The False Virgin

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘You may as well ask a man why he won’t settle for copper when you’re dangling a bag of gold in front of him. Our girls are pretty enough, but next to Beornwyn, they’re as plain and charmless as mules are compared to the finest horse.’

  ‘And have you told fair Beornwyn you think of her as a horse?’ Wulfred said drily. ‘I’m sure she’ll be most flattered.’

  By way of reply Cynwulf swung himself down from his horse and punched his brother on his arm. ‘She’s a jewel, an angel, the fairest swan and the purest rose dropped from Heaven itself. Satisfied? Now you wait here and keep watch. If that guard did recognise us, he might have summoned help and had us followed. So you make sure you keep awake.’

  ‘Not much chance of sleeping in this wind,’ Wulfred grumbled, as a distant rumble of thunder rolled through the darkness. ‘Be quick. I don’t want to be caught out in this when the storm breaks.’

  Wulfred settled himself with his back to the wall of the church, drawing his mantle over his face. He watched the track intently, though unless the guard was carrying a flaming torch, on a night like this Wulfred would have been hard-pressed to spot anyone creeping up on them out of the writhing trees and bushes.

  He had resigned himself to a long, cold wait, but he’d scarcely settled when he heard a shriek behind him, so loud it carried over the roar of the sea and wind. He sprang to his feet and raced up towards the church, dragging his sword from its sheath as he ran. He was about to hurl himself at the door when Cynwulf came staggering through it and collapsed into his brother’s arms.

  Fumbling to hold both his sword and his brother, Wulfred lowered the lad clumsily to the ground.

  ‘Where are you injured? Who attacked you?’

  Wulfred took a firmer grip on the hilt of his sword, his body tense, ready to defend them both when Cynwulf’s assailant burst out of the church. But no one emerged. Cynwulf was shaking and babbling incoherently. Wulfred could make little sense of it, but the boy didn’t seem to be mortally wounded.

  ‘Stay here,’ Wulfred ordered.

  The door of the church was swinging back and forth in the wind. Wulfred edged towards it, ready to strike. He slid into the church, pulling the door closed behind him as silently as he could. He had no wish to be ambushed from the back. He flattened himself against the wall, watching for any sign of movement. A candle was burning low on the altar. Nothing stirred in the shadows, but there was something pale lying on the ground. With his left hand, Wulfred pulled out his dagger and, holding both weapons ready, he edged along the wall towards the altar.

  He stopped as his mind at last made sense of what his eyes were seeing in the dim light. A naked woman lay sprawled on her belly on a wolfskin. Her face was twisted sideways towards him, her arms flung wide as if she was penitent, praying. But he didn’t have to touch her to know she was not praying, at least not in this life. Her eyes were wide and staring, her mouth open, frozen in a scream of pain and shock. Her back was scarlet with blood, which had run down and soaked into the wolf’s pelt beneath her. She had been stabbed, not once, but half a dozen times in savage frenzy.

  Wulfred hurried from the church, pausing only briefly at the door to gulp down the cold air and try to steady his thoughts. His brother was still crouching on the ground where he’d left him, moaning and rocking back and forth in misery, but there was no time to let him grieve. Wulfred dragged him roughly to his feet.

  The younger lad grasped his arm frantically. ‘You saw her, didn’t you? You saw her . . . I didn’t imagine . . .’

  ‘She’s dead, little brother.’

  ‘Who did this to her, Wulfred?’ Cynwulf’s voice was broken by dry sobs. ‘Who would want to kill such a wonderful creature?’

  ‘I don’t know who did it, but I do know who will be blamed for it. As soon as her body’s discovered, all of Badanoth’s guards will be questioned. The one who challenged us must have recognised us. In that lightning flash he saw our faces as clearly as if it was noon, and he saw in which direction we were headed. They’ll think this is our revenge for the insults Badanoth heaped on our father.’

  ‘Then we have to get out of here,’ Cynwulf said frantically. ‘We can’t go home; that’s the first place his men’ll come searching. We have to get far away. Come on!’

