Hemlock at Vespers: Fifteen Sister Fidelma Mysteries

by Peter Tremayne

  Fidelma studied the young man. He was fresh-faced, tousle-haired and had a look of bemusement as if he were caught in a stream of events over which he had no control. Something maternal stirred in Fidelma for the youth had the vacant expression of a little boy lost and alone in a frightening forest. She shook herself to rid her mind of the emotion.

  She gestured for him to sit down.

  “Tell me your story, Nath,” she invited, also seating herself.

  “Little to tell,” the boy said quietly. “I love Ainder and wish to marry her. Moenach was always an enemy to me, to me and to my other brethren. He was a bully always, as a child and as a youth. He delighted in actions that harmed us but like most bullies he knew how to ingratiate himself to his betters. Father Allán would not hear a word against him. Moenach engineered the expulsion of Follamon...”

  “I know about this. I have talked with Brother Ninnedo.”

  Nath gave her an intense look.

  “Then you know what Moenach was really like?”

  “I know what I have been told. So when Ainder came to you and told you what had happened, you were in a great rage?”

  Nath lowered his head and sighed.

  “I rage still. Sister, I do not regret Moenach’s death. We are taught to forgive our enemies, them that do us ill. I cannot find it in my heart to do so. I rejoice in his death. I approve his ultimate punishment. My heart is exuberant. My mind tells me, however, that this is not the law nor the path of the Living God.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No!” The word was ejaculated like a rasping breath.

  “Then why did you run away? Muirenn had been taken prisoner and the rest of the community thought the guilt lay at her door. Why bring suspicion down on your head?”

  Nath looked bewildered.

  “There were many who did not believe in Muirenn’s guilt and believed that Father Allán was using her as an easy scapegoat to protect Moenach’s reputation.”

  “If they knew Muirenn to be innocent, they must have known someone to be guilty. By running, you provided a suspect.”

  Nath shook his head. “Knowing that it is impossible for someone to kill does not mean that one must have knowledge of who committed the deed.”

  “That is true,” conceded Fidelma. “You, for instance, knew Muirenn not to be guilty of the deed. You claim that you, too, are innocent. Why should you be believed any more than Muirenn?”

  “Father Allán said... I thought it for the best until I could make myself heard before a Brehon.”

  “What did Father Allán say?” demanded Fidelma sharply.

  Nath hesitated.

  “When Ainder told me her story, I went straightaway to tell Father Allán. As before, he did not believe me. He fell into a terrible rage and it was some time before he calmed himself. He would not believe anything against his favorite. He told me to go away and never speak of it again. Later, when I heard Moenach was dead, I feared Father Allán would blame me.”

  “So Father Allán knew that Ainder accused Moenach of rape?” mused Fidelma. “And you, Nath, you blindly ran into hiding even though you must have realized that, in the meantime, your running away would compound any suspicions of your own guilt?”

  “But there was no suspicion,” interposed Ainder, “for everyone thought that Muirenn had committed the deed.”

  Fidelma nodded thoughtfully.

  “That is what puzzles me. On Brother Aedo’s word, Father Allán had Muirenn imprisoned until my coming. You say that many did not believe her guilty but the entire community seemed apparently satisfied to have the old woman locked up and the assumption of her guilt left until my arrival. I still find it hard to understand why, knowing this, you, Nath, did not return to your community and await my arrival like the rest? Why draw attention to yourself by running away... unless you had something to hide?”

  Nath looked blank while Ainder was agitated and defiant.

  “The truth, Nath!” snapped Fidelma when neither of them spoke. “I no longer want to indulge in your games.”

  The young man raised his shoulders in a shrug of helplessness.

  “We thought it for the best...”

  Fidelma glanced at Ainder. Her lips were compressed and she was staring at the ground. Abruptly, a thought dawned in Fidelma’s mind.

  “Ainder told you to go into hiding, didn’t she?” She asked the question sharply, without warning.

  Nath started nervously and raised his head to look at Ainder.

