by Non Bramley
It was Lollis who filled in that blank time for me. She arrived one morning and smiled a little grin of triumph when she felt my forehead.
‘Your fever’s gone, thank God. You’re a tough bugger, I’ll give you that.’
I went to clasp her hand in my own two and yelped at the pain from my palm.
‘Yes, you won’t be using that for a while,’ she said, peeling back a poultice from the wound. ‘I had to cut out a lot of flesh. You were rotting away. You’ll use the hand again but it’ll never be the same. I’ve done the best I can. Johanna tells me you’re not sinister – I mean left-handed.’
‘No,’ I croaked.
‘Then you’ll manage. Wound’s healing nicely. You’ll be weak as water for quite some time yet.’
The days went on. Eventually I could stand and walk to the door and back. I was shocked at how skinny I’d become.
Will visited when he could, and read to me from volumes borrowed from the abbey library whose entire collection had been gifted in the old times by the wife of a parliamentary general. Our favourite was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
One day, Lollis arrived with a small wooden box and a sheaf of dusty paper. In the box were four pots of coloured inks, stoppered with waxed wool. I spent my recovery drawing from memory the characters from Chaucer’s stories, giving his pilgrims and rogues the faces of people I knew.
When I finally stood from my bed and walked on weak legs out into the Close it was as silent as a prayer and carpeted with fallen leaves.
Autumn was nearly over. The pilgrims had gone.
Chapter Seven
I was hailed as a lost friend when I next ate at Vicars Hall. It was gratifying but not perhaps the greeting a serious woman of the law should have expected. I’ve always been lax in reminding folk of my authority.
The company was a little less pleased however when I charged them all to join me on an attempt to search as many of the buildings outside the walls as we could before winter came. I sat beside Will Mercer that night, as we stoically chewed our way through a bean stew and he told me of his plans for the mill. I wasn’t truly listening. I was making plans of my own. Soon darkness, hunger and silence would seal us in. I had perhaps one month. After that the days would be short and sunless and the hundreds, maybe thousands of predators that hunted in this crowded land would be waiting.
I should have headed west weeks ago, gone back to Saint Ivo’s where wolves were rare. I would make my final search, saddle Meg and head home. I could spend the winter writing to the other westerly houses, asking if they had seen or heard anything of the missing, and perhaps pick up the trail again next spring.
I finished my meal, wished Will a good night and left the hall. I was quietly joined on the walk back to my lodgings by David, the young Vicar Choral with a voice as beautiful as his looks were damaged. The left side of his face was marked with a long scar that had taken his eye. It made him look old and young at the same time.
I greeted him and waited for whatever he wanted to say, slowing my pace to match his shorter stride. I talked of inconsequential stuff, not wanting to frighten away whatever confidence he wanted to share, but we were almost at my door when he spoke.
‘I don’t know if we should tell you this – it feels like gossip-mongering.’
‘Explain yourself, lad,’ I said, stopping.
‘I don’t know anything about the lost child. It’s probably nothing, and he’ll have told you anyway. Will loves her, I’m sure of that. He’d never hurt her, would he? I don’t know what to think.’
‘You’re talking about Anne Mercer?’
David swallowed and looked away. ‘Anne and Will, yes. It was after practice one evening, just before the feast of Saint Augustine, and we heard them.’
‘Who’s we? The choir?’
He nodded. ‘Me, Patricia, Robin and Susan. We all heard them. They were arguing out in the Close. It was loud and we’d left the door open. He was saying that they had to leave – that she was his daughter and she had to do as he said, that things were going to change. Anne said he was asking her to choose between him and her God. She said he was killing her.’ David looked shamefaced. ‘He said it was his decision who she fucked. The next day she was gone. I think she wanted to get away from him, Reeve.’
I understood now Will’s grief and shame and his face that grew more haggard by the day. Did he believe that he had driven her away with his greedy love and need for control? It was hard to believe that Will had done away with his girl, but he might easily have forced her to secretly leave him, slipping out unnoticed before dusk.
