Bright Belovèd

by Non Bramley

  ‘Get my scrip!’ I said.

  There was an eyeball by my feet, punctured by teeth. I looked at the iris; it was amber.

  The child was odd. It was dead but mostly uneaten. The fingers were gone but its face was intact. She was about five years old with malnourished features, and smelt like rancid bacon.

  —The older we get the worse we smell, Levi, have you noticed? The child was too young to stink like that. Only at the very beginning and the very end of life can we smell sweet. Now I’m a very old woman I smell of nothing at all. Of itself, corruption is not the most terrible perfume. It’s oddly familiar – a more potent version of our own scent grown heady and persistent with musk.

  ‘Get my scrip, Thomas!’ I bellowed.

  After a while, he came back, shaking like a leaf in a storm.

  ‘Have you not seen death before?’ I said, taking my leather scrip and searching through the contents.

  ‘Were they alive when – when they were being … do they kill them first?’ he asked. His voice was too loud.

  Wolves don’t kill their prey before they eat; they just immobilise it. A quick bite to the spine and the meal stays nice and warm and doesn’t thrash about. Their victims would have seen, heard and perhaps felt everything but the very last tearing mouthful. Long snouts nuzzling out the choicest morsel. I have heard odd tales of speaking wolves, so the tormented souls may have been given a running commentary on the taste of their own organs.

  I took out a sheaf of paper and the stick of charcoal I kept in a roll of cotton. It was my custom to draw the dead. That way, perhaps I could find those who were searching for them and let them know their fate, or a kinder version of it. An odd compulsion of mine.

  I met Thomas outside. He was in the middle of the road, shuffling from one foot to the other. I asked him then if he thought that those people, who had died so gruesomely, would be rejected by God because they had not confessed their sins to a priest before being consumed in bloody lumps. Did he truly believe that God was some pedantic scribe fussing about convention?

  ‘I want to go now,’ was all he said.

  We neared the outskirts of the city and joined a straggle of pilgrims trudging towards the spires.

  ‘I think it’s important for us to think about who we’ve hurt and to ask God’s forgiveness for it,’ Thomas said.

  ‘They would have had time enough for that.’

  Was I touched by his simplicity of faith? Thomas believed that if you could only find the right formula, the right creed, you could impose your will on a chaotic world that frightened him senseless.

  The last thing of note to mention of our journey I have no explanation for. I just felt it was the right thing to do.

  Travelling up towards the great walled abbey enclosure at Banfield, with its solid stone gatehouse, I saw a dammer in the gutter. It was only a head and torso, limbs long gone. They always remind me of moths, dusty things drawn to the flame of life. This one was female. Strands of grey hair still clung to her skull. I dismounted and manoeuvred the dammer inside the leather sack where I kept my dry clothing, avoiding the lazily snapping jaws. Its wrinkled eyes looked almost golden. Thomas turned in his saddle and watched, bemused.

  We said our goodbyes before the gatehouse. Tom was keen to be off to his post at the leper house that was quarantined in its own little stockade half a mile outside the west wall. A great, chaotic procession of pilgrims flowed around us and jostled our horses, knocking my feet out of the stirrups.

  They cringed away from the sack when its pathetic contents growled.

  I felt guilty that I was glad to be rid of the responsibility of Tom, and told him I would visit, see how he was getting on.

  ‘You’re not afraid of the lepers?’ he said.

  ‘No. By the time they’re dropping fingers they’re not contagious. Just count the fingers on any hand you shake.’

  He smiled and at that moment the light caught his hair, flaming it gold and copper. I thought that I must remember and paint that moment of pure vision, if I could ever get hold of a few coloured pigments or inks. Then I turned my horse and joined the great river of human life.

  It’s my custom when visiting a new place to explore it thoroughly before I announce myself. You can see and hear much when you’re just another face, not “The Reeve”, who must be told an edited version of the truth.

