Cross of Vengeance (21 page)

3. Woodland that can be cleared by the axe and turned into arable land.

4.
Rough land covered with a mixture of rushes and grasses – suitable for the grazing of young bullocks.

5.
Mountain pasture – only suitable for sheep and goats.

6.
Wet land: marsh and bog land.

T
he sun was a dark red ball above the mountains to the east when the party from the law school set out for the bog. The night had been much cooler and the air felt more like September than had the preceding days when it seemed as though the sultriness of August would never come to an end. Mara’s old mare whinnied energetically and surged out in front of the boys’ ponies as though to show that she was as young as any of them.

The bog was part of common land for the inhabitants of the six townlands that lay around Cahermacnaghten. It was situated, oddly enough, halfway up the side of a mountain, apparently built up on one of those flat limestone tablelands – perhaps where an old lake had quickly filled with trees and other vegetation. Even now, huge, gnarled stone-hard tree trunks were dug out from time to time.

The sun was showing its rays by the time they arrived and the surface of the bog glistened a deep brown-black and smelled pungently of fresh peat. The view up there was extraordinary – to the west was the brilliantly sparkling pale blue sea, with its white-capped waves, on which seemed to float the Aran Islands; to the north was the rounded summit of Slieve Elva, and behind and below them was the valley land. Mara drew in a breath of satisfaction looking at the fluffy white heads of the cotton flowers and the myriad of bees that haunted the purple ling. Overhead a hen harrier flew with great beats of her wings and in the centre of the bog small piles of dried sods were warmed by the early-morning sun into a golden brown.

Although the party from the law school arrived by six o’clock, dozens of people from the surrounding farms were already hard at work.

Mara walked around exchanging the traditional greeting of ‘God bless the work’, and somehow it felt very soothing to be greeted so warmly by all. It would have been tempting to have spent the morning at her desk, or even pursuing her enquiries in Kilnaboy, but she had always gone to the bog every September since she was a child, and if she had missed this year there would have been enquiries about her absence. It was in any case, she always felt, an important part of her work to be a member of the community. After all, Brehon law only worked if the community willed it to work. She had a friend who was a lawyer in the English tradition, working in the city of Galway, and he could never understand how they managed without the threat of prison or the hangman’s noose, never could understand how pride in family and clan could ensure the good behaviour of each and every member of this close-knit society.

The turf on their patch was ready to be taken home – Mara could see instantly that the colour of their winter fuel was now a pale brown, very different from the rather black-looking sods that Nechtan’s men had been stacking the day before. Cumhal was an excellent farm manager and Mara lived in fear that he and Brigid, both of whom had served her father before her, would decide to retire. With that in mind she continually insisted on them employing adequate staff. If only Cumhal would go on supervising she would not ask any work of him, but, as usual, despite being a man in his sixties, he was the most active of all, effortlessly swinging himself up on to the back of the cart and unloading the turf barrows that were heaped up there and handing them over to his workers with many instructions about how to stack the turf and avoid breaking the sods.

Finbar shot past her with one of the turf barrows, narrowly missing entangling her gown and shouting out, ‘Sorry, Brehon, did I hit your knee?’ And suddenly Mara realized something.

Knee-high! she said to herself. The turf barrows were all knee-high, light and long – broad enough and long enough to carry the body of a man. She had been considering Sorley, whose muscles were toughened by forty years of gravedigging, when thinking about Nuala’s suggestion of lifting the corpse on to a horse, but a long, low, light, two-wheeled turf barrow was a different matter. A weight could be pushed on that with little effort – and it would certainly be narrow enough to be wheeled in through the church door to the lowest step that led up to the altar.

She gazed at the clumps of rushes and tufts of purple moor grass beside the path, but her mind was seeing the churchyard at Kilnaboy. Nechtan’s men had been stacking the turf. There had been three or four turf barrows coming and going from the piled-up cart. No doubt, though this was something which she could check, they may have been left accessible during the night – the work was still going on the following morning. This meant that the murderer could have wheeled one into the church. With their handles and their two props at the back to keep them level during loading, these turf barrows were ideal for moving a heavy weight with relatively little effort.

