My Lady Judge (25 page)

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Authors: Cora Harrison

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BOOK: My Lady Judge
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CÁIN LÁNAMNA (THE LAW OF MARRIAGE)
Heptad 47. There are two kinds of rape:
forcor,
forcible
rape, and
sleth,
where a woman was subjected to intercourse without her full consent.
Sleth
of a woman who normally frequents alehouses, without a male member of her family in attendance, will carry no penalty.
In the case of
forcor,
the rapist must pay the honour price of his victim’s husband, father or son. He must also be responsible, if necessary, for any children that result from the rape.
In addition to the honour price, the
éraic,
or full body fine, must also be paid in the case of a rape of a nun or of a ‘girl in plaits’.
 
 
I
t SEEMED AMAZING THAT Nessa had borne a child. She I was fat, but not particularly developed or forward for her age. Pathetically, she still wore the two plaits hanging over her shoulders that signified maidenhood. Her small, round face was still babyish, though the skin was spotty. She was in the garden of her home, a little cottage near the church, and she seemed to be gardening. Or rather, she was pouring a stream of water from a leather bucket over a row of young leeks.
‘You’re giving them a little too much,’ said Mara gently. She opened the garden gate and walked into the trim, well-tended vegetable garden. ‘Look, you’re washing the soil away from the roots. Here, give it to me.’
Nessa handed over the leather bucket obediently. She would probably be obedient about everything, thought Mara. Nessa’s mother was extremely religious and had brought the child up with great strictness. From the time that she was a tiny child Nessa had been dragged to every possible church service; by the age of three she would have been as familiar with the smell of incense as she was with the smell of milk. Nessa would never dare to show the rebellion that Emer and her friend Aoife showed to their fathers. She would not be wild and stay out late or disappear, giggling, into the darkness with a young man. So who had made her pregnant? And why could she not tell the truth?
‘Look, see, you just trickle it on,’ said Mara, demonstrating the technique. ‘You try now.’
Obediently Nessa took the leather bucket, but soon went back to letting a steady stream gush out. Patiently Mara took it away again. She couldn’t bear to see the seedlings destroyed.
‘You’ll be glad of these leeks next winter when all the watercress is gone from the streams and sorrel is gone from the ditches,’ she said. ‘They are getting on very well, aren’t they? It’s amazing, isn’t it, how a tiny seed can grow into a plant so quickly.’
Nessa looked at her blankly. She seemed to be quite content
to have the Brehon walk into her garden and take over the watering from her.
‘It’s like ourselves,’ continued Mara. ‘Once we become women, once our monthly bleed starts, a man can put a seed inside us – a tiny, tiny seed – and then after nine months it becomes a baby.’ I must have a word with Emer and Aoife, though I doubt either is as innocent as this poor child, she thought, while she kept her eyes fixed on the trickle of water that she was pouring carefully from the bucket.
‘I liked the baby,’ said Nessa unexpectedly. ‘I wanted it to stay alive. I wanted to play with it.’
‘Yes, I like babies, too,’ said Mara softly. ‘I had a little baby once, but now she is a woman and she has her own babies.’
‘I didn’t like the man, though,’ Nessa continued. ‘It hurt.’
‘Yes,’ said Mara soothingly. ‘You were a bit too young, that’s why. Wait another few years and then perhaps you’ll get married and you’ll have another little baby, a stronger one this time. Perhaps I’ll be drawing up a marriage contract for you one of these years. Who do you think you would like to marry?’
Nessa smiled slightly. She also blushed. ‘I’d like to marry Rory,’ she said.
‘Yes, he’s very handsome, isn’t he,’ said Mara. ‘I think if I were young again I would quite like him myself.’
‘Would he hurt me?’ asked Nessa.
Mara held her breath for a moment. Was she nearing the truth of what happened to Nessa? Obviously the man who had hurt her, who had raped her, was not Rory, although she – or was it her parents? – had accused him.
‘I think he would try to be careful and not hurt you,’ she said. ‘He is a kind young man. He is good and gentle with animals.’ She paused, trying to find the right words, words that would not alarm Nessa, but would elicit the truth. ’So he wasn’t the one that hurt you?’ she asked carelessly, still continuing to water the tiny
plants. Soon she would flood them herself, and they might rot, but they would be a sacrifice to the truth.
