Sacrilege: A Novel

by S. J. Parris

  Someone nearby struck up a low continuous moaning that seemed to ebb and flow, echoing mournfully from the walls. I turned my thoughts inward and imagined I was making notes on a clean sheet of paper. There were four deaths that may be connected—five, if you counted Sarah Garth nine years earlier. The beggar child found dismembered on the midden last autumn—there was no proof that it was the same boy Meg had seen Edward Kingsley feeding in the kitchen of St. Gregory’s, except for the bloodied sacks I had found in the underground tomb, but it was a strong possibility. Next there was the Huguenot boy Denis, who was certainly linked to Edward Kingsley and had most likely died in that dreadful burial chamber beneath the mausoleum. I did not yet know who had killed the boy or why, but the crude attempt at embalming his body—to disguise the smell of decay and prevent discovery?—must surely have something to do with Ezekiel Sykes’s purchase of mercury and antimony salts. Which leads to the third death: William Fitch. Someone had ransacked the apothecary’s shelves in a frantic haste to destroy incriminating papers—among them evidence of that purchase of Sykes’s. And afterwards, John Langworth had been back to Fitch’s shop to retrieve two stones of black laudanum. Why?

  And then there was Sir Edward himself, the focus of my absurd journey. Why had he died? “Didn’t have the wit to look behind him on a dark night,” Langworth had said to Samuel, but his tone had been one of irritation, not triumph, as if his friend’s murder were more of an inconvenience than anything else. What was Sir Edward’s business with the boys? He was too eminent and too recognisable in Canterbury to have gone out scouring the streets for homeless children to lure back to the priory; he must have had someone to do that for him. Fitch? The apothecary would have had the means to drug the boys—perhaps with laudanum—to keep them quiet. I rubbed a hand across my face. None of it made any sense. Those poor boys must have been imprisoned to feed someone’s appetites. Both Langworth and Sir Edward himself were known to have relationships with women; that did not necessarily exclude baser tastes, but I remained unconvinced. Was Sir Edward procuring the boys for someone else, as a favour or a debt? Sykes, perhaps, or someone more powerful? As magistrate, it was a grave risk to take; if it was not for his own benefit, it must have been for substantial reward. But I still had no answer to the question of why he had to die.

  Nor could I ignore the practical details of his murder. Whoever struck him down that night had been inside the cathedral precincts, taken the crucifix from the crypt, and waited for him, knowing he would come through the cloisters in the direction of Langworth’s house. Only the dean had a key to the crypt. And anyone trying to leave the precincts would have been seen by Tom Garth. I sighed. Unless, of course, it was Tom Garth. From what Meg had told me, he had good reason to want revenge on Sir Edward. But why now, after nine years?

  I glanced up and saw that the old man with the beard was crawling towards me through the filth. Repulsed, I shrank back into the wall, but there was nowhere to go. His bony hand clawed at the sleeve of my shirt; a filthy smell came off him and the hand gripping my arm ended in long brown nails that curved over, reminding me of the dead boy’s hand in the prior’s tomb. White spume gathered at the corners of his mouth as it worked frantically with no sound. But though I flinched and pulled back, I noticed that one of his eyes was milky with the thick film of a cataract, and both were filled with tears. He was trying to say something. Holding my breath, I leaned closer.

  “What is it, old man?”

  He mumbled the same phrase again; it seemed to end in “me,” but he spoke so quietly I could not recognise the words.

  “Tell me again,” I said, gently. His eyes opened wider and he repeated his phrase a little louder, shaking my arm as if his message was of great urgency. Wincing against his foul breath in my face, I watched the movement of his shrivelled lips and realised that he was not speaking English at all.

  “Sinite pueros venire ad me,” he whispered again.

  I stared at him.

  “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” I repeated. “Which children?”

  “Sinite pueros venire ad me, et nolite eos vetare talium est enim regnum Dei,” he muttered, completing the verse from the Gospel of Luke. His face clouded with despair.

  “ ‘And do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.’ Do you know more Latin?” I asked, intrigued. “Are you an educated man?”

  His good eye roamed my face and his mouth twisted into something like a smile.

  “Monachus,” he said.

  “You were a monk?” I asked, in Latin. He nodded sadly. I laid a hand over his and tried to keep my voice low as I pointed to my chest.

  “And I.”

  At first I thought he had not understood, but after a moment’s consideration he shook his head.

  “Impossible. You are too young. They tore down the sanctuaries and put us on the road before you were even born, son.”

  “Not here. In Italy. Were you a monk here in Canterbury?”

  He nodded. “At Christ Church Priory.” Then he pushed back the matted strands of hair that grew around the fringes of his head to show me his burned ear. I studied his weathered face; he must have been near to eighty.

  “I thought all the brothers were dead.”

  “I am dead.” He gave a far-off smile and pointed at himself. “Look here—is this not the face of a corpse? I have been dead these fifty years.”

  “What did you mean about the children?” I asked, still in Latin.

  The old man’s eyes opened wider, his face tight with fear.

  “ ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea,’ ” he quoted again, this time from the Gospel of Matthew. “This is the word of the Lord.” He shook my arm, as though willing me to understand. “Better a millstone around his neck,” he repeated, his unfocused gaze sliding off me and around the walls.

