Condemned to Death Read Online Free Page B

sea,’ explained Fernandez. ‘In this weather the corpse will soon be in a bad way and the boat can be buried with it. It’s useless, as a boat. You can see for yourself, Brehon, that the timbers are as thin as linen in some places.’
    ‘Stands to reason that those who laid him on the tide wouldn’t have wanted to waste a good boat,’ said Setanta, Art’s father, and there was a low murmur of agreement from all of the fishermen around him.
    ‘Nothing to do with us, as Brendan says, Brehon,’ said Michelóg, a local farmer whose land stretched down to the beach. Brendan nodded his agreement, while the other fishermen, Mara noticed, glanced at each other. Michelóg was not popular amongst them, and yet they were nodding when she looked at them as if to say that they were all in agreement.
    ‘You can see for yourself, Brehon,’ said Brendan, taking over the leadership while the fishermen turned gratefully from Michelóg towards him. ‘You can see for yourself that the boat did not come from the Burren because there was a south-westerly wind last night – you can still feel it on your left cheek and it was a south-westerly gale three nights ago. That boat would have been swept up here from west Corcomroe or even from the Kingdom of Kerry during the storm – it’s nothing to do with us,’ he repeated. ‘It’s an affair belonging to another kingdom.’
    ‘Your young lad, here, young Cormac, has been explaining to me about the custom of putting a murderer in a boat with no oars and pushing him out to sea. I had forgotten all about it,’ explained Fernandez. Mara said nothing. She felt furious with Cormac. ‘Say nothing except to me when there is a case going on’ was the rule that she had given to all her scholars, but Cormac, obviously, had not been able to resist airing his knowledge. It was, perhaps, a pity that Domhnall had felt that he should be the one, as the eldest in the law school, to bring her the news. If he had remained she was sure that he would have managed to silence Cormac. Slevin did not have the same easy authority, and may have been busy with safeguarding the boat and its terrible contents.
    ‘This is nothing to do with any of us, Brehon.’ Michelóg was looking at her very intently and she suddenly found this insistence, this slightly belligerent tone of voice to be strange, and she found the respectful silence of his listeners even stranger. She was surprised to find Michelóg on such good terms with the fishing community. A couple of years ago she had judged a case, brought by the fishermen of the area, that Michelóg deliberately and continually allowed a very savage bull of his to wander on the sands in order to alarm the fishermen and prevent them from using the bay at Fanore. Mara had quickly found a precedent among her law books and had told Michelóg that he had to keep his bull under control, either locked in a shed or in a field with no road access and near his house. Now, however, he seemed to be on the best of terms with Fernandez and Brendan.
    There was, she thought, a certain impetus from the crowd that surrounded her to say that this sad event had nothing to do with the people of the Burren. So what was wrong?
    ‘I’ve got a horse and cart ready here, Brehon,’ put in Michelóg. ‘We can take the body to Kiltonaghan Church. Someone has slipped up there to get the priest. We want to do everything in the right way according to the rules,’ he ended sanctimoniously.
    ‘We’ve all decided that we will bury the poor fellow in our own churchyard; he has made his peace with God and man,’ put in Fernandez, looking around him. Heads were nodding, but there was a feeling of tension in the air which did not accord with Fernandez’s pious words. Children were very silent, the younger ones clutched by mothers, the older ones wide-eyed and apprehensive. The whole of this maritime community acted as though they were under threat, and the threat, she realized, came in their eyes