  But his brother pulled him back. ‘If Badanoth thinks we killed his daughter he won’t just seek our deaths, he’ll start a blood feud between our kin that’ll last for generations. We won’t need the Vikings to destroy us, we’ll do the job ourselves. No, we have to make them blame someone else . . . The Vikings! Badanoth constantly fears a raid, and where else would they make for but a church?’

  ‘Badanoth isn’t stupid. He knows they’d never sail in a wind like this,’ Cynwulf protested.

  ‘So . . . they could have been blown off course, driven to take shelter in the bay, and with the night so dark and windy they’d easily get past the guards,’ Wulfred said, trying to sound more certain of this than he felt.

  A spasm of grief suddenly overwhelmed Cynwulf again and he crumpled against his brother. ‘But she’s lying in there – dead. My Beornwyn is dead!’

  ‘Yes,’ Wulfred said grimly, ‘and by dawn she must be more than a stabbed corpse.’

  ‘What . . . what do you mean?’

  Wulfred felt the trembling grip of his brother’s fingers on his arm and knew that Cynwulf was not going to be able to face what must be done.

  ‘Stay here on guard and swear to me, little brother, that whatever happens you will not set foot inside the church again tonight.’

  Another flash of lightning cleaved the darkness and as the thunder answered it, the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. The storm had broken at last.

  The young priest did not make his way to the church until mid-afternoon. The downpour had beaten the vegetables and fruit in his little patch into the mud, and now that the sun was shining hot and strong again, he’d spent several hours salvaging what he could and laying them out to dry before they rotted in the mud. The daily offices he’d said in haste and with a good deal of ill humour as he worked. But only when he’d saved as many of his crops as he could did he finally toil up to the church to check that the wind had not wreaked more damage than usual there.

  He knew something was wrong when he saw the door half hanging from its hinges, though he tried to convince himself that the wind must have battered it open. But he smelled the stench of blood and shit before he even set foot inside.

  He had taken no more than a pace into the church before his legs buckled and he sank to his knees. He didn’t even have the strength to crawl outside before he vomited. It was a long time before he could steel himself to look again. A severed head with long brown hair was impaled on the top of the wooden cross on the altar. The limbs had been hacked from the corpse and hung at each corner of the church – north, south, east and west. The feet and hands had been cut off and dangled like bizarre fruit from the windows. Blood had dripped onto the sandy-coloured stones below.

  Beornwyn’s flayed skin lay draped over the stone altar like an altar cloth and a buzzing cloud of flies crawled over the skinned torso, which had been dumped beneath the smashed image of St Oswald. Even as the priest stared in horror, a single blue butterfly fluttered drunkenly in through the open door and alighted on the mutilated corpse among the flies. It uncurled its long proboscis and delicately sucked the juices of the dead. The priest vomited again.

  AD 864

  Mildryth holds out her hand for the coin that the pimple-faced young monk proffers. She examines it carefully before sliding it away in her scrip. Satisfied, she nods and leads him up the path towards the small stone chapel that has been built a little way from the church. She gestures to him to enter and follows him in, keeping a close watch as he kneels in reverence. Thieves are always ready to steal holy relics, and monks are the worst of them all. Mildryth guards her saint as fiercely as any she-wolf protects her cubs.

  A long wooden box lies upon the stone altar, surrounded b
y the burning candles offered by the villagers and strangers who come to pray to the saint. There have been many more strangers coming to the shrine of late. There are rumours the Vikings are preparing to come across the seas in force, not just a raiding party, but huge fleets of longboats full of warriors ready to slaughter and burn the whole kingdom. People are terrified that they will die unshriven. They come to the shrine to pray to the saint who was slain by the Vikings, for surely she has the power to save them.

  The monk leans forward and presses his lips to the box containing the mortal remains of the blessed martyr. He touches his fingers to it, and then to his forehead, mouth and breast as if anointing himself with her holiness. Finally he clambers to his feet and backs out of the shrine as if leaving the presence of a great queen.

  He turns and gazes earnestly at Mildryth, then seems to remember she is a woman and averts his eyes. ‘They say you actually knew her. You were her closest companion, her disciple. Tell me of her death,’ he begs, closing his eyes as if preparing himself for a moment of ecstasy.

