by Mary Malloy
Lizzie thanked the man and walked away. Jackie whispered, “What did I tell you? The whole thing is fucking weird.”
Out on the street Jackie laughed until Lizzie could not help but join her. The sky was beginning to darken and they stepped into a small restaurant called The King Alfred Tea Shop to eat.
“You must admit this is a strange business, this pilgrimage, what with the body parts and all,” Jackie insisted.
“Absolutely it is,” Lizzie admitted without hesitation. “But don’t you find the macabre bits fascinating? You just learned about the sale of the bones of a tenth-century murdered king, a thousand years later, to a Russian Orthodox Church in some place called Woking! Tell me this isn’t a great way to spend your vacation!”
“You know, of course, why Woking is particularly funny?” Jackie asked, wiping tears of laughter. When Lizzie said that she didn’t, Jackie answered the question. “It’s where the Martians landed in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds! I wish we were going there,” she added. “That’s a place for a pilgrimage—dead kings and aliens! But I must admit that you do know how to show me a good time.”
They discussed where to stay for the evening and decided to get a cab to take them back to the Horse Pond Inn in Castle Cary, and to drive from there the next morning to Bristol to visit Alison.
“And now to end the perfect day, we drive for one hour to get back to where we started walking two days ago!” Lizzie said as they settled into the back seat of the cab.
“You do see my point about the other road being just as fair, whatever road it happens to be.”
“I do. I amble a bit, I get lost, I wade through pig shit, I cross electric fences and barbed wire, I find myths about the bones of an ancient king accepted as reality, and an actual story about the bones of another one so fucking weird that nobody in their right mind would believe it. I see deer and sheep and cows and birds, and my dear friend joins me for a couple of days and we ride in a taxi halfway across England. This, Jackie, is the modern pilgrimage and we are on it!”
Chapter 19
Alison was in excellent spirits when Lizzie and Jackie arrived at the hospital, and was thrilled to meet Jackie. “I read that paper you wrote on the Wife of Bath,” she said, “obviously you are one of us.”
“The coven of the Weaver?”
“Is that what Lizzie called us?” Alison asked with delight.
“I was thinking of some other descriptors as we walked to Shaftesbury yesterday,” Jackie said.
Alison asked what they were and Jackie answered “Ama-saxons! Big women. Strong, smart, hearty-laughing women. Women who walk all day singing, then drink a pint of hard cider and sleep well.”
Lizzie had known that Alison and Jackie would like each other, but she was especially pleased at how amusing Jackie was being for the benefit of the old woman, who was laughing heartily at the colorful description of their walk. Each of them had a crotchety side, but neither was displaying it today.
“Is there any chance that we can put you in a wheelchair and roll you to the Chaucer conference?” Lizzie asked hopefully when there was a break in the banter.
“I just don’t think so,” Alison said resignedly.
George entered the room, and hearing the last part of the conversation repeated Alison’s answer. “There is no way that she will be able to attend any conference for at least several weeks.”
He greeted Lizzie with a kiss on the cheek, and then was introduced to Jackie, who was quite curious about him, and even more so about his son, who followed a few minutes later. Jackie knew most of the story of Lizzie’s relationship with the Hattons as a researcher, and that they had become friends in the course of the work she did for George at his house, but Lizzie had not told her about her familial relationship with them.
Lizzie brought them all up to date on the progress of the walk, including the information that Jackie had located a list of the artifacts looted from Glastonbury and Shaftesbury Abbeys, in which they might find a record of donations made by the Weaver.
Alison was excited by the news. “Will you be able to look at the list before the Chaucer conference?”
Lizzie said that she wouldn’t. “I was thinking, Alison, that since you can’t be there you should withdraw your name from the program and wait for another opportunity to make an announcement about the work.”
“Nonsense!” Alison said determinedly. “You can make the announcement. You know everything I do, and I trust you to make a decision about what should be made public.”
“I just don’t feel right about it,” Lizzie argued, but everybody in the room urged her to do the job.
“Having put even the title of the presentation into the conference program, you have raised a lot of interest about your sources,” Jackie said. “The best way for you to control how the information gets out is to present it right away. This conference is definitely the right venue for that.”
The arguments were convincing and Lizzie agreed to do it.
Alison seemed pleased and asked Lizzie to come sit beside her. “This is the right decision,” she said. “You will need to take good notes for me about who is there and what questions they ask.”
“I’ll have Jackie with me,” Lizzie said. “She can be our spy!”
Alison liked the idea.
Taking Lizzie’s hand she asked if she was suffering any after effects of the accident. “You weren’t hurt, were you?” she asked with concern.
Lizzie assured her that she was fine.
“You and I were both very lucky,” Alison said. “I’ve seen that car coming at us over and over in flashbacks. We could have been killed.” She asked about the driver.
“I’m sorry to say he died at the scene,” Lizzie said softly. She thought about whether she should tell Alison about his last word and finally decided she would. “It was so strange,” she said. “And now I’m not sure what I really heard, but I could swear he said ‘Becket’ to me.”