Any able-bodied man – Father Miguel, Brother Cosimo, Father MacMahon, Blad or Sorley – could easily have rolled Hans Kaufmann from the altar steps to the barrow and from the barrow to the top of the wedge tomb. But what about women?

Mara went on mechanically greeting, admiring the quality of the turf, enquiring about family members – one very small portion of her mind was all that was needed for these familiar courtesies. The rest of her mind was furiously active – churning the evidence, she thought to herself with a small smile, as she remembered Brigid’s words.

Hans Kaufmann was a man with a mission. He had not only wanted to destroy the faith in relics and other such miracles, but also to expose corruption within the Roman Church. He had found out about Brother Cosimo’s theft of a valuable crucifix. Had he found out some other guilty secrets? The reaction of the prioress, Mara thought, as she looked back, had been over-done – as good as a play, Slevin had said, and he was right. It had been a bit of play-acting. So had Hans Kaufmann known of a guilty secret of the prioress? Ardal had been talking to Father MacMahon about this Martin Luther and how he had loved to expose sins like sodomy, indecent living or illicit pregnancies among the priests and nuns, in their parishes, monasteries, abbeys and convents.

An illegitimate daughter! Perhaps the prioress had an illegitimate daughter. Mara’s mind went to the letter K – K for
kind
– the German word for child. It might have referred to one of the other nuns, but could have meant the prioress herself. The huge age difference between the girl Grace and her supposed sisters – what if the prioress had slipped, had a secret love affair, had given birth to a daughter and then her family had rallied around; her mother had taken the baby, and with the help of Bess, had reared her. But if Grace herself knew the secret, she might have betrayed it to Hans Kaufmann. There was little doubt in Mara’s mind that the girl had been attracted to the handsome young pilgrim.

Hans Kaufmann was a fanatic, Mara told herself. Fanatics always feel that the end justifies the means. The young girl’s murmured confession of her secret and illegitimate birth would only be grist to his mill. What would he have done? Well, he would have confronted the prioress, possibly taken money from her, threatened to expose her, certainly left her anxious and vulnerable. She would have confided in Bess.

Together they could have disposed of this false pilgrim.

Was the girl Grace involved?

Mara thought not. Her sensitivity, and her fondness for the German pilgrim might have caused trouble for the other two more practical ladies.

The prioress and her sister the widow could have visited the church after Mór had brought supper to the pilgrim. Hans would, according to Nuala, have been quite drunk at the time, might have mocked their request for clemency, for silence. And then one of them, the delicate-minded prioress or the tough-minded widow, stuck a knife in him.

So far, so good.

But before the knife was stuck into him, he had been stripped. The evidence of the clothes was quite unmistakable. These garments which she had discovered in the wishing hole bore not even a drop of blood, and they had definitely been those worn by Hans Kaufmann when he had sought sanctuary in the church earlier that day.

So how had he been stripped? Mara’s mind went back to Cormac’s suggestion that he might have done it for a dare. Or perhaps out of fear. What if a man or a woman held a knife to his throat, or to another part of his anatomy – and Mara’s mind went to the earthy Bess – and threatened to kill him if he did not strip?

But how could they have stabbed the man to death? He was far too strong for one to hold while the other killed. It just didn’t make sense.

Or was it Sorley, a man whose whole life was bound up in his worship of the relic entrusted to his care, in the round tower that he and his father had built, in the round tower which had been desecrated by the German pilgrim?

Or could it have been a group of people? If that was the way, then the whole ghastly simulation of a crucified Christ had been planned from the beginning. And that meant, thought Mara, her eyes fixed intently on a grey furry butterfly quivering on the tiny pink cups of the heather flowers, that meant that some sort of perverted religious motive must have been at the back of the murder. ‘
God is not mocked
’
were the words on the scroll inserted into the crown of thorns, and perhaps that was a message to others that might come to this sacred place at Kilnaboy, where the double-armed cross built into the gable of the stone church proclaimed the resting place of the venerated relic of the Holy Cross. She stared for a moment at the four round eyes marked on the butterfly wings, giving the insect an owl-like look of wisdom. There is something in this case that I am not seeing, she thought impatiently. Perhaps now that I am forty-six years old my brain is not as keen as it used to be. The thought was a depressing one.

