Free Verdict of the Court by Cora Harrison Page B

happened at that moment in any case; that she did not know. But the knife had fallen from Brehon MacClancy’s shoulder blade and tumbled into the fold of his cloak. Turlough had been right – it had hardly penetrated the flesh.
    ‘Yes, Rosta, you go ahead, you won’t disturb us,’ she said then and shook her head quickly as the physician stretched his hand towards the knife. Her mind was whirring with thoughts as they waited in silence for the table to be cleared. One of the boys had opened the hatch leading to the kitchen and they placed the loaded trays, one by one, on the wooden counter behind this and soon they all disappeared back into the small kitchen.
    Mara waited after the door had closed behind them. She looked curiously at O’Hickey. Turlough, her husband, no physician, but a practical man who had seen death throughout the numerous wars and skirmishes throughout his lifetime, had remarked that the knife seemed to be inserted very shallowly. Why had Donogh not noticed this? She picked up a candle from a nearby shelf and holding it in her hand she lowered it until the flame illuminated the back of the corpse. There was little to be seen. The man’s clothes, the cloak, the tunic, the
léine
all served to obscure the entrance pathway of the knife. But could any knife that delivered death have fallen out so easily? Or could he have swallowed or eaten something poisoned? She picked up the goblet of mead, sniffed, but could come to no conclusion. Still, poison was unlikely. After all what was the point of the knife if poison was the real weapon?
    ‘He must be stripped and examined,’ she said decisively. ‘The basement will be the best place for that.’
    ‘My apprentice has gone to his home in the north for Christmas; it will take days to get him back.’ Donogh O’Hickey stared at Mara in dismay. ‘We can’t keep the body for as long as that. Could we get Nuala over from the Burren?’ he queried.
    Mara thought about this. Nuala worked terribly hard and had been looking very pale. Her assistant, Peader, had gone to visit his mother in Scotland so Nuala would be reluctant to leave her territory when a serious accident might occur. It could not be justified to take her away when her absence might mean that a man could bleed to death or a woman die in childbirth. Surely there were other physicians in the large kingdom of Thomond. Why was Donogh so reluctant to investigate this death properly?
    She went to the kitchen hatch, knocked on it and when Rosta appeared, told him to send the captain of the guard to her.
    ‘Oh, and Rosta, could you lend me a box and a clean linen napkin,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t need to be ironed or starched.’ Rosta, she knew, was very proud of the starch which he made from the roots of the cuckoo flowers and she could see by his dismayed face as he handed her the crumpled object, which one of his assistants had taken from a large basket, that he didn’t think it was fit for the wife of his King.
    ‘That’s perfect,’ she assured him, ‘and just that small box over there, that’s all that I need. Tell the captain that his men should bring a litter and perhaps a rope so that the body can be carried safely down the steps.’
    The safest thing on that spiral stairs, she thought, as she returned to the window recess, would probably be for one of those strong men-of-arms to sling the body over his shoulder and take it down to the cellar like that, but that might be considered to be discourteous to the dead man and could even be against some obscure rule of the church. She bent down to pick up the knife and slightly recoiled. A slightly fishy smell seemed to emanate from it. She looked down at it, feeling puzzled. She had expected a smell of blood, but not of fish. Holding the napkin to shield her hand she picked up the knife by its handle and held it to her nose. Yes, it was fish – rotten fish, she thought.
    And yet the knife itself with its long blade and its deadly sharpened