Condemned to Death

by Cora Harrison

  ‘It’s all your fault, Dullahán; you spoilt our clue,’ said Cormac eventually, eyeing her anxiously.

  ‘Don’t scold Dullahán,’ said Mara. ‘You know I think that he has played a part in this and has helped me to come to understand what really happened.’

  They both stood very still, watching her, and even the dog seemed to calm down and lay obediently at their feet. Mara looked across the rocks at the place where the old house stood precariously near the high-tide mark.

  ‘Yes, of course!’ She exclaimed the words aloud as suddenly the bits began to come together in her mind.

  She would wait, she thought, until the return of Domhnall and Slevin tomorrow before taking any action. It was, she thought, a tricky legal point, but she was pretty sure she knew the solution. As to the other matter, well that would have to be sorted out also.

  In the meantime there were a few questions in her mind so she went up the beach to find Cliona.

  Cliona, when Mara first knew her properly, was a very young woman who had divorced her husband because he had not wanted her to have a baby. At the time of the court hearing, she had been suckling Art and after the divorce she had courageously worked her small sheep farm herself. Mara had given birth quite soon afterwards, and once she realized that she was unable to breastfeed Cormac, she had engaged Cliona to live with them and to suckle and care for Cormac as well as her own son. This had worked well, with Cumhal keeping an eye on the farm for her, while she lived with Mara. It had worked until Cliona and Setanta had fallen in love and wished to marry and live on Cliona’s farm. Mara had been faced with the dilemma of finding another nurse for Cormac or allowing him to leave her house in order to remain with his little friend and almost twin-brother Art and with Cliona who had been a mother to him. The decision was made; Cliona and Setanta fostered the son of the Brehon and of King Turlough Donn and Cormac grew up devoted to them both.

  And I probably did the right thing, thought Mara as she went up the beach in search of Cliona. No boy could have had a more affectionate foster-mother and Setanta, also, had been a father to Cormac. There had been feelings of jealousy when she had envied the love that Cormac showed his foster-mother; Mara acknowledged that to herself, but she had always trusted Cliona and had respected her judgement in all matters. What Cliona thought of her, she was not sure, but she noticed that Cliona was protective of Cormac and anxious that he should not be misjudged by his own mother. This made Mara slightly ill at ease with her on occasion so she began by making a laughing reference to Dullahán.

  ‘He’ll settle down – the more cracked the pup, the better the dog, did you ever hear that saying,’ said Cliona reassuringly.

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right – although I suppose he must be two years old now,’ said Mara, and then she said, looking out to sea, ‘Etain is managing that big boat of Brendan’s well, isn’t she? Art tells me that she usually sails the old boat, the one that they keep moored down by the old house.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Cliona seemed relieved that the conversation was not going to be about Cormac. ‘They work very hard, the pair of them. She’ll have to slacken off now with a baby due at Christmas – so I hear.’

  ‘I suppose that they have to work very hard because I don’t suppose the samphire season goes on too long; just about up to the beginning of September, isn’t that right,’ said Mara. She had been thinking about that and wondering how Brendan got the money to buy that big boat. Had he, perhaps, been one of the lucky finders of a piece of gold on the early morning beach, had brought it to Galway and exchanged it for enough silver to buy a Galway hooker. It seemed very likely.

  ‘Oh, they’re not just reliant on the samphire,’ said Cliona readily. ‘Oysters are the main business. And of course the two things fit well together. The samphire plants are ready for picking from Bealtaine, right through Lughnasa, right to the end of that month, usually and then the oysters are finished spawning and ready to eat long before Michaelmas Day – and they go on right through the autumn and the spring, right around until the first samphire have come through again.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mara. Oysters were something that she detested so she had not known that piece of information. It still all made sense to her, though.

  ‘And when did Brendan get the new boat?’ she asked, idly putting some more brittle, salt-encrusted, dried seaweed on to the fire.

  ‘Just a few months ago, I think,’ said Cliona. ‘He must have had a bit of luck, Setanta says.’

  Sixteen

  Bretha im Gata

  (Judgements about Thefts)

  If a man steals an ox or a cow he must give back four oxen or four cows.

