Murder at whitby abbey, p.24
Murder at Whitby Abbey, page 24
‘And you will say it! You do say it! You will! You will! I know this! Your lies are shouted from the roof tops! You are the incarnation of evil, like all women! Daughters of Eve! Driving men to destruction in the pits of everlasting hellfire! Rightly were you thrown out of the Garden and rightly will you be thrown out of my abbey!’
‘Your abbey?’ she was stung to retort. ‘I imagine Abbot Richmond and his chapter would have some claim on it and not wish to hand it over entirely into your keeping!’
‘Aaaaagh!’ He began to thump his chest. ‘Take her away! Save me from this witch’s vile false-speaking! Out, woman! Out! Back to your sink of iniquity! Back to your fiery pit!’
Hildegard turned to Dunstan, but he was already hurrying forward. ‘My mistake, domina.’ He turned to the bursar. ‘Peter, this is a fever of your mind. She has said nothing. What do you imagine she has said?’
‘She accuses me! She accuses me! Her lies will drag me down!’ He put his head in his hands and began to sob.
‘Of what? Say it.’
‘Of sin! Of gross sin!’ he blubbered. ‘She caused me to touch her and a devil with wings of fire swooped down to burn me because I would not submit to her lust! Take her away! Take her from my sight!’
‘Peter, calm down.’
Two burly assistants approached. One of them held a steaming beaker. ‘Shall we give it him now, brother?’
‘If you can, yes. Try to get him to sleep. When he wakes he may be sufficiently rested to be back in his right mind – enough to make reparation to the domina for his calumnies – and to instruct that clerk of his to make peace with the townsfolk. He’s led us down the wrong track and I fear what will lie at the end of it if something isn’t done to make us draw back from the brink. His madness is spreading everywhere!’
Hildegard had backed away and Dunstan came over to her to say, ‘The abbot has retired to his lodging as if the matter will resolve itself. Meanwhile the mercenaries are taking up arms, eager to shed blood, and the monks are busy barricading themselves behind the walls. We shall be over-run, it will do no good, and my poor old fellows,’ he gestured to the row of beds where the patients lay, ‘hoping for a quiet end to their days are going to be under attack if not murdered in their own beds.’
‘Why does the abbot not stop this now?’
‘He is too holy to engage himself with the gross affairs of commerce.’
‘But what about the prior? Surely he has the authority to do something?’
‘You have seen, surely, what sort of leader he is? He is no more than Hertilpole’s manikin, like one of those child’s toys on sticks that can only dance to another’s tune. He is in thrall by way of Hertilpole to Cuthred who, of course, will follow his master’s orders to the letter and take joy in the bloodshed that will surely follow.’
‘Cuthred?’
‘Hertilpole’s clerk and factotum. Without word from him the prior will do nothing.’
The Cistercians were waiting further off and came over when they saw Dunstan looking so distraught.
While Hertilpole started to rant again as the assistants tried to persuade him to drink their calming potion, Gregory and Egbert asked what they might do to help.
‘Batten down the doors. Those fellows in the town may have right on their side but they’ve been drinking since Christmas Eve. They’ll not be open to reason if they have to drag themselves all the way up the cliff side only to be insulted once more. They’ve been treated shamefully and when they realize how they’ve been cozened yet again there’s no knowing what they’ll do. I suggest that you, domina, bring your belongings into the guest chamber here. You will not be safe outside the walls.’
‘We’ll help her.’ Gregory and Egbert said as one.
‘I only have one saddle bag.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Gregory replied. ‘We intend to come outside on to the foregate to see what’s what and we’ll help you bring your things back inside at the same time.’
TWENTY
The afternoon was already darkening under a scud of racing clouds from the east. Further snow looked likely, but so far it had held off. When they reached the guest house, after persuading the reluctant porter to open the night door for them, they discovered that the other guests were already forewarned and on the point of leaving.
‘This is unexpected,’ complained lady Amabel as soon as she saw Hildegard. ‘We thought to celebrate here but it looks as if we’ll be on the road during the Feast.’ She pulled a reproachful face at her husband.
