by Paul Doherty
‘You fought your assailant off?’
‘I was out looking for Wenlock,’ Mahant spoke up. ‘I heard the shouting, the slash and clatter. I answered Wenlock’s cries of ‘Aux aide! Aux aide!’ By the time I arrived his assailant had fled; from that time on we decided to go armed.’
‘And you reported all this to Father Abbot?’
‘I might as well have talked to his stupid swan!’
‘And you have no idea of your attacker?’
‘No, he was dressed all in black, cowled and masked.’
‘Or why you were attacked, at that time, in that place?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘Have any of you,’ Athelstan persisted, ‘relatives outside this abbey?’
‘Not that we know of, we are old soldiers. Some of us were married but now our wives are dead.’ Mahant’s voice turned wistful. ‘Whatever children we had lie cold beside them.’
‘As do two of your comrades?’
‘Brother, Sir John?’ Wenlock’s voice turned pleading. ‘We are finished, surely?’
‘I would like to inspect the chambers of the dead men.’ Cranston rose swiftly to his feet. ‘And that includes William Chalk’s.’ Cranston gestured towards the door. ‘Now, sirs. With you or without you . . .?’
The anchorite, whom the old soldiers described as mad as a March hare, stared calmly through the aperture of his anker house on the south aisle of the abbey church. The monks had finished their hour of divine office. They’d left in a soft slither of sandal and the bobbing light of lantern horns. A cold breeze now seeped through an opened door to whip the remaining glow of candles and tapers. Gusts of sweet beeswax and incense still trailed. Here and there the silence was disturbed by the scurrying of mice and rats sheltering in this forest of stone against the savage cold outside. The anchorite wondered what he might see tonight. He’d heard of Hyde pricked to death near the watergate. The anchorite had tried to warn him. He’d seen Hyde leaving in pursuit of some monk – was it the Frenchman Richer? Then another shadow followed him – a monk, surely? The anchorite was certain of that. He’d seen the flitting blackness through the dark. He glimpsed the glint of steel, but that was life, was it not? Violent and turbulent, full of tension and strife, that’s why he sheltered in these sacred precincts with his precious manuscripts, his box of treasure and pallet of paints. He was an anchorite but an exceptional one. He performed one service for the Lord Abbot which few painters did. The abbot was a Grand Seigneur with all the powers of a lord, of Oyer and Terminer, of being Justice of Assize. He had the power of axe, tumbril and gallows and the anchorite served as the abbot’s hangman. In return Lord Walter had been good, allowing the anchorite, when the church was deserted, to leave his cell and paint visions of the life hereafter on the walls and pillars around his cell. Yet she, Alice Rednal, the sinister haunter of his life, had followed him here. The anchorite was sure of that. He’d seen Alice Rednal’s hard face pressed up against the aperture, features all ghoulish, hair as tangled as a briar bush, but that couldn’t be, surely? He’d hanged Rednal at the Elms in Smithfield. He had tolerated her taunting as they rattled along in the execution cart but he’d then watched her die. The anchorite moved back to his small carrel and chancery stool. He sat, picked up his quill pen, opened his journal and began to describe the nightmare which always plagued his sleep. Was this, he wondered, the cause of the recent horrid apparitions?
‘Suddenly, without warning,’ he whispered as he wrote, ‘I saw the witch, yes I did,’ the anchorite glanced towards his cot bed, ‘climbing on to me. It greatly shocked me. I was so terrified I could not speak. In one hand the harridan carried a wooden coffin and in the other a sharpened scythe. She put a foot upon my chest to restrain me.’ The anchorite pushed his journal aside and crept back towards the aperture. He peered through at the painting on the far pillar, the evocation of his own nightmare which haunted him day and night, awake or asleep. He had executed that. At the time he’d been proud of it, and so had the good brothers who’d called it a vivid ‘Memento Mori’. Now the anchorite was not so sure as he gazed out in the juddering light of a torch fixed in an iron sconce above the painting. He had depicted Death as that night-hag, her face gnawed away to gleaming white bone. He’d intended to paint black hollow eye sockets but instead he had given her red glaring eyes, her teeth jutting up loose in a large jaw, arms stretched out like scaly bat wings. The anchorite turned away then froze at the rustling of a robe and the slither of soft buskins. He hurried back to the anker slit. He was sure she was there – Alice Rednal had returned to haunt him. The anchorite wanted to scream but he could not, he dare not.