  “Look at me, Nath!” Fidelma said sharply. “Tell me the truth and you will have nothing to fear.”

  The young religieux hung his head.

  “Yes. Ainder advised it was for the best.”

  “Why?”

  “It was Ainder who came to me with the news that Moenach had been slain. When I told her that I had already told Father Allán about Moenach’s attack on her, she felt that no one would ever believe her any more than they believed me when I told people that Moenach was the culprit who stole Father Allán’s cup. But she feared that suspicion might fall on me for the killing because of what I had told Father Allán. He knew I hated Moenach. I agreed that I should hide until the whole affair was over or until a learned Brehon arrived who might view my case with sympathy.”

  “That was stupid. If Muirenn had been found guilty, that would have weighed heavily on your conscience.”

  “I would not have let that happen. I would have returned,” protested Nath.

  “Returned? And what excuse would you have offered for your absence? You would have willingly returned to exchange places with Muirenn? That I find hard to believe.”

  “Believe it or not, it is the truth.” The young cenobite looked defiant.

  Fidelma turned reprovingly to Ainder.

  “That was foolish advice which you gave to Nath.”

  The young girl raised her chin pugnaciously.

  “I thought it best at the time,” she answered.

  Fidelma gazed thoughtfully at the girl.

  “I believe you did.”

  She rose and turned toward the door.

  “I am returning to see Father Allán now. You should return to the community, Nath. You have told me the truth.”

  Father Allán rose awkwardly as Sister Fidelma entered his cubiculum.

  “Will you tell me why you killed Moenach, or shall I tell you?” she demanded with an abruptness that left him staring open-mouthed at her. Her voice was cold, impersonal.

  Father Allán blinked and his jaw slackened at the unexpectedness of the question. Before he could protest innocence, Fidelma added with emphasis: “I know you did it. It would save time if we dispensed with any false protestations. I first suspected when I heard that after Brother Aedo had arrived here with the news, he was so distraught that he could not lead you to the spot. Yet you unerringly led the way to where Moenach’s body was, in spite of the fact that there are many similar glades and dells in the forest so, if Aedo had given you the best directions in the world, you might have hesitated before you found the body.”

  A bewildering variety of expressions chased one another across the face of the Father Superior. Then, as he realized that Fidelma was coldly determined, he sat down abruptly and spread his hands helplessly.

  “I loved Moenach!”

  “Hate is often simply the other side of love,” observed Fidelma.

  The Father Superior hung his head.

  “I raised Moenach from a boy. I was his foster father before the law. He had everything a young man could want, good looks, talent and a way of bending everyone to his will, of deceiving everyone into believing his goodness and piety...”

  “Not quite everyone,” Fidelma pointed out.

  “I know. I know,” sighed Father Allán, his shoulders hunched. “I should have listened to his fellow cenobites a long time ago. I should have listened. But I was prejudiced and stopped up my ears when they told me the truth.”

  “What changed you?”

  “I tr
ied to deceive myself for a long time about Moenach. Then Nath came to me with the terrible news of what Moenach had done to Ainder. I could not allow the evil that I had nurtured to continue. If he were capable of this as a boy, what evil lay in store in the future?”

  “What happened?”

  “I dismissed Nath, pretending that I did not believe him. I knew that Moenach had gone down to the village and so I hurried immediately down the path and waited for him. The rest was simple. He had no suspicions. I drew his attention to something on the ground and while he was bending to examine it, I picked up a rock and hit him, again and again until...”

  “Then Muirenn happened to come on the scene... ?”

  “I heard someone coming along the forest path. I hurried away as quickly as I could.”

  “And poor Muirenn saw the form of a religieux hastening away from the scene. You left the old woman there to be blamed for Moenach’s death.”

  “I did not wish that. My soul has been in purgatory ever since.”

  “Yet you did not speak up when Brother Aedo claimed that she was the murderess? You went along with it and added to the evil of your deed by arresting her and calling for a Brehon to try her.”

