A MASS FOR THE DEAD (2 page)

“The MacDonald will be needing to know of it all,” I commented darkly, “and he’ll not be pleased.”

The sun glowed brighter, burning through the remnants of the fog, against the hill behind us to the east. To the west, I saw the green bulk of Oronsay across the Strand and beyond that the sea towards Ireland.

We made our way past the glistening black rocks that lined the Strand. Seamus headed for the old coracle beached on the damp sand. “The brothers will not mind if we take this over.”

“No,” I agreed. “They’ll be thinking of other things the now.”

We pushed the boat into the water and jumped in. The tide was full in and just starting to turn. I glimpsed the stone bulk of the carved Sanctuary Cross standing above the waters, marking the boundary between secular and sacred land. I thought of my father lying there dead, and shuddered.

The heavy wooden weight of the oars in my hand comforted me. Strange I should feel it so, the death of a father who had only tolerated me at best. At worst, I had always felt he hated me. I had not been the son he’d hoped for, and he had made no secret of it. A cripple, good for nothing except scriving, and hating that. And being a cripple, I had not even had the grace to settle quietly into the life of the Priory, as would have been only proper and seemly. Neither a fish nor a fowl. The spray touched my cheek like a benediction but I pulled hard at the oars, trying to out row my thoughts.

The bottom of the coracle scraped the sandy bottom as we neared the other side. I pulled it onto the bank and followed Seamus up the hill towards the Priory, feeling the rays of the sun hit the back of my legs with a faint warmth as I walked, the water and sand drying off in the cold wind.

The sun struck the gray stone walls as we crested the hill and passed piles of stone lying on the grass, ready for the masons. No workers were about and I guessed they would not labor today. Behind the walls, we could see the newly finished chapel, chapter house, and cloisters, all built of the same stone. Inside the new chapel, with its fine slate roof, candles burned, their light glowing through the tall slit windows, but we turned towards the infirmary.

“That’s where he’ll be, I’m thinking,” said Seamus, his fourteen year old bravado somewhat cowed by the atmosphere of the Priory. Having lived here for ten years I did not share his illusions, and led the way past the dormitory to the infirmary. I did not see my uncle, or the sub-prior. Perhaps they spoke privately on the event.

My steps slowed, not wanting to see what I knew awaited me, yet fascinated, too; that awful fascination one feels for the final mystery.

And may he rot in whatever Hell he’s gone to
, I found myself thinking as I finally gazed on the sandy, dirtied body of my father. It lay on a plinth, the rough boards covered with a linen cloth, while next to it a canon chanted prayers for the dead. The body lay on its back, pale, waxen, looking in some weird stony fashion like a grave-slab carving. It was my father, and yet not my father.

The gulls had gotten to the body, before Alasdair Beag had found him, and the corpse was the worse for it. A bloody depressed area on his head showed where someone had struck him, from behind. His face and neck had an ugly, bluish cast to them, and a fine thin mark around his neck looked pale by comparison with the surrounding skin. His neck and jaw were bruised, his mouth stuffed with sand. Grains of sand spilled out from his mouth onto his lips.

Whoever had done this had battered him after stuffing the sand in, hitting again and again. Some seaweed still lay tangled in his hands and the hair around his tonsure lay wetly against the cold skin. My own throat closed and I felt myself choking as I looked at the body.

I covered the body again with the linen sheet and turned to go. Tears filled my eyes. I swallowed them tightly. He was dead, and I need never bear the humiliation of hearing him refer to me as “his bastard son, the cripple” again.

My uncle stopped me as I left the infirmary.

“Muirteach.”

“Aye, Uncle?”

During the years I had spent in his home as his foster son I had learned to be wary of Uncle Gillespic when he had that tone in his voice, and I was not wrong now. He pulled me to one side, just inside the dormitory, empty except for old Brother Augustus, where we could speak more privately.

“Wait outside for us Seamus, there’s a good lad,” Gillespic dismissed the lad and turned towards me, his hand on my arm for comfort.

My uncle was a broad shouldered man, with long chestnut hair and a full beard, and penetrating eyes that now rested upon me thoughtfully a moment before he spoke again.

“This is a bad thing, Muirteach, very bad, I’m thinking.”