  Mildryth has been waiting for this. They all ask for that tale, the strangers who come to her shrine. She recites again how the virgin Beornwyn was praying alone to the blessed St Oswald when the Vikings attacked, striking her down before the very altar as she was kneeling in prayer. How, like St Oswald, she was dismembered as an offering to the god Odin, but even when the saint’s head was struck from her body, her lips had continued to pray for the souls of men. The heathens had flayed her skin from her body, but the Virgin Mary had sent a cloud of butterflies, as blue as her own heavenly mantle, to cover her, so no man might look upon the saint’s private parts to her shame.

  It has been more than fifteen years since the night her mistress was slain and now Mildryth herself can no longer remember what is true. Sometimes in her dreams she sees her own hand stabbing the knife into that bare back, over and over again in such a murderous rage of hatred she cannot seem to stop. But when she wakes she knows it was the Vikings who slaughtered her beloved Beornwyn; everyone told her it was and how could she say otherwise?

  The young monk kneels before her, takes her hand and kisses it. They think if they touch the hand of the woman who touched Beornwyn, her blessing will pass to them. She is the living link to the blessed saint, as the Bishop is the living link to St Peter and to Christ Himself. Mildryth’s touch will save them.

  ‘Ask Saint Beornwyn to pray for me,’ the monk pleads.

  And Mildryth will, for she is the virgin saint’s guardian and protector now, just as she has always been.

  Historical Note

  Lythe means ‘on a hill’, and the church and graveyard of St Oswald are situated on a hill overlooking the sea on the Yorkshire coast. From there you can see the ruins of Whitby Abbey, several bays further along the cliffs. It is believed that the present St Oswald’s church occupies the site of an ancient Anglo-Saxon church.

  By AD 848, this Anglo-Saxon church was all that remained of a Celtic double monastery that was probably built around the same time as the nearby abbey of St Hilda in Whitby (Streanæshalch), housing both nuns and monks in AD 657. Unlike St Hilda’s abbey, the Lythe monastery had fallen into ruins long before the time of the Prologue and only the church remained in use.

  From AD 793 there were an increasing number of Viking raids on the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. The raiding parties often targeted churches and monasteries, because of their rich store of gold and silver treasures, but raids increased dramatically from AD 835 with a full invasion being launched in AD 865. In AD 867 the Vikings destroyed the abbey of St Hilda in Whitby. The Vikings settled and eventually converted to Christianity, burying their dead at Lythe and building a wooden church on the site. This church was replaced with a stone Norman church after 1066.

  During the remodelling of St Oswald’s church, Lythe in 1910, builders discovered that thirty-seven carved stones from a much earlier period had been built at random into the later Norman church walls and buttresses. Two of the stones have been dated to the eighth century. These carved stones were restored in 2007 and are now housed in a permanent display at the beautiful St Oswald’s church.

  Act One

  I

  Whitby Abbey, Winter 1199

  It was a pity that Reinfrid and Frossard were friends. Reinfrid was clever, and might have risen high within the Benedictine Order if Frossard had not been there to lead him astray with mischief; and Frossard might have accepted his lot as a lay brother if Reinfrid had not been constantly telling him that a son of Lord Frossard, albeit an illegitimate one, deserved better than life as a labourer.

  One bleak evening, when a bitter wind turned all to ice, the two young men chanced to meet in the monastery grounds. It was Reinfrid’s turn to prepare the church for compline, while Frossard had been charged to clean the stables.

  ‘The abbot has been vexed with us ever since we let that pig into the scriptorium,’ said Frossard, chuckling at the memory of scribes scurrying around in dismay while the greedy animal feasted on finest vellum. ‘So I have a plan that will take his mind off it.’

  Reinfrid brightened. Life had been dull since their last escapade, and his quick mind chafed at the strictures of a cloistered existence. He had never wanted to be a monk, but as the youngest child of an impoverished knight, he had been given no choice. His unhappy situation was what drew him to Frossard – the solidarity of two youngsters whose lives were blighted by circumstances of birth.

  ‘It concerns Beornwyn,’ Frossard went on, ‘the virgin killed by sea-pirates up in Lythe three and a half centuries ago. She was chopped into pieces, and her flayed corpse was found covered in butterflies the following day.’

