Condemned to Death

by Cora Harrison

  Nuala absorbed this without comment. ‘And I would say that the man has been dead for about three days,’ she said.

  ‘Three days. That’s a surprise!’ Mara looked all around the tiny bay. The sand was soaking wet and every dip and declivity in the rocks around them was filled with seawater and most of them held tiny shrimps or other sea creatures. It was obvious that the tide would cover this spot and extend far up to the high-tide level where the smoke from the fires drifted back towards the sand-dune cliffs.

  Nuala had followed her thoughts. ‘Came in on the tide, Liam thinks. He’s had a look at the boat. Says the bottom timbers are more soaked than they would be if it were just resting here. He knows about boats; he’s the son of a fisherman.’

  ‘That’s what everyone here has been telling me – that the boat came in on the high tide in the early morning.’ Mara stared meditatively at the boat. And yet, she thought, she was fairly certain that the boat had been there on the dunes when she had noticed the rabbit jump from it. And Slevin remembered it also.

  So, he could have been killed three days ago, launched out to sea and then drifted in on the tide, thought Mara. The south-westerly wind had just got up this very morning, she remembered. Perhaps that had made a difference. Or perhaps it was just fate. Perhaps one boat looked like another to someone like herself, or even Slevin. She got up and walked all around but there was nothing to make it look different – no name, no marks, just a boat whose timbers were worn out, were fragile with the passage of time.

  ‘There was something else strange about the body.’ Nuala had been watching her, waiting until Mara’s thoughts had unravelled themselves.

  ‘Yes.’ Mara turned to her with relief. Gathering evidence, she often reminded her scholars, should come before speculation.

  ‘The man’s tongue was pulled out after death – I don’t mean that it was torn out, but a certain force was used before the body stiffened. It was pulled out and then the upper teeth were closed over it and probably held in position – this probably happened about an hour after death. You see, the body starts to stiffen from the head down, so the eyes and the mouth stiffen before the neck and shoulders. Someone did this when the jaw had begun to stiffen. It would not have taken long.’

  She made no further comment, but Mara nodded. ‘I can understand the reason for this,’ she said. ‘I think that it was all part of painting a picture, of giving an appearance of a man who was put out on the ocean in a boat with no oars. My own scholars are always fascinated by that – by the fact that a man would be launched out to sea and that his fate would be in the hands of God. In fact, it probably condemned him to die of thirst. The murderer wanted the corpse to present the appearance of a man who died of thirst.’

  ‘Whereas, in reality, the man had died from a blow to the head,’ said Nuala drily.

  ‘Can I see?’ asked Mara, nerving herself to stand up.

  ‘There’s nothing to see,’ said Nuala without moving from her seat. ‘You can look if you like, but no mark has been left. The damage is internal. The instrument that hit the skull must have been well padded. And, as well as that, he wore a wig so that also protected the skull.’

  ‘I’d better have a look anyway,’ said Mara. She didn’t want to, but she felt a responsibility to this man who had drifted up onto the shores of the territory where she was Brehon. She was embarrassed that she had not noticed that he wore a wig. She had focused on the face, the open mouth, the widely opened eyes. Now she needed to find out more about him. He was not a man from her jurisdiction and he had, if Domhnall was correct, no relations to be compensated for his death, but for the sake of law and order and of justice within the kingdom, the truth had to be established. Resolutely she walked towards where the dead man lay within the boat.

  The body had been washed, the incisions neatly sewn up, the linen shirt laid over it, under the tarpaulin. Most of the seaweed that had draped it when she had first seen the corpse had now been picked off and left at the side of the boat. She bent down and looked at it: reddish-brown leaves of dillisk, white carrageen, sea cabbage, long brown broad strands of kelp and flat purple slices of laver – there were even a few strands of samphire.

  ‘Nothing unfamiliar here,’ she said. ‘All of this could be found on Fanore beach. When I was a child I used to come here with Brigid. She used to pick carrageen to make cough syrup to give to my father’s scholars. I used to bring back these long brown kelp streamers – Cumhal told me that they could be used to forecast the weather – if they were stiff, then we were in for a dry spell and when they went limp we could expect rain.’

