loose the block and make her second attempt on my life.’
‘Thankfully it failed,’ Eadulf added. ‘Ever since I first met Buan I kept thinking that I had met her before. Her features seemed so familiar to me. I mentioned it to Fidelma. But it was not until Buan made her final mistake that it all came together.’
‘A final mistake?’ Abbot Erc was shaking his head, perplexed. Fidelma looked appreciatively to Eadulf.
‘She was trapped into making that mistake by Eadulf.’
All eyes turned to him and he shrugged modestly.
‘All along, Sister Buan had been pretending a lack of education. She claimed not to know a word of Latin, thus trying to assure us that she would not have had any knowledge of Cinaed’s work. Had this been so, we would have had to accept that she must have been innocent of the book destruction and that would have been a fatal flaw in our argument. However, as the daughter of a chieftain, raised by a chieftain, she would naturally have learnt Latin.’
Abbot Erc was still puzzled.
‘But I can vouch that she was no scholar. She had neither Latin nor Greek.’
‘No, she pretended not to, but made a fatal slip,’ contradicted Eadulf. ‘We were talking and I commented dura lex sed lex — the law is hard, but it is the law. And she turned and agreed with me without my needing to translate. And I knew then that she had been lying about her knowledge. Everything fell into place and I finally understood the significance of her resemblance to Uaman.’
Sister Fidelma nodded appreciatively.
‘Thanks to Eadulf, that was the point when the evidence tied into the knot that sealed Buan’s fate.’
‘She was ambitious to the point of blind evil,’ Abbot Erc sighed deeply. ‘What profit a person, if they gain the whole world, and lose their own soul?’
Fidelma nodded agreement at his quotation from scripture.
‘Publilius Syrus said…’ She paused, glanced to where Eadulf was waiting with a stoic expression for yet another of her many quotations
