now it looked as if Eamon, fired by wine and excitement, and the restlessness which was so much part of his nature, had decided to get the ride to Thomond over during the hours of the night. If he had taken the usual route south, crossed O’Briensbridge and turned north, then he would have been with O’Brien of Arra at breakfast time. He could have got his signature to the deed, and been back to the Burren by mid-afternoon.

  But why take such a strange way – go north instead of returning the way he had come? Would there be any sense in taking a journey through difficult riding conditions, mountainous most of the way? And why take a journey that would bring him through hostile land?

  What had happened to Fiona? And to Fachtnan? Both of these had seemed to have left the castle at the same midnight hour.

  ‘He couldn’t have come straight from O’Brien of Arra, though, could he?’ asked Shane shrewdly. ‘I’ve just been thinking about the route. He would have had to come through the Kelly kingdom at Ui Maine, wouldn’t he? He’d never have done that. Kelly is in the pocket of the Great Earl. I’ve heard King Turlough say that again and again.’

  ‘You’re right, Shane,’ said Mara. ‘I was just thinking of that myself. But perhaps he went south of the Kellys’ land, perhaps he just came through the mountains . . .’ It didn’t make sense, though, to her, either. Why should Eamon ride through the mountains – she wasn’t sure that there was even a path – why go that way, close to enemy land instead of the usual lowland route that he would know so well? She had sent him often with messages to Turlough, to Thomond across the Shannon, and every time he had taken the same route across O’Briensbridge. There was something very puzzling here. She stayed very still for a minute, conscious of the noise of hunters in the background. Soon they might be interrupted.

  ‘Listen,’ said Hugh, ‘I heard the horn. Listen! They’ve found a wolf!’

  A pack of wolfhounds swept past them, all panting heavily, tails whipping the air, eyes blazing with excitement. Even Bran, Mara’s devoted dog, passed with just a quick lick and a wag of the tail for his beloved mistress.

  ‘Perhaps Eamon heard the hunt and he came up the mountain to see it,’ said Aidan, looking pleased with his own brilliance.

  ‘Perhaps,’ began Mara dubiously. Unlikely, she thought. It would have made more sense to have delivered the signed deed to her and then concentrated on enjoying himself. Surely, in any case, even someone with the energetic nature of Eamon would have wanted a sleep after his midnight ride. She wished that she was back in the law school, sitting quietly and allowing her brain to sift through the various possibilities. However, there was no chance of peace at the moment. Turlough, his cousins, his son and his son-in-law, his allies and his friends, all came into sight, waving sticks, shouting encouragement to the dogs, their heavy leather boots sliding on the loose scree of the limestone.

  ‘My dear Brehon,’ said Ulick Burke. ‘You are everywhere. What brings you up here? Have you by any chance conveyed a meal and refreshments to the hungry hunters?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait until you return to Ballinalacken for that,’ said Mara. She was quite surprised to see Ulick had joined the hunting party. He wasn’t much a man for this sort of exercise, normally, especially as Turlough always insisted on hunting these mountains on foot.

  ‘We’ve had a splendid morning – killed two wolves already,’ said Turlough. He spoke absent-mindedly though, and did not appear to find the sudden appearance of his wife on the side of the Aillwee Mountain to be in any way surprising. His eyes and ears were following the wolfhounds’ progress. The four scholars gazed after the dogs, also, with a mixture of envy and longing; Mara was sorry for them, but unrepentant. Turlough would have taken the boys if she had asked, but it was nice for him to spend the day with his friends and relations without having schoolboys listening in to every incautious word.

  ‘They’ve found!’ yelled Donán O’Kennedy and Turlough patted his son-in-law heartily on the back. Mara was glad to see that gesture of friendliness. For the sake of Ragnelt, Turlough’s daughter, she had often wished that Turlough did not so openly show his contempt for Donán.

  And then five of the six men departed, slipping and sliding, steadying themselves with their sticks, but going down the mountain at breakneck speed, leaving Ulick Burke gazing at his hostess with an expression of interest.

  ‘So what really brings you here then, my dear Brehon?’ And without waiting for a reply he moved over to the edge of the path and peered down the mountainside, not looking towards the hunting party, but following the rough roadway as it snaked its gradual way down to the flat land of the high Burren.

  ‘Ah,’ he said with satisfaction after a minute. ‘That looks like your faithful servant Cumhal. And why the cart? Was there an accident? But why send for the Brehon for an ordinary accident?’

  ‘I think I hear my lord the king calling your name, Ulick,’ said Mara mildly.

  The lie did not convince Ulick. He flashed her a quick grin and bowed. ‘I shall leave you to your investigations, Brehon,’ he said and moved off after a keen glance towards the figure of Muiris, still standing impassively by the stone fence in the flax garden.

  ‘I’m sure that’s why Eamon came over this way,’ said Aidan as Ulick moved lightly down the steep side of the mountain. ‘He must have heard the hunters and decided to come and see the sport.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mara absent-mindedly. Another matter had occurred to her and she looked speculatively at Muiris O’Hynes.

