Condemned to Death Read Online Free PDF

careful of the priest’s feelings.
    He was, of course, also, the son of Setanta the fisherman and of his wife Cliona, the sheep farmer, both of whom were present among the uneasy, rather guilty-looking crowd who faced her at the moment. This errand would probably remove the boy from the sands until the preliminary details had been taken and there were still plenty of scholars to serve her purposes until Nuala the physician arrived and either confirmed her suspicions, or, which Mara hoped, dismissed them. Mara had great reliance on Nuala and felt that she would probably be able to tell without any lengthy examination whether the man had died out there on the Atlantic Ocean or whether there was some other reason for his death.

Three
Bretha Commaithschesa
(Judgements of the Neighbourhood)
    There is a common right to all seaweed cast upon the beach. It may be taken and used to fertilize the land.
    All edible plants, such as the seaweed
duilsc
which grows upon the rocks of the foreshore, may be taken freely by those who wish to gather them.
    M ara, with one last look at the body in the boat, deputed Slevin to stay on guard and to keep the seabirds from molesting it, and then walked out of the small inlet and back across to the main area of the beach. The crowd of fishermen and their families followed her in unusual silence.
    The sands at Fanore were scored diagonally with a long level line of black limestone, rather as though some long-gone race of people had built a road to run from where the River Caher entered the beach, between the sand dunes, right down to the low-tide mark on the other side. Here and there on this smooth flat surface a rock had been left and had been sculpted by the sea into a square shape, as if a giant had deposited a shining black stone box there in the centre of the roadway. Mara took up her position on one of these, seating herself on the smooth surface, warm from the sun, and sending Finbar to get her satchel from the pony’s side. She always kept it ready packed with slips of vellum, a travelling inkhorn and a case of well-trimmed pens. For the moment, though, she thought, her words would go unrecorded. She looked up at the still silent people.
    ‘Does anyone know who this man is?’ she asked and as she expected, heads were shaken.
    ‘Or how he was washed up on the sands?’ she continued and again there was this silent shaking of heads. Men looked at each other uneasily, though, and the women’s eyes were shielded or fixed on their children.
    ‘I don’t wish to hold up your work,’ she said to them all. ‘I shall just sit here and perhaps anyone who suddenly remembers the man, or knows anything about the boat, could come and tell me if anything occurs to their mind. But in the meantime, I know that you need to tend to your fish and my scholars here can tell me what happened this morning. Síle,’ she said to the eight-year-old, ‘perhaps you will stay, too, since you were the one that first saw the boat.’
    It was very interesting, she thought, to see how glances were exchanged at that and how the women grabbed the hands of young children as though to prevent any chatter and how the older boys and girls sidled away with quick looks at their parents’ faces. There was definitely something quite wrong here. No one is at ease with a dead body, but fishermen and their wives had often seen the dead, killed by Atlantic storms. Etain was the last to go. She watched her young sister for a moment with a troubled look on her face but eventually went away with many backward glances.
    ‘Come and sit down,’ Mara invited her younger scholars. The MacMahon twins, Cian and his sister Cael, sat side by side at her feet and Cormac perched on a smaller box-like rock at a slight distance. After a slight hesitation, Síle went and squeezed herself onto the rock beside Cormac. He half got up, caught his mother’s eye and sat down again. Cael sniggered and Síle gave a proud smile. Mara decided to get rid