Writ in Stone (3 page)

‘I must go back to the lodge now,’ she said, ‘but, Ardal, perhaps you could make arrangements for me to talk to any travellers or visitors in the lay dormitory. They may have seen or heard something during the last few hours. Just have a word with the abbot, will you? I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

As Mara approached the royal lodge she could hear Turlough’s voice coming from the king’s chamber at the front of the building. Probably the two bodyguards were in there with him explaining the events of the morning. That would give her a moment to get changed. She went quietly up the stairs and into her room. Brigid must have been in during her absence. The room was tidied, the bed covers neat and the charcoal brazier in the corner was filling the room with a welcome glow and on top of the iron bars that covered it was an ewer filled with hot water. Quickly Mara washed, then dressed in her warmest wool gown, pulled on thick woollen hose and her fur-lined boots. A tap came to the door and she opened it.

‘I brought you some breakfast. Sit down and eat it now, everything else can wait.’ Brigid had been a servant to Mara’s father and she had brought up his daughter after the death of his wife. Sometimes Mara felt irked by her unceasing vigilance, but this morning it was comforting to be mothered.

There was a large round griddlecake still steaming from the hot plate and a wooden cup of hot spiced ale. Mara drank it gratefully, only now fully realizing how cold she had been.

‘So it wasn’t the king after all, praise be to God,’ observed Brigid, seating herself on the window seat.

‘How did Fergal and Conall come to make that mistake? And why were they at the church if the king had not gone there?’ asked Mara, with her mouth full of griddlecake. The salted butter was incredibly creamy. No wonder the abbey cows were famous for their milk!

‘Well, it was I that thought of waking them,’ explained Brigid. ‘You see we all heard the king the night before – everyone heard him, even the people at the low table at the end of the refectory, they heard him, so when I woke up this morning and I saw all the light in the room, I sat up in bed and I said to Cumhal: “that’ll be the rain turned to snow.” So he had a look and I was right, there was a great fall of it last night and then I sent him to wake up the bodyguards and get them to make a bit of a path over to the church before the king got up, and that was how they discovered the body with the head beaten in. The king’s cousin it was, Mahon O’Brien, is that right?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mara, rinsing her hands in the pewter bowl and then combing out her long dark hair and braiding it neatly. She crouched down by the brazier, holding her hands out to its warmth. Two minutes with Brigid would be enough to give her all the background to what was going on, as well as warming her, she told herself.

‘And it couldn’t have been anyone from outside,’ continued Brigid with a dramatic toss of her sandy-coloured hair, still in its overnight braids. ‘Cumhal’s been out and had a look. Ardal O’Lochlainn was there when he went. “There’s been no one in and no one out, Cumhal,” he says. “You’re right, my lord,” says Cumhal. And it wouldn’t have been any of the brothers.’ Brigid had a great respect for the monks of St Mary’s abbey. ‘So that just leaves the people in the guest hall and a few travellers in the lay dormitory.’

‘So who do you think it might have been, Brigid?’ asked Mara, examining herself carefully in the small silver mirror she had brought with her.

‘I couldn’t rightly say,’ said Brigid, an unusual note of doubt in her mind. Normally her opinions were firm, instant and then unshakeable. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t the king that was meant, after all,’ she continued. ‘Who would want to harm him? A nice man like him.’ Brigid adored Turlough who lavished extravagant praise on her cooking.

‘You think the murderer knew that it was Mahon?’ queried Mara dubiously. Unlikely, she thought. And why had Mahon gone to the church at dawn? That was something she had to find out about.

Brigid lowered her voice. ‘The word is that wife of Mahon O’Brien was in a great state about him bringing a new wife to the household, and her a girl young enough to be his own daughter. And then of course, I don’t suppose that Teige O’Brien was too happy about the last meeting of the O’Briens. Somebody was telling Cumhal about that at the
Samhain
fair. It seems that some of the clans would prefer Mahon to Teige as
tánaiste
if anything happens to the
mac an ri
,’ she paused to gasp in a breath and then added, ‘God bless and save him, the poor lad; he doesn’t look well at all. The wasting sickness, they say it is. Everyone was talking about it last night.’

