He crunched along the path that led from the church and listened to the soft wind whispering through the tall grass, dry after the long summer.
None of the other nuns had cared much for the method of choosing Eleanor either, he’d heard, but he was seeing a slow change in their view of her. Her youth still bothered most, although he now heard more about her kindness, modesty, and willingness to listen. The extensive changes they feared would be made had not occurred. The small ones that had been made seemed to please them.
He had even heard some compliment her on being more in their midst, something the old prioress had rarely done. When she was obliged to entertain, they learned that the food served was what they themselves ate. And rumors had come from Amesbury kin of a couple of the Tyndal nuns that the new prioress had spent a year in the world before making her final vows, a fact that argued somewhat against the inexperience which had troubled many.
In addition, Eleanor had been seen in conversation with the crowner. It was noted that this older man, a representative of King Henry, showed her due respect despite her youth. This pleased the nuns. When respect was shown to their leader, honor was bestowed on the priory.
Thomas stopped just at the rise of the hillock near the monks’ quarters and breathed in the salty air. Bracing, he thought. Perhaps he was growing accustomed to it. He walked on toward the small bridge leading to the stables.
Nonetheless, Brother Rupert’s murder had still not been solved, a reality that cast a long shadow over both nuns and monks at Tyndal. Although lay brothers visibly watched the gates and walls of Tyndal and the prioress was observed overseeing such efforts, Thomas still heard voices turn hoarse in terror as nuns recounted awakening during the night after dreaming that some demonic creature was standing over them, bloody blade in hand. It troubled Thomas as well that nothing had come to light since the discovery of the knife hilt and bloody garment. The murder seemed no closer to being solved.
Thomas looked down from the bridge and watched the sparkling stream flow beneath. It had a soothing babble, and the occasional dark shadow wriggling through the clear water suggested there were fine fish to be caught for dinner. He turned away and crossed to the other side.
Truth be told, however, his concern over the murder had been momentarily diminished by another decision just made by the prioress. All nuns at Tyndal came to him for confession except Prioress Eleanor. Of course he was used to those in power choosing their own priests, but it seemed strange that a prioress, noted for being more with her flock than prioresses were wont to be, should behave in only one respect as he would have expected her to do in all others. What bothered him most, however, was that Brother John was her choice for confessor.
Thomas continued up the path that led to the stables and smiled. At least the smell of horseflesh was the same, he noted, whether in London or in the country.
Nay, he was not jealous of Brother John. After what he had survived in his London prison, ambition and competitiveness dwindled to insignificant passions. No, the problem lay in his opinion of the man. Thomas was of two minds about him. The monk’s eyes could be as cold as green ice or as warm as gem fire in the sun. He had treated Thomas both with disdain and with gentleness, neither of which seemed contrived. Indeed he was a curious man, intriguing enough that Thomas had followed him on occasion and had even spent more time in his company.
Just two nights ago, Thomas had seen the monk slipping quietly out of the dormitory and he had followed him, once again into the clearing in the woods. This time no one attacked Thomas, but he watched as Brother John stripped off his habit and spent an hour whipping his naked body in the moonlight while praying in a quiet voice for unspecified forgiveness. As the monk stood with arms raised to the sky after his strange penance, Thomas found himself inexplicably seized with lust for the first time since he had arrived at Tyndal, but in the few moments it took him to quiet his own unruly flesh, Brother John had disappeared. Thomas had spent the rest of that night troubled by sporadic and now forgotten dreams.
The next morning, the monk had greeted Thomas with good cheer and asked if he would like to accompany him when he took the novices fishing after Mass. The man he had seen caressing a lad in the chapel behaved properly during the fishing trip, and Thomas noted no hesitation on the part of any boy to be close to him or to join in the physical roughhousing usual between elder and younger males. Although no man had ever groped him as a youth, he knew other boys who had been, and one who was raped by some knights in his father’s company. Those boys had tried to avoid the men thereafter. Brother John, however, seemed genuinely loved. A puzzle, Thomas thought, for he was sure the monk had shown more than brotherly love for the youth in the chapel that night of his attack.