I shrugged my shoulders, not wanting to show him my feelings, but my uncle continued. “The MacDonald will not be liking it.”

“And so? It does not matter if he likes it or no, the man is dead, Uncle.” I must have sounded more sullen than I meant to, for Gillespic stopped for a moment and looked me full in the face.

“And harder on you than you’d admit.”

I nodded, forced to the admission by his gaze. Sure, that was one of the talents of my uncle, that gift of seeing the best in you that you’d been trying to hide, even from yourself. As a boy fostered into his household, those years before I had gone to the Priory, my uncle’s hazel eyes had seemed to see right to the root of my soul, somehow finding good in his crippled and angry nephew.

It was a pity my father hadn’t had shared that trait. The hot lump in my throat got the better of me for a minute, and I looked away and out the dormitory door, studying the new carvings on the pillars of the cloister, until my eyes cleared.

“Well, it’s as I said, Muirteach,” my uncle continued in a kinder tone. “The MacDonald himself will not be liking this, his own Prior killed in his own backyard, so to say, and will be wanting some answers to it. And for myself, he was my brother after all, and I’ll be having to ask the honor price from whoever is responsible. Or you should be asking.”

“I’m asking for nothing,” I said stubbornly.

“Who did do it, then?” I asked, after a moment when my uncle did not answer. “Do they know?”

Gillespic shook his head. “Nary a clue. Just a big bloody blow to his skull, and a mouth choked full with sand, like, with not a person near by to see or hear any thing at all, at all.”

“That’s always the way of it,” I said with much more nonchalance than I felt. I shuddered, unable to keep up the pretence. “My mother’s kin, they could have done it.”

“Aye, or Sheena’s kin, or even yourself. Crispinus had a rare talent for making enemies.” My uncle crossed himself and added, “God rest his soul,” in a rare show of piety, yet somehow I sensed it was heartfelt. Then he stared at me suddenly with those remarkable eyes he had. “Where were you, the last night?”

“At home, drinking.”

“Alone then.”

“Seamus was with me. And Aorig saw me.” I was suddenly angry. “What are you saying, Uncle? By Christ’s Holy Blood, I had no reason to love my father, but I did not kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Brother Augustus looked up at us sharply as he heard my outburst, but my uncle continued without sparing the monk a glance.

“No, now, Muirteach,” Gillespic said soothingly, “I’m not saying that at all. Muirteach, you must control yourself the now, and not be swearing here in the Priory. You’ll be giving the poor brothers here fits, as if it were not bad enough for them to have a dead prior to be dealing with.”

Brother Augustus returned to his prayers and after another minute my uncle continued. “Every man knows you had little reason to love your father, what with the way he treated your poor mother, God rest her soul. And you, as well. And for that, I’m thinking you might come under suspicion, that’s all of it.”

“Well, Uncle, you can rest your mind. I did not do it. And whyever should I, with half of the population of the Isles ready to do it for me?”

Gillespic shook his head. “It’s a bad thing, that it is Muirteach. And I’m thinking you should be the one to carry the news to His Lordship himself.”

“Me?”

“Aye, whoever better to do it than the man’s oldest son.”

And whoever better to do it than someone not my uncle
, I thought, but I kept my thoughts to myself. Gillespic had that amazing quality, he could get you to do something you had no desire to do, and somehow you’d find yourself happy to be doing it for him. And, even though I protested, I knew I’d be setting sail before much more time had passed, southward towards Islay, to take the news to the Lord of the Isles.

Chapter 2

G
illespic had a small
bìrlinn
readied, twelve oars only, and we set off from Oronsay, after a hurried meal. Or rather, I set off, accompanied by four other men to crew the galley. Seamus was eager to come along, and a good hand with the oars. Gillespic stayed behind.

Clouds obscured the early sun of the day, and soon it started raining, a misty drizzle that strengthened, soaked through my shirt and cloak, and made me shiver. The
iorram
sung by the crew was sad one, suited to the day, and the dreary errand we were on made my mood worse.

When I tried to imagine him gone, I found that I could not fathom life without my father. He had loomed large in my life. As a child I tried to win his approval, but had never found it coming.