Nessa shook her head. ‘No,’ she whispered with a quick look around her. ‘The lawyer, Colman, told me to say that. He told my mother and my father. Colman promised that Rory would marry me if I said that and I thought I would like to be married to Rory. It would make Emer and Aoife very jealous.’
‘But who was the man who hurt you, Nessa?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Nessa simply. ‘But I think it was God …’ Her voice died away. She scuffed the wet soil with the toe of her boot.
Mara put down the leather bucket and turned around to face her.
‘Don’t be silly, Nessa,’ she said bracingly. ‘You’re too old for nonsense like that. Of course it wasn’t God.’
‘Well, he did it to Mary, the mother of Jesus, didn’t he?’ said Nessa sulkily.
Oh dear, thought Mara. ‘Well, that was a long time ago,’ she said vaguely. It was an inadequate response, but it seemed to satisfy Nessa.
‘Oh,’ she said, nodding her head. She thought for a moment, her young face puzzled and concentrated.
‘But what did he look like, Nessa? Was it a stranger?
‘I don’t know what he looked like,’ said Nessa. ‘He threw a cloak over my head and dragged me into a cave and then he left me there afterwards. I was crying. And then I got up and I went home.’
Mara drew in a deep breath. If I get my hands on this man I’ll leave him stripped of everything he possesses. I’ll drive him out of the kingdom, she thought. She could feel her stormy temper rising rapidly, but with the ability born of long training she thrust it down.
‘So how do you know it wasn’t Rory,’ she asked softly, ‘if you couldn’t see?’
‘It wasn’t Rory,’ said Nessa decidedly. ‘It wasn’t Roderic either. They were with Emer and Aoife. It was the night after
Samhain.
I was hiding. I was watching them kissing and … and all sorts of things. Then they went away.’
‘So you’re sure that it wasn’t Rory?’
Nessa nodded. ‘He smelled funny,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘He didn’t smell like a young man … and his hands …’ She stopped and shuddered slightly. ‘His hands were sort of hard and dry.’
An older man? wondered Mara. The smell would not be firm evidence, and the hard, dry feel of the hands? That wouldn’t necessarily rule out a young man, merely indicate a man who worked with his hands: Rory and Roderic, and, of course, the law scholars, were among the few young men on the Burren who did not work with their hands; their hands would be smooth and well tended. And yet, rape was usually a young man’s crime. Then, quite suddenly, the strange face of Feirdin MacNamara came into Mara’s mind. Could he have had anything to do with this crime? Ordinary girls of his age would have little to do with him. If he had been the perpetrator, then the Brehon, who had allowed him his freedom against the wishes of the
taoiseach
of his clan, would bear a heavy moral responsibility.
‘And you can’t think of anyone that it might have been?’ she asked, watching the small face carefully. Nessa seemed very childish, but she probably wasn’t as stupid as she tried to appear. She had probably found that to appear stupid was the easiest way of keeping out of trouble with her parents.
‘No,’ said Nessa. ‘I don’t want to think about it,’ she whimpered.
‘Well, if ever you get any suspicions, or remember something else, then you must let me know, Nessa,’ said Mara, going towards the gate. ‘You know, if we manage to catch the man that did this, the fine will be the twenty-three cows. That’s a lot of cows. But
you must be sure, so if you do think of a name, say nothing to anyone except to me. Will you do that?’
‘If I had all those cows, would Rory marry me?’ asked Nessa, blushing again.
‘Perhaps,’ said Mara. Stranger things have happened, she thought. Rory, she judged, was a fairly cynical young man. It’s amazing what such young men will do for money and a house. ‘Of course, the money would go to your father,’ she added, ‘but I’m sure that he would want you to be well settled in life.’
I could do with just one problem to solve at a time, she muttered as she went down the road. Still, this matter is probably more serious than the murder. Colman is dead and his sins are buried with him. Nothing will bring him back. But this affair of poor little Nessa needs to be settled. Rape followed by marriage was not unknown on the Burren. In fact, in some cases in the past, Mara secretly suspected that the girl had been a willing party to the alleged ‘rape’ in order to gain her parents’ acquiescence to a marriage with the man she loved. However, Nessa’s rape was a different matter; there was something deeply shocking and abhorrent about that blindfolding and violation of a girl only just past childhood.
The man who did that was a man whose mind was sick — a madman? Once again she thought of Feirdin and she frowned. She realized that part of the reason why she did not want to admit he was a likely suspect was because she did not want to be wrong. With a sigh she turned and took the road towards Baur South. She would have to go and see Feirdin and his poor mother, Gráinne.
 