Thomas walked into the stable, stopped, then looked around. His pitchfork was not where he had left it yesterday. Had one of the two lay brothers he had replaced hidden it out of spite? He chuckled. He hoped they liked slopping hogs and cleaning up after the chickens better than stable work.
He kicked around at mounds of hay and checked in the stalls. It had neither fallen nor been put elsewhere. Perhaps someone had taken it up for some task and hadn’t thought to return the tool where Thomas had propped it.
He walked outside and around the back into the shadows of the stable building. There, sticking out of a mound of filthy straw, was the pitchfork. As Thomas tugged at it, he realized it was stuck on something. He grabbed the handle with both hands, then pulled with a sharp jerk.
The tines emerged from the straw. For cert, they were quite stuck. Deep into a man. He was dressed in ragged, stained clothing; his beard was black and unkempt. His eyes stared fixedly at Thomas. He did not blink.
Indeed, the man was quite dead.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The wooden door to the prioress’s chambers creaked on its hinges, then slammed shut, the wooden panels shaking quite visibly from the force.
Eleanor raised one eyebrow.
“I swear that woman hates me,” Ralf the Crowner said as he stared at the still quivering door.
“Sister Ruth shares the concerns of many over yet another death in our priory.” Eleanor gestured toward a stool, and Ralf sat.
“I join with your charges in that concern, but I have found no traces of the person who murdered Brother Rupert. I suspect there is a link to this second death, but I have not found it. I am not used to being so thwarted, my lady, yet thwarted I surely am.”
“Have you identified who the poor man was?” Eleanor watched as Gytha carefully poured a goblet of wine for the crowner, then put the ewer down and began to cut some cheese.
“No one has come forward and claimed knowledge of him, nor do I know him.”
“Well, he is certainly from here. I saw him by the stream that day I turned my ankle and once again in the village when I was buying a donkey. No one else did, however.”
A softened squeal of pain caused Eleanor to look up. Gytha was sucking on her finger.
“Are you all right, my child?”
“The knife slipped, my lady. It has almost stopped bleeding. I will bring the…”
“Come here and let me see.”
Gytha hesitated, then came forward and gave her hand to Eleanor.
“The cheese will wait. Run to Sister Anne and let her bind your finger. The cut looks deeper than you thought.”
“But…”
“I will brook no argument here, nor do I need your presence for decorum. Sister Ruth stands without the door.”
Gytha left the room with a backward glance at her mistress.
“Perhaps it is just as well the child has left. Now I may ask whether you have shown the body to anyone in the village, Ralf.”
“Tostig. He claimed no knowledge of him but promised to ask others. No one has come forth.”
“And you believe him.”
“I trust most Saxons as much as most Saxons trust me.”
“That is blunt enough.
What have you in mind to get at the truth then?”
“Not what you might think I would do. I have never believed that torture brings forth the sound of truth, although it soon brings loud promises to say anything that will stop the pain.”
“You have no paid friends then in the village?”
Ralf laughed. “You surprise me, my lady. How could you think such a thing?”
“My father is at court and my elder brother fights at Prince Edward’s side in the Holy Land. I am naïve neither about the mechanics of intrigue nor about how men retain power.”
Ralf coughed.
“Lest you fear you have been too unguarded with a nun whom you now find to be less unworldly and perhaps better connected than you thought, let me assure you that I like a plain-spoken man. And men who are blunt to hide a soft heart I like even better.” Eleanor smiled, resting her chin in her hand. “So explain to me now why is it that you have no paid friends?”
“I bent the truth, my lady. Although many Saxons do not trust me, nor I them, I have true friends in the village that are so because they have learned I will be equitable to all and keep good order. Tostig is one such. What troubles me is that none of the Saxons I have befriended have come to me about this new death.”
