“Nor shall I,” Anne said and turned to reveal the man hidden in the shadows behind her. “Our crowner will be with me.”
Matthew shook his head in disgust. “Not only is he a worldly man but a rude one at that,” he protested in tones much akin to his preaching voice. “No respect for the Church, if you ask me. Why our prioress allows him to profane our sacred priory is beyond my comprehension, but women do have little logic and less understanding…”
Ralf stepped into the room. “Be off to enlighten Sister Ruth, monk. We would speak with Brother Thomas.”
“How dare you…”
Anne stepped between the two men. “Please, Brother Matthew! Sister Ruth is deeply troubled and needs your guidance before the next Office.”
Matthew growled something under his breath. As he walked through the door, he pulled back his habit so that it would not brush against either Ralf or Sister Anne.
***
“Have you come to your senses, monk?” Ralf asked.
Thomas had risen from his knees and was sitting on the narrow bed provided for him. His face was turned away from them both.
Anne knelt in front of the auburn-haired priest and raised her hands as if in prayer. “Please talk to us, Brother,” she said. “We believe you to be innocent of this crime but must know what knowledge you have of the dead man. Tell us and not only free yourself from this cell but help us catch the murderer.”
Thomas remained silent. He studied all four walls of his prison as if the form of each was unique, even wondrous. Then, as he bent his head, tears raced down his cheeks.
With a beseeching look, Anne gestured at Ralf to come forward.
The crowner reddened, shook his head, and stepped back.
The nun sat beside the weeping man. “Thomas,” she started, then hesitated. Once more she looked over at the crowner, her eyes begging Ralf to lend words filled with warm friendship to her pleas.
Ralf did not move.
With a dismissive toss of her head, Anne turned back to Thomas. “Tell us your grief,” she whispered, then put her arms around the monk and held him close like a mother might her young son. “Ralf and I could not love you more if you had been born kin to each of us. Do not weep so!”
Thomas put his head on her shoulder as if he were her child in fact and began to sob, his great racking gasps most painful to the heart.
As he watched Anne holding Thomas in her arms, Ralf clenched his fists, then hid them behind his back. Friendship, jealousy, and duty fought for primacy in him. The struggle was apparent in the dark red of his face, noticeable even in the flickering light of the cresset lamp.
“Speak, Thomas,” he finally said in a low voice. “Annie has the right of it. You are more a brother to me than my own kin, and I would not have you in this foul space for naught.” He swallowed. “Do not make the same mistake as the man who was imprisoned here before.”
Suddenly Thomas leapt away from them both and ran to the wall of his cell. “Leave me!” he panted, his back flat against the stones. “Get out of here! You may brick me up and starve me to death, Ralf, but you will hear nothing from me about your corpse.”
Chapter Twenty
Eleanor stepped away from the dead man and drew the sheet back over the ravaged body. Above her, the wind hit the chapel walls with so much force that she wondered if all nature was outraged by this murder of God’s soldier.
She turned to Sister Anne. “What strength it must have taken to slice through that buckram!”
“His armor was well-worn and ragged,” Anne replied. “You saw the holes where the cotton stuffing had fallen out, but a most demonic power was still needed to dig through it, then rip into the body with these devastating results.” She shuddered. “Could this have been done by one of the Evil One’s minions?”
“My aunt did teach me that the Prince of Darkness usually commits evil with the aid of mortals,” the prioress replied. “I suspect we must look for a killer with a man’s flesh and form.”
“And the meaning of this?” Anne pointed to the dagger found in the man’s chest.
What of the knife with Arabic script? Eleanor asked herself. Should King Henry be warned that an infidel with malign intent was on English soil? “What do you know about these Assassins?” she asked Anne.
“Little enough, but I have heard that they do not attack simple men like this corpse once was.”
