Act of Mercy (2 page)

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Authors: Peter Tremayne

Tags: #_NB_Fixed, #_rt_yes, #blt, #Clerical Sleuth, #Fiction, #Historical, #Mystery, #Medieval Ireland

BOOK: Act of Mercy
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In retrospect, he did not know why he turned from the room, without cleaning it. As he did so, he saw another stain on the floor outside the entrance to the sixth room. He hesitated a moment, tapped on the door and then lifted the latch, pushing it open.
The room was in shadows for the curtain covering the window had not been drawn back, but it was light enough to see that someone was still lying in the bed.
Colla cleared his throat. ‘Sister, you have overslept,’ he called nervously. ‘Your ship is gone – sailed. Sister, you
must
wake up!’
There was no movement from the form under the blankets.
Colla moved slowly forward, dreading what he would find. He could tell instinctively that something was very wrong. When he reached the window at the head of the bed, he drew back the curtain so that light flooded into the room. At the same time he noticed that the blanket covered the head as well as the body which lay still on the bed. There was a meat-knife on the floor. He recognised it as one from his own kitchen.
‘Sister?’ There was desperation in his voice now. He did not want to believe what his mind was already telling him.
With a trembling hand he took hold of the edge of the blanket. It was sodden to the touch. Even without looking, he knew that it was not with water. Very gently, he pulled the blanket away from the face beneath.
The young woman lay there, eyes wide and glazed, her mouth twisted into a final grimace of pain. Her skin was waxy. She had been dead some time. Deeply shocked, Colla forced his eyes to drop from her pallid stare to her body. The white linen of her shift was ripped and torn and suffused in blood. He had never seen such savagery inflicted with a knife before. The body had been cut –
hacked
– as if a butcher had mistaken the young woman’s soft flesh for that of a lamb to be slaughtered.
Colla dropped the blood-soaked blanket back to cover the figure with a curious groaning sound. He turned swiftly away and started to retch.
Fidelma of Cashel balanced against the taffrail of the ship, watching the coastline bobbing away behind it with surprising speed. She had been the last to board the vessel that morning and had barely stepped aboard when the captain had shouted for the single great square sail to be lifted on its hoistable yard up the central mainmast. At the same time, other sailors were hauling up the heavy anchor. She had not even had time to go below to inspect her cabin before the great vessel strained forward, its thin leather sail cracking and filling with the wind, like a lung filling with breath.
‘Set the steering sail!’ came the captain’s stentorian tone. The crew ran towards a long-angled mast, pointing forward of the main mast. A small sail was pulled into place on a cross yard. Beside the captain, on the raised stern deck, stood two muscular, thickset men. Here, on the larboard side of vessel, a large steering oar was fixed. It was so large that it took the combined efforts of both sailors to control it. At the captain’s shouted command, the sailors heaved on the oar. The ship caught the tide and fairly sliced through the wavelets like a scythe through corn.
So fast was the departure of
The Barnacle Goose
from the Bay of Ardmore that Fidelma decided not to go below for the moment but to stay on deck and watch the activity. The only sign of any of her fellow travellers were two youthful religieux standing arm in arm, at the port rail amidships. They were deep in conversation. There were no other passengers in sight, and Fidelma presumed that the rest of the pilgrims were below decks. Half-a-dozen sailors, whose job it was to sail the ship across the stormy seas to Iberia, were going about their various tasks under the watchful eye of the captain. Fidelma wondered why her fellow passengers had chosen to miss one of the most exciting parts of the commencement of a sea voyage, the leaving of harbour. She had made several voyages in her life, but never ceased to be enthralled by the sights and sounds as a vessel left its harbour, feeling the first bounce of the hull against the waves, seeing the rise and dip of the vanishing coastline. She could spend
hours simply watching until the distant line of land dipped below the horizon.
Fidelma was a natural-born sailor. She had often been out in a tiny curragh on the wild, windswept west coast, journeying to remote islands, and had not felt any qualms. A few years ago she had journeyed to Iona, the Isle of Saints, off the coast of high-hilled Alba, on her way to the Synod of Whitby in Northumbria, and then she had travelled to Gaul on her way to Rome and back again, and, in all those long voyages, she had never felt the slightest seasickness in spite of the most severe motion of the ship in which she travelled.