  “Whose neck?” I persisted.

  “The one who hurts the children,” he hissed, snapping his attention back to me so suddenly that I flinched again, and it was as if a wick caught light in my mind. Meg said an old monk had been arrested for the murder of the dismembered child on the rubbish heap. Was that what he was trying to tell me about, in his confused way?

  “Do you know him? The one who hurt the children?” I was gripping his hand harder now.

  “It was not me!” he cried out, in English, as if someone had struck him. “I didn’t touch him!”

  “ ’Course you didn’t, mate,” said a rough voice from the shadows across the room. “None of us did.” One or two of the others laughed weakly, until they lapsed back into their defeated silence.

  “I know you didn’t hurt him,” I said softly to the old monk. “But who did?”

  He fell silent and shook his head, and I thought I had lost him. I sat back, frustrated. Perhaps it was only the ramblings of a madman, after all. But he did not sound as if he had lost his wits—at least, no more than anyone would in a place like this.

  “I only prayed for him,” he whispered, reverting to Latin, just when I thought he would not speak again. “That poor child. He left him there, like offal. I sat by him all night and prayed for his little soul, that was all. Our Lord welcomed the children.” He looked up as if imploring me to understand. Tears coursed down his cheeks. I stroked the back of his hand and nodded. I sensed that I was close to something vital here, and I did not want to ruin it by pushing the old man too hard; these memories were touching some deep grief in him.

  “Where did you find him? Was it on the midden?” I prompted, cautiously.

  “You saw it too?” His eyes widened, and he shook his head. He leaned closer, fixing me with his milky eye. “Cut in pieces. Such wickedness. He was a good child. Always a smile, for all he had nothing of his own. All I did was keep vigil and pray to Saint Thomas for his innocent soul. I told them that. I couldn’t harm a living creature.
Do you know the worst of it?” He rubbed the tears away with the back of his hand, leaving grimy streaks down his face. “They claimed I butchered him for food, driven mad by hunger. For food! For pity’s sake—a child?” He ran a hand across his face. “God knows I have suffered hunger in my wanderings, well He knows how many times it has nearly taken me from this world. But I had rather die a bag of bones than let such a black thought enter my mind. Any Christian man would.” He scrabbled at my wrist again. “You believe me, son, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” I could guess what had happened; the old monk had been found by the boy’s body and blamed for his murder. “You said ‘he left him.’ Who? Did you see him—the man who put the boy there?”

  “The tall one.” His eyes drifted away again.

  “Yes, that’s him.” I tried not to sound too eager. “You remember him? What did he look like?”

  The old monk frowned, seemingly lost in the dusty corridors of memory. I wondered if anything he dredged up would contain a grain of truth or if he was mixing up recollections of different times and places from a long life, as old men do.

  “Tall, he was. Thin.”

  “Old or young?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone looks young to me.” He broke into a cackle at this and I waited patiently while he recovered from the coughing fit it brought on. Finally he spat a gobbet of phlegm into the straw and looked back to me, his face serious. “He was bald, like me, but not old like me. You understand? But I didn’t see him close. He brought bread one evening and gave it out to the children that beg outside the walls. He spoke to them. After he’d gone, the boy—that poor boy—shared his bread with me, because I’d not eaten for days. I never saw him again until he dropped out of a sack in pieces.” He shuddered violently and clawed at my arm again.

  “Was it night? Could you be sure it was the same man?”

  He must have caught the urgency in my voice, because his eyes grew frightened and he seemed to shrink inside the rags that hung off his skeletal frame. He turned his face away.

  “Sure … I am sure of nothing anymore, son, except that soon I will face judgement. And that I will not live to see Saint Thomas return to Canterbury.”

  I stiffened.

  “He will return, then? You are sure of that?”

  The old monk turned his head slowly back to me, his face lit by a sly smile, like a child hugging a great secret to himself.

  “He never left us.”

  “It is true, then?” I whispered, though I doubted any of the prisoners around us understood Latin. “Where is he?”

  A glimmer of life sparkled in the rheumy eyes. He gave a low, cracked laugh.

  “Only the guardians can tell you that. And they are sworn to silence. Men have died to protect the secret of his bones.”

  “Which men? When?”

  He leaned in, his face earnest.

  “You want to know the story?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “It was near fifty years ago, you understand? In some houses, the monks who would not take the new religion were executed as traitors, their quarters nailed to the city gates. But Canterbury surrendered willingly. No monk here died on King Henry’s orders.” He left a significant pause. The emphasis had been on King Henry.

  “But on someone else’s orders, then?”

  His fingers tightened around my wrist.

  “The night they moved Becket’s bones, I saw what I should not have seen. I could not sleep and had gone to pray in the chapel of Saint Andrew, near to the great shrine of Saint Thomas. I hid when I heard the door, because I should not have been out of the dormitory and did not want to give account of myself to the prior.”

  I nodded, half smiling, recalling the nights I had spent sneaking around the monastery, trying to avoid being caught by the abbot with my forbidden books.

