Chain of Evidence, page 20
‘Not that.’ Nuala sounded exasperated. ‘I’m not talking about gowns. I’m talking about my future. I’ve decided to come to the Burren and live at my house in Rathborney. You’re right. It’s a great house and would make a perfect teaching hospital.’
Mara’s eyes widened. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said with absolute sincerity. ‘What made you decide?’
‘I suppose it was Peadar,’ said Nuala thoughtfully. ‘I’ve been thinking, watching you at work, how much your scholars learn by doing things, by being with you. Yes, they have to have book learning, too – but I remember when I was a child what a struggle it was to understand my grandfather’s notes and how much I wished that I had someone to show me how these drawings applied to a real human body. I learned a lot about how to teach when I went to the medical school in Salerno in Italy, but I would like to teach the way you do – seizing opportunities from real life and applying them to the stuff you find in books.’
‘Perhaps one day the medical school at Rathborney in the Burren will be as famous as the school in Salerno,’ said Mara enthusiastically. ‘Well, everything is in good order for you. Fachtnan rides down there once a week and makes sure that the house is kept warm and the farm is well-attended to. He has been your faithful steward.’ She ended on a lighter note and saw the flush come to Nuala’s cheeks.
‘I think . . .’ she began and then she stopped. They had been standing at the doorway into the house and both heard the sound immediately. A horse been ridden at breakneck speed. A moment later the beautiful Arab horse that Mara had last seen being ridden by Tomás’s son came thundering down the road. At the same minute, Moylan, attracted by the sight, came running down the road between the law school and the Brehon’s house.
But the horse was not ridden by its owner. Instead of the elegant, beautifully-dressed figure of Adair MacNamara was Peadar. Peadar with a white face and fear-filled eyes.
‘Brehon!’ he shouted, sliding from the horse and allowing Moylan to catch the bridle. ‘Brehon! Something terrible is happening. My mother is gone to Galway so I had to come to you; you’ll have to stop them, Brehon. They’ve got her!’
‘Who? Your mother? Rhona?’ Mara turned an alarmed face to him.
‘No, I told you; she’s gone to Galway. It’s Slaney; the wife of . . . of my father.’ His voice rose to squeaky heights and then broke abruptly on a half sob. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’ He looked at Nuala. ‘I couldn’t do anything,’ he said apologetically.
‘How on earth did you get Adair to lend you that horse? You’ve ridden him to the ground,’ said Moylan angrily. He plucked a handful of last year’s dead grass from the ditch and began rubbing the foam and sweat from the animal’s legs and flanks.
‘I had to; they’ve got her, out in the circle; below Carron.’ Peadar turned a sob into hiccup and brushed his hand across his eyes. ‘What do you care about a horse?’ he raged in his high, half-broken voice. ‘They’ve got the woman out there. And I’ve seen the firewood.’
‘Where?’ asked Nuala, but Mara had immediately known where he was speaking of and she felt her lips turn cold. She knew that lonely circle at Creevagh and she knew the tales that people told in whispers about things that had happened there in old legends. Brigid’s words about Tomás’s unpleasant grandfather came back to her.
‘Cumhal,’ she called, but to her dismay it was young Dathi who appeared, saying that he didn’t know where Cumhal had gone. Still she had to go now before anything happened. She would have to rely on her status in the kingdom to give her authority. ‘Dathi, we’ll leave this animal with you, but saddle a horse for me. Moylan, you and Aidan saddle your horses now and be ready to come with me.’
When they had gone, she turned to Nuala. ‘Are you willing to take on Peadar as your apprentice, Nuala?’ she asked. ‘You’re sure?’
Nuala nodded; her face serious and concentrated.