“Then they are either afraid or have a higher loyalty than their friendship to you.”
“Well observed.”
“Tell me of Tostig’s reaction when he saw the dead man. What did you note?”
“He is a man who does not allow the color of his thoughts to be painted on his face, but I did detect a blink of his eyes and a twitch at his jaw when he first looked on the man.”
“Which suggested to you that his denial of any knowledge was false.”
Ralf nodded.
“That would confirm my own suspicion. When I saw the man in the village, the day I purchased the donkey, Tostig claimed he had not, although he was standing immediately behind me when I cried out. He could not have missed seeing him. I believe he not only noticed the man, I think he knew him.”
“Then he and the villagers do have reason either to protect themselves or him.”
Eleanor leaned back in her chair, stared at the ceiling in silence, then sat forward and sipped some wine from the goblet in front of her. As she put it down on the table, she watched the red liquid swirl and thought unpleasantly of blood.
“There may be another way to get at the truth of who this strange man was. Since you were last here, Ralf, I have had some discussion with the nun who used to pick mushrooms in the forest. She told me a strange tale of a demon that burst out of the earth in front of her near the bend in the stream where a tree hangs nearly suspended in air. It is the same place, I believe, where the cave of unknown purpose is.”
“A demon?”
“A demon with disheveled clothes and a black, unkempt beard. Unusual for a minion of Satan, I’d say, but not unusual for a man. Since I first saw our dead man there, I wonder if he might have been the very same demon.”
“Or it might have been a true son of Satan,” the crowner suggested.
“My aunt at Amesbury once told me that the demons we are unable to see or recognize are of far greater danger to our souls than those we can. I will ask my nun to view the corpse, but I will have Brother Thomas accompany her lest she need protection from otherworldly dangers. Indeed I fear she may remember all too vividly the image of her terror in recognizing the cause of it. Would you come as well? You should note her reaction and not hear it second-hand from me.”
“I will be there even if the corpse proves to be unholy and Satan himself comes to protect one of his own. Tell me, my lady, do you think there is a connection between this death and Brother Rupert’s? I do, yet it is a question, the answer to which eludes me.”
“And eludes me too. Something is indeed deeply amiss here. That something caused our dead man to both run in terror from the cave, yet be drawn back again; to run in fear from me at the village, yet come back to Tyndal, only to be found dead on the priory grounds as was our good monk.”
“I would not dismiss Satan’s hand in the incomprehensible, my lady.”
“Nor I, good Crowner, but if Satan has sent his minion to Tyndal, he remains quite invisible to us all.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sister Matilda screamed.
Brother Thomas held the cross in a tight grip, both hands stretched rigidly in front of him. Ralf stood behind him, eyes as unblinking and dry as if they had been painted on his face.
Eleanor pulled the wild-eyed nun into her arms, pushing her head into the curve of her neck so she could no longer see the body.
“Hush, sister! There is nothing to fear. Brother Thomas has the Evil One at bay with the cross in his hands. We are safe.”
“It is the very Devil who burst from the earth. He has found me!” The nun’s cries were muffled, but Eleanor could feel her body shaking with terror.
“He is powerless against you, bound as he is in the chapel near the altar, sister.” Eleanor gestured to Thomas to follow her out, then turned and pulled the trembling nun away with great gentleness. “We shall leave, and I promise you will never see him again.”
Sister Anne was waiting outside the door as the four emerged into the fading light. She helped Eleanor seat Sister Matilda, then gave the nun, whose eyes were now tightly shut against the sight of any further horrors, a drink from a cup she had close at hand.
“She needs to sleep, my lady,” Sister Anne whispered. “I will have someone sit with her tonight in case she wakes from evil dreams, but with this potion I think she will sleep well.”