My thoughts were bitter and I took a swig from the flask I carried by way of escaping them, then munched on a bannock when I wasn’t rowing, tasting the salt from the sea spray in my mouth along with the oatcake.

Despite the rain we made good enough time and by the time we reached the Sound of Islay the rain let up a bit. You could just make out the Paps of Jura, gray-humped through the mist on our left, but looking behind us the green bulk of Colonsay had vanished in the clouds.

It was getting on towards the evening when we beached the
bìrlinn
at Coal Ila, wet, cold, and hungry. The few small stone huts, their thatch dripping wetly after the rain, looked quiet. We could find no one there to rent us horses and so we set off on foot towards Finlaggan, where we would find John MacDonald, Lord of the Isles.

We made good enough time, and I kept up well enough with the others, at a walk. The hills of Islay gleamed green after the rain and the air smelled fresh and cold. I had been born here, but remembered little of it for all that. After my mother had died, and I’d been sent to Uncle Gillespic’s for fostering, I hadn’t returned often and this side of the island was far from the Rhinns, where my mother and I had lived with her family. But Finlaggan I knew well enough, having often accompanied Gillespic here in these last years since I’d left the Priory, and it was with a sense of dread that I saw the loch and the islands grow nearer as we walked.

The track grew busy as we neared the settlement, and the smell of peat fires rose from the cluster of houses by the loch side. We saw miners, along with others, craftsmen and lead workers, returning to their homes and their evening meals after the day’s work.

I was feeling an uncomfortable knot in my stomach. I cursed Gillespic for sending me on this errand, and cursed myself for accepting it. Not that I would have refused Gillespic, I admitted to myself wryly after I had finished cursing. I worshipped my foster father. But now I had to tell the MacDonald about the death of my own father.

The stone and wattle houses of the village spilled over on both sides of the causeway and down along the sides of the loch. Many of the homes belonged to His Lordship’s own elite bodyguard, the
luchd-tighe
, while others housed craftsmen serving the castle, and miners from the silver and lead mines. On the loch itself, nestled like jewels in a blue setting, we saw the two islands that formed the Lord’s castle of Finlaggan—Eilean Mor, the big island, and beyond that the smaller Council Island
,
Eilean nan Comhairle.

The Lord of the Isles, a descendant of that same Somerled my dog was named for, ruled a vast confederacy of clans in the Highlands and Hebrides, foremost among them his own Clan Donald. In his own territories John Mac Donald had nearly as much power as the Stewart monarch himself, for the King in Edinburgh was a distant figure who had little to do with our life in the islands. However, with that same canniness that he had shown when he put aside his first wife, Amie MacRuairi, to marry the Stewart’s own daughter, John MacDonald signed his documents and decrees merely
Dominus Insularium
, the Lord of the Isles, and had sworn at least nominal fealty to the Stewart king.

The pit of my stomach felt worse with thinking about it all, and my leg started to ache again as we neared the causeway. The sentry by the entrance was my distant cousin, Fergus, and he let us pass by without protest. We passed the kitchen buildings, where the aroma of roasting venison mingled with the smell of peat smoke to make me aware of how hungry I was after the long day, and then the jetty and the stone bulk of the Great Hall reared before us. The MacDonald’s men waited by the door, idly fingering their broadswords when they saw us.

“We’re needing to see the MacDonald,” I said. “It’s the MacPhee sent us, with news from Colonsay.”

The sentry raised an eyebrow. “News, is it then?” I nodded, but didn’t enlighten him as to what it was. “He’s away. Hunting,” he added, after a minute.

“Come away in, then,” he continued, looking a bit disappointed, when we still did not enlighten him. “Perhaps himself will be seeing you when he returns. Or perhaps he will be wanting to wait until after the meal.”

We were settled and brought some food and drink. After waiting for over an hour in the smoky, crowded hall, drinking claret, watching some MacNeills playing at draughts, His Lordship’s grizzled hound scratch at his fleas, and half-listening while a harper played idly in a corner of the hall, I concluded that himself would be seeing us after the meal. Or I hoped so. The rumbling in my stomach had grown more insistent, despite the bannocks and cheese we had been given, and I hoped the meal would come first and that the telling of our news, and my encounter with His Lordship, could wait.