by S. D. Sykes
Brother Merek had been fortunate to have been allocated his own bedchamber, since the lay brothers were not usually granted such a privilege. But there had been a good reason for this favour. Merek’s loud and resonant snoring had been highly disturbing to his fellow brothers – so this room, with its thick walls and out-of-the-way location beyond the Abbot’s kitchen, guaranteed that the other monks had been able to sleep. This cell had not yet been re-occupied since his disappearance, as the Abbey was far from full. The Abbot had been correct when he warned that our numbers were dwindling. Nevertheless, the room had been cleaned in anticipation of the next occupant, whomever that might be.
The cell itself was dark, with a north-facing window and walls that were lime-washed and free of any decoration. There was still a straw mattress on a simple bedstead, with a pillow and a roughly woven blanket that was tucked over the mattress, ready for use. I lifted this blanket to find a yellowing linen sheet beneath that gave off a fusty odour, as the bed had not been properly aired for many days.
Looking about the room, I saw that somebody had roughly piled Merek’s belongings in the corner, waiting for these items to be distributed or thrown away. There was a pair of knitted socks, some rough leather gloves, a collection of snail shells and a knife with a horn handle. These items all rested upon a plain psalter that was bound in leather.
A Benedictine is supposed to eschew all worldly goods, but this rule had not stopped most of us from accumulating possessions – small trinkets and souvenirs from our old lives. I still owned a few clay marbles and a small sling that I’d been given by Gilbert before leaving Somershill at the age of seven. I hid these keepsakes in a bag beneath my bed and pulled them out every so often, when I needed a reminder of the outside world. Such possessions were tolerated, as long as they were kept discreetly and did not openly offend our vows of poverty.
I took each of Merek’s belongings from the pile in turn, surprised to find that the snail shells had been painted with linseed oil to reveal their subtle beauty. I held one of these shells up to the light for a moment to admire the colours before I returned to my search. The gloves, socks and knife were a little more revealing to my investigation. Each item was useful and of good quality, so I wondered why Merek had left them behind? It was a niggling difficulty with my theory that he was now eking out a living in the woods. If Merek had been planning such a primitive life, then why had he not taken these items with him? I let my mind ponder on this question for a while, without coming to any particular conclusion.
I then opened Merek’s psalter. It was clearly a work in his own hand – perhaps an exercise he had completed when working in the scriptorium? The lettering was almost childlike, and the text was illuminated with the roughest of marginalia – curling vines and creatures that might, or might not, have been rabbits. It was difficult to tell. This was no great work of art, more of a practical exercise in the use of a pen. And yet this psalter looked as if it had been treasured.
I quickly flicked through – passing the psalms, calendar and the litany of the saints, until I came to some blank pages at the back of this small book. Sometimes such pages are used to write a personal note or thought, so I hoped that Merek might have obliged me with an anecdote or message – some evidence that would inextricably link him to Agnes and the missing girls. It was an optimistic idea at best, but I still found myself disappointed to discover that the page was completely bare, without even so much as the indentation of a scribble that had been subsequently washed away.
I might have replaced the psalter onto the pile, had not something caught my eye when leafing back through the book to see if there were a hidden page, or a loose sheet of parchment waiting to fall out. Yet again, I was in search of that elusive piece of evidence. And I did find something. Though not where I had expected.
The book fell open at the calendar, suggesting that this part of the psalter had been more regularly opened than other pages. This intrigued me enough to run my finger down the list of saints’ days, finding ten strange words squashed together in pairs at the end of five separate lines. These words were written in a character set that I did not recognise. It was certainly not Greek or Syriac. And the ink was different to the rest of the psalter. Unlike the oak-gall ink used by the brothers in the scriptorium, with its rich, dark-brown pigment, these words appeared to have been written in a crude medium. Probably from a mixture of charcoal and water, given the faint and transient nature of the lettering.