  “I am a human being,” cried Father Allán. “I am not beyond sin if self-preservation is a sin.”

  Fidelma pursed her lips as she gazed at him.

  “Your attempt to shift the blame to the innocent and stand by while the innocent suffered is a sin.”

  “But my deed was not evil. I have cleansed the world of an evil that once I nurtured in the mistaken belief of its goodness.”

  Father Allán had recovered his full composure. His features were scornful, almost boastful now.

  “I believed that Muirenn might prove her innocence. But if Muirenn was innocent then suspicion should not fall on me. Nath had foolishly been persuaded to disappear. He might have been blamed. Everyone knew how he hated Moenach.”

  Fidelma felt troubled. There was something about this puzzle that did not fit exactly together. A piece of the puzzle was still missing. She accepted that Father Allán had struck the blows that had killed Moenach. However, why would Father Allán, who had not previously accepted Brother Nath’s word about Moenach, nor, indeed, the word of any of those who had tried to warn the Father Superior about Moenach, suddenly accept Nath’s story of Ainder’s rape to the extent that he went straightaway and killed Moenach? Something did not fit.

  Suddenly Fidelma’s mouth split into an urchin grin of satisfaction.

  An hour later she presented herself at the cabin of Illand.

  Ainder greeted her at the doorway.

  “I will not keep you long, Ainder,” Fidelma said. “I want to clarify one point. You told me that Nath loved you?”

  Ainder nodded with a frown of curiosity.

  “But you did not return his love,” Fidelma continued calmly. “You never returned it. You only used him.”

  Ainder flashed an angry glance at Fidelma. She saw the grim signs of knowledge in the eyes of the religieuse.

  “Father Allán is under arrest for the murder of Moenach. Muirenn is released and no suspicion falls on Nath whose only crime was that he was easily led.”

  For a while Ainder said nothing. Then she seemed to explode in emotion.

  “Nath was weak, untalented. Allán was a chieftain’s son with position and a reputation. I, we ...”

  She suddenly realized the implication of what she had confessed to. Her shoulders hunched and then she said in a small-girl voice. “What will happen to me now?”

  Fidelma did not feel pity for this child-woman. Ainder did not love Father Allán any more than she had loved Nath. She had been using Father Allán simply as a means of changing her station in life. It had been Father Allán who had become infatuated with the girl. So besotted with her that when he heard that Moenach had raped the girl, and had it confirmed from her lips, he had waylaid the young man and killed him. The rage that Nath had witnessed had not been for his accusation against Moenach but for Moenach’s crime against Ainder. It was a rage born of jealousy.

  That much might have been understandable as a justification for killing Moenach. But Father Allán and Ainder together had conspired to lay the blame on two innocent people. Muirenn might well have proved her innocence and so they had plotted to use the guileless fascination of Nath for Ainder and manipulate him into guilty behavior. Ainder had cynically deceived and exploited the enamored youth.

  “You will be tried for complicity in the murder of Moenach,” replied Sister Fidelma.

  “But I am only a...”

  “A young girl?” finished Fidelma drily. “No. As you have previously remarked, you are at the age of choice and considered responsible in law. You will be tried.”

  Fidelma gazed a moment at the hatred on the girl’s face. She was thinking of the infatuated Brother Nath and the love-sick Father Allán. Grá is gráin—love or hate, even the words came from the same root. What was it that the great poet Dallán Forgaill once wrote? Love and hatred were hatched from the same egg.

  ABBEY SINISTER

  The black guillemot, with its distinctive orange legs and mournful, warning cry, swooped and darted above the currach. It was an isolated traveler among a crowd of more hardy, sooty, white-rumped storm petrels and large, dark-colored cormorants, wheeling, diving and flitting against the soft blue May sky.

  Sister Fidelma sat relaxed in the stem of the boat and let the tangy odor of the saltwater spray gently caress her senses as the two oarsmen, seated facing her, bent their backs to their task. Their oars, dipping in unison, caused the light craft to dance over the waves of the great bay which seemed so deceptively calm. The clawing waters of the hungry Atlantic were not usually so good-natured as now and often the islands, through which the currach was weaving, could be cut off for weeks or months at a time.