  If he steals a horse, a pig or an inanimate object then he must return double its value. Every law-abiding man can take anything from a burning building, from a corpse on a battlefield, from a great depth at the bottom of the sea or of a lake, from a place of terror reputed to be haunted by monsters, or anything deep within the rocks which can only be reached by ropes.

  Mara woke early and went downstairs. There would be no sign of Domhnall and Slevin bearing the letter from Valentine Blake for another few hours, but she was too restless and too full of ideas to spend any longer in bed.

  The letter didn’t really matter, she thought. She had asked Valentine certain questions, but now she was certain that she knew the answer to those questions – it would be good to get confirmation, but she was confident that she was right. There was no sign of either Fernandez or Etain so she poured some fresh milk into a carved goblet, sliced a wedge of the soda cake that had been left on the table and then went outside, looking first out to sea and then, when she walked out through the gate, turning and looking back over the mountain that rose up sheer behind her.

  It was, she thought, a spectacular sunrise, almost the most stunning that she had ever watched. The colour of the sky was as though a translucent layer of soft red had been laid across a background of ever-changing blues, paling to pink at times and then turning a vivid red, then to a light purple. It had been a dry few days and in front of that spectacular sky the bare limestone of the mountain reared up in a glory of glistening silver, smooth walls, pointed crags, and long sloping shelves, all seeming as though some celestial power had designed them to be seen against the backdrop of that magnificent sunrise.

  ‘Red sky in the morning; fishermen’s warning!’ The voice at her shoulder, amused and carefree was that of Etain. ‘That’s what we say, the farmers talk about shepherd’s warning, but storms don’t bother the shepherd as much as the fisherman, I can tell you that, Brehon. I don’t like the look of that sky.’

  ‘Do you fear the sea?’ Mara asked the question, thinking that she knew how the dashing Etain would reply, but was surprised at the seriousness of the voice.

  ‘Anyone who doesn’t fear the sea dies young,’ said Etain abruptly. ‘You must never stop fearing the sea or else you are lost.’

  ‘And Brendan?’

  ‘Oh, he fears the sea, too! Why do you think he spent so much silver on buying that hooker – not for these summer runs, but in the winter to ferry the oysters across Galway Bay in a storm – that’s not for a small boat. I pack the oysters for him so that he’s not tired, but it’s an anxious journey, I can tell you, Brehon, and I’m always glad to see him safely back.’

  ‘And how is he going to manage without you this winter?’

  ‘He’ll have to hire some help. He can’t afford to lose the market now that it has been set up. There should be plenty of fishermen who would do a morning’s work, especially in weather too stormy for their little boats. He’ll have to sort something out. I’ll be too busy in the future to help him and I’m not having Síle do that work. She’s not strong. She can help me to look after the baby and she’ll have a home here with Fernandez and me.’

  Mara had half-wondered whether she was supposed to know about this baby, but Etain looked and sounded quite unself-conscious. It was interesting that she did not appear to think there wou
ld be any difficulty for Brendan in paying a wage to a fisherman. There had been a time when Brigid had spoken with pity about the orphaned brother and sister, only seventeen and fifteen when their parents died, leaving them with the responsibility of a young sister and just a few acres of poor land and a small, disease-ridden herd of cows. Now, it appeared, Brendan was wealthy enough to buy himself the best boat in the neighbourhood and also to employ labour.

  ‘When did he buy the hooker?’ she asked casually and was not surprised to hear that it was about eight months ago. Brendan had probably found a piece of gold at that time, taken it to Niall Martin and then bought himself a big boat to cope with the winter storms.