‘I want him out of the way and safe and I want no one to be able to get hold of his patrimony,’ said Mara. ‘Fachtnan, you get your writing materials and go with Nuala and Peadar to the schoolhouse. Draw up the apprenticeship agreement and have it signed – Peadar is old enough to sign it himself as he has no living father. Make sure that Nuala has all the powers over him according to the English law of apprenticeship. When you have done that, lock it into the box in the press. I’ll leave you in charge. Settle Nuala and Peadar down in Rathborney and then follow us to Creevagh – Fiona, Hugh and Shane can stay with Nuala. Help her in every way, won’t you, and, Nuala, on my return I will be bringing you Slaney, your first patient. I must get her away from that crowd. With the help of God,’ she added. She was not given to these pious appendices to her words, but this time, thinking of how she would have to confront the might of the MacNamara clan on her own, except for a couple of young lads, she felt that she would try to get all the supernatural help possible. The thought of Ardal O’Lochlainn and the army of men that he usually had working around his farm crossed her mind but she dismissed the idea. This would have to be carefully done.
‘Let’s go,’ she said when Moylan and Aidan returned and set such a pace on her mare that she soon outstripped them and had to wait beside Caherconnell, Nuala’s old home, in order for them to catch up. She had no real fear of aggression towards her own person; her status as Brehon of the Burren had given her complete confidence in her ability to handle a crowd, but she did want her entrance to be as impressive as possible. She rode in silence, turning over in her mind what was best to be done. If only she had got rid of Stephen Gardiner! It had been a shock to hear from Cumhal that he had gone – not to Galway, but only a few miles west to the kingdom of Corcomroe.
‘Look down there, Brehon,’ said Aidan after a while. Mara checked her horse and looked down. They had been climbing steadily and had passed through the area of common land, known as the High Burren. Far below them, where the high clint-paved land fell away into a small valley, there was the townland of Creevagh with its large ancient enclosure. Mara stayed very still and signed to her scholars to wait in silence. Both were, like herself, dressed in serviceable dark grey wool cloaks, felted and treated until they were almost impervious to wind and rain. In the gloom of the late afternoon, with the heavy sky above giving little light, they could watch without being seen.
The enclosure at Creevagh was a large one measuring about a hundred feet across its centre. Uniquely it had two dolmens – the one situated within its walls and the other one in another enclosure just outside. Each was almost the same in construction – a flat stone rested upon three massive upright stones, giving it the look of some strange, prehistoric altar. When Mara was young, Brigid had told her that the dolmen within the first circle had been used for burial of good souls who would go to heaven; and the second dolmen had been used for the evil souls who were doomed to go down into the fires of hell. A sunken passageway, about the depth of a man’s height, had been made by hacking through the stone and was constructed to join the two enclosures. Some years back, a farmer, rescuing a sheep which had become trapped within the stones, had come across a pile of burned skulls and bones and this had seemed to lend credence to Brigid’s story. Most people avoided the place, especially at evening and during the great festival of Samhain, when, it was rumoured, the dead came back to life.
Today, on this wet May evening, the main enclosure itself was packed solidly with men – no women or children, noticed Mara, but the sunken passageway was empty and a fire burned beside the second dolmen. Not just beside it; realised Mara after a moment, as the flames leaped up. There was a ring of firewood all the way around it.
‘Pine,’ whispered Moylan, and Mara nodded. He was right, she judged. An aromatic smell filled the air from the thick black clouds of smoke that rose upwards. The fire had only just been started, she reckoned, but it would be a huge one. Enormous heavy branches of pine had been layered in almost a complete circle around the dolmen, leaving a small gap in front of the foremost supporting stone.
And around that stone was draped a heavy iron chain. Mara drew in a long breath. What was happening? The flames were getting higher, the fire burning in that exuberant way of pine; now she could see that the area outside the enclosing wall of the second dolmen was piled high with more pine. Trees must have been felled to accumulate as much firewood as this.
‘Just the crowd from the castle – none of the MacNamaras from the Burren, I’d say,’ said Moylan in a whisper. ‘What are they doing, Brehon? This is MacNamara land, but it is not a sacred site, not like the inauguration place. I’ve never heard of anything been held there.’
‘Nor I,’ said Mara in a low voice, straining her eyes to try to see the faces. ‘Not in my time, nor in my father’s,’ she added, ‘but Brigid said . . .’ And then she stopped as the words of the legend came back to her: ‘And they shall be purified by fire and it shall be lit at Creevagh, the place of the branches . . .’