‘Not so, sweeting. I have friends at a manor near Guisborough. If we start now we shall arrive not long after nightfall. It’s safer to leave at once and, besides,’ Sir Ranulph gave his son a covert glance, ‘I have finished my business here.’
Darius raised his surly countenance from inspecting the straps on his bags. ‘And what business might that be, my dear lord and father?’
‘Ha! That’s surprised you, hasn’t it! You don’t imagine I’m here for mere pleasure, do you?’ He patted Amabel’s hand to take the sting out of his words and indicated a velvet bag containing something not much bigger than a man’s hand waiting to be taken out with his personal baggage to where the wagon would convey their possessions northwards. ‘I consider I have had a profitable few days here. When you find out why you’ll congratulate me.’
He was looking so extremely smug that Hildegard paused to hear him say, ‘I’ve always told you wealth resides most securely in land. I now have in my possession something a buyer is willing to exchange for a very large piece of land indeed. If you’re still set on running sheep over it, so be it. I don’t object to that. But it’s land, Darius, land, and one day you’ll learn there’s nothing more valuable, not even sheep.’
Darius looked put out. Then the corners of his mouth began to lift. ‘Why, you old schemer! Is it what I think it is?’
His glance fell on the velvet bag.
His father tapped the side of his nose and the two of them turned away with Sir Ranulph putting his arm round his son’s shoulders like man to man.
Before he left he went over to Gregory and Egbert and extended one hand. ‘A good joust, brothers, but Master Buckingham’s need for payment, a bill I was willing to settle in full, swung the abbot in my favour. I hope you don’t think it was underhand?’
‘Well done,’ murmured Gregory. ‘It’s good to know that after the imminent attack by the mariners the abbey will be rebuilt again by so prodigious a master builder.’
Sir Ranulph looked puzzled and when he worked it out he gave a bark of laughter. ‘Quite so, friend. Quite so!’ Still chuckling, he ushered his entourage towards the door with Sister Aveline, giving Hildegard a final smile, tagging along behind.
‘Did he mean what I thought he meant?’ Egbert wrinkled his brow. ‘But, Hildegard, I thought you told us that the Glastonbury merchant had obtained the relic?’
‘That’s what Aveline told me.’
At this moment the two body servants from Glastonbury were heaving a chest down the stairs, one at each end and when, puffing, they gained the ground floor, they dropped it down to have a short rest.
Behind them came the merchant himself in a blue hood, ready for the road. It was generally known that he had dined almost every day in the abbot’s lodging. Now, before going out he offered a few opinions about the coming siege and wished the Cistercians well.
As he went to the doors he added, ‘We’ve had a successful visit. Well worth our journey to this wild region. I’ll have many stories to tell the monks when I return south. My commiserations to you fellows, however, and to you, domina. It is not without a qualm that I take home the very thing you yourselves hoped to obtain. However, we can but abide by the abbot’s decision, can we not?’
With that he swept out followed by his two servants, his metal-bound chest, and he himself carrying a carefully wrapped object – no bigger than a man’s hand.
The others looked at each other in astonishment. ‘So who has the original and who the fake?’ Hildegard’s expression was close to hilarity as she looked from one to the other. ‘I told you horse-hair didn’t cost much!’
‘They may not agree. It may have cost the buyers much indeed. I wonder what they paid!’ The men themselves were close to hilarity too as they guessed what must have happened.
When they told Luke, who had tracked them down after a word with the infirmarer, he was incredulous. ‘But do they not suspect?’
Gregory explained what the abbot had told Hildegard earlier, that the bidders in this sale had been sworn to secrecy.
‘Each one will believe he has the genuine relic. Later in the year when they have a ceremony of dedication on St Hild’s Day the truth may slowly filter out. But who will doubt that he himself does not possess a genuine lock of Abbess Hild’s precious hair and that the others are fake?’
‘Sir Ranulph has already got someone to give him land in exchange,’ Hildegard told Luke. ‘He’ll deny any suggestion of its being a fake should he be questioned.’
