Condemned to Death by Cora Harrison Read Free Book Online

waited for them to look at each other, but they didn’t – they looked straight at her with innocent and uncomprehending faces. Mara almost wished that Brigid was here with her. She could just hear her housekeeper, who had been her father’s housekeeper before and had almost forty years of coping with scholars. ‘
He had that puss on him like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth
,’ she would say.
    ‘It’s strange that you don’t remember the boat,’ she remarked. ‘Finbar, would you go back and wait by the body and send Slevin up to me. In the meantime,’ she said to the four remaining scholars, ‘let’s just cross over and have a look around.’
    The sand was held firm by the coarse green blades of marram grass and it was easy to walk on. She went down the hill to the small hollow where the three tents for the boys were grouped around one large fireplace. They were anxious to show her their sleeping places, but she put them aside. She was beginning to feel a little annoyed at their efforts to divert her from thoughts of the boat that held the corpse. Cormac, she guessed, was at the back of this. His loyalty to his foster-father and to the fishing community was great, she knew, but his first loyalty, if he was ever to make a lawyer, should be to establishing the truth about a crime as serious as murder – and she was beginning to think that this body in the boat was going to be a case of murder.
    There were no marks in the sand to show whether a boat had been dragged out towards the pathway, or even to show its resting place when she had noticed a rabbit leap from it, but now at midday there was a breeze coming in from the ocean and the fine, very dry sand of the dunes was continually in motion, little flurries stirring and rippling. It had been blowing hard the night before; she remembered noticing from her window, just before she had blown out her candle, how the ash tree across the road from her house was bending and swaying.
    ‘Slevin, come over here, will you?’ she said over her shoulder as she saw his tall form appear on the roadway beside the dunes.
    ‘Someone’s taken away the old boat, then,’ he said instantly the moment he joined her, and then before she could say a word he blew a whistle through his pursed lips.
    ‘Of course,’ he said immediately. ‘That’s the boat that has the corpse in it – I bet that’s what it is.’ Slevin’s voice was breaking and it rose quite high as he spoke. Mara, looking back at the younger boys, saw that they had heard, but at that instant Cormac shouted, ‘Rabbit!’ and the attention of all was distracted as the grass was parted by the long-legged and agile leaps. They chased exuberantly after it only giving up when it dived into a burrow.
    ‘Saw it a minute too late; otherwise we’d have had rabbit stew tonight instead of more fish,’ said Cormac, twisting his hands to show how he would wring the animal’s neck. He and Cael began to argue with each other as to which had killed the most rabbits during their short lifespan and eventually Mara tired of them and suggested they return to their work on the beach.
    ‘After all,’ she said, ‘Fernandez is probably relying on you and it’s not fair to deprive him of seven pairs of hands. Tell him that I’ll just keep Slevin until Domhnall comes back with the physician.’
    They went readily and she sensed that they were glad to have something to do. At the moment, until and unless it was confirmed by Nuala that a crime had taken place, there was little to do and certainly not enough for them all. Now it was more a matter of quiet speculation and the summing up of possibilities.
    When they had gone she turned back to Slevin. ‘If the boat that was here last night …’ she began and then he interrupted her. ‘No it wasn’t,’ he said immediately. ‘The boat wasn’t here last night. I remember now. It was here when we saw the place first, before we went to stay in the castle before the wind blew