‘That’s Tomás MacNamara there talking to them all.’ Once more Aidan’s long-sighted eyes had identified the figure in front of the crowd.
‘And Stephen Gardiner standing beside him; what’s he doing?’
‘Let’s go down there,’ said Mara tersely. She had intended to wait until the arrival of Fachtnan, but now a terrible feeling of dread was coming over her.
‘Yes, you’re right, that’s Stephen Gardiner,’ said Aidan. ‘He’s come back into the kingdom, Brehon. How dared he?’ He sounded very bellicose, not at all like the usual, easy-going Aidan.
But Mara did not smile. She was filled with a great feeling of apprehension.
‘If we go across this field, Brehon, we’ll be much quicker than by the road,’ said Moylan. ‘I know this place. I’ve come up here hunting with the O’Brien lads. The ground is rock a few inches below the soil. We won’t slip.’
‘Yes, you’re right, both of you, it is definitely Stephen Gardiner. I didn’t recognise him immediately. He’s usually so colourful.’
And it was true. Stephen, who was usually dressed in blue or crimson velvets, now wore a black gown and a flat black cap. Mara went ahead of her two scholars, signalling them to be silent and then stopped at some distance from the entrance to the enclosure beside a moss-overgrown well. She dismounted quietly from her horse and handed the bridle to Moylan. The crowd stood with their backs to the entrance facing the small, low dolmen ahead of them. Behind that dolmen were three men.
Stephen Gardiner stood beside Tomás facing the silent crowd and now his voice rang out, the words blown away from the law school party by the northerly wind. There was a third man there also, a youngish man with a short, sparse red beard, and a huge stomach, half concealed by his cloak. His was a familiar face and Mara drew in a sharp breath of fury at the sight of him.
‘Boetius MacClancy,’ she breathed and her scholars looked at her with wide eyes. Boetius MacClancy was a cousin of Fergus MacClancy, the Brehon of the nearby kingdom of Corcomroe. Mara had been persuaded to leave her law school in his hands for a short time while she recovered from the birth of her son. An opinionated and stupid young man; he had been a disaster in that post.
‘I thought he had gone to London,’ said Moylan quietly.
‘Yes,’ murmured Mara. ‘And I thought we had seen the last of him.’ She compressed her lips. Boetius was a troublemaker and she didn’t like to have him here on the Burren. And why had he not come to see her and announce his presence, as would have been the correct procedure? Her first impulse was to push her way through the crowd, but her second was to wait. Most of these men were very drunk, she recognised. A few even had leather flasks slung over their shoulders and she guessed that they contained the strong, honey-smelling, and very potent mead that was always served at celebrations.
‘What’s that?’ Aidan’s voice had a quick note of alarm. Mara looked at him. They had known Boetius well, but Aidan wasn’t looking at him, but at something else.
‘It’s Slaney,’ breathed Moylan, but Mara found it hard to credit.
What she had first thought to be a bundle was really a woman who had been placed in front of the first dolmen, bound and gagged, standing there in front of the three men, Tomás MacNamara, Stephen Gardiner and Boetius MacClancy. It was Slaney, Mara now realised, but only a quick eye would have recognised her.
Slaney had been a tall, massively built woman with an enormous bosom and a stately air. Mara had never seen her in anything other than the finest gowns of silks and velvets. Now, she slumped there, a dazed and sagging figure, wearing a plain linen petticoat, her hair, unbound and uncombed, straggling down her back.
‘My friends, my brethren,’ shouted Tomás, ‘you all know now how your taoiseach met his death – not in battle, no; not from old age, no; not from a fatal sickness; no . . .’ He paused at each successive ‘no’ and the crowd groaned in response. ‘Your taoiseach was slain by a herd of cattle. But what sane man in his senses would go and lie on the path before a stampeding herd? And yet, the facts are there. His broken body was left behind them on the roadway.’ He paused, lowered his voice, and then said with a throb of sincerity, ‘But, my friends, and fellow clansmen, what made him do that? Had some evil influence placed a spell upon him? Was there . . .’ Suddenly he stopped and Mara could hear a soft sigh run through the crowd. ‘Was there . . .’ He dropped his voice dramatically, before continuing, ‘was there a spell placed upon him by someone?’ Here he paused for the words to sink in.