“Becket?” Alison, Edmund and Jackie repeated the word in unison.
When Lizzie nodded, Alison asked if she had any idea who the man was.
“His name was Bruce Hockwold, and he was from Canterbury,” Lizzie answered.
“Bruce Hockwold?” Alison asked.
“That’s what the policeman told me. And he was from Canterbury, which I thought was a very strange coincidence.”
Alison sat up in the bed. “His name isn’t Bruce Hockwold,” she said, her voice trembling in confusion. “His name is Hockwold Bruce, Hocky they call him. He was a friend of my father’s.”
“What?” George said from across the room. “Impossible! Are you saying that you knew the man who almost killed you?”
“I haven’t seen him in years, but he was frequently at my house, visiting with my father before he died.”
“What are the chances of that?” George demanded. “That you would know the man.”
“Very small, I should think,” Edmund answered. He gave his father a sign not to pursue the subject any more in Alison’s presence, and when a nurse came in to check her dressing, used it as an excuse to move the rest of the party out to the hallway.
“Lizzie, you told me that this man, Bruce Hockwold or Hockwold Bruce, looked at you before he tried to run you down. Is it possible that he did this on purpose to hurt or kill Alison?”
“It’s so hard to believe,” Lizzie answered. “The guy was ninety years old.” The image of his red car across the square, his face turning to look at them. “But yes, I think he might have intended to hit us.”
There was a stunned silence as the four of them tried to process the implications of this information.
“I have two questions that need answering,” Edmund said. “The first is whether Hockwold Bruce’s death means there is no longer a threat to Alison.” He turned and looked at Lizzie as he finished. “And Lizzie, whatever this threat is or was, does it extend to you?”
The question was completely unexpected.
“How could a de
ad old man possibly be a threat to me?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Edmund answered, “but you said he intended to hit us?”
“But I only meant because I was standing beside Alison. There is a chance she is mistaken about this. His name might actually be Bruce Hockwold; he may be an entirely different person.”
She shook her head and thought again of the accident scene. Her thoughts then moved to the man lying dead on the gurney. She had been in a hospital corridor not unlike this one, the same green walls, the same soft non-music in the background.
“And even if he was the same man and saw me with her, he never had time to convey that information to anyone else. From the first time he saw me until the moment his car hit the market building was only a few minutes.” She looked from Edmund to George and back. “No, whatever this is, I don’t think it has anything to do with me.”
“What does it mean, that he said ‘Becket? ’” Jackie asked.
Lizzie shook her head. “I have no idea. I mean the Weaver’s pilgrimage ended in Canterbury at Becket’s shrine, but the shrine itself is long gone—destroyed almost five hundred years ago by the same guys who leveled Glastonbury and Shaftesbury.” She thought of the Becket reliquary. Alison had told her that her father had a secret that he meant to share with her, but never did. She had only mentioned it one time.
“Can we sit down somewhere?” she asked.
Edmund knew of a small waiting room nearby and directed them there.
“I’m not sure how relevant this is,” Lizzie began when they were all seated, “but Alison has a Becket reliquary—that’s where she found the Weaver’s manuscript.”
George asked if it was worth killing for.
“It’s enormously valuable,” Lizzie said. “And there is an early edition in it of Canterbury Tales that is also worth a fortune.”
“Anything else?” Edmund asked.
“Two relics that are probably Becket’s—a finger bone and a blood-soaked piece of cloth—and two lenses from a telescope.”
“When you say ‘enormously valuable,’” Jackie asked, “how much are you talking about?”
“Millions,” Lizzie answered. “For the reliquary and the Chaucer, I think a few million pounds.”
George stood and walked to the window. “If this were just about stealing these things, there would be no reason to kill Alison. If she were in her house when robbers arrived, that would be one thing, but she was hit by a car far from home.”
Edmund leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his legs and touching the fingertips of one hand to those of the other. “If Hockwold Bruce knew Alison’s father,” he said slowly, “he might have known those things were in the house all along.” He turned to Lizzie. “Has anything changed that might have brought them to his attention again?”
“The Chaucer conference,” Jackie answered. “The announcement that Alison has found the Weaver’s journal means that she has found the reliquary.”
This seemed important to Lizzie, but she just could not see how anything in the reliquary would have led an old friend of Alison’s father to try to kill her. “Alison’s father had a secret,” she told the others, hoping the combined efforts of the group might clarify the situation. “He was supposed to share it with her, but he got Alzheimer’s and never did.”
“Perhaps he shared it with this Bruce character,” Jackie posited.
“But why would he try to kill her?” George asked. “If Alison was supposed to know the secret anyway, why wouldn’t he just tell her? I think he might have been senile or deranged. With him gone, that is probably the end of this.”
His son disagreed. “We have to explore the possibility that there is more going on than we currently know. Alison needs security, and I’d like to go have a look at her house to see if we can find anything else. At the very least we should remove the reliquary to a safer location.”
“What should we tell Alison?” Lizzie asked.