Eleanor nodded. “Then I might say that this murder was committed out of great passion, perhaps anger.” She touched the dead man’s chest with gentleness as if she wished to chase the wrath away. “What did you do to so enrage your killer,” she asked the corpse, “and what did he want to convey by stabbing you in the chest with that particular knife?”
“The wound from this knife did not kill him. From the dull look of the blade, I would doubt that it was the murder weapon. The length must be sufficient to penetrate as well. This knife did not pierce the chest very far, and the buckram was thinner there.”
“Ralf did not think that this was a robbery gone awry or the knife stuck in the chest to suggest a false motive.” Although it was the crowner who had just put her monk in custody, she normally respected his conclusions.
As if she had read Eleanor’s thoughts, Anne smiled. “Ralf is usually right about these things.”
“The nature of this killing and the extra time it would have taken to stab a dead man would not seem the style of casual thieves. If not robbery, then perhaps it was anger over some current deed, revenge for some deep wrong, or even prevention of some threatened injury or humiliation.”
“And the dagger left because it meant something to both the victim and his killer?”
“Well said! Or even a sign that something had been resolved by the killing. When de Montfort was killed in battle, parts of his body were chopped off and sent across the land, not just to humiliate him and prove he was dead, but to establish that the threat he posed to the king’s rule was ended.”
“But this man was a common soldier.” Anne frowned.
“Ordinary men shatter the tranquility of other ordinary men just as men of higher birth destroy the peace of kings. Perhaps, when the killer stabbed him with this knife, he meant to indicate that the end had now come to such disruption.”
“Do you think they knew each other?”
“I would say so, but when they met and the cause of this act remain unknown.” Eleanor fell silent. The only sound was the screaming wind.
“It is almost time for the Morning Office. Shall we…?”
“I will join you but wish to pray alone for a moment.”
“I shall stand without,” Anne replied and left her friend alone with the dead man.
***
Surrounded by the reek of another’s mortal corruption, Eleanor knelt on the stone floor of the hospital chapel and prayed that she might conquer her own. The pain she felt in her breast was like an unquenchable fire. Although she knew that the killer of this man must be found, she feared what she might discover in the search.
Ralf was right, of course. His seizure of Brother Thomas was the kind of gesture that satisfied the mighty while resolving little. If it gave them all at Tyndal time to find the real murderer while keeping their crowner, a man she knew to be fair and honorable, then the gesture served a good purpose.
Being neither saint nor fool, she would do whatever was necessary for the benefit of Tyndal Priory and having Ralf as crowner was definitely beneficial. Of course she could free Brother Thomas at any time. Ralf would not have protested had she freed her monk immediately. That was her legal right, and they both knew the crowner was in her debt for not exercising it.
Prudent though the gesture might be for those reasons, she could not forget that Ralf had also confined Thomas because he believed her monk knew something he would not confess. This troubled her more than any jurisdictional argument over who had the right to seize one of her monastics.
She bent over and moa
ned as her forehead hit the uneven floor. Tears finally flowed down her cheeks, and she looked back at the butchered body whose soul must be crying out for justice. “Is Brother Thomas as innocent as my weak woman’s heart believes, or is he somehow involved, even guilty of this horrible crime?”
Was her willing ignorance of this man’s past keeping her from seeing his evil nature? She did not know what had called him to the priesthood. If bastard-born, as she suspected, the Church must have granted him dispensation to enter holy orders, and that was not often done unless the father was of high rank. Surely she would have been told his lineage if that was the case, yet the abbess at Anjou had said nothing.
Of course she had the right to know about her priest’s past, but Eleanor did not believe in digging out a soul’s secrets just to satisfy a passing curiosity. Only when she sensed some contagion therein, something that might infect her priory with evil, did she pry into things usually left to the confessor. Might not this be just the occasion to ask?
“Could he be Satan’s liege man, and I so blinded with lust that I cannot see the malevolence I have allowed into Tyndal?” Or was he an innocent man, albeit one born with an archangel’s beauty? In that, as she well knew, there was no sin.