  They had left the mainland, with its rocky terrain and scrawny vegetation, to cross the waters of the large estuary known as Roaring Water Bay, off the southwest coast of Ireland. Here the fabled Cairbre’s “hundred islands” had been randomly tossed like lumps of earth and rock into the sea as if by some giant’s hand. At the moment the day was soft, the waters passive and the sun producing some warmth, making the scene one of tranquil beauty.

  As the oarsmen stroked the vessel through the numerous islands, the heads of inquisitive seals popped out of the water to stare briefly at them, surprised at their aquatic intrusion, before darting away.

  Sister Fidelma was accompanied by a young novitiate, a frightened young girl, who huddled beside her in the stern seat of the currach. Fidelma had felt obliged to take the girl under her protection on the journey to the abbey of St. Ciaran of Saigher, which stood on the island of Chléire, the farthest island of this extensive group. But the escort of the novitiate was purely incidental for Fidelma’s main purpose was to carry letters from Ultan, the Archbishop of Armagh, to the Abbot at Chléire and also to the Abbot of Inis Chloichreán, a tiny religious house on one of the remoter rocky islands within the group.

  The lead rower, a man made old before his time by a lifetime exposed to the coastal weather, eased his oar. He smiled a disjointed, gap-toothed smile at Fidelma. His sea-colored eyes, set deep in his leather-brown face, gazed appreciatively at the tall young woman with the rebellious strands of red hair escaping from her head-dress. He had seen few religieuses who had such feminine poise as this one; few who seemed to be so effortlessly in command.

  “There’s Inis Cloichreán to our right, Sister.” He thrust out a gnarled hand to indicate the direction, realizing that, as he was facing the religieuse, the island actually lay to her left. “We are twenty minutes from it. Do you wish to land there first or go on to Chléire?”

  “I have no need to be long on Chloichreán,” Fidelma replied after a moment of thought. “We’ll land there first as it is on our way.”

  The rower grunted in acknowledgment and nodded to the second rower. As if at a signal, they dipped their oars to
gether and the currach sped swiftly over the waves toward the island.

  It was a hilly, rocky island. From the sea, it appeared that its shores were nothing more than steep, inaccessible cliffs whose grey granite was broken into colored relief by sea pinks and honeysuckle chambers which filled the rocky outcrops.

  Lorcán, the chief rower, expertly directed the currach through offshore jagged peaks of rock, thrusting from the sea. The boat danced this way and that in the foam waters that hissed and gurgled around the jagged points of granite, creating tiny but dangerous whirlpools. He carefully maneuvered a zig-zag path into a small, sheltered cove where a natural harbor awaited them.

  Fidelma was amazed at his skill.

  “None but a person with knowledge could land in such a place,” she observed.

  Lorcán grinned appreciatively.

  “I am one of the few who know exactly where to land on this island, Sister.”

  “But the members of the abbey, surely they must have some seamanship among them to be here?”

  “Abbey is a grandiose name for Selbach’s settlement,” grunted the second oarsman, speaking for the first time since they had left the mainland.

  “Maenach is right,” confirmed Lorcán. “Abbot Selbach came here two years ago with about twelve Brothers; he called them his apostles. But they are no more than young boys, the youngest fourteen and the eldest scarcely nineteen. They chose this island because it was inaccessible and few knew how to land on it. It is true that they have a currach but they never use it. It is only for emergencies. Four or five times a year I land here with any supplies that they might want from the mainland.”

  “Ah, so it is a hermitage,” Fidelma said. There were many of the religious in Ireland who had become solitary hermits or, taking a few followers, had found some out of the way place to set up a community where they could live together in isolated contemplation of the faith. Fidelma did not really trusts hermits, or isolated communities. It was not, in her estimation, the way to serve God by shutting oneself off from His greatest Creation—the society of men and women.