‘Go back to hell!’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Go back I sent you there! Go back! In the name of the Lord and all that is holy I adjure you to return and stay there.’ He grasped the stoup of holy water which stood just within the doorway and feverishly threw a few drops about, but the cold pricking of his spine and the nape of his neck only deepened. She had come. The anchorite closed his eyes trying to summon up images of the Virgin and Child but he could not. All he could picture was a chamber full of flames and filth where venomous demons danced.
‘Hangman of Rochester, I promised you would see me again. Alice is here.’ The woman’s voice sounded like the hissing of a curling viper.
‘What do you want?’ the anchorite pleaded. ‘In God’s name, what do you want?’
‘Your soul!’
‘That is the Lord’s.’
‘Then your blood money.’
The anchorite glanced at the small silver-hooped casket crammed with precious coins.
‘Never!’ He turned, looked and recoiled at the face leering through the aperture, chalky white with glaring eyes.
‘Remember me?’ the voice hissed. ‘At the hanging tomorrow I will see you there, perhaps?’
The anchorite grabbed the pole he kept near his bed and turned to thrust it through the gap, but the phantasm had disappeared. The anchorite closed his eyes and fell to his knees, sobbing in prayer . . .
THREE
‘Forsteal: a violent affray.’
‘The day of their destruction draws near,
Doom comes on wings towards them . . .’
The melodious chant of the black monks of St Fulcher rose and fell in the taper-lit darkness of their great oak-carved choir close to the high altar. Athelstan leaned against the raised stall and tried not to be distracted by the images clustering around him. The sculptures, the vivid wall paintings, the shimmering colour of stained-glass windows, the darkness brooding at the edge of flickering light, not to mention row upon row of black garbed monks, their faces hidden by cowls – all of these were a constant temptation to gaze around.
‘I have sharpened my flashing sword,’ the choir sang.
Athelstan smiled at the words of the psalmist. Coroner Cranston had decided to curb his sharpened thirst in the refectory of the guest house, though not before telling Athelstan that they would not be returning to the city that evening. Athelstan had reluctantly agreed. He wanted to return to St Erconwald’s. God knows he had enough work there but the business here was compelling. This great abbey absorbed him. In itself it was a small stone city. At its centre stood this hallowed cathedral with its transepts and arches, pillars and plinths, its great rood screen carved in the same fine oak as the latticed woodwork of the chantry chapels dedicated to this saint or that which ranged along each aisle. Athelstan would love to bring his parishioners around this church, show them the exciting wall paintings and frescoes, the great table tombs of former abbots, the elaborate pulpit surmounted by a gorgeous banner displaying the Five Wounds of Christ. Perhaps the swan-loving abbot would grant such permission? A Christmas treat with a feast of bread and ale in the abbey buttery? But not now!
Athelstan let his mind drift. He had visited the narrow chambers of all three dead men. A sad experience. He and Cranston had gone through a collection of paltry possessions: badges, scraps of letters, weapons, clothing and pieces of a
rmour, be it a wrist brace or an ugly-looking dagger. Nothing remarkable except in William Chalk’s, those pieces of parchment bearing the crudely inscribed words, ‘Jesu Miserere – Jesus have mercy on me’, repeated time and again. Athelstan had asked Wenlock the reason for this. He simply pulled a face and said that Chalk, like any man, was fearful of approaching death. For the rest . . .
Athelstan stared up at a statue of St Fulcher. Those bare, whitewashed chambers with their pathetic possessions intrigued him. Something was wrong, Athelstan reflected. Ah, that was it! He smiled. Yes, they were far too neat and tidy, as if someone had already searched the dead men’s possessions – to remove what? Any suspicion about their past, the Passio Christi or some other bloody deed they’d perpetrated during the long years of war . . .?