‘A case of caveat emptor, indeed,’ concluded Gregory with a wry grimace.
The night passed in a state of uneasiness throughout the abbey. The guest house on the foregate sounded strangely hollow when the guests left and the kitchen staff disappeared with no work to do. The three corrodians had taken shelter in the dortoir with the monks. Hildegard, in the guest chamber inside the infirmary, was glad to be surrounded by some stalwart young men to supplement her own ability to fight should there be violence.
The definite loss of the holy relic, if such a thing had ever existed, still disappointed her. With the help of pilgrims who came to pray before it, the nuns at Swyne would have been able to finance an extension of their own buildings to take in more sick and elderly with no homes of their own. The prioress had mooted the idea of an extension to the choir too, with the idea of taking in more pupils to prepare them for the Song School in Beverley. Now those hopes would come to nothing.
Before they could leave they had a mystery to clear up, but ahead there was the confrontation with the mariners to face. Although it was difficult to imagine that they would actually storm the abbey precincts, and even more difficult to believe they would attack helpless patients in their beds, it was an uncertain atmosphere that pervaded the place. As Vespers and Compline came and went, night extended its dark mantle over the world and the Great Silence fell.
Dunstan went round to make sure the doors were barricaded. ‘Just in case,’ he muttered when he came to offer a few words to Hildegard about Hertilpole’s madness. ‘He’s sleeping now and we must pray that tomorrow his reason will be restored to a semblance of what it was.’
She wondered if the fishermen were waiting in the expectation that he would send someone to parlay with them after discussions in Chapter, and she wondered how long it would be on the morrow before they realized they were the victims of a hoax. The thought of their disappointment and rage was frightening. To the abbey it was a matter of showing who was boss. To the mariners it was a matter of life and death. With nothing else to lose it wouldn’t matter to them what they did.
Now, on the surface, everything continued as usual. The bell tolled at midnight, bringing the silent monks down the night stairs and into the nave to worship at the great altar while Hildegard, somewhat uneasily, stood almost alone at the west end behind the screen.
A few servants showed up and at the last minute she noticed Torold slip inside with a couple of companions. One was the silent boy who had done as he was told on the day of her arrival. The other was Miggy.
They were up to something. When everybody began to leave, Hildegard went as far as the west door then lingered out of sight while the boys remained. Duke had evidently been told to guard the exit and was sitting erect and in silence when Hildegard patted his head in greeting.
As soon as the boys heard the main doors slam they started to behave in an extraordinary manner.
The silent boy was instructed to walk from the screen at one end of the nave towards the west doors where Hildegard was standing out of sight. The other two stationed themselves at a short distance on each side of him and watched carefully as he began to pace forward.
He was almost up to the doors when Hildegard stepped forward. Before she could speak there was a frenzied scream and the boy fell to the floor, his face pressed to the tiles and both arms outstretched as if grappling with an enemy.
Hildegard ran to him. ‘Child! What is it?’
From both sides came gasps of shock and as Miggy ran up he was babbling about St Hild and ghosts and how you had to walk in a straight line down the nave and not deviate and she would appear to you in a white shift, but it was the domina, whose name was almost the same, who appeared but she was real.
He took a breath and clutched at her arm. ‘You are real, aren’t you?’
‘You sot-wits!’ she hissed. ‘Look at this poor lad, frightened out of his senses. What are you doing making such fools of yourselves?’
Then she began to laugh. The atmosphere of impending doom seemed suddenly as ridiculous as these children playing at magic to summon a dead saint.
‘Don’t you know it’s not true?’ she demanded, ruffling their hair and holding the shivering silent lad against her to comfort him. ‘It’s just a tale people tell round the fire in winter. Heaven and Hell may exist for all we know, but it’s as sure as anything that no-one has ever returned from either place to prove it. We only have the word of a few old men who want to keep us in awe of them, and story-tellers who share their outlandish fantasies merely in order to amuse us. Come back to the infirmary kitchen and have a tisane, then it’s off to bed with you all. I’m ashamed sensible boys like you should believe such stories!’
