Condemned to Death

by Cora Harrison

  ‘So, it must be Kerry. Cian and me have been to Kerry, went across on a boat when we were living with that old man, Brehon MacClancy, the old goat,’ she added with her usual downrightness.

  ‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum,’ said Cormac with a lofty air and then spoiled it by saying, ‘Mind you, he deserved to be killed.’

  Mara allowed them to chat on about the events surrounding the death of the former Brehon MacClancy for a few minutes, though she was surprised that their attention was so easily diverted from the present to the past. It was not like any one of the three. They were still discussing the death of the elderly Brehon as she walked up to meet Finbar and take from him her satchel and to give him an errand to take his mind off his troubles. He looked, she thought in a concerned fashion, very white-faced and worried.

  ‘Finbar,’ she said, ‘could you move all over the beach, top, bottom, sand dunes, and let me know any places from which the boat with the body can be seen. Be very thorough about it, won’t you.’

  That she thought would keep him busy until Nuala arrived and also keep him away from the rather awkward and excessive pity that the other scholars still showed towards him ever since the end-of-year results had been announced. She would have to make up her mind what could be done with him if he was sure that his own father, the Brehon of Cloyne, would not welcome him home. He wrote a neat hand and perhaps it might be possible to get him a job as a clerk to a man of affairs – even perhaps someone in Galway, she thought, and resolved to have a word with a lawyer friend of hers in that city.

  ‘How many fishing families are there at this camp?’ she asked when she returned to the other three. They seemed to have exhausted the subject of Brehon MacClancy and were sitting silently gazing out to sea. She took from her satchel a sheet of vellum, her horn and a well-mended pen. The flat rock made a good surface and she handed the pen to Cian and Cormac began to recite the names – he had known them all since babyhood:

  ‘Fernandez MacFelim; Brendan and Etain, the samphire-gatherers; Setanta and Cliona …’

  One by one the names were mentioned and checked by frequent glances to the top of the beach and when they had finished Cian had written a neat column of ten families, including Brendan and Etain. To her relief her scholars did not then do what she had expected them to do, which was to speculate on this death, but began questioning her about the lands ruled over by McCarthy Mór, who still styled himself King of Desmond – although the majority of the lands in his one-time kingdom were now owned by the Earl of Desmond. They all, she thought, fancied a jaunt down into the southern part of the country and were rather more stimulated than made anxious by the news that most of the Kingdom of Kerry was in enemy hands.

  ‘Brehon MacEgan,’ she said now in answer to their questions about the household of McCarthy Mór. ‘He is a relative of the MacEgan who runs the law school of Duniry in east Galway.’

  ‘We could go down there, all of us, if you’re too busy,’ offered Cormac. ‘I could borrow a few of the King’s new guns. We know how to fire them.’

  ‘It’s too far,’ said Mara. She had been thinking hard while replying mechanically to the questions. ‘If Nuala thinks that the man died of exposure, of thirst, or of any cause of death that would result from spending days or even weeks on the face of the ocean, then we will just have to bury him in the churchyard here.’

  ‘There’s no mark on him,’ said Cormac.

  ‘His tongue is sticking out; he was probably trying to catch raindrops,’ said Cian.

  ‘His eyes look like he died in agonies of thirst,’ said Cael and that was an unusually imaginative thought from a girl who was usually very keen on facts and logic. Obviously this death had impressed the young people.

  ‘The first duty of a lawyer is to gather evidence,’ said Mara, rising to her feet. ‘Let’s go across to Slevin and see whether there are any particulars that we can observe from the body before Nuala arrives and can tell us how he died.’ As she went along she could see how the discovery of the body would not have been made except for the accident of the child climbing over the rocks looking for shells. If this had been on land, by now the birds would have discovered it, but here on the beach today fish were being gutted at great speed and buckets of innards thrown into the sea, giving enough tasty morsels for the grey and white kittiwakes and larger fulmars which were continuously swooping down and picking them up. The dead body had not been spotted by any of them.