  There had been a deed that gave Muiris the lease of the valley and all its equipment, crop and furnishings from May Day 1511 to the eve of May Day 1512. The deed had been drawn up by her and signed neatly by Muiris, who, to her surprise, had turned out to be literate. The deed had been sent to O’Brien of Arra for his signature. Whether or not he had signed, the position now was probably that no deed had survived.

  The auction would have to be held again.

  And this time, Cathal O’Halloran might get in the last and, ultimately, successful bid.

  Five

  Di Astud Chor

  (On the Binding of Deeds of Contracts)

  There are some circumstances which can make a contract be declared invalid:

  A contract made under duress.

  A contract made by fear.

  A contract made while drunk (except in the case of co-ploughing agreements which are valid even if one, or all of the parties, are drunk at the time of signing).

  If a contract contains a fault which cannot be reasonably detected by the disadvantaged party, that contract has to be rescinded or adjusted.

  No contract is valid unless the document can be produced and the signatures verified.

  Nothing could make Fiona look plain. In her normal good spirits she sparkled, every blonde curl alive, blue eyes shining, cheeks pink with health. This morning she was pale and subdued, but had the fragile beauty of the snow-white windflowers that illuminated the little wood beside Mara’s house.

  Mara seated the girl on one side of the fire and took her place on the ot
her side. The hunting party had not yet returned but she had no wish to have her interview with Fiona interrupted or overheard so had asked Brigid to bring the girl to her own bedroom.

  ‘Had a good sleep?’ she asked.

  Fiona nodded, but the purple shadows under her eyes belied the acquiescence.

  ‘Will you tell me what happened last night?’ asked Mara gently.

  Fiona nodded again, but seemed to find it hard to start the story. Mara looked at her compassionately. Perhaps the Bishop of Kilfenora was right. Perhaps it was not wise to mix young girls with youths at this vulnerable age. She herself had made a disastrous marriage with an idle scholar at her father’s law school and had bitterly repented it soon afterwards. Her father had died soon after she had qualified as ollamh – professor – so she had to cope with the law school, her baby daughter and a husband who had given up the law and spent all of his time in alehouses. A lucky chance had given her an excuse to divorce him, but the experience had been unpleasant.

  ‘Eamon persuaded you to ride with him to Thomond, to bring the deed for the flax garden to O’Brien of Arra, was that it?’ she asked.

  Fiona coloured. ‘I just thought it would be fun,’ she said. ‘We thought that we’d be back before we were missed. Eamon said that everyone would be sleeping late and no one would look for us before midday.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara. ‘Just tell me everything that happened.’ It probably would have been fun, she thought understandingly. To steal away from the party, find their cloaks, mount their horses and ride along with the intense white light of the moon illuminating their path and the stars pricking the darkness overhead.

  ‘Which way did you go?’ she asked when Fiona did not reply.

  ‘Along the high road.’ Fiona seemed relieved by the simplicity of the question and added, ‘We could see the sea and we could see some lights from Aran. We thought that they must be having a party over there, also. We didn’t meet a person until we came to Kilfenora – and that just turned out to be a stray cow.’ Fiona smiled slightly at the memory.

  ‘And then through Kilfenora and over towards Thomond and you crossed the Shannon . . .’

  ‘At O’Briensbridge,’ confirmed Fiona.

  Mara mused on the route. It was as she would have expected. So what had brought Eamon so far out of his way?

  ‘You enjoyed the journey?’ She expected an instant affirmative, but Fiona seemed hesitant.

  ‘I suppose so – well, in the beginning at least.’

  Mara turned an enquiring glance towards her and after a moment, with a sudden rush, Fiona said, ‘I kept thinking that someone was following us. I kept looking behind me. There was a sound, but not horse hoofs, not on the road, anyway. But it must have been a horse because we were going quickly and it kept the same distance behind us all the time.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Mara. A horse on the road would have been unmistakable. The roads of the Burren were stone – that stone which lay everywhere in the kingdom with only a few inches of earth covering it. Unlike other places there was no need to build roads with load upon load of gravel and broken stone. On the Burren all that needed to be done was scrape away the soil and keep it clear.

  How odd for someone on horseback not to choose to ride on those excellent roads.

  Fiona, however, was not a nervous or fanciful girl so the chances were that she was right in her suspicions. It would be easy for a third person to ride unseen through the roadside fields, well hidden by the stone walls that surrounded them.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘What about when you had passed through Kilfenora? When you were in Thomond? Did you hear anything then?’

  ‘A few times, but we were talking and then we started singing so I suppose I forgot about it. That is until we reached O’Briensbridge. We went racing across it – the horses’ hoofs made a great din on the timbers and then when we were well past and had turned towards Arra, I was sure that I heard another horse cross over – not racing, just walking, but walking on those timbers is like beating a drum.’

  ‘It would be dawn by then, I suppose,’ said Mara.

  ‘Oh, yes, the sun had risen by the time we reached the castle at Arra. They got a bit of a surprise when they saw us. We had to wait for a while – they gave us wine and bread straight from the oven. We were there for ages, eating the bread and drinking the wine.’

