My Lady Judge

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Carve some slices of the venison, Cumhal,’ she ordered and stood with her ladle poised while Cumhal filled each platter with neat slices.

  ‘I’ll try both sauces,’ said Turlough. ‘A man of peace like myself never likes to take sides between two women.’

  ‘I’ll have them both, also,’ said Mara. After her long and difficult day she felt that she could do with the soothing silkiness of the cream sauce as well as the piquant bite of the bearberries.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Turlough, shutting his eyes to savour first one, and then the other sauce.

  ‘You’re not too worried about the O’Kellys, are you?’ asked Mara after Brigid and Cumhal had returned to the kitchen. She cut a piece of venison with her knife and then speared the cube and popped it into her mouth. It tasted delicious: crusty with burned juices on the outside and succulent and tender on the inside.

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Turlough, crunching the celery noisily. ‘If they want trouble they can come looking for it, of course. I’ll give them something to think about.’

  ‘As a man of peace, of course!’ inserted Mara.

  ‘Well,’ said Turlough with a grin, ‘it’s like this venison, there is an art in never overdoing anything.’

  ‘How’s Conor?’ enquired Mara. Conor was Turlough’s eldest son.

  ‘Good,’ said Turlough. ‘Have you been to his fine new tower house at Inchiquin? He’s pleased to be the tánaiste since my brother died. It will be good to have my own son to take over when I am gone.’

  ‘Pity he’s not called Turlough,’ said Mara. ‘Then you could be like those Richards and Henrys over in England – you could have Turlough I and Turlough II and so on.’ Let’s keep talking about the kingdom, she thought. I don’t want to think about the murder and I don’t want any pressure about marriage tonight, either.

  ‘He’ll make a good king, Conor,’ said Turlough, ‘but of course it will be one of his brothers or his cousins who will follow him. It might be my second boy, and I wouldn’t be too pleased about that. He has too much interest in English ways. He won’t make a good king of Thomond. I don’t trust him at the moment, at any rate. Anyway, let’s not talk about anything troubling tonight. We’ll just sit here like two old friends and enjoy our burgundy and our venison and let the tomorrows come when they are due.’

  He placed his hand over hers. ‘Mara,’ he said quietly. ‘I meant what I said in the letter. I won’t bother you for a decision. Take your time; think it over, and perhaps when you come to see me with your reports at the end of the month you might want to discuss it then. There’s only one thing more to say and that is that I know if you decide to be my wife I will be the happiest man in Christendom. I think we would get on well together,’ he added in a lighter tone.

  ‘I know that,’ said Mara earnestly. ‘It’s just that I do need time to think and it is very generous of you to give me that time

  … Oh, thank you, Cumhal. I don’t think we need another flagon of wine at the moment, but leave it there just in case.’

  This is worse than when Dualta and I were thirteen and my father kept hovering around, she thought, watching Brigid ceremoniously bringing an unnecessary second dish of parsnips over to the table.

  ‘So what about Kildare?’ she asked.

  ‘You heard the story about him going over to London and asking Henry VII for extra troops to deal with me?’ asked Turlough. He paused to chew on a piece of venison and then added with huge enjoyment, ‘Do you know what he said about me? These were his very words: “He is a mortal enemy to all Englishmen and the most maliciously disposed of any that I heard speak of.” He wanted the Tudor king to give him 6,000 men to deal with me, but Henry was too mean a man for that. He had too many other things to occupy him at the time. He was in the middle of the Burgundian negotiations and that was of much more importance to him than Ireland. Too much had been spent on us, over the past few hundred years, for too little of a return. These were his views. Tomás MacEgan told me that and he is a very learned Brehon. You know Tomás, don’t you?’

  Mara nodded. She knew Tomás; he was a man who never opened his mouth until he had carefully considered his words, a man of immense learning, skilled in English, as well as Brehon, law. Briefly she thought about Colman and his interest in England. She herself had never bothered, but perhaps she should. Knowledge is power, her father often told her, and power was important to her.

