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utmost truthfulness and discretion and he had spoken as though the memory had just come to him.
    So, yes, of course, thought Mara, the man had come from Galway City, he had worn English dress: a shirt, a doublet, breeches and nether hose, summer as well as winter, and doubtless a pair of leather boots. But someone had deliberately removed those very defining articles of clothes and just left the man in his shirt and under hose as though he was a fisherman or farmer, dressed only in the
léine
, or what could have looked like a
léine,
as though, she told herself, he could be a victim of the Brehon law punishment of
fingal
.
    ‘Here comes Art,’ said Cormac joyfully. He was very friendly with Cian and Cael, but his foster-brother Art and he were like twins, seldom happy out of each other’s company. ‘May I tell him, Brehon?’
    ‘Yes, but quietly.’ Mara had no thought of sharing her findings with the whole beach and she explained that to them all when Art and Cormac came back. Art looked pale, sallow beneath the summer tan, she thought, and resolved to keep an eye on him. He was a very sensitive boy, a good scholar, a hard worker, but one who always needed plenty of encouragement and praise. Things that other scholars shrugged off could upset him for days.
    ‘What do you think about the boat, Art?’ she asked. It was a question that she might put later on to the fishermen, but this fisherman’s son must surely have an opinion on it. He felt it carefully, and to her surprise was quite assertive in his belief that it could have stood up to an Atlantic storm.
    ‘Something light like this would ride the waves, Brehon,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s the heavier boat that would be more likely to overturn and sink.’
    Mara nodded, but she was sceptical that this boat, as thin as a cockleshell, could have been swept all the way up from the coast of Kerry without sinking.
    And if the man was from Galway then the south-westerly wind would have brought him up north to the coast of Spiddal or somewhere like that, certainly in the opposite direction to the Burren. And this was not the kind of boat that they used in Galway City. Theirs were bigger and more substantial.
    In fact, this boat, she was beginning to be sure, was the one that she had seen the rabbit jump from a few days earlier, the one that had been abandoned on the sand dunes of Fanore.
    And not only the fishermen, but her scholars, also, were aware of that fact and the uneasiness stemmed from that.
    Now she had to wait until Nuala arrived to see what she thought about this man’s cause of death. She walked forward to meet Finbar and to listen gravely to his report that the boat could not be seen from anywhere on the beach until the rocks which surrounded it were scaled. She worried again about how pale and hollow-eyed he looked. She had hoped that the holiday and the excitement about the midsummer’s eve feast, the sleeping in tents and the fishing expeditions would have taken his mind off his father’s edict.
    ‘Let’s walk back to where your shelters are pitched,’ she suggested to the others and encouraged them to talk about sleeping out of doors for the last couple of nights and about how warm and comfortable they were. Cael related, rather drolly, an exaggerated account of Síle’s fears during the night while Cormac and Cian vied with each other about how many hours they had stayed awake. They were all very anxious to show her the tents and to display how well the tar-soaked canvas kept out rain, but she did not allow too much time to be wasted on that.
    ‘There’s something missing here,’ she said looking all around innocently, though she had immediately noticed the absence of the boat.
    The others looked around, also, with blank faces. Cael had a slight frown between her brows, but she said nothing.
    ‘Don’t you remember that old boat that was wedged in over there?’ She pointed to the spot between two pointed grass-covered sand dunes. She