  Slevin was glad to see them – he had amassed a small pile of smooth black limestone pebbles just in case he was visited by some large seabird, but now he was just sitting on a rock and staring out to sea. He jumped to his feet when they arrived and greeted them warmly.

  ‘I was wondering about his clothes, Brehon,’ he said speaking in a discreetly lowered tone of voice when they were near enough to hear him. ‘Have a look at him.’

  Mara bent over the body and nodded slowly. ‘I see what you mean. What do you think, the rest of you?’ And then, when they made no answer but just looked blankly at the body, she said slightly impatiently, ‘Come on, think, all of you, look at him; what’s he wearing? No cloak, you’ll observe …’

  And then when they still did not answer she said in exasperated tones: ‘Tell them, Slevin.’

  ‘It’s linen, but it’s not a léine,’ said Slevin triumphantly and she nodded to him approvingly. ‘I must say, Slevin, that I didn’t notice that when I looked at him first. I suppose it was all that dried seaweed heaped on top of him.’

  Slevin had not disturbed the dark brown strands of crinkled seaweed, but with the sun shining down on the body Mara could now see quite clearly that the front of the garment was fastened together with small knotted woollen buttons inserted into slits of buttonholes.

  ‘He’s dressed in a linen shirt, not a Gaelic léine,’ said Slevin eventually to the younger scholars. ‘Can’t you see the buttons? We don’t have buttons – we just pull it over our heads. And the linen seems different, doesn’t it? May I touch, Brehon?’

  He had already done so, she guessed, but she nodded permission. It was part of her method of teaching that the older should instruct the younger. Slevin, she thought, had not wasted his time. While he had been gathering stones he must have been thinking hard. She listened to him telling the others how superfine the linen was, and pointing out that most men in the Burren and other Gaelic kingdoms, unlike this corpse, did not usually wear hose during the summer months.

  ‘They must have taken his sandals off?’ said Cian eventually.

  ‘Perhaps he wore boots,’ said Slevin and this fitted so well that she half-wondered whether Domhnall had said anything to him. She didn’t think so, however. Domhnall was a boy of the utmost truthfulness and discretion and he had spoken as though the memory had just come to him.

  So, yes, of course, thought Mara, the man had come from Galway City, he had worn English dress: a shirt, a doublet, breeches and nether hose, summer as well as winter, and doubtless a pair of leather boots. But someone had deliberately removed those very defining articles of clothes and just left the man in his shirt and under hose as though he was a fisherman or farmer, dressed only in the léine, or what could have looked like a léine, as though, she told herself, he could be a victim of the Brehon law punishment of fingal.

  ‘Here comes Art,’ said Cormac joyfully. He was very friendly with Cian and Cael, but his foster-brother Art and he were like twins, seldom happy out of each other’s company. ‘May I tell him, Brehon?’

  ‘Yes, but quietly.’ Mara had no thought of sharing her findings with the whole beach and she explained that to them all when Art and Cormac came back. Art looked pale, sallow beneath the summer tan, she thought, and resolved to keep an eye on him. He was a very sensitive boy, a good scholar, a hard worker, but one who always needed plenty of encouragement and praise. Things that other scholars shrugged off could upset him for days.

  ‘What do you think about the boat, Art?’ she asked. It was a question that she might put later
on to the fishermen, but this fisherman’s son must surely have an opinion on it. He felt it carefully, and to her surprise was quite assertive in his belief that it could have stood up to an Atlantic storm.

  ‘Something light like this would ride the waves, Brehon,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s the heavier boat that would be more likely to overturn and sink.’

  Mara nodded, but she was sceptical that this boat, as thin as a cockleshell, could have been swept all the way up from the coast of Kerry without sinking.

  And if the man was from Galway then the south-westerly wind would have brought him up north to the coast of Spiddal or somewhere like that, certainly in the opposite direction to the Burren. And this was not the kind of boat that they used in Galway City. Theirs were bigger and more substantial.