“Yet ask questions I shall,” she whispered to the corpse. “I owe you that, and I will face my monk with fortitude. If he is guilty of any ill, I will make sure he is duly punished.” Then she quickly whispered one more prayer. “Should he be innocent, please teach me the direction I should take. Must I keep Brother Thomas or send him away?”
With that, Eleanor rose to join Sister Anne and the rest of her nuns for the Morning Office.
Chapter Twenty-one
He shook with silent but frenzied rage.
That Devil’s strumpet had not seen him standing in the dark, obsessed as she was with her hellish corpse. He longed to slip behind the cursed whore, grasp her neck, and shake until her bones snapped. Had it not been for the tall nun standing at the chapel entrance, he would have, but he had no wish to hurt that one. She had never done him harm.
The groans of the dying and sick intruded on his musings. From the deep shadows of the gray morning, he watched the outlines of the lay brothers as they went from bed to bed, offering potions and prayers. If he prayed at all, it was to go to Hell where he might find his wife and make peace with her at last.
Could he do so? On the ship to England, he had believed he might, but that profane prioress had caused their rift to widen, bringing his wife back to war against him. Could his beloved do otherwise, now that she owed fealty to the Devil?
He still had hope, however. Earlier this morning he had seen the ghost of his wife, drifting deep in the gloom near his bed. For once she had not screamed reproaches at him but had remained silent as if ready to hear his tale. He had risen and walked toward her, hand held palm up in a gesture of supplication.
Then that handmaiden of Satan, the one who called herself the prioress of this place, had walked by, and his wife’s shade flew at him, whirring around his head and howling once more with rage. He had swatted at his ears, but the screeching continued until he had been driven nearly wild with it.
His mood darkened. He looked back at the chapel and silently cursed that evil spirit who had so roused his wife’s shade to renewed fury. Nay, that false prioress was not praying, in there with the corpse, to anyone but the Prince of Darkness. She knew his soul’s desire and would prevent him from making peace with his wife. Even Satan might be kinder and at least let him share a place with his beloved in eternal Hell.
“Be damned!” He heard his shout echo in his head, followed by the mockery of laughter. Damned? Wasn’t the prioress already one of the Devil’s own? He rose. He must destroy that vile creature!
Then his eyes fell on the nun outside the chapel. How could he slip by her? She might cry out. What choice would he have but to strike her? Nay, he could not hurt an innocent.
He fell back to his knees and began to weep, closing his eyes as he did. Once more, the shade of his wife floated toward him.
“I swear on the everlasting flames that burn you: I believed you were safer with the other Saracen women! How could I have known that such a monstrous thing would happen?” he sobbed.
A hand came to rest on his shoulder.
Chapter Twenty-two
Had Thomas ignored the bare walls, the narrow space, the lack of windows, he might have imagined that he was not in a cell. An earthen pitcher of Tostig’s good ale from the priory brewery sat on the rough boards of his small table alongside a bowl filled with thick cabbage soup, still steaming from Sister Matilda’s kitchen and fragrant with spices. Next to the soup were a loaf of fresh bread and a slice of good yellow cheese. Prisoner he might be, but Prioress Eleanor was making sure he ate well at his midday dinner.
But imprisoned I am, he thought, noting that there was no knife at his place. Despite the abundance set before him, he had no appetite.
Cuthbert coughed. “I will cut your cheese if you wish it,” he offered.
“Like a rat, I’ll gnaw it,” the monk replied with a weak smile, “but I do thank you for your kindness.”
“It may be of little solace, Brother, but many in the village grieve that this has happened to you. Those you have comforted in the past long for your release.”
“The word has traveled then?”
“If you will forgive me for saying so, monks and nuns do gossip.”
Thomas shrugged. “We are all mortal.”
Cuthbert carefully looked around and listened for a moment before continuing. “Some say our crowner has been bribed to do this so that someone of rank will escape justice.”