  ‘Tell me about English law,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know too much about it myself,’ said Turlough, dipping a finger of yellow parsnip into the bearberry sauce and munching it. ‘You’d want to talk to Tomás. All I know is that it is supposed to be based on Roman law. They hold their courts indoors, in big buildings – not like us where we have our courts out in the open, on top of hills, or beside ancient places like you do here on the Burren. They have many lawyers in these courts, as well as judges. They say that they have very savage punishments. Men can be hanged for theft there.’

  ‘I’ve heard that,’ said Mara. ‘Is it any kind of theft or just something very serious like stealing from a great lord?’

  Turlough shrugged. ‘Almost any kind of theft,’ he said. ‘Anything from a loaf of bread to the theft of a horse.’

  ‘So no matter what the crime, everything is punished in the same way?’

  ‘Oh, they have worse punishments than hanging,’ said Turlough. ‘They can also hang a man, cut him down before he is dead, then draw out his guts before his eyes and then cut him up into quarters. Then they stick his head up on Tower Bridge so that everyone in London has to pass under it and be reminded that they must not break the law.’

  ‘It’s barbaric,’ said Mara with conviction. ‘What good do punishments like that do to anyone? I wonder that the English don’t devise a more civilized set of laws.’

  ‘By the way, one of my Brehons got a copy of English laws when he was in Galway. You might like to look at it. My Latin is too rusty to make too much of it.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Mara, ‘that we should make a record of all of our laws. There are books of them in every law school, but these books need to be put together. It might be a good idea to have a Brehons’ Conference some time. We could start this off in Thomond, with Brehons from your three kingdoms, and perhaps invite other Brehons from different kingdoms. If we are in danger from England, as you think, we will need to have this up-to-date record of our laws so that they don’t get lost or forgotten.’

  ‘That’s a great idea,’ said Turlough, slapping the trestle table with such force that the platters jumped and the flagon of wine tilted alarmingly. His face was illuminated with enthusiasm. ‘When you come to see me we’ll discuss our plans for this. It will be another thing for me to look forward to,’ he added with a meaningful glance.

  ‘I should make a start at this here at Cahermacnaghten,’ said Mara thoughtfully. ‘I should find all those old law texts, wisdom texts and judgement texts that my father collected, and things that he taught me, that his father taught him, and his grandfather before him, judgements and laws that have never been written down, but have been passed from generation to generation by word of mouth. I should write all these down and then put them together. It will be a lifetime’s work; we will need to search through the whole of Ireland. Perhaps my grandson, little Domhnall, will carry on the work after I am gone. It should be done, though, no matter how long it takes.’

  ‘There may come a time,’ said Turlough sombrely, ‘that no matter what we do, the law of England may prevail in Ireland and our Gaelic way of life and our Brehon laws, with all their humanity and their mercy, will be lost for ever.’

  ELEVEN

  HEPTAD 6

  There are seven bloodlettings which carry no penalty:

  1. Bloodshed inflicted by an insane person

  2. Bloodshed inflicted by a chief wife in jealousy of a concubine who comes in spite of her

  3. Bloodshed by a physician authorized by the family to care for a sick person
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br />   4. Bloodshed inflicted in battle

  5. Bloodshed by a man who enforces suretyship

  6. Bloodshed by a man who takes part in a duel

  7. Bloodshed by a boy in playing a sport

  The king left the Burren early the following morning to go to the bishop’s Mass at Kilfenora and afterwards on his formal tour around the kingdom of Corcomroe. As soon as he departed Mara called all of the scholars into the schoolhouse.

  ‘I know it’s Sunday,’ she said to them. ‘I don’t want to break into your holiday, but I just want to get a few things straight in my mind before your memory of them fades. You can all be of great assistance to me, as you were all there on that night before Bealtaine.’ She paused and looked around at them. All seemed at ease, alert, with bright eyes and eager faces.

  ‘Hugh,’ she said quickly. ‘That was your knife – the knife that killed Colman. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, Brehon,’ replied Hugh with the promptness of a well-trained hound.