Motion. The idea caught at her mind. Perhaps that was the answer? From a child she had been on horseback. Maybe she had become used to the motion of riding horses and therefore did not react to the motion of a ship as someone who had always kept their feet on dry land might do. She promised herself that on this voyage she would try to learn something more about sea lore, navigation and the distances to be run. What was the point of enjoying a voyage if she did not know the practical side of it?
She smiled to herself at the useless wandering of her thoughts and raised herself up against the wooden ship’s rail to focus on the vanishing height of Ardmore with its tall, grey-stone Abbey buildings. She had spent the previous night there as guest of the Abbot.
Unexpectedly, as she thought of the Abbey of St Declan, she felt a curious sensation of loneliness.
Eadulf! She identified the cause at once.
Brother Eadulf, the Saxon monk, had been emissary from Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, to the court of her brother, Colgú, King of Muman at Cashel. Until a week or so ago, Eadulf had been her constant companion for almost a year, a supportive comrade in several dangerous situations when she was called upon to exercise her skills as a
dálaigh,
an advocate of the law courts of the Five Kingdoms of Éireann. Why was she troubled suddenly by his memory?
It had been her own decision. A few weeks previously, Fidelma had decided to part company with Eadulf to commence this pilgrimage. She had felt that she needed a change of place and space in which to meditate, for she had begun to view her life with dissatisfaction. Afraid of the emotional routine in which she had found herself, Fidelma no longer trusted her own feelings about her purpose in life.
Yet Brother Eadulf of Seaxmund’s Ham was the only man of her own age in whose company she felt really at ease and able to express herself. Eadulf had taken a long time to accept her decision to leave Cashel and set out on this pilgrimage. He had raised objections and
protested for some time. Finally he had decided to return to Canterbury to rejoin Archbishop Theodore, the newly appointed Greek Bishop whom he had accompanied from Rome and for whom he acted as special envoy. Fidelma was annoyed with herself for missing Eadulf already with the coastline still in sight. The coming months loomed lonely. She would miss their debates; miss the way she could tease Eadulf over their conflicting opinions and philosophies; the way he would always rise good-naturedly to her bait. Their arguments would rage but there was no enmity between them. They had learnt together as they examined their interpretations and debated their ideas.
Eadulf had been like a brother to her. Perhaps that was the trouble. She compressed her lips at the thought. He had always behaved impeccably towards her. She found herself wondering, and not for the first time, whether she wanted him to behave in any other way. Members of the religieux did cohabit, did marry, and most lived in the
conhospitae
, or mixed houses, raising their children to the service of God. Did she want that? She was still a young woman and with a young woman’s desires. Eadulf had never given any indication that he felt attracted to her as a man should feel towards a woman. The closest she had come to the subject, to prompt his thoughts upon it, was during a journey when they had spent a cold night on a mountain. She had asked Eadulf if he had heard the old proverb that a blanket was the warmer for being doubled. He had not understood.
There again, she reflected, Eadulf was a firm adherent to the Church of Rome which, while it still allowed its clergy to marry and cohabit, was clearly moving towards the doctrine of celibacy. Fidelma, on the other hand, was an adherent of the Irish Church which disagreed with so many of the rites and rituals of Rome, even to the dating of Easter. She had been raised without any prohibition on her natural feelings. Those differences between her culture and that now espoused by Rome were a major source of the arguments between her and Eadulf. The thought had barely entered her mind when she remembered the
Book of Amos.
‘Can two walk together, except that they be agreed?’ Perhaps the philosophy was right and she should dismiss the subject of Eadulf altogether.
She wished her old mentor, the Brehon Morann, were here to consult. Or, indeed, her cousin – the chubby-faced, happy-go-lucky Abbot Laisran of Durrow who had persuaded her, as a young girl, to enter the religious life in the first place. What was she doing here anyway? Running away because she could not find a solution to her problems? If so, she would merely carry those problems into whatever
corner of the earth she journeyed. There would be no solution awaiting her at her destination.
She had argued herself into this pilgrimage for the purpose of sorting out her life without any pressure from Eadulf, from her brother, Colgú, or her friends at Cashel, her brother’s capital. She wanted to be somewhere that had no connection with her previous life, somewhere she could meditate and attempt to resolve matters. But she was confused. She was not even sure that she wanted to be a religieuse any longer! That thought brought her up with a shock as she realised that she could now ask that very question which she had been suppressing or hiding for this last year or so.