“As little as possible at this juncture,” Edmund answered. “She needs to recover from her surgery before she starts worrying.”
“Too late for that, I think,” Lizzie said. “The worrying has begun.”
Chapter 20
Oh my God, the place has been ransacked,” Edmund said when they entered Alison’s house.
“No it hasn’t,” Lizzie said calmly. “This is how she keeps it.”
“Well, this is a kind of security system, I guess. Good luck to the robber who can find anything here.” Edmund asked Lizzie if she knew where the reliquary was, and she took them through to the library.
“I don’t know if we could find anything in here if we didn’t already know what we were looking for,” he said.
“It’s not quite so disorganized as it seems,” Lizzie responded. “Having worked here for a few weeks I am getting to know the structure of the place.”
Jackie had been silent through the conversation, but now she turned to her companions. “You are such neophytes when it comes to serious book collecting!” she said. “I’ve seen places with ten times the number of books in this amount of space.”
“Jackie put herself through library school working for a book auctioneer,” Lizzie said to Edmund in a loud whisper.
“I’m just saying that there is a system for moving efficiently through a room like this. First show us the reliquary.”
Lizzie pointed out the collection of Chaucer editions on the shelf behind the desk and then the smaller shelves, which served as a door to the space behind. She pulled out the reliquary and put it on the desk.
Jackie gave a gasp of excitement. “It is fabulous!” she said.
“Thank you for using an appropriate ‘f’ word in front of my friend,” Lizzie said. She opened the box and laid the contents on the wood of the desktop.
Jackie could not resist picking up the small book. “You’re certainly right about the value of these things Lizzie. This is one of the early Caxton editions of Canterbury Tales, the second edition maybe?”
“That’s what Alison told me.”
“I think there are maybe only a dozen or so of these that survive.”
“What about the rest of these?” Edmund asked, indicating the other copies of the book on the shelves, maybe fifty in all.
“It’s a really extraordinary collection,” Jackie said. “Few libraries can boast anything like it for the number of early editions. It would be almost impossible to assemble it today by purchasing the individual volumes—most of them are found only in libraries.” She asked Lizzie who made the collection.
“I think Alison might have said it was her father, but as I think about it, this collection in itself might be an interesting clue to the relationship between the Weaver and Chaucer. What if she purchased the earliest edition and put her own journal in it?” She felt a thrill as she said it. “I assumed, and I think Alison did as well, that some later descendent saw the similarity between the Weaver’s journal and Canterbury Tales, but what if she is the one who made the connection?”
“Sorry Lizzie,” Jackie said. “Unless she lived a lot longer than a hundred years that just isn’t possible. I think the first published edition of Canterbury Tales was 1477 or thereabouts. And, very importantly, didn’t the Weaver make her pilgrimage in the late thirteenth century—before the printing press?”
“Damn!” Lizzie said. “It was such a great idea, but of course you are right.”
“I see where your thoughts are heading, though,” Edmund said. “You are thinking that these early editions of Canterbury Tales might have been purchased by Alison’s various ancestors as each volume came on the market.”
“That is not what I was thinking, but it is a brilliant thought, simply brilliant!” Lizzie said enthusiastically. “The collection was made over generations by people interested in the book because of the Weaver’s connection to it.”
“If there was any way that you could prove that,” Jackie said, “it would be the story of the century in the library world.
”
“Thank you Jackie, but is that a world we want to be in?”
“It is a lovely world, as you well know,” Jackie answered, mimicking Lizzie’s sarcastic tone.
Edmund had picked up the bone from the table and was studying it.
“Alison is pretty sure that is a human finger bone.” Lizzie said. “Is she right?”
He said that she was.
Lizzie handed him the scrap of cloth. “And this might be covered with the blood and/or brains of Thomas Becket.”
“Hard to tell after all this time,” he said turning it over in his hand. “I suppose we could send it to the lab to see if they could get any DNA off it.”
Jackie made a joke about cloning the saint, but the others ignored her.
Edmund had moved on to the lenses. “Any idea what these are for?”
“I think a telescope,” Lizzie answered, “but Alison and I went through all the ones her father had here in the house and it doesn’t seem to be for any of them.”
“All right then,” Edmund said briskly. “What do we need to do here, beyond removing the reliquary and its contents to a safer location?”
“I suppose we should look to see if Alison’s father left any clue to the secret he was supposed to tell her.”
“Any suggestions on how to do that?”
Lizzie said that Alison thought if there was a clue it was probably in or among the books. “But I don’t think she has ever undertaken any sort of systematic search. She found the reliquary only when she went searching for a reading copy of Chaucer.”
“How many books do you think there are in this house?” he asked with a sigh.
Jackie estimated over ten thousand, and Edmund sighed again.
“I think if there is anything to find, it would most likely be here,” Lizzie said. “This was her father’s room and Alison told me that she did not often come in here after he died. I think she regularly moves things around in the rest of the house, and she told me she has found unimportant things that her father stashed in books, but this is the place where she would be least likely to have stumbled on something by accident.”