  Banfield is a small city and an old city of ancient houses, churches and guild halls, ringed by a thin band of middle-time homes that were now a no-man’s-land. It lay less than twenty miles from a huge place that had once been one of the biggest cities in England. At the fall, a tide of diseased and voracious humanity had surged out in a wave from this city, scouring the land in every direction. When it hit Banfield it destroyed much of it and only a few souls clung on, hiding in the ancient churches.

  Eventually the uninfected left their hiding places and spread out in a second wave. Banfield was a beacon. The abbey church of Saint Agnes and Saint Credan, built to be the grandest of cathedrals, had two spires that were visible for miles and drew souls to them.

  This church, standing now for over a thousand years, had been built in a lawless time. Shortly after its completion a politically beleaguered and shrewd Bishop realised that although the king might object to the building of a walled castle, he might not worry so much about a fortified cathedral.

  First came a ditch that flanked the church on three sides. Then came a wooden palisade and finally there came huge, stone walls, with fortified gatehouses and towers. The cathedral was a fortress for God.

  It sat surrounded by dormitories for the clerics and workshops for the lay brethren and sistren, built up against the encircling walls. Over the years the walls crumbled a little here and there, but at this vital time they could be easily patched.

  It became a sanctuary for the living.

  I spent an hour walking Meg around the outside of these walls that rose to a height of fifteen feet or so above my head. To the west the encircling ditch was flooded. Saint Mathias’s Hospital – the lazar house – stood on the far side of this ditch behind its own high wooden walls and in a cluster of what had been homes, but were now storehouses.

  The abbey’s west gate could be reached by crossing a bridge over the ditch that very few used. Lepers have no visitors.

  I walked past on the slippery grass bank, lost my footing and ended up with one leg knee deep in brackish water and mud. There was no sign of Tom.

  The north side was a sheer wall, rising up strong and clean. Here I found what I was looking for when I came upon the place where the ditch, dry and shallow, was filled with the refuse of this little city within a city. Offal from the butchers’ blocks, the contents of shit pails, vegetable peelings, old bones and all the usual detritus would be poured from the wall’s parapet, leaving a long brown stain. Where it fell it had attracted dammers, who gobbled up the rancid stuff, and the occasional rat if they were lucky. It was not much of a place to call home but they would be left mostly unmolested, and there was food of a sort.

  I left my dammer foundling there. I couldn’t give her the release of death, but I could at least take her to where she would have peace, there to wait out eternity.

  I followed the wall to the east, and the water reappeared, hugely deep and dangerous. Here was a small door set into the abbey wall, and a plank bridge resting on wooden piles. To my left cultivated but weed-choked fields spread out.

  Finishing the circle, I came back to my beginning and the south gate to the abbey. Leading up to the gate house a fine, stone bridge crossed a wide pool that lapped right up to the walls, and fed water to the ditches. The bridge was thronged with people who moved towards me, up the main street and past ancient buildings that were too decayed to occupy at night. Wolves go where the food is. Anything outside the walls would be dead by morning. I joined the crowd and walked Meg under the high roof of the gatehouse. No one stopped me or asked me my business.

  It was utter chaos.

  Insid
e the walls the press of bodies was fantastic. Meg skittered and danced at the closeness of things she couldn’t see, so I got down from the saddle and walked her to what I hoped was the stable block, shouldering a way for us both through a wall of flesh.

  A bedraggled brother took my horse and gave me vague directions to Prior Johanna. I need not have worried that my arrival would cause too much interest; he had too much to do to take note of me. I knew then that I had no hope of finding the lost girls, or their abductor. Who would notice one lost soul in this sea of faces?

  ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘Sometimes more, sometimes less. More when the weather’s good and far more in spring. Winter’s too dark to travel. I like winter.’

  So many people, all with some ailment or disease of the body or soul. They fell to their knees and crawled towards the doors of the great church, towards the bones of Saint Credan. Prayers, entreaties and sobbed confessions all mingled and made my skin turn gooseflesh.