She had entered the life simply because the majority of the intellectual class of her people, all those who wished to pursue the professions, did so, just as their forebears had been members of the Druidic class. Her one abiding interest and passion had been law, not religion in the sense of sublimating herself to a life of devotion within some abbey away from the rest of her fellow beings. She now fell to thinking about the times when the Superior of her abbey had chided her for spending too much time with her law books and not enough time in religious contemplation. Maybe the religious life was no longer for her.
Perhaps this was the real reason for her pilgrimage – to sort out her commitment to God rather than ponder her relationship with Brother Eadulf? Fidelma suddenly felt angry with herself and turned abruptly away from the rail of the ship.
The great leather sail was towering high above her, against the azure sky. The crew were still bent to various tasks, but their movements were less frenetic than they had been when the vessel had initially left the protection of the bay. There was still no sign of the rest of Fidelma’s fellow pilgrims. The two young monks were still having their animated dialogue. She wondered who they were and why they were making this voyage. Did they harbour the same conflict of thoughts that she did? She smiled ruefully.
‘A fine day, Sister,’ called the captain of the ship, moving from his position by the steersmen and coming forward to greet her. He had barely acknowledged her presence when she came aboard, too busy concentrating on the task of getting the ship underway.
She leant with her back against the rail and nodded pleasantly.
‘A fine day, indeed.’
‘My name is Murchad, Sister,’ the man introduced himself. ‘I am sorry I did not have time for a proper greeting when you came aboard.’
The captain of
The Barnacle Goose
could not be mistaken for
anything other than the sailor he was. A sturdy, thickset man, Murchad had greying hair and weatherbeaten features. Fidelma estimated he was in his late forties; she noted that he had a prominent nose which accentuated the close set of his sea-grey eyes. Their forbidding aspect was offset by a twinkling hidden humour. His mouth was a firm line. When he walked towards her, he moved with the rolling gait she associated with seafarers.
‘Have you acquired your sea legs yet?’ he asked in his dry, rasping voice; the voice of someone used to shouting commands rather than indulging in social conversation.
Fidelma smiled confidently.
‘I think you will find me a pretty good sailor, Captain.’
Murchad chuckled sceptically.
‘I’ll let you have an opinion when we are out of sight of land in a deep, restless ocean,’ he replied.
‘I’ve been on shipboard before,’ Fidelma assured him.
‘Is that a fact?’ His tone was jovial.
‘That it is,’ she answered gravely. ‘I’ve crossed to the coast of Alba and from the coast of Northumbria to Gaul.’
‘Pah!’ Murchad screwed up his face in distaste although his eyes did not lose their good humour. ‘That is a mere paddle across a pond. We are going on a
real
sea voyage.’
‘Is it longer than from Northumbria to Gaul?’ Fidelma knew many things but the distances by sea was a knowledge that she had never had to acquire.
‘If we are lucky …
if
,’ emphasised Murchad, ‘then we will be ashore within the week. It depends on the weather and the tides.’
Fidelma was surprised.
‘Isn’t that a long time to be out of sight of land?’ she ventured.
Murchad shook his head with a grin.
‘Bless you, no. We will sight land a few times on this voyage. We have to keep close to the coast in order to maintain our bearings. Our first landfall should be tomorrow morning; that is, if we find a favourable wind all the way to the south-east.’
‘Where does that take us? To the kingdom of the Britons of Cornwall?’
Murchad regarded her with a new appreciation.
‘You know your geography, Sister. However, we don’t touch the coast of Cornwall. We sail to the west of a group of islands which lie several miles from it – the islands called Sylinancim. We do not stop there but sail on with, I hope, a fair wind and calm seas. If so, we make landfall on another island, called Ushant, that lies off the
coast of Gaul. We should be there on the following morning or soon afterwards. That will be our last look at land for several days. Then we sail due south and should touch the coast of Iberia before the week’s out, God willing.’
‘Iberia, and within the week?’
Murchad verified her question with a nod.
‘God willing,’ he repeated. ‘And we have a good ship to take us.’ He slapped at the timber of the rail as he spoke.
Fidelma glanced round. She had taken a special interest in examining the ship when she came aboard.
‘She’s a Gaulish ship, isn’t she?’
Murchad was a little surprised at her knowledge.
‘You have a keen eye, Sister.’
‘I have seen a ship like her before. I know that the heavy timbers and rigging are peculiar to the ports of Morbihan.’
Murchad looked even more surprised.
‘You’ll be telling me next that you know who built her,’ he said dryly.
‘No, that I can’t,’ she replied seriously. ‘But, as I say, I have seen her like before.’

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