Free Condemned to Death by Cora Harrison

was getting on in the law school that she would not grudge the absence of her husband – and Oisín would feel the same. It would not be a busy time for him – his major business was the importation of wine from western France and that would mostly occur in the autumn. ‘Take Slevin with you,’ she ended, ‘and bring your father straight to Cahermacnaghten, not to Fanore.’
    It would be best, she thought, to talk with the merchant from Galway before taking him over to Fanore.

Five
Do Breithemhnas for Gellaib
(On Judgement about Pledges)
    The creditor who holds your brooch, your necklet or your earrings as a pledge against your loan must return them so you may wear them at the great assembly. Otherwise he will be fined for your humiliation.
    O isín O’Davoren was Mara’s second cousin, as well as being her son-in-law. He came from an obscure branch of the O’Davorens. His father, his grandfather and his uncles had all been coopers, and had been content to live out their lives in the useful trade of barrel-making. Oisín, though, had been ambitious. In his teens, he had visited Galway to sell some barrels and had decided that the life of a merchant was the one for him. He began to buy and sell wine as well as barrels. By the time he was a young man of just thirty, he had done so well that he now had a fine stone house as well as a shop in the city. He also had three children and had been very pleased and proud that his mother-in-law had accepted his eldest son, Domhnall, then aged eight years old, as a scholar in her renowned law school.
    And the placement had worked out. Domhnall, to Mara’s mind, had inherited the brains and the integrity of her own father, Domhnall’s great-grandfather. The immense toil of the law school, the hundreds of legal decrees, triads, heptads and other lore that had to be memorized, the languages, English, Latin, Spanish and even Greek, were easily absorbed by the boy. What was almost more important, though, was that from the start he showed signs of a mature judgement which made Mara hope that he might, in his time, take over the law school of Cahermacnaghten from her.
    To Oisín, however, she contented herself with praising Domhnall’s prowess and his sense of responsibility towards the younger pupils. She knew her son-in-law well enough to know that ever since Cormac, her son by her second marriage, had joined the law school, he had been on tenterhooks to know how that would affect his son who was, of course, oddly, Cormac’s nephew. In her own mind, Mara was by now fairly sure that Cormac would not want to be a Brehon and that even the amount of work involved in studying for the further qualification of
ollamh
was going to be a great deterrent to him, if he did indeed have any ambition to inherit the law school from his mother. No, she thought, Cormac was like his kingly father and would prefer to be engaged in warfare and in the affairs of the three kingdoms.
    However, these were early days and so Mara plied Oisín with some of his own imported wine, thanked him very sincerely for coming to see her immediately and not waiting until the morning and then led the conversation around to the question of the dead man.
    ‘If it is indeed Niall Martin, then he has neither wife nor child,’ he declared with decisiveness that she expected from him. ‘I’ve known him for a long time; have had some dealings with him when he has given me gold articles for sale in France. An honest man, though very keen on money. His shop was tiny and he never expanded it, though I think he did very well for himself. He lived above it. An old woman came in and out and cleaned the place. She had her own key. I’ve seen her climb the steps at the side of the shop with it in her hand. As for meals, well, I think that he ate breakfast, dinner and supper in the various pie shops around, and you’d often find him, of an evening, in one of the inns. Not a very strong man; he could have dropped dead of a heart