  I should tell you a little about the abbey church I suppose, although I know nothing of architecture. It’s built as a cross and is the tallest thing I have ever seen, with spires that are so high it’s hard to see where they end. In a world where I’m always head and shoulders taller than my fellow man, it was curiously moving to feel so small. They dwarfed me. Inside there are shrines everywhere, and tombs of the honoured dead. Old flags still hang high up in the darkness of the roof. Echoes clang and roar like sound heard underwater.

  Eventually, after several false starts and fruitless searching, sweating in the heaving crowds, I found an inconspicuous door that led me upwards to blessed quiet and calm. I was in a library. I leaned against the wall and breathed in the smell of old paper, it was infinitely better than the smell of sick flesh. Sitting in a spot of sunlight, a young woman in a long green dress looked up from her book.

  ‘Lost, pilgrim?’ she asked, her eyes dropping to the hammer at my waist.

  ‘I’ve travelled two hundred miles and I’ve never felt so lost,’ I told her. ‘I’ll be on my way in a moment. Just let me catch my breath. There’s no air down there.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the great spring surge. In April flowers bloom and our little community grows. Are you here to pray to Saint Credan?’ She stood, placed the book reverently on a table and walked towards me. ‘I’ll show you where you need to go.’

  ‘I want Prior Johanna. I’m the Reeve. She’s expecting me,’ I said.

  ‘In that case, you’re not lost at all. Well done.’

  I had found the Prior.

  Johanna was a strange cleric, I never saw her dressed in dour colours, but in greens, reds and blues that made her dark skin glow. Whip thin, disconcertingly friendly and quick-witted she insisted on pouring me a cup of cider. It was cold and bittersweet. As we talked she would reach out and touch my elbow or my hand for emphasis. You felt she wanted to put her arms around the world. She treated me as a friend from the moment we met and I have never known anyone like her.

  My first impression of her age proved to be wrong. She was nearer to fifty than twenty, but had that quickness of movement I associate with youth.

  The ancient library with its piles of desiccated books was her heaven, and although not her official office it was where she spent most of her time.

  As we talked she asked me questions, most of them personal. Her friendliness was not exactly comfortable. She told me later that it was the only Christian way she could find to control and subsume other wills to her own.

  Finally, after she knew my whole life story and I felt as vulnerable as baby, I asked her why she had called for a Reeve.

  ‘We live in chaos,’ she told me happily. ‘Saint Credan calls to the world and it comes to ask for help and forgiveness.’

  ‘Does he listen? Any miracles?’

  She hesitated. ‘He heals minds. I think he gives comfort, but we have no pile of discarded crutches if that’s what you mean. I think he inspires us to help each other and that’s his gift.’

  ‘Forgive me, but your walls look pretty miraculous if you’ve been on the road.’

  ‘For a time anyway,’ she said. ‘People stay but not for long. We’re bursting at the seams and we struggle to feed so many mouths. We provide one meal a day, most days. Nothing in the winter. You can stay here and starve or head out and take your chances. Eventually most leave. Only the sickest stay with us, and we bury them as decently as we can.’

  She hadn’t answered my question and I told her so. What did she want of me?

  She took both my hands and looked me directly in the eye. ‘The west end of the Abbey Close is all pilgrim houses. Three young women and one child have gone missing and we want to know, frankly, if it was a wolf that got in somehow, a fellow pilgrim or, God forbid, one of us who took them.’

  ‘There are too many people here, too many comings and goings for that to be possible,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Now, yes, but this happened close to winter. We had just a handful of visitors then, and four of them disappeared. In the winter we number no more than twenty.’

  I should have stood. I should have said that this was an impossible task.

  I shouldn’t have told her I would try.

