Cross of Vengeance (30 page)

‘And you came back about midnight, did you?’ Mara asked gently. She was certain now in her own mind about the truth, but all of the incidental details had to be cleared out of the way.

Mór nodded. ‘He had told me to come straight back, but I knew it was not safe, not with all that patrolling. I had an excuse the first time – it had been agreed that he should be fed – but to come again, well, I would have to be careful and to choose my time. I did think that it would be best just around the time the O’Lochlainn handed over to Nechtan O’Quinn.’

‘And when you arrived at the church at the hour of midnight?’

‘I waited until Sorley sounded the bell. I saw him go back to his own house. I heard Nechtan and the O’Lochlainn talking together over by
Crooked Moher
and then I went across the churchyard with my new flask of wine.’

‘And you went through into the unlocked church?’

Mór nodded. ‘That’s right. I opened the door and I went in. All of the lights were still on, every candle blazing. For a moment I
thought that he was hiding behind the
altar and that he would spring out on me; it was the sort of thing that he would do. But … it’s a funny thing, Brehon, but there was an empty sort of feel about the place.’

‘And he had gone?’ Mara knew the answer to that question, but followed it up with another. ‘What did you think?’

Mór shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘I thought that he had made a fool of me; that he had stolen out and somehow got hold of his horse and managed to get away – perhaps at the time when I told him that the O’Lochlainn would be handing over to Nechtan O’Quinn.’

‘You didn’t think to search the church?’

Mór shrugged again. ‘Why should I? It wouldn’t be the first time that I was let down. He wasn’t there and that was that.’

‘And when you saw him dead the next morning, what did you think then?’

For the first time Mór did not meet Mara’s eyes.

‘I didn’t know what to think, Brehon,’ she said firmly.

Mara smiled. ‘I didn’t know what to think either,’ she admitted. ‘It was one of the most puzzling cases that I have known. Thank you for telling me everything so honestly, Mór, and don’t worry. Nothing that you have said to me will ever be made public.’ She got to her feet, noting the relief in the woman’s eyes.

Grace was not with her two sisters and Brother Cosimo who were having a farewell snack with Blad in his spectacular hall. Mara did not go in, but went swiftly across the churchyard and down the small passageway until she reached the tomb – the
gabhal
. Grace was there, just standing, not looking at the capstone but below it. Mara saw that she had removed the limestone plug. She turned her head and then seemed to feel that an explanation was needed.

‘An old lady showed me this place on the first day that we came here,’ she said softly. ‘She saw me limping and beckoned to me. I couldn’t understand her and she couldn’t understand me, but we both had lame legs and that made the bond. She brought me here and showed me how she put her leg into the hole and then said a prayer. I did the same and she patted me on the shoulder and said something and mimed how she had been so terribly crippled and now was improved.’

Mara smiled. A dry, hot summer had probably improved lots of rheumatic arms and legs in the elderly, she thought cynically, but did not say so. Who was she to judge?

‘I wondered how you knew about it,’ she admitted.

Suddenly the last piece of the picture slipped into place. She looked down at the hole and knew what had happened.

‘You were sorry for him, weren’t you, perhaps a little in love with him?’ The girl, she thought compassionately, was probably very young for her age. While fourteen-, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds were out flirting and trying out their wiles on young men, Grace would have been hiding indoors, afraid to show her scarred face and her marred body among the pretty Welsh girls of the neighbourhood.

Mara bent down and touched a scratch mark on the stone that had been removed from its socket. Badger, she thought, and wondered whether some other frightened creature had tried to get inside the hole.

‘Will it be easier if I tell what happened?’ she asked, looking into the white face. ‘Don’t worry. I mean you no harm,’ she added, her heart melting as she heard the stifled sob. This tale should be told quickly, she thought. She knew its beginnings, soft words spoken on board ship, jealousy awoken by the flirtation with Mór, girlish, romantic love turned to horror.

‘You went to the church – perhaps you brought the pilgrim something, or perhaps came to bear him company. You knocked on the church door, is that right?’

‘I knocked a couple of times. I was going to go away, thought he must be asleep. And then he suddenly opened the door.’ The words were barely audible.

‘And he had taken his clothes off.’

