Chain of Evidence (26 page)

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.

Boetius, much as she despised him, had been well-trained. He went through the points in favour of Slaney’s guilt, enumerating them one by one on his fingers: of her greed for money; of her knowledge of her husband’s will, leaving her the entire contents of the castle; of her rage when her husband introduced a new wife into the castle; of her fury that another woman’s son, not any son that she might produce, would now be an heir to his father’s lands and possibly to the leadership of the clan.

Mara waited in the shadow of the bunched clusters of ivy, determined not to interrupt him, willing him to go on as long as possible. Her mind followed the journey that Moylan would take, across the rocky terrain of the High Burren. How long before he reached Fintan? And how long would it take Aidan to reach Ardal O’Lochlainn? She hoped that Fintan would come first. The blacksmith was rod holder to the clan here in the Burren. His influence might prevail to shame those gathered here to burn to death a drugged woman. But a clash between the O’Lochlainn and the MacNamara clans might result in open warfare.

The men, gathered into the confines of the enclosure, were beginning to get restive. Boetius, happy to have an audience, had begun to slow down, dragging out every point. He would not hold them for much longer. By this stage all present had been convinced of Slaney’s guilt; they were anxious to get on with the shameful, furtive business. But perhaps a few of them, she hoped, might be beginning to have doubts.

‘And then this woman, this creature –’ Boetius pointed at Slaney – ‘she took the filthy drug that she had made from the root of cowbane and she disguised it with mead and handed to it to her husband to swallow. And then when she knew that he was seeing visions she persuaded him, in the ways that such women use, to go down and to stand in the way of the marauders and the stampeding herds. She—’

‘What are your qualifications, Boetius?’ enquired Mara
stepping
forward briskly and nodding graciously at those who drew back in stunned astonishment. ‘Have you ever progressed beyond the grade of
aigne
? Ah, I thought not, what a shame,’ she said as he gaped at her. ‘An
aigne
,’ she explained condescendingly to Stephen Gardiner speaking in English now, ‘is the lowest grade of lawyer in our system of laws. I have a couple of boys in my law school who will shortly be sitting the examination for this qualification. I’m sure that they will pass and I do hope that they will continue their studies and will progress to a higher grade. An
aigne
is only allowed to practise in the lowest forms of courts and cannot ever be a judge.’ And then slowly and carefully, in tones of warm
assurance
, she translated her remarks to the crowd, explaining to them carefully that she was the only one present who had the right to pass judgement.

‘The matter of the death of your late
taoiseach
, Garrett MacNamara, will be dealt with by me at Poulnabrone, the judgement place, in a couple of days’ time,’ she assured them. ‘I invite you all to be there where I will present my findings to you and will sentence the guilty person.’

For a moment she thought that all would be well. There was a stunned silence and men looked at each other uneasily and muttered. Boetius opened his mouth, displaying his rather unpleasantly yellow teeth, Stephen Gardiner shuffled uneasily and bore the look of a man who sees his enterprise beginning to disintegrate, but Tomás stared straight ahead and there was no hint of relenting in that stern face. His son, Adair, Mara noticed, did not appear to be amongst the men within the enclosure. But was all this for him, so that Slaney would be denied her inheritance and there would be adequate silver to make Tomás and his family rich and powerful? And what role did the adoring mother, Cait, play in this accusation of Slaney?