  ‘She is not a saint,’ said Reinfrid, haughty in his superior knowledge. ‘The Church does not recognise her, and Abbot Peter deplores the fact that pilgrims visit her shrine.’

  ‘Yes, and do you know why? Because it means they do not spend their money here. He would be the first to acknowledge Beornwyn if her bones were in his abbey.’

  Reinfrid laughed. ‘So what do you suggest? That we steal them for him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The blunt reply made Reinfrid’s jaw drop. ‘But that would be impossible! They are watched day and night. We would never get near them.’

  Frossard smirked. ‘Oh, yes, we will. I met two of the guards yesterday, and we got talking. They are on duty tonight. They mentioned a liking for wine, so I sent them a flask – and in it is some powder from old Mother Hackness, which will make them sleep like babies. All we have to do is walk to Lythe, collect the relics and bring them back here.’

  Reinfrid raised his eyebrows archly. ‘And present the abbot with stolen property? I doubt that will go down very well!’

  ‘We shall say that Beornwyn appeared to us in a dream and told us to fetch her. The fact that the guards slept through her removal will be proof that we acted with her blessing.’

  Reinfrid was thoughtful. Saints were always appearing to people in visions, asking to be toted from one place to another, so it was not beyond the realms of possibility that Beornwyn might prefer an abbey to the paltry little fishing village four miles up the coast. Frossard grinned when his friend made no further objection.

  ‘It is a good plan, Reinfrid. What can go wrong?’

  At midnight, Reinfrid slipped out of the dorter and ran to the postern gate, where Frossard was waiting. They set off together, descending the hill to the little village clustered below, where the familiar smell of fish and seaweed assailed their nostrils, along with the sweeter scent of ale from a tavern that kept notoriously late hours. Bawdy songs and womanly squeals gusted from within. The pair borrowed a boat to cross the river, then climbed past more cottages until they reached the cliff path that ran north.

  It was a clear night, and bitingly cold, so they walked briskly. Both knew the shrine well. It was a pretty place near St Oswald’s church, which had been built shortly after the saint’s martyrdom and not changed since. It comprised a stone
chapel with an altar, on which stood a plain wooden box that contained the relics. The villagers had decorated the chapel with pictures of butterflies, and candles always burned within. Relics were vulnerable to unscrupulous thieves so the shrine was never left unattended.

  Frossard grinned triumphantly when they reached the building and saw the two guards slumped on the floor. The empty wine flask lay between them. Reinfrid was uneasy, though, and crept towards them to make sure they were really asleep. He touched one cautiously, then jerked his hand back in alarm at the cold skin.

  ‘Christ in Heaven! They are dead!’

  ‘No!’ Frossard grabbed a candle to look for himself, but it took only a glance to see that Reinfrid was right. He backed away in horror. ‘Mother Hackness said her powder was safe!’

  ‘How much did she tell you to use?’

  Frossard looked stricken. ‘Three pinches, but I needed to be sure it would work, so I added the lot. But I did not know it would . . .’ He trailed off, appalled by the turn of events.

  Reinfrid forced down his panic, and began to make plans to extricate them from the mess. ‘You must burn the shrine with their bodies in it. Then everyone will assume they fell asleep, and failed to wake when a candle fell and set the place alight.’

  ‘And you?’ asked Frossard nervously. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘We cannot incinerate a valuable relic, so I will carry Beornwyn to the abbey and be as surprised as anyone when she is discovered on the high altar tomorrow. It will be declared a miracle – she did not want to burn, so she took herself to Whitby. Obviously, we cannot take the credit now; we must distance ourselves from the whole affair.’

  ‘Yes!’ breathed Frossard, relieved. ‘The guards’ families know I sent wine, but they will not want it said that their menfolk were drunk while they were minding Beornwyn, so they will keep the matter quiet. Your plan will work.’

  Reinfrid shoved the casket in a sack and tossed it over his shoulder, leaving Frossard to deal with the fire. Frossard’s hands shook as he set his kindling, and it was some time before he had a satisfactory blaze. He waited until the flames shot high into the night sky before turning to follow his friend. Then it occurred to him that Mother Hackness might guess the truth, so he went to her shack in the woods, shaking her awake roughly to inform her that her powder had killed two men.