Mara put down the mirror and gave a last rub of her hands in front of the glow from the brazier and then straightened up. Her quick ear had caught a sound of the door opening from the king’s bedroom up a flight of stairs from her own. She went to the door and waited for him.

‘My lord, this is a terrible matter,’ she said looking up at him, her voice as formal as she could make it. He had dressed, she noticed, and was booted and enveloped in a fur mantle.

‘Terrible,’ he echoed. He didn’t look as shocked as she had expected. And yet, it was surely obvious that the victim was meant to be him. He was a man of war, of course, despite his essential soft and sweet nature. He would have lived with danger from a very early age. Looking at him now, Mara felt her legs unsteady once more. This man, this king, that she had lain with last night to her great pleasure, was still in the utmost danger. Whether it was a murder committed by one of his traditional enemies, or by one of his jealous relations, this was a crime that she had to solve and that had to be solved quickly. If she delayed, then the assassin might make a second attempt and this might result in the death of the man whom, above all others, she loved.

‘I am going now to interview the strangers, the passers-by and the pilgrim in the lay dormitory,’ she said to him, noting with satisfaction that her tones were clipped and unemotional. He bowed his head.

‘I will accompany you, my lady judge,’ he said and his tone was as formal as her own and if he squeezed the soft flesh of her arm rather too intimately when he took her by the elbow, then no one but the two of them knew of that.

Three

(Judgements of Bloodlettings)

There are two fines to be paid by a person who murders another. The first is called the
éraic,
or body fine, and this is paid to the nearest kin of a murdered person. It is forty-two
séts,
or twenty-one milch cows, or twenty-one ounces of silver. Added to this is the second fine, which is based on the victim’s honour price.

In the case of
duinetháide,
a secret killing, the
éraic
is doubled.

A small drifting snowflake stung Mara’s cheek as she stepped out from the front door. The storm clouds of earlier had begun to fulfil their promise. The sun had disappeared and the sky was blue-black. No travellers could stir outside the abbey today, she thought, with a quick glance at the snow-clad mountains on all sides of the valley of the monks. The four chieftains, who had been waiting, had moved into the shelter of the doorway to the guest house.

‘My dear lord!’ It was Teige O’Brien who stepped forward. Mara was moved to see the close embrace between the cousins. He and Turlough were of the same age, had been brought up together and usually the greeting was more of a playful punch.

‘God has spared you to us,’ said Ardal O’Lochlainn solemnly and the other two
taoiseach
s, Garrett MacNamara and Finn O’Connor, murmured echoing sentiments.

‘The wife of our cousin would like to see you and the Brehon, my lord,’ said Teige. ‘I mean the chief wife, Banna,’ he corrected himself.

Probably wants to find out what the division of property will be, thought Mara, but I have to start somewhere and it may as well be with the wife, or better still, the two wives of the dead man.

‘You go; I’ll wait here for you,’ said Turlough to Mara, an expression of almost comical dismay on his face, but she shook her head at him.

‘I think that Banna will wish to see you, also, my lord,’ she said firmly. The more people that were clustered around Turlough until the assassin were found the safer he would be. There was no doubt that he was probably the intended victim, she thought. Why should anyone want to kill Mahon O’Brien? Resolutely she took his arm and steered him towards the guest house.

The guest house was a large handsome stone building of two floors high. It had four guest bedrooms on the first floor with rooms for servants in the garret above. The ground floor had a large handsome parlour and a kitchen and washroom with water piped from one of the many spring wells that encircled the abbey. Like the Royal Lodge it was built on the south-west side of the cloisters. It was newly built, replacing a much smaller building, and was unusually large for a small abbey like St Mary’s of the Burren. A recent inspection, by an official from a French Cistercian abbey, had spoken rather sourly of the luxury of the guest accommodation, and of the abbot’s house, in comparison with the quarters allocated to the monks and to the lay brothers. However, the abbot, Father Donogh, was an O’Brien, part of the royal family of O’Briens. O’Brien money had paid for the original building and O’Brien money paid for the upkeep and the embellishments to the abbey; fitting provision for the kinsmen would be a priority.