My suspicions were immediately raised. Not only were these words easy to wipe from the parchment, should the need arise – they had also been deliberately hidden in a part of this book that was not designed for personal notes. I soon understood what I was looking at. It was a code. I guessed at a simple substitution cipher – the type of code that I had sometimes used with a fellow oblate when younger, to pass a note expressing our opinions about the size of the Abbot’s nose, the novice master’s bad breath or even a cruel observation about another boy in our class.
Were these coded words in Brother Merek’s psalter something similar? A joke perhaps? Something that had amused him in a solitary hour? Perhaps they meant nothing at all… and yet I didn’t think so. It was the way that they were squeezed in amongst the saints’ days, when they could easily have been written at the back of the psalter. There was something secretive about them, subversive even.
I dropped the psalter into my bag and turned to leave the cell when I found myself face to face with Brother James. The old monk had crept silently to the threshold where he now occupied the doorway, meaning that I could not pass.
‘Brother James,’ I said in surprise. ‘I didn’t see you there.’
‘Ah, so it is you,’ he replied. ‘Young Oswald. I thought so. I recognised the sound of your feet.’ I had made an effort to come here as quietly as possible, but I had forgotten that Kintham was patrolled by the likes of Brother James – prowling vigilantes, always on the lookout for sin. This old man might have been nearly blind, but he had the ears of an owl. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me.
I hesitated, realising that I should have prepared an excuse. ‘I… I was looking for something,’ I stammered.
‘In Brother Merek’s cell?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it, then?’ He stared at me with a pair of milky eyes, and I wondered if he could see me after all?
‘I lent Brother Merek a comb before he disappeared,’ I said quickly, my mind now working a little faster. ‘And I wondered if it was still here?’
‘A comb?’ he said. The idea seemed to offend him.
‘Yes. It was a gift from my mother. It’s carved from ivory and I’ve always treasured it. I thought that I’d lost it, but then I remembered that Merek had asked to borrow it.’ I pointed to the pile of Merek’s possessions in the corner, though James would not have been able to see it. ‘I thought I might find the comb here, in his cell.’
‘Did you find it?’ he asked.
‘No. Unfortunately not,’ I said. ‘So I shall just have to keep looking.’
I then stepped forward, in the hope that James might move himself out of my way. Instead, he kept his feet firmly planted on the threshold and I was unable to pass.
‘You should not become attached to worldly goods, young Oswald,’ he said, his tone accusatory.
‘Yes, you’re right, Brother James,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that it has a personal value to me.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘It sounds to me as if you were rather too proud of this comb. Too delighted in its hollow beauty.’ He sucked his lips over his gums, making an unpleasant, smacking sound. ‘Carved from ivory indeed? What foolery. And equally, your mother should not have given you such a covetable object. Was she hoping to provoke petty jealousies amongst the brothers?’ He wagged a bony finger in my face. ‘We must think of such dangers when we live in a community. We are each responsible for one another’s souls.’
‘Thank you, Brother James,’ I replied. ‘I hadn’t thought
of that.’
Again I hoped he might move, but again he remained rooted to the spot, tutting to himself. ‘Mind you. I’m not surprised that Brother Merek has stolen such an object from you,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t stolen,’ I replied.
‘Where is it, then?’ he snapped. ‘Merek asked to borrow this comb and then left the monastery. It sounds very much like stealing to me. The man was vain and untrustworthy.’
‘I always thought that he was the most devout of lay brothers,’ I said, repeating Peter’s description of Merek to judge Brother James’s reaction. ‘A man of God.’
Brother James sucked his lips against his teeth again. ‘Then you have a lot to learn about life,’ he said. ‘Brother Merek was never devout. And I should know. I taught him myself in the scriptorium for long enough. But he could not stretch the thickest sheet of vellum without causing a tear.’ He paused. ‘And do you know why? He spent too long staring out of the windows. That was his problem.’
‘Staring at what?’ I asked.