Mara hardly waited for the nod. That must have been the way it was. Hans, roused, wanting to make love to Mór, would have taken the knocking as flirtatious by-play – he had already stripped because of the hot night, perhaps, and then at the knock removed his braies.

‘And you got a fright and ran.’ Once again there was a nod.

‘And he chased after you.’ Undoubtedly the false pilgrim was drunk – perhaps he did broach the communion wine after Mór left. It was extraordinary that no one had seen him, but of course Ardal and Danann were sheltering with their backs to the oak tree looking towards the road, not towards the church. They would have been too far away to hear anything.

‘I ran.’ The words were barely audible. ‘I could hear him behind me. I ran towards the darkness, out of the churchyard.’ Grace, Mara remembered from Bess’s explanation, could when frightened run as fast as any other girl of her age. The sight of Hans would have terrified her into forgetting the pain of the scar tissue on her thigh.

‘And you suddenly thought of the hiding place, the empty space under the capstone.’

‘I thought that I would be safe there. I still thought I was, even when I heard him come after me.’

Mara put out a hand and touched the girl on her arm. ‘You must have been terribly frightened.’ Not for nothing, she thought, was the rape of a young girl considered to be such a serious crime under Brehon law; although technically Grace was not ‘a girl in plaits’, emotionally she was. Her terribly scarred face and lame leg kept her away from the experiences that helped other young girls to mature.

There was more to be said, though, she knew that. She had a picture in her mind of the terrified girl crouching in that small space beneath the capstone. It was obvious what would have happened next.

‘You took out your knife from your pouch.’ All of the women had serviceable strong-looking knives. Grace would have reached for hers once she felt threatened. The trapped animal is dangerous; Cumhal always warned the boys of that, telling them to back away from a cornered rat.

‘He heard me breathing, I think,’ whispered Grace. ‘I couldn’t see him, but I could … I could smell him. He reached in and grabbed me. He said something … something about it being good that it was so dark that he wouldn’t be able to see my face …’

Vile rapist
, thought Mara, but she said nothing. The rest of the story had to be told by Grace.

There was a long silence. And then, quite abruptly, Grace said, ‘I didn’t know it would be so easy to kill someone. I just drove my knife – drove it into him – and nothing seemed to happen. He made a kind of sound, but he was still there. Still standing. I thought he’d run away.’

‘And then?’ asked Mara.

‘I suppose,’ said Grace dully, ‘that I sort of knew the truth really. I could smell the blood. It was pouring rain. I could hear the drops pattering on the grass, but even still I could smell that sort of … You know,’ she said suddenly and unexpectedly, ‘there is a copper mine near to where I live and blood smells like that, it smells like copper. And then there was a flash of lightning and I could see his legs – just his legs, nothing else – and I tried to tell myself that he was all right, just standing there.’

‘He had slumped over the capstone, was that it?’

Grace nodded. ‘Yes, just there. I knew that no one could stand there in the pouring rain for so long without moving. I thought he might be unconscious, that I might be able to escape, so I slipped out past his legs. And then there was another flash of lightning and I saw his eyes, just staring up at the sky, wide open, and then I knew that he was dead. He was there, with his legs on the ground, slumped over, his head turned upwards towards the sky.’

‘And the weight of his body was across the capstone.’

‘That’s right. Once I realized that he was dead, I was terrified. I thought that I would be hanged or burned to death. So the idea just came to me to pretend that he had been struck down by God.’

Mara nodded. The body would still have been quite pliable and the girl would easily have been able to arrange it on the slab, arms outstretched, feet together.

‘And then I went back to the church. There was no one around. I picked up the clothes and I carried them back and pushed them well in under the slab and put the stone back. All the blood seemed to be washed away by the rain.’

And then she added the remaining touches – the crown of thorns, the making of the holes in the hands and feet – it all took a certain cool courage, but perhaps it was just desperation, thought Mara.

‘Where did you get the prayer?’ she asked.

‘I had it in my pouch; that was why I went to the church. I was going to give it to him. I wanted him to pray for forgiveness, to save his immortal soul before it was too late.’

God is not mocked.
A fitting final judgement …

(Son Sections)

A boy who is adopted into a kin group may be able to have rights of inheritance if the adopting parents pay a fee
(lóg fóesma).
A contract must be drawn up, bound by securities and agreed by the head of the kin group. He does not gain automatic entitlement to a full share of kin-land, but only to the land under the direct ownership of the adopting father.