  On top of what they already had at the party at Ballinalacken, thought Mara. Eamon was not a young man to deny himself. She could imagine him, quaffing goblet after goblet as they waited, still talking brilliantly, but probably getting wilder and more reckless as the time wore on.

  ‘And then the O’Brien himself came. He got a shock when he saw me and I said that I was one of your scholars.’ Fiona giggled, a little colour coming back into her cheeks. Mara smiled. Fiona, like she herself as a girl, enjoyed the shock caused by being a female law student.

  ‘He asked me all sorts of questions; he seemed to be angry with Eamon for bringing me. He kept looking at Eamon and frowning, and then Eamon began to hiccup – he’d had too much to drink and the O’Brien rang a bell and got his housekeeper to take me out and show me to one of the chambers where I could rest while he and Eamon did the business together. He just shooed me away as though I had been a hen.’ Fiona sounded so indignant that Mara had to smile before asking,

  ‘So you didn’t actually see the deed being signed?’

  Fiona shook her head. ‘No, but Eamon told me that it had been signed and witnessed by the O’Brien’s steward.’

  ‘And then you started on your return journey.’ Mara sat back and waited. Something had gone wrong, obviously, and this was going to be the moment that Fiona had to decide whether to trust her, or whether to tell some story. The hesitancy was in the girl’s eyes before she lowered them, nudging a small piece of turf with the side of her foot. Mara bent down and picked it up, tossed it on the fire and then added some bigger pieces from the basket, carefully arranging them so that the flames blazed up between the brick-like shapes. She loved the smell of turf – a wood fire was brighter and hotter, but nothing compared to the pungent aromatic smell of the peat.

  ‘I suppose you and Eamon had a row,’ she said eventually, looking casually over her shoulder at Fiona. The sapphire-blue eyes snapped open and the girl’s cheeks turned red.

  ‘How do you know?’ she asked.

  ‘I know what boys are like when they have had too much to drink,’ said Mara dryly.

  ‘Well, the first thing that happened was that he started galloping quite quickly down the road and I shouted after him that he was going the wrong way. He wouldn’t stop so I was forced to go after him.’

  ‘And when you caught up with him?’

  ‘He refused to turn back, he kept on teasing me and saying that I didn’t know the right way and then when I stopped and said I wasn’t going any further, he grabbed my pony’s reins and started to lead it. The pony didn’t like it. She was snorting and plunging. I was afraid I would fall off. I screamed at him. I managed to pull the pony up to a stop and then I got off and said that I was going no further until he told me what he was doing. I thought he must be drunk. I was saying to him “Look, Eamon, this lake goes on for miles and miles; we have to go back and cross the Shannon at O’Briensbridge. It’s the only place where we can cross unless we go right up to Ui Maine.”’

  Mara bit her lip with annoyance. This girl should have been more carefully supervised. If any harm had come to her it would have been hard to explain to Robert Macbetha how his only child came to be alone with a drunk young man in the middle of the night twenty miles away from the law school where he had carefully deposited her less than a month ago. Still, she thought, the girl, if she is to work as a lawyer, will have to learn to deal with these matters sooner rather than later and read the reflection of her own thoughts in Fiona’s eyes.

  ‘I wasn’t afraid of him,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘I’ve always been with boys in my father’s law school and I know how to kee
p them under control. I shouldn’t have allowed him to drink so much, though, because he was quite wild, going on about us getting married and him having a bagful of silver and the two of us opening up a law school together – all sorts of silly talk like that. He knew well that even if we wanted to get married that we both had to finish our law school terms and pass our examinations. And then we would each have to get a position with some great lord or king. I told him that he would have to have saved up plenty of silver before he could think of marriage – and that I had other plans.’

  ‘So what did he say?’ Mara was reassured by Fiona’s resolute manner.

  ‘Oh, he just went on about how much he loved me and that he would find a way, so I just told him that I didn’t love him enough to get married and that I was going back and he could follow if he wished to ride with me or else he could keep going up to the north and beyond if he wished. Then I offered to take the deed back to you if he was going to go on to Galway.’

  ‘So he wanted you to go to Galway,’ mused Mara. ‘Was that what he said? Didn’t he know that he would have to go through the Kelly territory to get there?’

  ‘I told him,’ said Fiona with another toss of her bright gold curls. ‘I told him it all and then he grabbed me and tried to kiss me. I kicked him hard and screamed. I told him that someone was coming and he just jumped on his horse and rode away.’

  ‘And you came home – alone? Why didn’t you ask O’Brien of Arra to give you an escort? That was a stupid thing to do, Fiona. I’m surprised at you.’

  ‘I thought that Eamon would come after me,’ confessed Fiona. ‘I thought that he would apologize and behave himself. I kept thinking that I heard him following me. I didn’t look back because I didn’t want to encourage him, but I was sure that he was only a little bit behind me the whole way back until we came to Corcomroe. I was so tired then that I just stopped thinking about him. As soon as I reached the castle I went straight to bed.’ She looked up at Mara and said, ‘Don’t look so worried, he’ll be home soon. He was just in a bad mood, but he won’t fail to bring you back the deed.’