  In fact, this boat, she was beginning to be sure, was the one that she had seen the rabbit jump from a few days earlier, the one that had been abandoned on the sand dunes of Fanore.

  And not only the fishermen, but her scholars, also, were aware of that fact and the uneasiness stemmed from that.

  Now she had to wait until Nuala arrived to see what she thought about this man’s cause of death. She walked forward to meet Finbar and to listen gravely to his report that the boat could not be seen from anywhere on the beach until the rocks which surrounded it were scaled. She worried again about how pale and hollow-eyed he looked. She had hoped that the holiday and the excitement about the midsummer’s eve feast, the sleeping in tents and the fishing expeditions would have taken his mind off his father’s edict.

  ‘Let’s walk back to where your shelters are pitched,’ she suggested to the others and encouraged them to talk about sleeping out of doors for the last couple of nights and about how warm and comfortable they were. Cael related, rather drolly, an exaggerated account of Síle’s fears during the night while Cormac and Cian vied with each other about how many hours they had stayed awake. They were all very anxious to show her the tents and to display how well the tar-soaked canvas kept out rain, but she did not allow too much time to be wasted on that.

  ‘There’s something missing here,’ she said looking all around innocently, though she had immediately noticed the absence of the boat.

  The others looked around, also, with blank faces. Cael had a slight frown between her brows, but she said nothing.

  ‘Don’t you remember that old boat that was wedged in over there?’ She pointed to the spot between two pointed grass-covered sand dunes. She waited for them to look at each other, but they didn’t – they looked straight at her with innocent and uncomprehending faces. Mara almost wished that Brigid was here with her. She could just hear her housekeeper, who had been her father’s housekeeper before and had almost forty years of coping with scholars. ‘He had that puss on him like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth,’ she would say.

  ‘It’s strange that you don’t remember the boat,’ she remarked. ‘Finbar, would you go back and wait by the body and send Slevin up to me. In the meantime,’ she said to the four remaining scholars, ‘let’s just cross over and have a look around.’

  The sand was held firm by the coarse green blades of marram grass and it was easy to walk on. She went down the hill to the small hollow where the three tents for the boys were grouped around one large fireplace. They were anxious to show her their sleeping places, but she put them aside. She was beginning to feel a little annoyed at their efforts to divert her from thoughts of the boat that held the corpse. Cormac, she guessed, was at the back of this. His loyalty to his foster-father and to the fishing community was great, she knew, but his first loyalty, if he was ever to make a lawyer, should be to establishing the truth about a crime as serious as murder – and she was beginning to think that this body in the boat was going to be a case of murder.

  There were no marks in the sand to show whether a boat had been dragged out towards the pathway, or even to show its resting place when she had noticed a rabbit leap from it, but now at midday there was a breeze coming in from the ocean and the fine, very dry sand of the dunes was continually in motion, little flurries stirring and rippling. It had been blowing hard the night before; she remembered noticing from her window, just before she had blown out her candle, how the ash tree across the road from her house was bending and swaying.

  ‘Slevin, come over here, will you?’ she said over her shoulder as she saw his tall form appear on the roadway beside the dunes.

  ‘Someone’s taken away the old boat, then,’ he said instantly the moment he joined her, and then before she could say a word he blew a whistle through his pursed lips.

  ‘Of course,’ he said immediately. ‘That’s the boat that has the corpse in it – I bet that’s what it is.’ Slevin’s voice was breaking and it rose quite high as he spoke. Mara, looking back at the younger boys, saw that they had heard, but at that instant Cormac shouted, ‘Rabbit!’ and the attention of all was distracted as the grass was parted by the long-legged and agile leaps. They chased exuberantly after it only giving up when it dived into a burrow.

  ‘Saw it a minute too late; otherwise we’d have had rabbit stew tonight instead of more fish,’ said Cormac, twisting his hands to show how he would wring the animal’s neck. He and Cael began to argue with each other as to which had killed the most rabbits during their short lifespan and eventually Mara tired of them and suggested they return to their work on the beach.