  Chapter Three

  I am a Christian. I believe in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Those first few days at Banfield made my faith seem as insubstantial as thistledown. Pilgrims arrived every day, more and more of them. They crawled on ragged knees to the shrine of Saint Credan and scratched stone dust from it, swallowing the gritty stuff in hope of a cure. Their faith and their need were overpowering. Even then, sins regretted and promises of better behaviour evaporated as soon as they turned their backs to the shrine and walked away. Some wailed, some screamed, and it felt like a mass purging of grief and loss. The air smelt of salt and sweat.

  Every day Brother Andrew, the abbey’s Sacristan, would climb the worn stairs to Saint Credan’s head chapel, take the saint’s polished skull from its reliquary and hold it from the balcony that looked out over the nave. Hundreds of faces turned to follow its black gaze as he swept it from left to right, far over the heads of the faithful. Keeping the saint’s head separate from his body seemed more like a punishment than an act of reverence. In fact it was just a practical way to spread out the insatiable crowds. I mentioned to no one that the skull looked more female than male to my practised eye.

  I found the whole thing distasteful and saw no miraculous healings. But small miracles were happening here. Johanna and her band of brothers and sisters welcomed every soul, no matter how unsavoury, no matter how sick and gave them a roof and a meal, often going hungry themselves.

  Those pilgrims who could work were asked to take a turn in the fields or the kitchens, though few were able or willing to do so. Self-preservation makes us selfish – why waste your strength planting crops you’ll never see ripen when you’ll be fed regardless? It confounded me but I suppose survival robs us of our ability to think ahead. Most looked on the abbey’s clerics as servants and on Saint Credan as a capricious miser who could heal their hurts but chose not to. Perhaps if they’d been miraculously made whole they would have willingly bent their back to the plough in gratitude.

  I slept well that first night. The following morning I left my draughty little room in what was known as the Bishop’s Palace, although there had been no bishop here for decades. It was an impressive enough place, with a wide sweep of steps up to the door and its own set of high stone walls. A little fortress within a fortress. The Prior lived here too somewhere, although I had no idea where.

  This place felt desperate. The members of the abbey community could keep no order when they were so outnumbered. They offered a little of what was demanded – a roof, a small meal and the chance of redemption – and hoped that their usefulness would mask their vulnerability.

  Prior Johanna had arranged to meet me in the chapter house, a circular room with strange acoustics. It was here that the community m
et to discuss the matters of the day, and a whisper could be heard as clearly as a shout. It would be hard to share secrets in this place. The roar of that day’s pilgrims made strange echoes.

  Three young women and one child, all missing. Four disappearances and perhaps four different causes. Untangling one mystery would be challenge enough, never mind multiple crimes, and that was supposing these were crimes, not accidents or happenstance. Perhaps one or more of them had simply taken the opportunity to escape an unhappy family without the need for goodbyes.

  I needed as many details of the missing as Prior Johanna could remember. She greeted me, asked after my comfort and stood frowning over the great Chapter ledger where the disappearances had been noted, turning the pages and tapping the entries with a long, ink-stained finger. I could smell alcohol on her breath but it wasn’t unpleasant. She smelt like blackberries.

  ‘There’s not much here, Reeve. All four girls travelled with family and arrived in autumn last year.’ She squinted at the crabbed text. ‘The first to vanish was Rebecca Moorhead, sixteen years old we think and travelling with parents. She was gone within a few minutes of arrival at the south gate. Her mother lost sight of her, which is strange.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Autumn’s late in the travelling season. No crowds to get lost in.’

  At first it was thought that Rebecca had left the Abbey walls and wandered off into the maze of broken buildings that surrounded it. She was small, fair-haired and prone to shaking fits that would leave her confused and disorientated for hours. The family were visiting the shrine of Saint Credan in the hopes that he could stop these fits that were coming with worrying frequency. Her parents searched until dusk, but no trace was ever found. They lingered hopefully, caught between the agonising choices of staying through the winter and facing starvation, or moving on while the days were still light enough to travel. Finally, in October, grim-faced but accepting, they left.