by Mary Malloy
Lizzie turned the conversation once again to the textile.
“Oh,” Tyler said, as if he had just thought of it. “I have it!”
“What?”
“I have that piece of fabric you were asking about.” He had a knapsack with him, which now he put on the wall of the castle. From inside it he withdrew a bundle wrapped in tissue paper.
“I don’t understand,” Lizzie said. “How could you possibly have it?”
Tyler gave her an impish look. Behind him Lizzie could see where the stone steps descended into the cavernous darkness of the castle interior.
She put her hand out to steady herself on the wall and found that there was a large gap in the stones there. For the first time it occurred to her that she had been careless and stupid to dismiss the possibility that someone might mean to hurt her. Tyler was nerdy and slightly built, and consequently she had never considered him a threat, but now she saw that though he was small he was wiry. She could see the sinews of his arms as he held the fabric to his chest. He could not, she told herself, actually be intending to murder her, but what was he doing with the Weaver’s gift to Canterbury Cathedral?
“Why do you have that textile?” Lizzie asked again, attempting to sound nonchalant as she surveyed the stones around her. If Tyler attempted to push her, what could she grab, where could she step securely?
“I stole it yesterday from the treasury storage at Canterbury Cathedral,” he said. His calmness unnerved her.
Lizzie tried to assess if he was more dangerous if he was calm or if he was discomposed. She wondered what her own response should be and decided that feigning ignorance would not be convincing; he was too smart for that. As she contemplated what to say next, he spoke.
“Do you know where they found this, back when it was discovered after the war?”
“In a grave with a marker for Osbert Giffard?”
“Yes!” he said. His hands twitched and moved possessively around the bundle. “How did you know that?”
“I found the clue left by William Kent.”
He nodded. “Of course. Where was it, by the way? Dr. Bruce always wondered and Mr. Kent would never tell him.”
“A church near Guildford.”
“Really? How interesting, but it really doesn’t matter.” He set the bundle on the wall. “Do you know what is going to happen now?”
“You and I are going to struggle until one of us falls?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “That’s an interesting way to put it. I thought you might just say that I was going to push you off this tower.” He shook a finger at her. “It was very stupid of you to come up here alone with me.”
She agreed that it was. “I thought you could be trusted.”
“I don’t think so.” He said, still shaking his finger. “I think you thought that I could be used for information and then disregarded.”
“Nonsense. I would have given you a very nice acknowledgement in the book. But don’t expect that now.”
“You know you really are quite interesting and I am enjoying this conversation. It’s a burden to have a secret and no one to share it with.”
“I’m sorry to tell you that it isn’t a secret anymore. My friend Jackie knows.”
He laughed. “Oh yes, I remember her from the conference, she went after poor Dante Zettler with his pathetic notions of Chaucer.”
“Yes, poor Dante.”
“That was too bad about him,” Tyler said. “He was just in the wrong seat at the wrong meal.”
Lizzie steadied herself by putting a hand on the stone beside her.
“I can’t believe you tried to kill me!” she said angrily. “What did I ever do to you?”
“It’s not what you did, it is what you might find.”
“And now I’ve found it and other people know about it, so the secret is out.” She cursed herself for her stupidity and carelessness. Martin only knew she had gone to Rochester to meet someone, but she hadn’t mentioned Tyler Brown’s name. She hadn’t told anyone else she was coming here; she never called Edmund as she’d promised.
“What do you think the secret is?” he asked slyly.
“That Thomas Becket is still buried in Canterbury Cathedral in a grave marked with the name Osbert Giffard.” As she spoke she thought about the implications of that. If the Weaver’s textile had once bound the bones together, then what was Tyler Brown doing with it now? Shouldn’t it still be in the grave?
Tyler looked at her closely. “You are just beginning to realize that something is not right here, aren’t you?”
“How did you get the textile?” she demanded.
“I told you, I stole it from Canterbury Cathedral.”
“From a grave there?”
“No. You need to pay more attention to me.” His tone was condescending. “I told you that I stole it from the storage area of their treasury. I work there often and am, I’m happy to say, quite a trusted colleague.”
“You said it was found after the war?”
“Yes, it was in 1950 actually. Unfortunately, Hockwold Bruce was not in Canterbury at the time and didn’t realize what had happened until later.”
“What did happen?”
Tyler Brown sighed and looked up at the sky. “It was one of those completely routine renovations that happen all the time in the Cathedral. They were working on the piping and in the process opened a few graves. There was an archaeologist there who said this textile was potentially important, and they took it from the grave and reburied the bones.”
It began to dawn on Lizzie what had happened.
“Did they bury them in the same place?”
“No.”
“Did they note where they went?”
“No.” Tyler Brown shook his head sadly. “No, they did not.”
“What about the Osbert Giffard stone?”
“It was moved to the center aisle and there is nothing under it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Hockwald Bruce came into the Cathedral one night and lifted it up to see.”