Eleanor, short as she was, took the sitting nun’s head and pulled it close to her breast and gently rocked her. “You did a brave thing tonight, Sister Matilda. I believe you will rest now, and, in the morning, we will walk together in the garden after chapter and speak of your return to grace from this penance you have endured.”
Sister Matilda turned to look up at the prioress, her eyes already unfocused from the draught the sub-infirmarian had given her. “Penance, my lady? I did penance?”
“You did indeed! Remember? It was for your pride. Now that you have done this thing tonight, I believe you may be relieved of your work in the garden.”
The nun sat up and swayed, her face filled with blissful relief and joy.
“Say nothing more, my child. It is your duty now to sleep. We will speak in the morning.”
Sister Anne gestured, and a lay sister came out of the shadows. They whispered together for a moment, then the lay sister and Sister Matilda wobbled away in the general direction of the hospital.
“I will stand just there until you need me,” Sister Anne said, gesturing to a yew tree a little distance away.
Eleanor turned to Brother Thomas. “You look shaken yourself, brother.” She meant it kindly, but she saw him stiffen. “It is one thing to cross swords with a human enemy, but yet another to face Satan himself,” she added quickly. “Your courage was impressive.”
“I faced a corpse, not Satan, my lady.” His expression was unreadable.
“You did not know that when I asked you to protect us against a possible demon.” Eleanor wanted to reach out, take his hand, and clutch it to her as she had the terrified nun. The sweet pain she felt at the thought of his hand on her breast was less than chaste. She dropped her gaze, and there was silence between them.
“As you will. I am here to serve and am pleased if I served as you wished.”
“You served well, brother.” Eleanor took a deep breath and looked up. “I have one thing more to ask of you.”
Thomas bowed his head in silence.
“Should you see or hear anything of note in the matter of this death as you perform your tasks, I would hear of it, and hear of it first. Anything unusual. Anything out of place. We are both new here, but I have learned that you are a thoughtful and observant man. Crowner Ralf can only search the outside world for signs of this murde
r and that of Brother Rupert. I need your skills for noting anything untoward within our priory, especially amongst the monks and lay brothers.”
“Aye,” Ralf said. “I concur, good brother.”
Had the light not so failed that his face was in shadow, Eleanor might have seen Brother Thomas turn pale before he nodded agreement.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The rock bounced off the stone walls of the priory, and the curse spat after it was quite Anglo-Saxon.
“Who knows me here? Who is her spy?” Thomas snarled, as he threw another rock in impotent rage at the priory. “And what fool gave a woman the right to order men around? Unnatural, it is. This whole place is fucking unnatural!”
This rock shattered. Thomas sat down on the ground and put his head in his hands. He was shaking, but rage no longer masked his fear. Indeed, he had been afraid when the prioress had told him to come to the chapel and hold a cross against any demon still residing in the corpse of the man he had found.
And when Sister Matilda screamed, he thought he had seen a Son of Darkness rise from the body, smelling of smoke, his grinning image flickering in the candlelight. Thomas would have sworn to that. And when he held the cross in front of him, for cert he had heard the thing sigh before it disappeared, then all he heard was the calm prioress crooning to the nun in her arms as if she held a baby there, not an adult woman. Truth to tell, there was a instant when Thomas wished she would soothe him as well, but, along with the innocence of childhood, he knew he had also lost the right to such a comfort for himself.
Thomas began to sob, his body shaking uncontrollably. He had wept little since he was a small boy, yet in this place dedicated to peace and God, tears came to him easily and often. “Aye!” he cried into his hands. “She is a better man than I. I hate her for it!”
In truth, he did not hate the prioress. Had she been a man of the world, he would have admired her coolness. Had she been a prior, he might have sat at her feet and begged to learn how she blended her piety with pragmatism. Had she even been a saintly woman, he could have worshiped her holiness. She was none of those, but rather a young and earthy woman who was so very different from all the others he had ever known. He did not understand her at all, but he did respect her.
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