As they calmed down and sheepishly followed her out through the side door with Duke’s claws clicking over the tiles beside them, she asked, ‘What would you have said if St Hild had appeared? Did you have some questions ready?’
Torold replied. ‘We’d have asked her if she knew who killed my father.’
‘That’s the reason we cannot leave yet. Young Torold needs answers and nobody but us seems interested in finding any.’ Hildegard and the other three Cistercians were walking up to the headland away from the abbey.
For a time their images were captured by the luminous dawn between Lauds and Prime, when even in winter the northern sea thickens the reflected light and mirrors it back to the land. Their faces were bathed in silver light like the features of saints drawn on grisaille glass.
They had decided to walk up the rise above the fish pond for no other reason than a desire to escape the gradually increasing hysteria inside the cloisters.
The brotherhood were behaving as if annihilation by the sword was inevitable. Some were desperately ready to be martyrs. A few silent ones were detached from it and moved about with thoughtful faces, but the rest flaunted their righteousness in loud condemnation of the mariners’ defiance. It was as if Hertilpole’s shattered mind had shed its fragments among them like the pieces of a broken mirror.
‘There is yet time for the prior to assert himself,’ Luke said in a tone that suggested he had not much hope of that.
Egbert mocked the idea. ‘Do you seriously see him going out on to the foregate to talk to them? He hasn’t the nerve.’
‘I would talk to them,’ Gregory admitted. ‘But it’s no good promising them what the abbey will not deliver. I don’t understand how the abbot can believe it will end in satisfaction for either party. Violence will achieve nothing. It begets only more violence. The fishermen cannot pay with what they do not have. Is the abbey going to ruin them? Where will that get them? The abbey needs them as much as they need the abbey.’
‘It will go to law,’ Hildegard suggested. ‘They say the old abbot was always in and out of the courts.’
‘Will this one choose that route? He’s a sad example of what lack of leadership can do to a fraternity.’ Egbert gazed moodily out to sea where the horizon was streaked with crimson as the sun began to shrug itself out of the water. Millions of red and gold lights began to blink across the surface. Everyone turned to watch.
Despite the daily yet always awe-inspiring beauty of the dawn, Hildegard’s thoughts were still with Torold. He was right to ask who had killed his father, but she was beset by the creeping suspicion that the murderer might have slipped through their fingers.
The idea was too vague to share with the others yet. It made little sense. What if, she wondered, Aelwyn had known that the relic was a fake? He had obtained the old, discarded bursa that had covered the reliquary and given it to his mistress. It was a pretty thing. He could have sold it on behalf of the abbey to bring in some needed revenue, and the fact that he had not done so made one want to ask how he had obtained it. Sabine had kept her keepsakes in it. Did she, too, know that the relic it had once housed was a fake? Would Aelwyn have told her – or not told her?
She gnawed over other possibilities. They seemed endless. They led nowhere. But what if, by some process she had not yet worked out, somebody thought Aelwyn was about to announce the truth? He appeared to have grown into an honourable man after his rampaging novitiate. His actions showed that. Maybe this subterfuge about to be practised regarding the holy relic now went against the grain? Again she asked herself, what if, getting wind of his intention, someone had decided to shut him up?
Then there were the guests to be accounted for.
It was in Sir Ranulph’s interests to have a genuine relic, and the Glastonbury merchant would be of the same opinion. What if some loyal person among either entourage thought up that diabolical way of keeping the truth secret.
The same theory might be applied to Edred. He was considered by everyone but the bursar to be an honest man. For that very reason he might have decided it was time to reveal the truth.
Remembering the conversation in the hall between Sir Ranulph and Darius as they were leaving, it began to strike Hildegard as too overt, like a scene by a couple of mummers acting out a pretence at secrecy. It might have been intended to demonstrate their belief in the absolute genuineness of the relic – a ploy to cut off any suspicion that might arise about their involvement in keeping the truth out of it.
