‘And then decided to frame him for a murder,’ said Mara harshly, and he groaned, dropping his head into his hands and then lifting it again. His eyes were moist and his colour high.
‘It wasn’t the way that you said, not quite, anyway.’ He groaned loudly again. ‘You’ve seen into my thoughts, gone to places in my mind where I am ashamed to go myself, but I’m not quite as bad, or as calculating, as you have made out.’
Mara nodded. ‘You had Walter’s dagger there in your belt and you stabbed young Gomez with it. And then you thought of how you could make this work to your advantage.’
‘I stabbed him on an impulse,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I had no notion of it when I left Walter. I decided that it was the best plan to let him sleep the night out there and then to come home next morning when his father had already gone out. I swear to you, that’s all that I had in my mind. And then, just near the gate, I met Gomez. He had been guilty of gross conduct towards Catarina, a girl I have known since she was a baby. I didn’t want him to find Walter so I picked a fight, shouted at him – I suppose I was drunk, too, and I had a row with him. He was insolent, foul-mouthed . . .’
But the young man did not pull out his dagger, thought Mara, remembering the unblemished dagger in Carlos Gomez’s belt.
‘I lost my temper,’ admitted Valentine. ‘I had stabbed him before I realized what I was doing.’
The murder of Carlos Gomez was easier for him to talk about than his plan to transfer his guilt on to the shoulders of his innocent and immature nephew. He explained to her very carefully the insults that had been given to Catarina, the gross and crude attempts to bed with her, the fury of the girl, and described his own loss of control.
He has the soul of a criminal, thought Mara. He is just good at hiding that soul from himself. What will he turn out like? How will he use the power that has now been granted to him since the death of his brother-in-law? Am I doing the right thing?
‘So you dragged the body – I saw the mud caked on the back – and you placed him beside the mill where Walter lay, knowing full well that the connection would be made between the two young men once morning came. Now tell me about the part that the cloak played?’
He was taken aback at that. ‘How did you know?’ he asked almost angrily.
She ignored that question. It was for her to question, for him to accept the punishment. That was the essence of Brehon law – the scales of retribution had to be balanced. She could see how it had happened. This man was needy – was greedy – and he had succumbed to temptation and involved his nephew and his sister in a terrible ordeal that almost ended in a terrible tragedy for both. Mara thought back to Hugh’s innocent words about Lucius Junius Brutus, who agreed to the execution for conspiracy against the Republic of his own two sons, and hoped that had not been in Valentine Blake’s mind on that night of Shrove Tuesday. She preferred to think that he had truly believed that James Lynch would pardon his son.
Mara was sensible enough to know that Margaret Lynch, born a Burke, would not mourn her strange, hard-hearted, upright, and honest husband too much, but at the same time she had been deprived of a husband, left without means to support her son and herself in the lifestyle that both had been accustomed to. I will clear up the last detail, impose the penalty and then be on my way, thought Mara. She was hungry for the sight of her little son, and for the clean, pure air of the Burren.
‘The cloak,’ she reminded him.
‘I dragged the body for a while, but then I came across a cloak lying on the ground and recognized it as Walter’s. I wrapped Carlos in it so that I wouldn’t get his blood on my clothes. That was all that was in my mind at that time,’ he said pleadingly. ‘I was going to throw the body into Lough Atalia.’
And yet, thought Mara, Valentine had been dressed in black velvet that night. Any smears of blood would not have shown on his clothes. She suspected him of not telling the entire truth. She suspected him of having drafted the whole plan in his mind, either just before he had used Walter’s dagger to kill the man, or perhaps immediately afterwards.
‘And when you reached the mill, you thought of Walter lying drunk inside it, you left the body near to the doorway, took the cloak, now soaked in blood, and arranged it on top of your nephew so that his white shirt should be stained, so that there should be no doubt as to his guilt. Then you went home and waited for the news to break.’ Mara paused, then said solemnly, ‘Valentine Blake, I find you guilty of the murder of Carlos Gomez, how say you, guilty or not guilty?’
‘Guilty,’ he mumbled with a look at her that said, ‘Yes, but . . .’ She silenced him with an authoritative gesture.
Mara pondered for a moment. It was pointless taking money from this man who was in financial difficulties and sending it to the enormously rich Gomez family, who would not understand its significance and who would be content only with the life of the murderer. No, the money should be to compensate Walter and his mother for the loss of a father and of a husband. James Lynch, after all, had been the intended victim. There was another victim: poor Sheedy had died in his cell on the night of the riot – perhaps of terror – to the great distress of Hugh and Shane, who had looked forward to releasing him when their part in the night’s drama had been played through. However, Sheedy had no near relations; and who knows, she thought, death may have come as a merciful release to his troubled soul.
‘I sentence you to a fine of forty-two cows or forty-two ounces of silver for the secret and unlawful killing, and added to that is . . .’ she stopped for a moment. What was Walter’s honour price? A merchant had no status under Brehon law, so she decided to use the honour price of a craftsman, and continued rapidly, ‘Added to that is fourteen cows or fourteen ounces of silver, making a total of fifty-six ounces of silver. This money is to be used for the benefit of Walter and Margaret, perhaps some of it could be initially used to apprentice the boy to some trade where he would be happy.’
‘I shall apprentice him to a potter!’ Suddenly Valentine was blazing with excitement. ‘I’ve just thought of a wonderful idea. I shall import pottery from France. It is very elegant stuff. The merchants of Galway will buy it up and I may even find some salt mines in France to supply me. I’ll take Walter with me. I swear to you that I will use him like a son and that he and Margaret will have a home with me for as long as they want it.’
‘See that you do,’ Mara said coldly. He was getting off too easily for her liking, but she could see no alternative. She did not wish to see his body swing on the gallows, to be mourned by the sister and the nephew who loved him, by the wife who would be left a widow and by the baby son when he grew up fatherless. She got to her feet. It was time for her to leave this city of alien laws and alien practices, but she had one more thing to say and she said it looking intently at him.
‘Valentine Blake, you are now Mayor of Galway,’ she said. ‘See that you remember the mercy that was extended to you and when you judge other fellow men, judge them with mercy in accordance with the law that has spared you to your wife and to your son.’
Author’s Note
In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century the medieval city of Galway, situated beside the Atlantic Ocean, was a tiny island of English law, English language and English dress within the Gaelic land to the north, east, and south of it. Galway, then, was a fine city of stone as can be seen from the three pictorial maps drawn about that time and from its description by a traveller who described it as ‘. . . fenced with such a huge strong wall that travellers affirm that they have not seen the like in Europe . . . built from one gate to the other in the one form, looking like the colleges of Oxford, so magnificent that at my first entrance it did amaze me’.
Nowadays it is fascinating to wander around the ancient part of the city and to see Lynch’s Castle almost as it looked in the early sixteenth century, to see the remains of Blake’s Castle and throughout the streets to be able to glimpse late medieval drip ledges, gothic windows, stone mullions, ancient doors here and the
re among the shop fronts and restaurants of the last few centuries. Many of the places mentioned in my story still exist: King’s Head Inn is still there and its medieval past is shown in the magnificent fireplace.
The tale of early sixteenth century James Lynch and the murder trial is one that is embedded in the history of Galway. Since it seems to have been first told some considerable time after the events, and since there has been doubt thrown on the nineteenth century retelling by James Hardiman, first librarian of the university at Galway, I have felt at liberty to change some details and to incorporate it into one of my stories about Mara the Brehon, who was the notorious mayor’s contemporary.
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