‘At the servants, of course,’ replied James. ‘The women.’ He puffed the air from his cheeks. ‘The Abbot makes sure to employ the plainest, most demure of women to come to Kintham, as he doesn’t want to provoke the brothers into lustful thoughts.’ He wagged the finger again. ‘But, even so, I knew that Merek was spying upon these servants, despite their plainness. Looking at the way they walked to and from the kitchens. Staring at their breasts or their behinds. He was flagrant in his lechery. Absolutely flagrant.’
‘Are you sure about this, Brother James?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’ he said, offended at this question.
I mustered my courage. ‘I just wondered if you might be mistaken about Merek’s lechery?’
‘Why would I be mistaken?’ he said.
‘Because your eyesight is poor,’ I answered timorously. ‘I wondered how you might have seen Merek staring out of a window?’
He was displeased with this observation – flaring his nostrils to display his affront. ‘You really are a stupid boy, aren’t you?’ he said, poking a finger into my chest. ‘When a man’s eyesight is weakened, his other senses grow in strength. For example,’ he said. ‘I may not be able to see your face properly, Brother Oswald. But I know you’re feeling nervous because you have just lied to me.’
‘I haven’t lied to you,’ I said, far too defensively.
He took a moment to consider this. ‘So you say. But your stance is timid, and you’ve been sweating. I can smell the odour on your skin.’ At this point I was disturbed to find that he leant forward to sniff me. ‘They say that a horse can smell fear,’ he continued. ‘Well, so can I.’ He then cupped a hand to his ear. ‘And you should also know that my hearing is extraordinary. With such skills of perception, I am not duly troubled by my poor eyesight. In many situations, I am able to perceive more than a man with perfect vision. And do you know why? Because that man makes the mistake of relying solely upon his eyes, when his ears, nose and sense of space might tell him more.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. ‘I shouldn’t have doubted your story about Brother Merek.’
He huffed disdainfully. ‘You may take this from me, young Oswald. Brother Merek’s humours were too dry and hot to be a monk. Too passionate. He could not keep to his vows, and that’s the truth of it.’ He waved a twisted hand. ‘I do not believe that Merek was accosted by robbers, which is the story I hear over and over again, especially from your tutor Brother Peter. Merek has found himself a woman in one of the villages and has eloped with the foolish wench. No doubt he is in London now, or some other town where he believes he might mingle into a crowd to disguise his identity.’ He leant towards me, fixing me with those unnerving, opaque orbs. ‘We will not see him here again, Brother Oswald,’ he said ominously. ‘You can be sure of that.’
Chapter Ten
Once Brother James had finally stood aside to let me pass, I sped back to my own cell and closed the door – before quickly pulling Merek’s psalter from my scrip to look again at the code he had hidden in the calendar. Could these curious, secretive symbols be relevant to my investigation, or were they just a few meaningless scribbles? Whichever the case, I needed to decipher the code as soon as possible – so I copied the symbols into my own day book, before returning the psalter to Merek’s cell. I didn’t want Peter to find it in my possession.
After this I started to play around with the code, trying to apply the basic principles of cipher substitution that I’d learnt from studying Bede’s Reckoning of Time. I assigned different letters of the alphabet to each symbol to see if I could find some meaning across the five groupings. The puzzle was so absorbing, that I didn’t notice when Brother Peter entered our cell, only sensing his presence at the last moment, when a shadow fell across the table. I instinctively turned the page of my day book before he could see what I was doing, finding myself looking at a poem that I’d been writing for most of the previous year.
Peter and I had not spoken very often since our William of Ockham conversation, as I had been minded to ignore him. I was still annoyed with Peter for refusing to help me with my investigation, and he knew it.
‘What are you doing with yourself in here?’ he asked brightly, hoping to engage me in a conversation.
‘Nothing much,’ I replied, not looking up from the poem.
‘I thought you were working in the gardens today,’ he said. ‘The thyme needs clipping.’