I cursed myself for my idiocy.
I’d failed to check the most important aspect of Will Mercer’s tale.
The following morning I walked to the mill. The warmth was leaching from the air and I wanted to savour it while I could.
I had been right about the stream undermining the mill. Will was up to his waist in water where the millwheel had been inexpertly wedged to stop its turning. A large crack had appeared in the wall.
‘It’s being eaten away,’ he said, feeling the stonework under the waterline.
‘I’ll help you,’ I said. ‘But first you’ll tell me about the argument you had with Anne the night before she went missing.’
Will looked startled. ‘We never argued,’ he said, dismissing me with a wave of his hand and I lost my temper. I took him by that arm and hauled him up on to the bank - enough of excuses and games.
‘You were heard by witnesses. Tell me.’
He felt the threat in it.
‘It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t important. You wouldn’t understand. It was between me and her.’
I tightened my grip on his arm enough to cause pain. ‘By Christ you will tell me the truth! I’ve been wasting weeks looking for her. Where is your daughter?’
Will struggled. ‘I don’t know! You think she was so perfect? She was a whore, Jude.’
Was this what he was? Had I been so caught up in his grief that I’d failed to see his inadequacy? This ravaged building with its broken wall was made by a man who broke and defiled beautiful things – tried to bend them into something they weren’t.
I picked him up with my right hand and held him off the ground. ‘Of her own free will? Or were you whoring out your daughter? She ran off, didn’t she? God help you if you’ve had me chasing her when I could have been looking for the child.’
He batted at my hand. ‘It’s none of your business!’
‘You will tell me, Will,’ I said, and dropped him into the stream.
He came to the surface, coughing up muddy water, and backed away until he was pressed against the broken wall, so I jumped into the stream. His look of terror will haunt me till the day I die.
‘You will tell me, Will.’
He covered his face with his wet hands. ‘I’m so ashamed. You don’t know. I just wanted her to stop.’
We stood there in the stream, and Will, finally, told me.
‘She watched me, over the years, doing the things I had to do to keep us alive. If someone had food and I could take it, I would. I didn’t care who I hurt as long as she was fed.’
‘We’ve all had to do things we don’t like to live, Will – you and everyone else in the world.’
He took his face from his hands. ‘You didn’t have your child watching you while you killed though, did you?’
‘You killed someone?’
He nodded. ‘I think so. I’m not sure. He was sick, weak, and I hurt him for his coat. She was so cold and I needed that coat. She watched me do it. When I put it round her she cried like it burnt.’
Anne Mercer was young and pure-hearted, but she wasn’t naive. To save her father’s soul she had whored herself out to anyone on the road who could give them a little of what they needed to survive. Even then she’d try to find something to love in each stranger’s soul, making the act - in her own mind - a sacrament not a sordid deal. She would never watch him kill for her sake again. Will had witnessed it all, as she
had witnessed him. He’d suffered the contempt-filled grins of her customers as they tied up their breeches and paid in scraps.
Will had fought with her, even hit her, but she told him she would leave if he ever hurt another soul. The terrible deal was made.
‘For Christ’s sake, Will, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What? That I’m such a piss-poor excuse for a man that I agreed to it? That I couldn’t make her stop? That if I tried, she’d leave me? At least if I was with her I could try to keep her safe, Jude. She’s all I have.’
He was exhausted. I hauled him out of the stream and we sat on the bank.
‘So that was how you’d been living before you came to Banfield. Was she … seeing men here?’
‘No, praise God. We were fed here – not much, I’ll admit, but she could stop defiling herself with any filthy bastard who wanted to paw at her. She worked in the infirmary and met a young man, a brother of the house. I liked the lad. He wanted to marry her, I think, but he died. Winter was coming and we’d have to move on. I couldn’t bear it … the thought of her being touched. She couldn’t bear the thought of me doing what had to be done. We couldn’t stay and watch the other starve. We were trapped.’ He sighed and looked up at the autumn sky. ‘That’s why she left me, Jude. I could survive on my own and so could she.’