  ‘And you gave it to Colman? Why?’

  He stared at her. A look of panic had returned to his small, freckled face.

  ‘He asked me for it,’ he said eventually.

  ‘And you just handed it over to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, looking a little relieved.

  ‘Why?’ she asked calmly.

  ‘Because he …’ Hugh’s voice tailed away.

  From the corner of her eye Mara could see Shane making signs to Hugh. She could interpret them easily. Tell her, the sign said, but Hugh was silent. She looked at him thoughtfully; he had clearly told Shane, possibly Fachtnan, too. She would not pursue the question now, she thought. He would tell her soon.

  She turned away from Hugh. ‘Now, you’ll all have to help me. You are my scholars and you have always helped with my law cases. This is one case where you know more than I do. That night, I turned back after the first terrace, but you all went on. Even if none of you saw the killing, you were present and will have seen who was there. So when did you first see Colman’s body, Hugh?’

  He opened and shut his mouth once or twice and then, strangely, closed his eyes, almost as if the picture in front of them was too painful to bear. ‘Just after the bonfire was lit,’ he said in a low voice and half-opened his eyes again.

  Mara beamed at him. ‘That’s wonderful evidence,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘And who put the torch to the bonfire?’

  ‘Ardal O’Lochlainn,’ said Hugh, his blue eyes now wide and candid.

  Mara looked at the others. They were all nodding. ‘You were all with Fachtnan, all the rest of you?’ she asked and waited until the heads nodded. ‘Now, what I want you all to do is to think back to the time before the bonfire was lit by Ardal O’Lochlainn …’ She stopped suddenly, remembering that ride into Galway. Hadn’t Ardal said that he had not been there? She tried to remember his words … something about allowing the men to go … but perhaps she had misunderstood him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Moylan and Aidan, speaking together as they often did. These two had come to the law school on the same day eight years ago. They were both six years then and had bonded together like a pair of puppies from the same litter. ‘We were up on Eagle’s Rock.’

  ‘A great place for seeing the whole mountain,’ said Mara. Their attention would have been mainly on the bonfire, she thought. Nevertheless, they were at an age where memory and eyesight are at their best. She turned back to Hugh.

  ‘But you weren’t on Eagle’s Rock, were you?’ she said gently.

  The unhappy look was back in Hugh’s eyes. ‘No,’ he said shortly.

  ‘Colman told him to wait for him,’ explained Shane.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Mara. She seized the long stick of charred pine that always stood at the side of the fireplace and drew a large oval on the whitewashed board that stretched the length and the height of the wall. ‘Now, this is the first terrace on the mountain,’ she said, indicating the outer oval and quickly sketching in another, slightly smaller oval inside of it. ‘The king and I got as far as here, but most people were going on to the second or third terrace by the time we left. Now let me put in the other terraces.’ With a steady hand she drew six more irregular oval shapes inside the first.

  ‘Here is Wolf’s Lair, on the fourth terrace,’ she said, drawing a large ‘X’. ‘Where were you waiting, Hugh?’

  ‘Over there,’ he muttered.

  ‘On the fourth terrace?’

  He nodded silently. His face had gone pale. ‘I couldn’t see inside Wolf’s Lair,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Well, Wolf’s Lair is on the western side of the mountain, so were you over there on the eastern side, the way that people come up?’

  Shane was nodding encouragingly, so Mara moved on. Hugh had been very badly frightened; it would take him a time to trust her and to come out with the full story.

  ‘And you other boys were up here on Eagle’s Rock,’ she continued, letting her voice take on a note of excitement. ‘That’s wonderful – just the place to see everything!’ They would love the idea of a mystery and a chase, she knew. ‘Quickly, now, don’t even talk about it. Just think of a name and then come out and show me where they were just when the bonfire was lit.’

  Colman was probably killed before the lighting of the bonfire, she thought, but it would have been quite dark by then. Little could have been seen on the mountain, just shadowy figures moving with pitch torches in their hands. Still, the sudden flare of a torch would illuminate a face for a minute. Once the bonfire flared up the light would give clarity to the figures, of course.