I deliberately mumbled an answer to this, as I knew it would irritate him. I could hear him clear his throat, as if he were about to say something – before he changed his mind and took a seat on his bed. He then delved noisily into his scrip to retrieve his leather flask. Like every dedicated drinker, Peter always carried a supply of liquor with him, wherever he went.
‘Brother Eric is jaundiced again,’ he told me, after taking a gulp of the brandy. ‘He’s so yellow that it looks as if we’ve washed him in a tub of dyer’s broom.’
‘Is that so?’ I answered, still not looking up from the page of poetry.
‘I’ve treated him with a decoction of soapwort,’ Peter continued. ‘But he looks feebler than ever. I wonder if he will last out the week.’
‘Poor man,’ I said glibly, before scribbling a line of verse that neither scanned nor rhymed. They were just the first words that floated into my mind, and were even worse than my usual attempts at poetry. I continued to stare at the page, aware that Peter’s eyes were boring a hole into the back of my head, but I didn’t submit to this pressure. After a while, he accepted defeat. He stood up, replaced the flask into his scrip and flounced out of the room with a puff of frustration.
* * *
Over the next few days, I used every free moment to work again on the cipher, though I began to experience an increasing sense of frustration. Merek had never struck me as being particularly intelligent, so I felt irritated at not being able to solve his code with any more ease. I tried any number of letter to symbol substitutions, but was still unable to extract any sense from the words. To make matters worse, Brother Peter nearly caught me out on three occasions, bursting into the room unexpectedly, or trying to lure me into giving something away in a conversation.
His suspicions were definitely raised, but I was always able to feign an enthusiasm for writing poetry whenever he caught me working. Seeing as he had always encouraged me to write verse to express my feelings, he could hardly now complain at my new dedication to this pursuit. To his mind I spent far too long reading the works of Pope Pius and Aquinas, or studying the trajectory of Venus. An appreciation of the liberal arts was to be encouraged, so that my education would be more rounded.
* * *
By the third day, I had decided to abandon the code in a fit of dejection. There was no reason to think that these random symbols had anything to do with the missing girls. Perhaps Peter had been right all along? I had conflated similar incidents in a naive attempt to solve this mystery. There was nothing to prove that Merek was
guilty of anything, other than disappearing without trace from the monastery.
It was just as I was about to wash away the workings in my day book, that one final idea occurred to me. After three days of staring at Merek’s code and attempting to solve his method of substitution, I wondered if I were approaching the problem from the wrong angle? Perhaps I’d even over-complicated matters? Rather than starting with Merek’s code and trying to randomly substitute each symbol for a letter of the alphabet, and subsequently working through the endless possibilities that this created, I took some words of my own – words that were relevant to my investigation – to see if they could be imposed upon the code. I had expected this to be another long and laborious process, but to my great surprise I found that my idea worked almost immediately.
However, in the thrill of this success, I had failed to notice that Brother Peter had crept into the room on one of his regular snooping missions. Within moments, he had pounced on me and grasped my day book from the table.
‘This isn’t poetry,’ he said, looking through my workings. ‘You’ve been lying to me again, Oswald.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘You’ve been lying to me, Brother Peter.’
I regretted this accusation almost immediately – especially since Peter was drunk.
‘Me lying?’ he seethed. ‘About what?’
‘About Brother Merek,’ I replied. ‘He was no man of God. No devout monk. And now I can prove it.’
‘Oh yes?’ he asked. ‘And how do you intend to do that?’
I grabbed my day book back from Peter and pointed to the top of the page, where Merek’s five pairs of words were written in their strange cipher. ‘See this,’ I said. ‘It’s a code that I copied from Merek’s psalter.’
Peter looked at me with a frown. ‘What about it?’
‘I’ve solved it.’
‘And?’
‘And these words are the names of the women missing from Stonebrook,’ I said. ‘Mary Ancoats. Mary Chandler. Winifred de Terre. Mary Brewer. Jocelin Baker.’ I waved the page in Peter’s face. ‘Now do you believe me?’