“What think you?”
The sergeant spat. “Ralf would sooner cut off his own balls than take any man’s bribe.” He looked up, turning red. “I spoke before I thought, Brother. Forgive me my rude language.”
For the first time, Thomas laughed. “Then I assume our crowner’s manhood is intact.”
Cuthbert nodded, turning yet a deeper shade of wine-red.
“Since gossip travels swiftly in the village, I wish you would spread the word that I am in good spirits and know that our crowner will soon capture the man who killed this soldier. Thus my residence in this cell is but temporary, and I will soon be released.”
“The villagers believe he arrested…?”
The monk shrugged. “Since men are sometimes placed in safe custody to protect them from harm, I believe Ralf fears that I know something that could put me in danger. In fact, I was on that road where the man was found, although I left it before the glade. You may also pass the word along that I know Ralf to be an honorable man who would never set justice aside for his earthly gain.”
“That I will, Brother. Your words may save our crowner from an accidental shower of night soil as he passes through the village of Tyndal.” Cuthbert grinned, then bowed out of respect for Thomas’ vocation and left.
Despite the sergeant’s sympathy, Thomas noted that the man did carefully lock the door behind him.
***
Thomas sat in silence and stared at the meal in front of him. He still had no appetite. Briefly he might have broken the surface of his black pool of melancholy, but his head had slipped beneath it again. Even Sister Matilda’s finest efforts now failed to restore his humors.
Suddenly rage filled him, and he struck the table with so much force that great drops of soup flew in all directions. “I am cursed,” he cried. “Cursed!”
A knock at the door and a muffled question reminded him that Cuthbert remained near to guard him. He shouted back that he had accidentally bitten his tongue and all was well.
How he wished that was true! He must find some way out of this prison. He could not remain in it, haunted as he was by his past. If he were to stay, he surely would go mad.
Thomas closed his eyes. When Ralf reminded him about the last prisoner who had been put here, he had grown angry with passion
fueled by the humiliation of his tears. Anne and Ralf had meant him no ill. He knew that and had apologized to them for his outburst before they left. Nevertheless, he had refused to tell them what they wanted to hear. What could he say? How could he say anything?
Nor, despite his speech to Cuthbert, could he easily forgive Ralf. Although he knew the crowner had not put him in this cell as a cruel jape, Ralf had been his friend and he had placed him here. Did friendship count for nothing?
Thomas knew that his behavior had been questionable and that he had been on the same road where the murder had taken place. The madman had been right, if he had seen him as he claimed. He could quarrel with none of this. What had hurt him was that Ralf had not set aside appearances and let the bonds of friendship weigh more heavily in this matter.
“Were I a better man,” he muttered, “I would respect him for that. A less honest man would have ignored a friend’s apparent guilt.” The monk’s shoulders sagged. “But I am not that better man.”
The crowner might have proven his integrity, but that was cold comfort when Thomas did not know how he could explain the basis for his guilty behavior. It had been true that he had been so eager to return home that he had forsworn sufficient food that day. This omission had not given him the fortitude to withstand the sharp questioning from both his prioress and Ralf about the circumstances and timing of his return. Then he had faced the corpse and, with his humors set off-balance, had seen his rapist in the features of the dead soldier.
Nor did it help matters that he was in a cell once again, one that not only brought back London memories but also those from last year when he had chanced his own life to save another’s. This last part Ralf might understand, but that alone was insufficient to explain all.
Thomas shook his head. Ralf was right. He did have something to hide, and he knew he could not blame the crowner for putting him in this cell, whether to keep him safe or to wear him down so he would tell what he knew. The crowner had been sharp-witted enough to sense the oozing fear when Thomas’ past sorrows met with current circumstances. Ralf might be a friend but he was also the representative of the king’s justice. The difficulty Thomas faced was how to justify what had happened without revealing things about which he had no wish to speak.
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