  ‘Emer and Rory were over here,’ said Enda, coming out and seizing the charred stick. He drew two stick-like figures, one with very large breasts outlined, and then stood back with a smirk, shrugging his blond hair out of his eyes. It’s interesting how the art of adolescent boys seemed to reproduce the fertility symbols of ancient pagan times, she thought idly, as she said aloud, ‘Good, so they were on the top terrace at the north side.’

  ‘And Rory and Aoife were over here on the west side,’ said Moylan, coming out and copying Enda’s daring drawing. Even Hugh was sniggering now, Mara was glad to see.

  ‘So they were also on the top terrace,’ she said tolerantly.

  ‘Father Conglach was on the fifth terrace over on the west side,’ said Aidan, getting to his feet.

  ‘No, he wasn’t, he was on the fourth terrace,’ contradicted Fachtnan.

  ‘Yes, Fachtnan’s right,’ said Shane. ‘I heard him shout at Nessa and she was on the fourth terrace.’

  ‘No, he didn’t shout at Nessa,’ said Hugh quietly. ‘He shouted at Colman; I heard him.’

  Mara looked at him with interest, remembering the priest’s condemnation of Colman. Hugh flushed under her gaze.

  ‘Well, he shouted at Nessa, too,’ insisted Shane.

  ‘He might have yelled at Colman; I heard him yell, but I didn’t take too much notice,’ said Aidan. ‘He is always shouting about something or other. He was shouting at me the other day for having pimples. He said that they were the mark of the devil,’ he added in aggrieved tones.

  Mara concealed a smile. ‘Well, it looks as if Father Conglach was on the fourth terrace near to Wolf’s Lair. Do you agree with that, Aidan?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He thought for a moment and then said graciously, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ He came out and drew a stick figure for Father Conglach on the fourth terrace.

  ‘And Feirdin was going down,’ said Fachtnan suddenly. ‘I remember looking and wondering why someone was going down before the singing and the dancing started. And then I saw that it was Feirdin and I thought he might be frightened. He’s a bit strange about some things. He was with someone. I don’t know who it was. It wasn’t anyone that I know.’

  ‘Which terrace was he on?’ asked Mara, her heart sinking. This, of course, would be the conclusion that most people of the Burren would jump at and only Feirdin’s mother would be upset. Even the MacNamara clan would not mind too much
if it turned out that Feirdin MacNamara was the man who killed the young lawyer. After all, their own taoiseach, Garrett MacNamara, had taken his case for judgement and had wanted to have him kept under restraint. The responsibility to leave him at liberty would be borne by the Brehon.

  ‘He was probably between the third and the fourth terrace when I saw him, or perhaps it was the second and the third,’ said Fachtnan. ‘I heard Malachy the physician call down to him, but Feirdin didn’t stop. He was going down quite fast.’

  ‘I’ll ask Malachy, then,’ said Mara. ‘Put the two of them in, Fachtnan.’

  After that the suggestions came thick and fast. The top terrace was filled with figures – most of the young people were up there: Donogh O’Lochlainn’s young sons, represented by Moylan with a series of crosses. The older ones, the mothers and fathers, were content with the lower terraces – most of them were marked in on the sixth terrace; Daniel, probably deciding that this was to be Emer’s last evening of fun before settling down to married life, had certainly been on the sixth terrace.

  ‘Murrough and his wolfhounds were over there on the eastern side on the fifth terrace,’ said Hugh unexpectedly. He walked forward, did a neat little sketch of a wolfhound head and then went over and sat on the floor with his arm around Bran who had come in to sit at his usual place under the lintel of the open door. If Murrough was on the eastern side there, he might have seen Hugh on the terrace below him, thought Mara. I’ll have to ask him. At least one part of the boy’s story could be confirmed.

  ‘Oh, and Diarmuid was over there near Wolf’s Lair,’ said Shane. ‘I remember seeing him, because I remember wondering if his dog, Wolf, would make a good hunting dog.’