  She looked resolutely at the mouth of the corpse and saw what Nuala meant. Someone had deliberately closed the upper jaw so that it held the tongue between both sets of the yellow teeth.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said to Nuala. Her indignation at this treatment of a dead body, at this deliberate attempt to mimic a judicial procedure, was so great that she hardly noticed the difficulty of climbing back across the rocks and onto the orange sands of Fanore beach.

  The meal was over as she came back up the sands. No one had resumed work, though. The fishermen, their wives and their children stood in a group and she noticed that Michelóg the farmer stood amongst them. Fernandez, Etain and Brendan were a little apart. They were deep in conversation but moved away from each other as Mara came up the sands.

  ‘We were thinking, Brehon, that since the tide is on the turn, we should bury the body,’ said Fernandez. There was a hint of diffidence, of unsureness in his voice and she ignored his suggestion.

  ‘Call everyone to come down and inspect this boat,’ she said abruptly. She waited until he beckoned and until there was a line of about thirty people in front of her. ‘I want every man, woman and child to look at this boat, and at the man in it, of course. I want you to tell me whether you have ever seen either before.’

  It would be, she thought, noticing the closed-in faces, a waste of time. Even the children had been warned to say nothing.

  Nevertheless, it had to be done so she stood beside it patiently as all filed past, efficiently managed by Domhnall and Slevin. Her other five scholars, were, she thought, not showing themselves to be much help. Their loyalty, for the moment, appeared to be with their fishermen friends, although she did see Cael shoot an enquiring look at her brother, as though asking a question, which was silently answered, Mara reckoned, as after a glance from Cian, his sister’s face became as hooded and expressionless as the others. Still this could not be helped for the moment. Mara watched the faces as they filed past the body in the boat and sorted out the words that she would use when the procedure was over. To each one she asked her questions – asking for information about the boat and the man. Nothing but head-shakes answered. She waited until all the family groups stood uncertainly before her and then she signalled to Liam to cover the body again.

  ‘I am not satisfied about this death,’ she said, raising her voice to contend with the roar of the wind and the waves, and the high melancholy calls of the white and grey seabirds. ‘The matter will have to be investigated, but in the meantime, the body will have to be moved; the tide threatens it. I would like it if someone,’ here she looked directly at Fernandez, ‘could bring a cart to the top of the path through the dunes, and then we’ll take the body to the church. It can lie there in the church and within the boat as its coffin until I can establish the identity of the dead man.’

  No one dared ask her how she was going to do that, so she waited until they had gone back up to their fires again, Fernandez stopping to assure her that a cart would be with them in ten minutes and then when they were out of earshot she turned to Domhnall. ‘Do you think that we could possibly ask your father to come here to Fanore,’ she asked. ‘I have to be sure of the identity of this man before I investigate what did, in fact, happen to him.’

  ‘I’m sure that he will, Brehon,’ said Domhnall readily. ‘Shall I ride over to Galway and ask him to come back.’

  ‘If you w
ouldn’t mind, Domhnall, and do tell him that I am very sorry to disturb him – and give my love, and my apologies, and to your mother, also.’ Sorcha, her daughter, she knew was so pleased about how well her eldest son was getting on in the law school that she would not grudge the absence of her husband – and Oisín would feel the same. It would not be a busy time for him – his major business was the importation of wine from western France and that would mostly occur in the autumn. ‘Take Slevin with you,’ she ended, ‘and bring your father straight to Cahermacnaghten, not to Fanore.’

  It would be best, she thought, to talk with the merchant from Galway before taking him over to Fanore.

  Five

  Do Breithemhnas for Gellaib

  (On Judgement about Pledges)

  The creditor who holds your brooch, your necklet or your earrings as a pledge against your loan must return them so you may wear them at the great assembly. Otherwise he will be fined for your humiliation.