Lizzie considered pushing him off the tower in one of his thoughtful moments, but she was still having a hard time conceding that Tyler Brown was a murderer, and that on this lovely day he would actually try to kill her. It seemed too fantastic to be real. He was too elfin, too cultured; he didn’t seem to be either a psychopath or a religious fanatic. How could he possibly be a threat if he wasn’t one of those? She looked at his knapsack on the wall. There was a pointed stone near it that stood up higher than the stones around it. She calculated what it would take to slip the strap of the pack over his neck, but that seemed impossible. It would not take much to slip it over that stone, however.
She forced herself to keep the conversation going. “I assume Hockwald Bruce brought you into this triumvirate,” she said.
“He did. I know you will think it sounds like a cliché, but he really was like a father to me. I loved him and I felt the honor of being invited into the Becket society.” He described going to meetings with William Kent and Frederick Wickersham. “They were great old men,” he said, “until Mr. Kent lost his mind, and then that idiot Freddie Wickersham came to a meeting at his grandfather’s insistence, but he wasn’t committed to the undertaking.” He looked hard at Lizzie. “It is a vocation, really—a holy calling—and we didn’t bring him into it when the old man died.”
“But what was the use of continuing the society once Hockwold Bruce lost the knowledge of where the bones were?”
He turned on her angrily. “Don’t blame Dr. Bruce!” he said fiercely. “He would have given his life to protect that information. It wasn’t his fault. He fought tirelessly to restore the position of the Catholic Church in England.” He was ranting now, about how the Catholic Church built all the great cathedrals and deserved to have them back, and how the relics of Becket were essential to rally people to action.
“Except that you don’t know where the relics are,” Lizzie said.
&
nbsp; “I intend to find them,” he whispered ferociously.
She tried to read his expression, a mixture of confusion and defiance.
“Ah,” she said, “Hockwald Bruce never told William Kent or Frederick Wickersham that they were lost.”
She resisted the temptation to scoff at him. He was getting angry and that made her position more dangerous. She asked him why Hockwald Bruce had tried to kill Alison Kent. “They were old friends,” she said.
“Dr. Bruce wasn’t sure how much she knew, but once she found the journal of that woman you call the Weaver, there was always the chance that she might reveal the secret either inadvertently, or by caring less about it than about her own work.”
“And he couldn’t just bring her into the secret, because there was no longer a secret worth protecting.”
The two studied each other for several minutes, each calculating their own position on the wall and that of their adversary. Lizzie believed she had identified the best stones in each direction to grab or stand on if Tyler rushed her, but as the threat became more real she began to panic.
When he finally moved, he came at her with an outstretched hand and took her arm in a painful grip. She seized the front of his shirt with one hand and with the other grabbed at the wall behind her, desperately trying to find a handhold in one of the niches that had looked so reassuring earlier. The bundle of fabric went flying off the wall as she reached for the pack, and she was finally able to move her fingertips through the strap and slip it over the adjacent stone. This gave her something to cling to as she stamped her heel onto Tyler’s foot and then brought her knee up hard into his groin. He released his grip and she pushed him as hard as she could.
He did not fall over the wall of the castle and onto the lawn below, but into the interior of the ruined shell, striking his head on one of the projecting ledges that had once held a floor, and then onto the stone pavement another forty feet below it.
Lizzie knew that he could not have survived the fall. She held tightly onto the wall and breathed in big frightened gasps, acknowledging the terrible perilousness of her position. She had maintained her calm through the whole of the peculiar conversation with Tyler, when time seemed to drag, but once the confrontation turned physical, events had moved in a swift blur. As she looked at his body crumpled on the pavement below, she began to sob and shake violently. For a moment she had a terrible flashback to the previous year at Hengemont, when she had found herself near to going off the roof before Edmund saved her.
She walked gingerly back to the stairs and then slowly descended, putting first her right and then her left foot on each step and keeping one hand securely on the wall at all times. By the time she reached the bottom there were two men kneeling next to Tyler.
One turned to her. “I’m sorry, your friend is dead,” he said. “What happened?”
“He tried to push me,” she said. “He’s not my friend. Call the police.”
“I already have, and the ambulance, but it won’t help him.”
She did not look in the direction of Tyler’s corpse, but walked outside to find the bundle and then sat on the lawn and unwrapped the work done so long ago by the Weaver. The fabric was musty. It had lain in the shrine for two hundred years and in a grave for another four, but patches of bright scarlet color were still visible. The alternating monograms and mitres were still gold against the background, though the gold wire thread had broken in many places.
She rolled it up again and put the tissue paper back around it as the police arrived. Now she probably would need that solicitor, she thought. She called Martin to tell him what had happened.
“I’ll come right there,” he said anxiously. “Where will you be?”
“Probably in police custody,” she said darkly. “Would you call Edmund and find out about that solicitor for me?”
He said he would do that and come directly to Rochester.