  “Five men came,” the old man continued, his breath buzzing hot against my ear, “carrying between them what looked like a coffin. Some while later they left carrying one likewise. So I followed them at a distance. They were taking it to the crypt.”

  “Who were they?”

  “They kept their cowls up. But one I saw by the light of the lantern he carried to guide the others—he was the assistant cellarer. A seven-night later he was dead.”

  “How?”

  “A fall, on a staircase in the tower. But he was one who had said he would not take the oath of allegiance to the king. No one knew, then, what the consequences of that might be.”

  “So”—I frowned, trying to follow his reasoning—“you think the others were afraid he might be tortured and reveal the truth about Becket’s body?”

  He nodded.

  “I think they wanted to be sure of his silence. And he was not the only one. The day the king’s commissioners came and broke open the shrine, when they ground the saint’s bones into dust before our eyes so nothing remained as a holy relic, no monk standing there believed it was truly Saint Thomas. But we dared not speculate aloud.”

  “But those who knew where the real body was hidden must all be dead by now?”

  “They say there were four guardians, to match the number of Becket’s murderers. Each guardian hands on the secret to one who keeps the old faith in his heart, in preparation for the day England returns to the true Church, like the prodigal son.” He passed a hand over his brow. “But who the guardians are now, I cannot tell you. Ask me no more, son. They will hang me this time for certain, and I am ready. I am weary of this life. God knows I have only ever tried to serve Him faithfully, though He has seen fit to send me so much suffering at the hands of heretics.”

  I laid a hand over his and a silent tear trickled down his hollow cheek. His words reminded me of Hélène’s, and I felt suddenly overwhelmed by the weight of their grief and bewilderment; all over our bloody continent, Catholics and Protestants alike went on dying at one another’s hands, all looking up to heaven and crying out to their God, Whose side are You on? While their God remains deaf, saying nothing, because on both sides they have failed to understand who or what He is, as they spill more blood in His name.

  Hours passed, or what felt like hours. The old monk leaned against my side and I watched with almost filial concern as his papery eyelids fell and his ragged breathing slowed. I may have dozed myself for a while; it was hard to tell, in that half-light and filth, what was real. The only means of telling that time had passed at all was the way the light fell at a different angle through the arrow slit in the wall opposite. I rested my head back against the dank stone and repeated the old man’s words over to myself, trying to fit them into the puzzle.

  Eventually there came the sound of a key grinding in the lock and the prisoners stirred as one from their stupor. The door opened a crack and the gaoler’s face appeared.

  “You. The Spaniard.” He pointed his stick at me. “Get up.”

  “I am Italian,” I said wearily.

  “You’re a lucky bastard, is what you are. Don’t keep them waiting.”

  I disentangled myself from the old monk, who clutched at my shirt in alarm.

  “Frater!” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “Don’t leave me.”

  “I will come back,” I told him, with a stab of guilt; still his hand flailed at me and I had to shake him off. As I stood, the gaoler gripped me tight around the arm and dragged me through the narrow gap to the top of the stairs. When he had locked the door behind me, he pointed his stick at my chest and motioned downwards.

  “Follow me and don’t try anything. You’re wanted at the Guildhall.”

  I had no idea of what this might mean, but his mention of luck kindled a small flicker of hope in my breast. Had my message reached Harry, and had he been able to use his influence with the authorities?

  Edmonton awaited us at the foot of the stairs, his face tight with anger. The same two guards stood beside him and took up their places flanking me with their pikestaffs as I stepped out of the door, squinting into the shade beneath the gate, but this time th
ey did not hold my arms. I was escorted back up the High Street, where curious shoppers and traders paused to follow our party with their eyes, leaning in and whispering to their neighbours. I did not meet their eyes, but kept walking in a straight line, following Edmonton’s stiff back. He had not said a word to me, but the contained fury of his demeanour encouraged my hopes further; he had the face of a man who is about to have a prize snatched out of his hands and can do nothing to prevent it. He strode on ahead of me and my guards, head set high, enjoying the appearance of control and the deference his position seemed to elicit from the townspeople. Let him have his little parade, I thought, as long as I walk free at the end of it. Above us the sky was still overcast, with rows of clouds bunched like dirty wool, and the heat trapped beneath it felt thick and stale, as if the air could not move. The sun was no more than a pale gleam; it was hard to tell what time of day it might be. I guessed at early afternoon.

  Edmonton stopped in front of an imposing building in the old style, with crooked beams of black timber and stone pillars either side of the main door. He gestured brusquely with his head and I followed him up the steps, through a high tiled entrance hall where he paused for a brief exchange in low voices with a man in the robes of a clerk. This man glanced at me warily throughout the conversation, which I could not hear, at the end of which we were led through a small antechamber into a larger room with a high ceiling and a series of leaded windows. My gaze fell first upon two familiar faces—Dean Rogers and Samuel, who stood to the left of a broad oak desk. The dean took a half step forward as I was ushered in by the guards, his face creased with concern, but it was Samuel’s eyes I met and held with my own, wanting to see what might be written there. But the look he gave me was empty of any emotion, except perhaps insolence, as if he knew I was waiting for him to betray himself and did not mean to give me the satisfaction.