  Oisín O’Davoren was Mara’s second cousin, as well as being her son-in-law. He came from an obscure branch of the O’Davorens. His father, his grandfather and his uncles had all been coopers, and had been content to live out their lives in the useful trade of barrel-making. Oisín, though, had been ambitious. In his teens, he had visited Galway to sell some barrels and had decided that the life of a merchant was the one for him. He began to buy and sell wine as well as barrels. By the time he was a young man of just thirty, he had done so well that he now had a fine stone house as well as a shop in the city. He also had three children and had been very pleased and proud that his mother-in-law had accepted his eldest son, Domhnall, then aged eight years old, as a scholar in her renowned law school.

  And the placement had worked out. Domhnall, to Mara’s mind, had inherited the brains and the integrity of her own father, Domhnall’s great-grandfather. The immense toil of the law school, the hundreds of legal decrees, triads, heptads and other lore that had to be memorized, the languages, English, Latin, Spanish and even Greek, were easily absorbed by the boy. What was almost more important, though, was that from the start he showed signs of a mature judgement which made Mara hope that he might, in his time, take over the law school of Cahermacnaghten from her.

  To Oisín, however, she contented herself with praising Domhnall’s prowess and his sense of responsibility towards the younger pupils. She knew her son-in-law well enough to know that ever since Cormac, her son by her second marriage, had joined the law school, he had been on tenterhooks to know how that would affect his son who was, of course, oddly, Cormac’s nephew. In her own mind, Mara was by now fairly sure that Cormac would not want to be a Brehon and that even the amount of work involved in studying for the further qualification of ollamh was going to be a great deterrent to him, if he did indeed have any ambition to inherit the law school from his mother. No, she thought, Cormac was like his kingly father and would prefer to be engaged in warfare and in the affairs of the three kingdoms.

  However, these were early days and so Mara plied Oisín with some of his own imported wine, thanked him very sincerely for coming to see her immediately and not waiting until the morning and then led the conversation around to the question of the dead man.

  ‘If it is indeed Niall Martin, then he has neither wife nor child,’ he declared with decisiveness that she expected from him. ‘I’ve known him for a long time; have had some dealings with him when he has given me gold articles for sale in France. An honest man, though very keen on money. His shop was tiny and he never expanded it, though I think he did very well for himself. He lived above it. An old woman came in and out and cleaned the place. She had her own key. I’ve seen her climb the steps at the side of the shop with it in her hand. As for meals, well, I think that he ate breakfast, dinner and supper in the various pie shops around, and you’d often find him, of an evening, in one of the inns. Not a very strong man; he could have dropped dead of a heart attack. He’d be sixty, I’d say. Could be more, could be less. He looked an old man when I came first to Galway, and that’s some time ago. He loaned me money for my first shop.’

  ‘What would have brought him to the Burren?’ queried Mara and Oisín hoisted his shoulders and pursed out his mouth. Mara did not press him. Oisín was a man who always liked to know everything – and to be known as the man who knew everything – and she didn’t want him inventing knowledge.

  ‘How would a man get from Galway City to Fanore?’ she asked. Of course, she thought, a search must be made for a stray horse, and it was possible that one was now quietly feeding from the sparse grass on the rocky fields that overlooked the sea.

  ‘Not by horse, anyway,’ said Oisín unexpectedly. ‘He didn’t ride. He told me once that horses frightened the life out of him. No need for a horse if you stick to the city streets; that’s what he used to say.’

  That was true; thought Mara. Galway was a small city. She thought about it for a moment. This goldsmith hated horses; so how had he got to the Burren?

  ‘So it has to be by boat,’ said Mara thoughtfully.

  ‘Someone must have brought him.’ Oisín sounded quite sure of that. ‘He didn’t have a boat of his own. I can’t imagine him managing one. He was quite a feeble old man. It will have been one of the fishermen from around here.’

  It was, of course, a possibility. It could have been anyone. All of the O’Connors had been involved in this great new enterprise of selling these carefully smoked fish to Galway inns and pie houses. Fernandez had explained to her that the brine-impregnated wood and the seaweed gave the fish a delicate flavour that was relished in a city famous for its places to eat.

  But there was one man from Fanore who was not involved in this enterprise, but this one man crossed and re-crossed Galway Bay almost every single day.

  ‘You’ve never traded in samphire, have you?’ She put the question idly to Oisín and was not surprised to see him shake his head.

  ‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘I trade in almost anything. In fact, I make money by combining loads, by sending heavy flagstones and light leather cloaks to Bordeaux and bringing back barrels of wine and parcels of French lace. Or it could be that I send hunting dogs and salted meat to Spain and bring back oranges, apricots and gold and silver bullion. I might do something with these smoked fish if they taste good, but I’d never touch anything like samphire – too short-lived – they say that it should be in the boiling water as soon as it’s taken from the sea. Now Brendan O’Connor knows that. He carries it in barrels filled with seawater right over to the quay in Galway. He tells me that for a special customer he sometimes even chips off pieces of the rock and brings it, still growing, into the kitchen. But in any case he’s got woven baskets to put it in when he fishes it out and he just carries it dripping down the street. The cooks like that; it shows the people in the street that they are using fresh ingredients,’ said Oisín with a nod of admiration towards another successful merchant.

  Mara listened with amusement. Her son-in-law had forgotten about the murder in his interest in how another man made money. She was not surprised when after a minute he burst out with: ‘I’ve just got such a good idea. I could sell him some of my worn-out half-barrels. I know a sign-writer – does some great pictures for the inns – he could paint a picture of the samphire on the barrels and Brendan’s name. It would look good and he’s getting more business as he goes along the streets. The inns and pie shops would like it, too. Regular customers could have their names painted on them as well. I must have a word with Brendan, see what he thinks. It could be the making of him.’

  ‘Well, you’ll see him tomorrow morning,’ said Mara rising to her feet. ‘I hope Brigid makes you comfortable. She was getting ready your room in the guest house when I was over there a couple of hours ago – and you will want to have a word with Domhnall before you go to bed so I will say goodnight, now.’

  She ushered him to the front door, but did not go to bed. Her mind was very active and now, in the privacy of her own thoughts, she could indulge in some spec
ulation. She waited until she heard the gate to the law-school enclosure slam closed and then went out into the summer’s night, crossing the road and walking across the limestone paved field, keeping close to the wall to avoid disturbing the cows with their young calves.

  The wind had died down and hardly a breath of air came through the wall, though it was one of those gossamer walls, constructed of stone leaning against stone, looking in half-darkness like a white pattern drawn on a darker background. The pink and purple orchids and the ragged robin that grew in the crevices were almost invisible now, but the tall moon daisies shone silver and gold through the twilight, and tiny luminous blossoms of bright yellow star grass flowered here and there at her feet. There was a strong perfume from the pale cream woodbine in the hedgerow and somewhere in the distance the churning sound of the nightjar’s evening song sounded like the noise of the waves on the beach.

  What did happen to that man? She sat down upon a boulder and shut her eyes for a moment, seeing the beach at Fanore.

  It would have been evening. Nuala had said that he had eaten a meal a couple of hours previously. Oisín had confirmed that the man, Niall Martin, ate in pie shops and inns – the presence of the half-digested apricot in the stomach corroborated that. So one evening, three or four days ago, Niall Martin, a prosperous gold merchant, a single man who lived alone, did not, on that evening, return to his rooms above his shop, but had perhaps walked down to Quay Street, found a boat there – perhaps by prior arrangement, or perhaps it was just an impulse – whatever it was, Oisín had made it clear that the gold merchant was not a person to manage a boat by himself. Therefore another man was there in the boat, had taken the passenger on board, had untied the rope from the quayside – cast off – and sailed – surely sailed – rowing would be too slow – sailed back across Galway Bay and perhaps moored at the little pier built by the fishermen of Fanore well over fifty years ago. Niall Martin had got out of the boat, her thoughts went on; he had got out of the boat, but the owner of the boat, the faceless one – what had he done? Stayed there, probably, she thought. If another journey had to be made across the bay, then, despite the long summer nights, it could not have been delayed too long. But why did Niall Martin come to Fanore? And who dealt that fatal blow? And what was the weapon? Something hard, smooth, and well-padded according to Nuala – not a club, she had thought – perhaps an axe, but it would have been padded, otherwise it would have broken the skin and bone. It was the impact of the blow that had killed the man.