  ‘Must have been expensive,’ she commented, turning once more to look back at the sunrise. Now the dark red was streaked with pointed peaks of smoke-like black, seeming to replicate the jagged rocks that were now returning hues of the darkest dark grey. Mara looked back to the sea and was glad to find that the bows of those small boats that she could see dotted around the ocean were now turned towards the shore and she hoped the fleet of fishing boats would be back soon. She thought that they would. The sky would give them its message and all knew that if rain came it would douse the fires and the catch could be wasted. At the moment all was very still, rather ominously still, but the wind in these western parts could get up very quickly and come storming in from the Atlantic. Her scholars were not in the boats, she was glad to see, but were down on the beach and were being pressed into service by Fernandez to help to load his Spanish ship with the barrels. It would be a race against time and tide now, she knew as she watched the barrels being rolled down the sand and stacked up against the rocks, ready to be winched aboard with the sling which Fernandez had set up on his deck. Dullahán was acting as though the whole scene was set up for his amusement, barking wildly as he chased after the barrels and ignoring the shouts, commands and pleas to go away. Presumably he had not managed to find the lost, half-chewed map with the Greek writing, but the fact that Mara had advised a search at low tide might have prevented the scholars from going out with the boats this morning, so she was glad that she had thought of suggesting it. She counted heads. Cael was there, determined to prove the strength of her muscles by twirling a barrel over the strip of black limestone, Art and Cael were rolling another barrel across the sand, while Cormac tried to distract Dullahán by throwing a large flexible slimy stalk of kelp for him to retrieve. Finbar she saw, also, up to his knees in water, helping to tie the sling onto one of the casks.

  Reassured that all were safe, Mara turned back to look at the sky again. Streaks of yellow were now imprinted across the fluffy red background, and as she watched the whole sky turned to a shade of dark orange that seemed to mirror, in soft glowing light, the expanse of sand on the beach. Even for the non-weather-wise, it looked as though settled weather could not be expected, despite the present calm.

  ‘Are you going to Galway this morning, Etain?’ asked Mara, turning reluctantly away from the sky and bringing her mind back to her task at hand.

  ‘Not me; Brendan is going. There he is now. I’ve been up at dawn picking samphire and he was loading up as fast as I could pick,’ said Etain. ‘He’ll do a second run in the big boat when as he comes back if all is well and the storm doesn’t break.’ She turned to look at Mara, saying, ‘Did you want him? I’d say that he’ll be back as soon as he can. That sky looks like as if it’s brewing up a bad storm. Look at those clouds getting up. Amazing how quickly it can change, isn’t it? One minute bright as an orange and now, look, it’s all grey and black overlaying it– there’s rain coming, I’d say. Your boys will get wet riding back from Galway. They should have gone with Brendan this morning in the hooker – the sea is quicker. Why didn’t you send them with him? He’d have been glad of the company.’

  And with that she left. And Mara was glad not to have had to reply. It would have been a difficult question to answer. Why had she not sent them with Brendan? That was not a question that she wanted to answer honestly to Brendan’s sister. She cast another look at the sky, wished that she had Cumhal with her as he would undoubtedly be able to forecast when the rain would come. In his absence, she decided to be sure rather than sorry, as Brigid would say, and she went back indoors to fetch her cloak and went to walk up beside the Caher River until she reached the spot that she had identified from high on the mountain. There was something she wanted to check on and when she saw the rock formation she knew that her memory was right.

  The rocks here were not flat slabs like in other places, but were slanted and sharp-edged. In most places those edges had been softened by a thick coating of springy grey-green lichen, but here and there the rim showed through, sharp as though they had been shaped by a whetting stone. Mara bent down to look, but there would, she thought, remembering Nuala’s words about the lack of a wound, be nothing really to see – just a strong conviction that this was how the death had happened, here a couple of hundred yards further up from the sand dunes and the beach.

  Domhnall and Slevin arrived back before the storm, triumphant at how fast they had come, but exhausted. They had set off before dawn and were both yawning heavily so Etain suggested that they pull a couple of mattresses in front of the fire in the hall and have a few hours’ rest in peace away from all of the shouts and excitement on the beach. They handed over the letter from Valentine to Mara and she read it through, nodded at its confirmation of her guesses and put it into the pouch that hung from her waist. She did not share it with them, however, and left them to have their sleep and went back down onto the beach.

  The hooker was back, moored to the pier, but there was no sign of Brendan. Setanta was pulling his boat up the strand with the help of Cormac, Art and Finbar. Dullahán tried to jump into the moving boat, but was roared at so fiercely that he for once desisted and stood with an uncertain and slightly hurt look on his face.