‘The abbot wishes to see you, also, my lord,’ murmured Ardal as they stepped inside the heavy oaken door. ‘And he asked me to tell the Brehon that Father Peter is keeping the travellers and the workers in the lay dormitory until she can interview them. If you wish, Brehon, I will accompany you when you have finished talking to my cousin.’

Mara gave him a quick nod and smile as she followed the king up the stairs. She had forgotten that Banna was Ardal’s cousin. There wasn’t much resemblance between the enormously fat Banna and the slim, handsome Ardal. Not much of a resemblance in temperament, either, she thought with a small, quickly repressed grin, as the king knocked on the door. Immediately loud sobs rose from within and as the maid opened the door, Mara could see Banna sitting on the window seat with a large linen handkerchief covering her face.

There was a slight movement from above and Mara turned to see a young face peering down from the upper storey.

‘I’ll join you in a moment,’ she whispered to Turlough and rapidly made her way up the second staircase.

‘Frann,’ she said warmly, taking the young hand within hers. ‘I am very sorry. This has been a terrible shock.’

‘Oh!’ The young woman was obviously surprised at these words from the Brehon. Probably no one had thought of coming to condole with her. All attention would have been focused on Banna, the chief wife.

Frann, the newly acquired wife of second degree, was no more than sixteen years old, Mara guessed, looking shrewdly at the smooth face and plump young hands. She was almost young enough to have been the dead man’s granddaughter. What had been the attraction, she had wondered last night, peering through the dim candlelight at the slim young figure, to make a man antagonize his wife of over thirty years and scandalize his brother, the abbot. But today, in the fierce white snow-light that streamed through the window of the upper landing, she understood.

Frann’s smooth young face had creamy-white skin, the colour of a widely opened rock rose, and her eyes rivalled the blue-green iridescent sheen of a dragonfly in spring. She was slim, but there was nothing childlike in the voluptuously curved line of breast and hip. Her mouth had a curiously lifted and curled upper lip, almost as if it had been moulded from scarlet sealing wax. As Mara looked at her, she saw the girl’s pink tongue dart out and moisten the already shining lips; this was obviously an automatic gesture. Frann was well aware of her attractions. She made no other reply to Mara’s condolences and showed no pretence of sorrow.

‘Come inside out of the cold,’ said Mara, taking the girl’s arm in a motherly way. ‘Come in by the fire. Is this your room, here?’

It was a narrow, bare room, with just a bed and a small, plain chest at the foot of it: more of a room for a servant than for the wife of the king’s cousin. There was no heat there; it was bitterly cold and the small brazier by the shuttered window only held cold grey ashes. Beside the brazier stood a basket empty of charcoal. Obviously no one had attended to the room this morning. Banna’s servants would have known that, now their master was dead, there was little point in serving this new, unimportant wife of the second degree.

‘Come downstairs to the parlour,’ said Mara swiftly. ‘You can’t sit here in this freezing room.’

Frann shrugged her pretty, rounded shoulders. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said amiably, but she followed Mara down the stairs and when they came into the parlour she crouched near to the fire that roared up the chimney and held out her pretty hands to the heat. ‘I’m used to the cold,’ she boasted. ‘I was brought up on the mountains north of Galway. We get real cold there with snow for many months of the year.’

‘So what brought you to this part of the world?’ asked Mara, heaping some more wood on to the fire. The room was luxuriously furnished with well-padded, carved chairs and cushioned benches and stools. The walls were hung with handsome worked carpets and sheepskin rugs were scattered on the polished flagstones of the floor. This room had been swept and polished this morning, the dead ashes removed and the fire attended to. Mara sat down on the chair by the fire and looked across at the girl.

‘My father was a shepherd,’ said Frann. Her voice took on a slightly sing-song rhythm as if she were telling an old tale to the sound of a softly played lute. ‘We lived in a small cottage by a mountain stream halfway up the mountain. Myself and my brother, we used to climb to the summit every morning to see that the sheep were safe and we used to be able to look across the sea to the magical island of Hy-Brasil. We would stay up there all the days of daylight, looking after the sheep and leading them to places where they could feed from the herbs until evening came . . .’ Her strange eyes seemed to be green now, but still held those flecks of blue which gave them that iridescent sheen.