The young policeman was surprised at her assertion that Tyler Brown’s death was not an accident but a murder attempt gone awry. She gave him the card she still had of the detective in Oxford, and then handed him the bundle.
“He said he stole this from Canterbury Cathedral,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice. She felt listless, flattened.
Martin arrived, having taken a taxi from London, then Edmund with the solicitor, but the Rochester police were not inclined to hold Lizzie or to charge her with a crime after speaking to the police in Oxford. Edmund offered to take them back to Hengemont and Martin gravely accepted for them both.
Chapter 33
Explain this to me again,” George said, after Lizzie had told them the story of what happened. “Were Thomas Becket’s bones destroyed at the time of the Reformation or not?”
“No,” Lizzie answered. “Becket’s bones were replaced in the shrine with the bones of a monk, Osbert Giffard, and it was his bones that were destroyed.”
“And then your family kept the secret of where Becket’s bones were hidden?” George turned to Alison.
“Apparently so,” she said. “It seems that one of my ancestors was a monk at Canterbury at the time the bones were secreted. He came back to Bath with the reliquary and the secret, and passed it on to a nephew.” She put a hand on Lizzie’s arm. “My father had, in fact, kept a good genealogy of all the men involved, just as you thought, Lizzie.”
“They must have moved the remains over the years, but always kept the name Osbert Giffard associated with the grave to identify them.”
“And now the bones are lost?” George continued.
Lizzie had already told this part of the story more than once, but she described again how Becket’s bones had been moved during routine maintenance of Canterbury Cathedral, and the Weaver’s gift, the piece of fabric that could best identify them, had become separated from them.
“So they just got moved to a different place.”
“That seems to be what happened. It is unlikely now that they will ever be identified.”
“Does it matter anymore?” Martin asked.
They all looked to Alison for the answer. If the triumvirate had continued, she would likely now be one of the secret keepers. “I don’t know,” she answered. “How many bones do you need? I have one in this box here. Could it be used to restore Canterbury Cathedral to the Catholic Church? I hardly think so. Times have changed too much since the game started.” She took a deep breath. “One thing I can say for sure is that this secret was never worth endangering Lizzie, or killing poor Dante.”
George put a reassuring arm around her. “The Weaver is clearly the most interesting ancestor to you.”
“Yes she is,” she nodded. “And Lizzie and I have assembled a wonderful range of material to tell her story.”
“I’m still intrigued by your father’s interest in her, though,” Lizzie said. “Why did he use her monogram on that church window in Guildford? And why did he think it was necessary to make that faux grave for Osbert Giffard there?”
George said that he thought he understood that move on the part of William Kent. “It was the war,” he said, “the terrible devastation of the war. He was the only surviving member of the triumvirate and he was afraid that another calamity like that could wipe out them all. He wanted to leave a clue in a place that could be found by someone who was looking for it, and he wanted to associate it with his own family.”
“The Weaver was well known to him through the Canterbury Tales connection, and his mother had shown him the Weaver’s monogram,” Alison explained. “The fragments of family trees are not all from my family, by the way. When Stephen Buckland and John Hockwold died in the war, my father tried to find their heirs, presumably to invite them into the triumvirate. Hocky Bruce was obviously a connection of John Hockwold, but he never found a descendant for Stephen Buckland, so he asked his friend Frederick Wickersham to join.”
Martin was looking at the picture of the tomb in the illuminated manuscript. “This textile in the painting here, this is the one that wa
s actually around the bones?”
Lizzie said that it was. “I held it in my hands,” she said. “It still had some of that fabulous red color, and the gold.”
“When we mount our exhibition we can include it,” Alison said.
Martin continued to study the pictures of the gifts made by the Weaver. “She was really an extraordinary benefactor of artists,” he said, “and a very talented designer. I can’t wait to see this tapestry.”
“Since we are going home in two days it will have to wait until we come back for the book launching.”
“We could go tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m afraid not,” Lizzie said. “Tomorrow I need to go to Canterbury and finish the pilgrimage.”
Chapter 34
There was no convincing her husband or friends that she should travel to Canterbury Cathedral by herself. Not only were they worried about her seeming too calm after her near-death experience, but they were all curious to see the place again with the information so recently learned. Even Alison was determined to go, announcing that she was recovered enough to travel in a car and a wheel chair. If she was going then George said he must also go, and consequently it was a party of four that traveled the next day to Canterbury.
They stuck to the motorways, bypassing the places Lizzie had stopped along the way. It was a very different view of England, more real in some ways. She knew that the vast majority of the population lived in urban areas, but clung to her romantic perceptions of the countryside.
In Sittingbourne they stopped at her request. “This is where the Wife of Bath told her story,” she said, “her terrible story that has given me so much grief.”
The town had a rundown look, and no visible surviving medieval architecture. Lizzie got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk next to it.
“Have you decided what it is that women most desire?” Martin asked, standing beside her.
“To finish their important projects and get them published!” Alison declared from inside the car.