M
ara stood and waved a farewell. Six pilgrims had come here on the eve of the Feast of The Holy Cross and now only four left. Side by side in the churchyard lay the other two, each in his own way believing intensely in the religion to which he had given his devotion, and yet each lacking in humanity and a respect for their fellow human beings. Hans Kaufmann believed that he knew better than others and was prepared to destroy what they believed in, and yet he himself was a seducer and a rapist. As for Father Miguel, well, he believed so intensely in his own narrow view of God and the devil that he was prepared to be an arsonist and perhaps a murderer. Mara could hardly bear to think of Father Miguel. She would never know whether he had in fact firmly supposed that the small figure capering around in a horned mask was really the devil, or whether he was prepared to punish the audacity of a nine-year-old child by burning him to death. Whatever it was, he had suffered a terrible end, and she hoped that the smoke had rendered him unconscious before the flames reached him.

There was one more thing that she wanted to do before she left Kilnaboy.

Nechtan was standing by his barn talking to his steward when she went past the church and towards the castle. She exchanged a few pleasant words with him and went on to give her thanks to Narait for her hospitality.

Narait was sitting listlessly by the window when Mara came in, but roused herself to make anxious enquiries about Cormac.

‘Disgusted with himself for blacking out like that,’ said Mara with a smile. ‘He’d have much preferred to play the hero and put the fire out single-handed.’ She wondered about apologising for the loss of the devil’s costume, but decided to say nothing. Cormac had worried about the nature of a recompense for this on his way home, and she thought that she should leave the matter to him. There was something else that she wanted to discuss with Narait.

‘Narait, have you ever thought of adopting a baby,’ she said, coming to the point in a straightforward way. Before Narait could speak, she went on, ‘There is a motherless little boy near here, he’ll be the most beautiful child, with golden hair and blue eyes. His mother died in childbirth, his father has deserted the children, and they are with their grandparents at the moment. The older children will be cared for – they will work on their grandfather’s farm and help him and their grandmother; they are happy children who have been well brought up, but that little baby needs a mother’s love and a mother’s care.’

And then she sat back and watched the effect of her words. There would be no problems if Nechtan and Narait decided to adopt the motherless child of poor Aoife. Nechtan would have an heir to his position as
coarb
of the ancient monastic lands of Kilnaboy and Narait would have a beautiful child to love. Mara had not actually seen the baby herself, but all of Aoife’s children had, like the poor girl herself, been blond, beautiful and blue-eyed. The wet nurse that Muiris and Áine had found would probably be happy to go on feeding the baby – the grandparents themselves would have their hands full with the other eight children, and Rory, if he ever reappeared, could make no objection. It was the perfect arrangement – a stroke of genius, thought Mara, with a slightly smug feeling of self-congratulation as she watched the colour flood into Narait’s face, her eyes light up and her lips begin to curl into a tremulous smile.

‘Go and talk to Nechtan, he’s out by his barn,’ said Mara indulgently. ‘I’ll wait here for a moment – I have something to sort out in my mind and would welcome a quiet few minutes on my own. If you and Nechtan are happy about the idea, I’ll drop in to see Muiris and Áine, the grandparents, on my way home and then you can ride over to their farm tomorrow. Nechtan knows Muiris well; his lands march with yours on Roughan Hill. You’ll have to see the baby, of course, but I’m sure that you will love him as soon as you have him in your arms.’

Narait almost flew out of the room and Mara, watching through the window, saw her run in the direction of the barn. She smiled with satisfaction and turned her thoughts back to the affair of the false pilgrim. The truth had to be told to the people of the Burren, she decided. She owed them that. No man’s death in her territory must go unaccounted for. She would tell them of the attempted rape, also, and would tell them what her verdict had been. Few would care that much, she decided, but she would put the legal arguments before them, ask whether there were any questions and then, if there were none, she would move quickly on to the next case. Within a few months the death would be forgotten – unless, of course, this Martin Luther made such a stir in the world that religions changed and a new type of pilgrim arrived at Kilnaboy anxiously seeking the grave of the man who was marked by God with the stigmata of his own son.