‘Then would the waters have engulfed us.’
Before the leading cantor’s words could be answered by the choir, a voice low but carrying echoed through the church.
‘And they have engulfed me,’ the voice continued. ‘Yea, I am caught in the fowler’s net and the trap has been sprung.’ The voice faded.
‘The anchorite, God bless him,’ the monk next to Athelstan whispered. ‘He has to hang a man tomorrow.’
The cantor, now recovered from his surprise, repeated the verse and the plain chant continued. Athelstan peered down the church and quietly promised himself a visit to the anchorite sooner rather than later. At the end of compline Athelstan expected Father Abbot, seated in his elaborately carved stall, to rise garbed in all his pontificals and deliver the final blessing. Instead a strange ceremony ensued, the likes of which Athelstan had never seen before. The monks sat down in their stalls, cowled heads bowed. A side door in the nave opened. Four burly lay brothers, armed with iron-tipped staves, brought in a man dressed in a black tunic, feet bare, hands bound, his face hidden by a mask. Immediately the cantor rose and began singing the seven penitential psalms as the prisoner was forced to kneel between black cloths set over trestles. Athelstan had noticed these when he had first come under the rood screen into the choir. As the monks chanted, Prior Alexander left his stall and thrust a crucifix into the prisoner’s bound hands. Other brothers wheeled a coffin just inside the rood screen whilst the almoner brought a tray carrying a flagon of wine and a platter of bread, cheese and salted bacon. Athelstan recalled the coffin he had seen and the gallows near the watergate. The abbot must have seigneural jurisdiction. The prisoner now before them was undoubtedly condemned to hang on the morrow though not before his soul was shriven and his belly filled with food. Athelstan whispered a question to the monk in the next stall. The good brother broke off from chanting the ‘De Profundis’ – and swiftly answered, before the prior coughed dramatically in their direction, how the prisoner was a convicted river pirate who’d murdered one of their lay brothers. The felon had fled to a church further up the Thames to claim sanctuary but eventually surrendered himself to the abbot’s court. He had been tried and condemned to hang from the gallows after the Jesus Mass the following day.
The penitential service finished. The good brothers filed out of their stalls, past the prisoner who now sat in his coffin, ringed by guards. Athelstan followed the others and, once out of the abbey church, he joined the rest in washing his hands and face in the spacious lavarium near the great cloisters. Afterwards, led by a servitor, Athelstan joined Cranston for supper in the abbot’s own dining chamber, a magnificent wood-panelled room warmed by a roaring fire. Thick turkey rugs covered the floor and skilfully painted cloths hung over the square, mullioned-glass windows. The splendid dining table had been covered in samite and a huge golden Nef or salt seller, carved in the shape of a war cog in full sail, stood at its centre. The platters, tranchers and goblets were of pure silver and gold. Napkins of the finest linen draped beautifully fluted Venetian glasses to hold water drawn from the abbey’s own spring. The wines, both red and white were, so Abbot Walter assured them, from the richest vineyards outside Bordeaux. Athelstan wasn’t hungry but the mouth-watering odours from the abbot’s kitchens pricked his appetite whilst Cranston, now bereft of cloak and beaver hat, sat enthroned like a prince rubbing his hands in relish. Other guests joined them: Prior Alexander, Richer and the ladies Athelstan had glimpsed earlier. The young, fresh-faced woman was Isabella Velours, the abbot’s niece; the older one Eleanor Remiet, the abbot’s widowed sister. Isabella was dressed for the occasion in a tight fitting gown of green samite, a gold cord around her slender waist, her fair hair hidden beneath a pure white veil of the finest gauze. Mistress Eleanor, however, was garbed like a nun though in a costly dark blue dress tied tightly just under her chin, a veil of the same colour covering her hair and a stiff white wimple framing her harsh, imperious face. Unlike Isabella she wore no rings, brooches, collars or necklaces. Both women bowed to Cranston and Athelstan, then as soon as Abbot Walter delivered the ‘Benedicite’ they sat down on the high-backed chairs, grasped their water glasses and whispered busily between themselves. Occasionally