Writ in Stone Read Free Page A

poured himself some more wine.
    ‘A man’s ancestors are the most important thing to him,’ he said as the door shut behind his sick son. ‘Tell me a man’s breeding and I will tell you what that man is. My ancestors were great men.’ He looked beligerantly around the table and everyone’s eyes fell before his. ‘Conor Sudaine, whose anniversary we will honour tomorrow, was a man who fought until no drop of blood remained in his veins.’ He turned to the abbot. ‘We will have a Mass for him tomorrow?’
    The abbot bowed his head respectfully. ‘At sundown, my lord.’
    ‘I’m not convinced that we do enough to honour him.’ The king was in a quarrelsome mood, thought Mara, anxiously eyeing the low level of the flagon of cheap Spanish wine which the abbot had placed before his most important guest.
    ‘Perhaps some extra prayers,’ she murmured. The weather was stormy and there would be many young brothers at a loose end tomorrow as farm work would be difficult. It wouldn’t do any of them any harm to have an hour of quiet prayer inside the church as a change from the back-breaking toil of digging leeks from the cold wet soil.
    ‘That’s it,’ said Turlough, crashing his fist on the table and making the platters jump. ‘Tomorrow will be a day of continuous prayer, from dawn to dusk, beside the tomb of Conor Sudaine.’ He looked around the refectory where every knife was suspended and every eye turned respectfully towards him before announcing dramatically: ‘I myself will take the first hour of the vigil, after you have celebrated the office of prime. I will be in the church by dawn.’
    ‘I will be happy to accompany you, my lord,’ said the abbot heroically.
    ‘No, no.’ Turlough was in a mood to disagree with everyone. ‘I will be alone. You, my lord abbot, may take the second hour. Fergal, Conall,’ he bellowed over his shoulder, ‘I’ll rouse you at dawn and we’ll go across to the church.’
    ‘Yes, my lord,’ they chorused respectfully. They would know the king well enough not to take it upon themselves to rouse him, thought Mara, guessing that by morning, Turlough would change his mind.
    So what had made the bodyguards go to the church before Turlough, wondered Mara, rising to her feet and walking quietly down the middle aisle of the church. Carefully she locked all of the doors and then stepped outside. The sky was full of menace, with purple-black snow clouds piling up against the white-capped summit of Cappanabhaile Mountain to the west. The four taoiseach s of the Burren stood outside the door to their guest house waiting for her, waiting, like the chieftains from time immemorial, to serve their lord, the king.
    ‘Brehon,’ said Ardal O’Lochlainn, coming forward. ‘This is a terrible thing. What can we do to help?’
    ‘Could it be one of the O’Kelly clan?’ asked Teige O’Brien eagerly. ‘He could have crept in and struck the blow.’
    ‘How would an O’Kelly know that the king meant to be in the church at daybreak?’ objected Garrett MacNamara. His wife was from Galway and she had distant connections with the O’Kelly clan.
    ‘They have spies everywhere,’ said Teige with conviction. ‘Everyone heard the king last night. Everyone knew that he intended to be alone in the church this morning. Perhaps they have a spy among the brothers and he managed to get word out. By the mercy of God, it wasn’t the king, but only Mahon, who was killed.’ Mara had to conceal a smile. There was little love between the cousins, Teige and Mahon. It had been rumoured that Mahon was more favoured than Teige by some of the O’Brien clan, although Teige would be Turlough’s choice for tánaiste , if anything happened to Conor. Teige’s suggestion that an O’Kelly might have come forty miles through a blizzard just because the king might possibly be alone in the church was absurd. It didn’t surprise her, though; the outsider was always a popular suspect when it came to