‘Will, did she take her belongings?’
‘She did.’
‘Then why lie to me? Why say she was taken when she obviously planned to go?’
‘I couldn’t find her. I thought you could. I can’t let her go.’
I wedged the heaviest beam I could find against the stricken wall and left Will in the care of Anice, who looked at me as if I were a monster.
On my walk back to the abbey, I contemplated the terrible obligations of love, and how I was lucky to have none of them.
—These are the obligations I’ve avoided all my life, Levi. They’re small and relentless and grindingly dull. They whittle you away to a wizened version of yourself. Your beauty is scrubbed away because tools don’t need to be beautiful.
Dragonflies, their wings made of blue light skimmed across the darkening sky.
The list of missing had now shrunk to three souls. Anne had walked away of her own free will, and although I wished her strange heart well she was no longer my concern.
Chapter Eight
The Close was blessedly quiet on the morning set aside to begin the search outside the walls. I had forgotten what silence feels like after the din of summer, how your senses are as tender as new spring shoots. The sun shone in a clear sky but it would be cold in the shadows.
Joining me at the south gate were Will, whose wrists were a mass of bruises; Anice; Johanna; Brother Andrew; Lollis; Patricia, and her three fellow singers, who followed her like a little shoal of fish.
No one asked Will how he’d come by his bruises; news, it seemed, travelled fast. Our numbers swelled to twenty when we were joined by Peter. He brought with him a handful of lay Brothers and Sisters who laboured where they were needed. In the clear light all looked haggard. The only souls absent were Banfield’s sole scribe, who was too elderly to walk far, and the infirmary and lazar house occupants who were too sick. The leper-house Brothers had been omitted from the call through an unspoken fear of contagion. Thomas was as isolated in his little leper hospital as he would be on the moon. I hoped he fared well.
I split our number into four groups and sent them east, north and west to search those buildings so dilapidated they were little more than crumbled walls. The houses to the south along the pilgrim route were better preserved and therefore more dangerous, so I made this my own hunting ground. At least two searchers from each group were armed in some way.
Lollis, Anice, Peter of the Piss Pot and David – Patricia’s little fish – were my companions, all ready for a long day and a grim task. I gave Lollis my knife as I judged that she would have the greatest knowledge of where to strike to cause most harm.
We started with the ruin closest to the cathedral gate. All of these buildings had been searched before my arrival, but mine is an oddly instinctual profession. I felt in my bones that we were close to at least part of an answer, and here we were no more than fifty paces from the south gate. It had some roof left and parts of an upper floor that I gingerly tested. It was rotten and impossible to cross. No one had gone that way.
We searched the rooms on the ground floor, turning over sheets of rotten plaster and poking into the dark corners.
Eventually I joined Lollis and David in the small rear garden. It was grown past our heads but we pushed though as thorns and bare branches scratched at us. Nothing.
Then, as I walked back to the broken house the ground under my feet rang hollow. I stopped and stamped the dirt. Yes, there was a hidden space under my feet; the ground just here had too much spring.
Picking up a scrap of slate, I began to scrape away at the mud and moss and found an edge. I followed it, working the slate like a blade into the dirt. When I sat back I had outlined a square.
Shouting now, I can’t remember what, I scraped at the sticky mud, forcing splinters under my nails and causing my injured palm to sing with pain. The ground had an odd smell to it, like curdled milk.
Lollis and I clawed and scraped away at what turned out to be barely two inches of sodden earth, revealing a hatch with a ring handle that I gripped with my good hand and pulled. It opened easily and death came up to kiss me in a puff of rank air.
‘Mother of God, save us,’ Peter said, and crossed himself.