  ‘Sorry for yelling at the dog like that, Brehon,’ apologized Setanta hastily when he spotted her. ‘It’s just that I want to get this boat up onto the dunes as quickly as I can. We might have a bit of a storm this evening or even earlier and I don’t like leaving them tied against that pier. The smaller boats can easily smash themselves to smithereens if the wind picks up enough.’

  ‘Yell at him all you like if it makes him do what he’s told. You’ll have to tell Cormac your secret of making that dog behave,’ said Mara and then was a little sorry when she saw her son look hurt, ‘but he was doing some good training with him yesterday,’ she added quickly and then, to distract attention from Cormac, she asked Setanta whether he had seen Brendan.

  ‘I believe he’s gone to have a look at the oyster beds, see how they’re getting on, Brehon,’ said Setanta, pointing an admonishing finger at Dullahán, who seemed to be about to recover from the shock of being addressed so harshly.

  Mara left them. The oyster beds were over by the old house and she was anxious to inspect that. As she approached Murrough’s place, as Art had called it, she could see that Brendan was quite some distance away and so, feeling thankful she was wearing a dark cloak, she slipped into the little old house.

  Murrough’s place was a small, cabin-like cottage with a gaping doorway. It had just one narrow window in the main room downstairs and another similar one high up in the gable on the southern end of the building. Mara came to the doorway, and saw that on the inner side of the three-foot-thick wall someone had hung a tarpaulin from a rod and weighed it down with beach stones inserted into a roughly sewn hem so that the wind would not blow it into the room. She pushed it aside and looked in. There was just one room downstairs and a solid and new-looking ladder leading up to a loft. With one backward glance at the distant figure of Brendan, Mara stepped inside. It had probably been used in the past to house animals – perhaps even Michelóg’s notorious bull – there was a small lump of dried dung in one corner, but the stone flooring had otherwise been swept clean and the large empty fireplace had some charred lumps of turf lying in it as though som
eone had lit a fire there quite recently. There was an old bench, worm-eaten in places, drawn up in front of the fireplace and again that looked clean and able to be used as a seat by the fire. The house, in fact, was surprisingly dry and free from bad smells, with fresh lime-wash gleaming on the walls. She went to the ladder and climbed easily to the top of it and looked into the loft bedroom. Again it was reasonably clean, quite weather-proof, and with a large swathe of sweet-smelling hay thrown down in one corner – in summer weather like this a man could place a cloak over that hay and sleep the night comfortably, especially a man who was driven on by his lust for gold.

  But this was not what she was looking for so she came back down again. From her early childhood she had been in and out of cottages like this and, one and all, they had their ‘hidey-hole’. Without hesitation she dragged the bench over so that its back leaned against the chimney breast and climbed up on top of it, inserting her hand into the wood-lined cupboard that was built between the slope of the roof and the top of the wall.

  And instantly her hand met the pliable osier rods of a basket. Carefully she drew it out. She had seen many of them during the last week, sometimes on the rocks where Etain worked, sometimes dripping sea water and filled with samphire, but this basket was quite dry and was stuffed with one of the short woollen jackets that fishermen wore over their léinte. She parted the folds and saw, by the sparse light that came through the window slit, a gleam come from within them.

  And then the light increased. The tarpaulin was pulled across abruptly and the man came in. He stood there for a minute and then said harshly: ‘That’s mine; that’s my property, Brehon, and this is my house.’

  ‘Yes, of course, it is your house, Brendan,’ said Mara, resting her spare hand on the back of the bench and climbing down. She carefully placed the basket on the seat before saying calmly: ‘I should have listened more carefully when I was talking to Michelóg. I remember now that he said he had a word with you about allowing the gold merchant to stay here. Of course he must have sold this old house belonging originally to his grandfather to you at some stage – it would be more use to you than to him. It touches on your land, doesn’t it? And as for this gold; well, you know, you may be right. It could be that when I look into it, it will turn out to be your property. After all, your land has shore rights and the law says that any goods found on the seashore belong to the owner of that shore unless it can be proved that they have come from beyond nine waves from the shore – in which case they will belong to the finder.’