Mara took three quick strides forward, but then stopped in the shadow of the entrance arch. She would wait to hear all before interrupting, she thought, leaning into the ivy-covered stones. She saw Moylan tie up the three horses at a distance and then he and Aidan crept forward and stood in the shelter of the surrounding wall.
‘But who did this?’ continued Tomas and now his voice was so low that some of those at the back strained to hear and looked in puzzlement at their neighbours.
‘Who was it?’ he shouted, now raising his voice to its utmost power. ‘Was it a witch?’ He used the English word ‘witch’ and Mara was now near enough to see puzzlement on the faces of the clan.
‘Witch . . .?’ The word was tossed from one to the other in a half-whisper from pursed lips – a whisper that swelled like the beginning of a storm wind.
‘Cailleach,’ amended Tomás and then there was a horrified silence.
Mara half-shivered – the cailleach was an elemental power, a creature who was half-woman, half-spirit, the spirit of winter, a power which brought cold winds, and tempests; a woman who came to rule as the days shortened, carrying a slachdan (wand of power) with which she shaped the land. Brigid’s tales about her powers had given Mara some sleepless nights as a child. For a moment she stood frozen, but then she pulled herself together. The legend of the cailleach belonged to childhood; but the threat of being a witch that now lay upon Slaney was of much more serious consequences. Mara’s father had brought back from his journey to Rome tales of a terrible witchcraft trial that he had witnessed in Italy where what seemed to be a harmless old woman had been accused of various crimes and had been burned to death at the stake. Could this be the intention, here in the Burren, where no one had the right to take a life, even from one judged guilty of the most terrible crimes?
‘Moylan,’ she whispered almost soundlessly in his ear. ‘You and Aidan must ride back as fast as you can go. You go to the smithy, Moylan, send Fintan MacNamara here and any of his men, and Aidan, you go to Lissylisheen and send Ardal O’Lochlainn with as many men as he can muster. Go as fast as you can. Oh, and Moylan, take my horse; it’s faster than yours.’
Trained to instant obedience from their early youth they were off, doubled down, but running like hares. She hardly saw them take their horses, but was reassured a few minutes later when she looked up at the road on the hillside and saw the two figures galloping along the road leading back towards the west. Now she would have to play a waiting game. Let them talk themselves out and then she would talk. The longer the MacNamara clan stood here in the damp and cold, the greater the chance that some of them at least would begin to sober up.
‘My friends,’ said Stephen, his well-trained voice filling the space well. He paused to allow the echo to throw back his words, and then continued, spacing the words well in order that all was clear. ‘I come from England, from the king of England, the Great Harry, as we call him. He has chosen your clan as the most amenable here in these kingdoms. There will be rich rewards for you all and for your leader if you will accept the laws of England and give true justice to those who have lost their lives through murder. I tell you, my friends, your laws are bad and evil. Under your laws a woman can murder her husband freely; little penalty attaches to it. Do you, can you, approve of such licence to kill one who should be her lord and master? If this woman here –’ and he indicated the bound body of Slaney – ‘if this woman here can be allowed to kill her own husband without paying the penalty then, my friends, the walls of civilisation will break down.’ Stephen stopped for breath and Tomás hastily translated. Quite a few of the audience knew English, Mara guessed, because the pause before Tomás had taken up the rhetoric had been filled with soft murmurings as neighbour explained to neighbour.
‘But don’t ask me,’ exclaimed Stephen, opening his two arms widely and then pointing suddenly to Boetius MacClancy, ‘ask this man here, a lawyer, a man who is learned in both English law and in your laws. He knows the truth. He has studied both sets of laws; he speaks your language; he will enlighten you.’
Mara clenched her teeth together tightly, but did not move. Let them finish, she thought. Her keen eye noticed an uneasy shuffling among the crowd. One man took a leather drinking vessel from his pouch, held it open above his mouth and then, in disgust, shook the last few drops from it. The crowd was beginning to sober up. The mead, she hoped, would by now have run out.