Athelstan caught Isabella throwing coy glances at Richer, who always tactfully smiled back. The door to the kitchen opened in a billow of sweet fragrances. Leda the swan, wings half extended, waddled up to the top of the table to receive some delicacies from the abbot. Prior Alexander audibly groaned and loudly muttered that perhaps the swan could be served up in another way. The cutting remark was not lost on Abbot Walter, who grimaced and seemed about to reply in kind but then the first course was promptly served: dates stuffed with egg and cheese, spiced chestnuts, cabbage and almond soup, lentils and lamb, strips of beef roasted in a thick sauce and slices of stuffed pike. Servitors refilled wine goblets and water glasses. For a while the conversation was general: the state of the roads, French piracy in the Narrow Seas, the demand from the Crown for a poll tax and the growing unrest in the city and surrounding shires. The conversation turned to the emergence of the Great Community of the Realm, that shadowy, fervent movement amongst the shire peasants and city poor, threatening revolution and preaching the brotherhood of man. The name of the Kentish hedge-priest John Ball was mentioned as being one of the Upright Men. Judgements were made on him and opinions passed. Athelstan kept his head down as if more interested in his food. The friar quietly prayed that his views would not be asked. Many of his parishioners were fervent adherents of the Great Community; Pike the ditcher for one sat very close to some of the most zealous of the Upright Men. Cranston, wolfing down his food, caught the friar’s unease and deftly turned the conversation to what Athelstan had told him about the prisoner condemned to hang the following morning.
‘A notorious river pirate,’ Abbot Walter pronounced, feeding Leda whilst smiling at his niece.
The abbot went on to describe other depredations of this well-known felon. Athelstan just picked at his food, secretly wishing he could take the entire banquet back in baskets for his parishioners. The friar lifted his head and quickly gazed round. He was certainly learning more about this abbey. He caught the mutual dislike between Abbot and Prior, which he recognized as truly rankling. Isabella, the abbot’s niece, seemed rather vapid and flirtatious. Athelstan wondered about her true relationship with the abbot yet the more he stared at her his conviction only deepened that a strong blood tie existed between the two. The elder woman, Eleanor, was at first tight-lipped but, as the wine flushed her face, she relaxed, becoming quite chatty, a highly intelligent woman, sharp-witted with a keen mind, who shrewdly commented on different matters. However, Athelstan noticed that the more she talked the more Cranston seemed fascinated by her, staring across the table as if trying to recall something. Athelstan took advantage of the servants clearing the table for the final course of sweetened tarts crowned with cream, to pluck at the coroner’s sleeve and whisper what was the matter?
‘I know her,’ Cranston murmured, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. ‘Friar, I am sure I do. A face from my past but I cannot place her.’
‘Has she recognized you?’
‘No, no. Ah well, what a strange place!’ He leaned close
r. ‘Well, Friar,’ Cranston whispered. ‘When you were mumbling your prayers I despatched one of the lay brothers to His Grace the Regent at his Palace of the Savoy—’
Athelstan abruptly gestured for silence. The table conversation had now changed. Mistress Eleanor was asking about the murders amongst the Wyverns. Abbot Walter immediately assured her that he could not explain the deaths but added that they might be the work of malefactors from the river.
‘The Wyverns suspect me,’ Richer declared abruptly. ‘They think I am waging a feud over the Passio Christi.’
‘Are you?’
‘You asked me that before, Brother Athelstan. As I answered then, I am a Benedictine.’
‘You also served under the Oriflamme banner,’ Cranston declared. ‘You’ve been a mailed clerk, yes?’
Richer did not disagree.
‘So why have you come here – the truth?’
‘I have already explained.’
‘Brother Richer is a peritus,’ Abbot Walter retorted, shooing off his pet swan. ‘He has done excellent work in our library and scriptorium but . . .’ Abbot Walter smiled maliciously at Prior Alexander, whose jibe about his beloved Leda he’d not forgotten. ‘Perhaps, with all our many problems here, Brother Richer, it’s time you returned to St Calliste. I mean,’ Abbot Walter waved a hand, ‘sooner, rather than later?’