  ‘After all,’ she said, ‘Fernandez is probably relying on you and it’s not fair to deprive him of seven pairs of hands. Tell him that I’ll just keep Slevin until Domhnall comes back with the physician.’

  They went readily and she sensed that they were glad to have something to do. At the moment, until and unless it was confirmed by Nuala that a crime had taken place, there was little to do and certainly not enough for them all. Now it was more a matter of quiet speculation and the summing up of possibilities.

  When they had gone she turned back to Slevin. ‘If the boat that was here last night …’ she began and then he interrupted her. ‘No it wasn’t,’ he said immediately. ‘The boat wasn’t here last night. I remember now. It was here when we saw the place first, before we went to stay in the castle before the wind blew itself out, but I don’t think I saw it when we were actually camping. You could ask Domhnall when he comes back with Nuala, but that is my memory.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara. But surely, she thought, that body could not possibly have lain in the boat on the beach for three days and three nights. Even after the fishing boats had set out to trawl for mackerel and herring, the women and younger children had stayed behind to build up the fires. The beach would have been scoured for every trace of driftwood and dried seaweed. There was no possibility that they could have missed something so startling and so obvious. According to Cormac, little Síle began to scream as soon as she was on the rocks above the small strip of sand.

  Nevertheless, Slevin had a good, clear mind and a very accurate memory so she had no doubt that he was right. She looked back at the rounded shape of the castle with its magnificent view of the ocean, the far islands of Aran and the dark orange sweep of the sandy bay of Fanore. ‘Where did you all sleep?’ she asked idly.

  ‘Domhnall and I slept in the main guard hall, Cael with Síle in one of the wall chambers and the others,’ his grin broadened, ‘the rest of the boys, Cormac, Art, Cian and Finbar, they decided to spend the night in the dungeons and Fernandez allowed them, but made them promise that when they got tired of it they would come up and join us.’

  ‘And they were all right?’ Mara was glad that she had not known, but she supposed that there was no harm in it.

  ‘Well, I must say that I slept like a top that night – and Domhnall, too. We had really comfortable mattresses stuffed with heather and it was nice and warm by the fire. Anyway, when we woke in the morning, there were the other four, lying down on their mattresses with their eyes tightly shut. Strange being in a castle with no men-of-arms there – in fact, most of the time there’s nobody there but Fe
rnandez and Etain, themselves – no servants, nothing. They have the whole big place to themselves – never even lock the front door, either.’

  This could change if the young man was elected by the clan to be their tánaiste, thought Mara. In the meantime, the young couple probably enjoyed the peace and seclusion – she rather envied them as she and her husband, King Turlough, always seemed to be surrounded by large numbers of people, whether they were at the law school, Ballinalacken Castle in the Burren, or in Turlough’s main castle, Bunratty Castle, by the River Shannon. Still, it would have been unlikely that either Domhnall or Slevin would have noticed any movements in the sand dunes – after a day in the wind and sun, hauling boats around and building fireplaces, they would have slept soundly all night. The other four might have seen something when they left the dungeons in order to lie in front of the fire, but they would have had the trouble of hauling their mattresses up the narrow spiral staircase and probably would not have bothered to glance out of the windows at the beach below.

  ‘Let’s go up to the spot where we both remember the boat was lying,’ she suggested and led the way up to the gap between the sand-dune hills.

  ‘It would have been here,’ said Slevin with a quick glance around him before pointing to one spot. ‘Look, Brehon, you can see there’s very little grass growing in this spot, just between the sand peaks.’

  ‘I wonder how it was taken away. It was very worn and thin in the timbers, but it still would have needed two men to carry it, I would have thought,’ said Mara.

  Slevin bent down low and then straightened himself. ‘I’d say it was dragged, look at those broken bits of grass, Brehon, but not dragged onto the path. I’d say that it was dragged in the opposite direction, down towards the Caher River. Look at this, and this.’ Slevin pointed towards the dunes leading to the north of the beach and went excitedly ahead of her, following the trail.