I called Anice. ‘Fetch Johanna. Tell her I need her knowledge of this street. Nothing else.’
Opening my scrip I found and lit a stub of candle. ‘I need to go down alone,’ I said. Even the tiniest lingering scent can tell you part of a story. I always carry beeswax candles, not tallow that would reek of dead fat when lit. Peter with his scent of elderly urine would not be welcome.
‘I need to go down alone.’
It was a cellar, accessible by a small flight of steps and built I supposed, to provide the occupants of this house with a cool place to store their supplies. Digging under the main house would be impossible; the place stood too close to the great flooded ditch. Anyone excavating there would soon find themselves waterlogged. This garden was a little higher, less prone to damp.
Light flooded down from the open hatch, and I was surprised by the size of it, at least twelve feet square. In the farthest corner that was only visible as I approached with my candle was a body.
I had found Magdela.
She lay on her back on a sheet of some kind of textile, now brown with the products of her corruption. Her lips and eyes had rotted, exposing crooked teeth, but her hair, a glorious red cloud was spread out around the ruined face.
—If you ever wish to touch the corpse of a loved one, Levi, touch their hair. It’s the only part left alive after death.
She was dressed in a white smock that had been raised to show her body – now caved in and glistening with slime. She was exposed from above her flat breasts to her bare feet, their tendons yellow now the covering of flesh had melted away. Her knees had been parted. Dead wild flowers were scattered around her and I collected one of each variety and placed them in a square of clean cotton. A bundle of thyme tied with thread lay by her feet, the same used to sprinkle holy water as a benediction. I could not see how she’d died, her flesh had liquefied and mingled and no edged wound was visible.
Taking my charcoal and paper I sketched her, making a study of everything and noting the position of each scattered petal, including the ones I’d removed. I was marking the drawing with coloured inks when Johanna arrived.
I’d been concerned before, worried that these young lives had been put in jeopardy. Now I was angry. This girl had been dressed up like a bride and then exposed in the most lascivious way – never mind if this was part of a game suggested by the fetish of the customer. To kill her was the most evil of crimes, but to then mock her body - to leave h
er like a slab of spoiled meat to rot in a hole suggested a mind so full of hate I could smell the stink of it. It was far worse than the fetid remains of the child with red hair. To the man who had killed her – and I had no doubt now that it was a man – her life was worth nothing. Only her death gave him pleasure.
I would send him to hell, even if I had to drag him there myself and guard the gate for eternity.
He would pay.
‘For all that’s holy, Jude,’ Johanna said softly as she came up behind me and rested her forehead on my back. ‘Cover her up. Don’t let them see her like that.’
‘We touch nothing,’ I said.
Then we heard the shout. Will had arrived.
When I emerged and dropped the door back into place Will grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me like a doll - I was amazed at his strength.
‘Is it Anne?’ he said. ‘Oh God, please, is it her?’
‘It’s Magdela. She’s dead.’
I have never seen a man so relieved or so tortured. If one of the missing had met this end then what did that mean for his girl?
I left Anice guarding the body, telling her to let no one down.
We worked our way through each battered building, Peter, Lollis, Johanna and I. I kept Will away, frightened we would find another corpse with black hair and blue eyes. He stood in the ruined street with Patricia, a little way apart from the rest of our group. They watched the search, whispering to each other, horrified but somehow elated. It’s how death takes people.
In the third house we searched I found a cellar hatch near the broken stairway. Its door was made of thick stone which was why it hadn’t rung hollow under the feet of other searchers not as heavy as myself.
This small room was barely big enough for me to stand. Almost under my feet, the corpse of a thin girl with fair hair was laid out all in white.
Rebecca.
There were flowers in her hair. She had been anointed with a thyme brush and her throat had been cut - the stone walls of her tomb keeping her body cool and relatively fresh during its long internment. Unlike Magdela, Rebecca was covered. Aside from the gash in her neck she looked like a sleeping bride.