‘Thinking about the case, are you, Brehon?’ Fachtnan came over and stood beside her.

‘An excuse for idleness,’ said Mara, watching the busy figures everywhere, backs bent, and hands busily picking up and tossing the light, well-dried sods. ‘Still, coming to the bog has triggered some ideas in me,’ she added. ‘It suddenly occurred to me that Nechtan’s men were using a couple of turf barrows to unload the cart on the day that the German was killed. They would have been ideal for taking the body from the church to the tomb – long enough and broad enough for the body, but narrow enough and light enough to take into the church – the weather was so dry up to then that they could have left no marks.’

‘You’re sure that he was murdered in the church?’

‘Not sure about anything,’ said Mara honestly. ‘And now I’ve found the clothes and they were neatly under the body – inside the tomb. Would you believe that—’

‘The wishing hole!’ he interrupted. ‘Of course, I’d forgotten that. It’s under the capstone, isn’t it? There’s a stone that fits into the hole at the side of one of the upright slabs. I remember one of the young O’Lochlainns, one of Ardal O’Lochlainn’s nephews, telling me about that. His dogs followed a fox and the fox got himself into the churchyard – some old woman had just taken her sore arm out of the sacred wishing hole and the fox jumped in and lay down. She said that he had found sanctuary, that he was God’s creature, and she put the stone back and there he was as snug as anything and the hounds raging outside and going around and around the tomb until they were dizzy. The O’Lochlainn lads were furious about it but she wouldn’t let them touch the stone. She was as old as the hills, old Brídín, you know – must have been about eighty at least – but she stood up to them and told them they should be ashamed of themselves and to take themselves and their dogs out of God’s acre. So off they all went with their tails between their legs, men and hounds!’

Mara smiled at the story. Forty-six years old, she thought – that’s nothing! Think of Brídín, as sharp as a knife. I’m at the height of my powers, she told herself firmly. Hard work and careful step-by-step thinking will solve this problem.

‘This finding of the clothes there was strange, though,’ she said aloud. ‘I didn’t know about the wishing hole, though Brigid did, and so do you, now that I have recalled it to your mind. But who else, other than the people of the parish know of it? And it doesn’t sound the sort of thing that Father MacMahon would approve of. After all, the tomb is a pagan object, not a Christian one. I doubt that he would boast of it to any visitors. It almost puts all of the pilgrims out of my mind,’ said Mara. ‘I don’t think that any of them could have known that story, do you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Fachtnan. Conscious of being idle among a mountainside of busy people, he went and secured an empty turf barrow and began to throw the dried sods into it, bending and swinging with the rhythm and vigour of a young man. Mara decided against helping him, though she wondered if the physical exertion would clear her mind. The people of the Burren had a strong notion of what was due to her status as the King’s wife as well as his representative, and would be shocked at her doing such heavy work.

‘Remember, the pilgrims arrived a couple of days before the feast of the Holy Cross,’ said Fachtnan, continuing to load with such rapidity that the barrow was now a quarter full. ‘They could have been speaking to someone in the churchyard – could even have seen someone put an arm or a leg in through the wishing hole.’

‘That’s true,’ said Mara. ‘And, of course, they had been to supper with Nechtan and his wife the evening before – they could have heard the story there. I’ll ask him about that. We are going to visit him today and to stay with him overnight – it will save my poor old mare a double journey. He’s asked the boys too, but you won’t want to come. Nuala needs your company. She’s upset about Aoife’s death. You ride over in the morning.’

‘I know,’ said Fachtnan thoughtfully. He threw a few more sods in and then paused in his loading, straightened his back and moved a step nearer to her. ‘This is a strange case, Brehon,’ he said meditatively. ‘Usually there is some real reason for murder, some intense fear, some intense greed; this time it seems as though this murder has most likely been committed as a religious protest or some form of revenge and that does not seem to be a strong enough motive.’