 
There was no sign of Feirdin when Mara arrived at the small wayside cottage where the widowed Gráinne MacNamara lived
with her son. Despite the heat, Gráinne was busily engaged in weeding the stony earth of her onion patch, but as soon as she saw Mara, she hastily threw down her rake and came to the wall, blessings and greetings pouring eagerly from her smiling mouth.
‘Come into the house, Brehon, come in,’ she pleaded. ‘I have some cowslip wine that you will like. They say that you like wine. I’ve never really thanked you for standing up to the MacNamara for me. I was so frightened that Feirdin would be taken away from me. That would have been the end for him. I tried to explain that to the
taoiseach,
but he wouldn’t listen to me.’
She picked up the rake again and placed it carefully in the small whitewashed cabin beside her house before saying emphatically, ‘Feirdin’s a good boy if you know how to handle him, that’s what I kept telling
himself,
but he told me that I couldn’t judge what was best for my own son. I knew that Feirdin wouldn’t be happy with Eoin MacNamara, but he just wouldn’t listen to me …’
She walked towards the door and threw it wide open, hospitably. ‘Come in, Brehon,’ she repeated.
‘No, no, Gráinne,’ said Mara. ‘I must get back to the law school soon. All my scholars have been to the beach at Fanore and I must be back to greet them when they arrive.’ That’s true, anyway, she thought, and a good excuse to avoid the cowslip wine. These homemade wines were not to her taste.
‘I only called in to see how Feirdin is getting on,’ she continued. ‘Did he enjoy the
Bealtaine
evening?’
Gráinne’s cheeks flushed. No doubt there had been some covert whispering going on. She would be very aware that suspicion would fall readily on her son.
‘He did, indeed, Brehon,’ she said with dignity.
‘One of my lads thought that he might have been a bit nervous of the bonfire; that he went down before it was lit,’ said Mara gently.
Gráinne stiffened and then nodded.
‘You weren’t with him at the time? You stayed down on the lower terrace?’
‘Yes, I did, Brehon, but I kept him in my sight all of the time.’
‘Did he have a torch with him?’ asked Mara casually.
Gráinne shook her head. ‘No, he doesn’t like torches; they frighten him. He could see his way by the light of other people’s torches. In any case, he is used to going out at night. He sees in the dark as well as any badger.’
It would be very unlikely, in that case, that Gráinne could have kept her son in sight all of the time, thought Mara. She could just picture the scene on the mountainside with the faces illuminated here and there by the sudden flare of the pitch torches. That was the only way her scholars had been able to pick out those that they knew.
‘It must be very difficult for you,’ she said sympathetically. ‘You must never know what will upset him or not.’
Gráinne’s face softened. ‘That’s the truth, Brehon, I never know with him. Sometimes he’ll go through the worst storm with the thunder crashing overhead and the lightning flashing through the window and he’ll just sit there singing a song and not even noticing it and then on another day just a rumble of thunder in the distance will set him running for the house, crying like a child.’

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