Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  He smiled at my puzzled expression. ‘You do not know this word either?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Their religion forbids them to work from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. They take work to mean any kind of household task, so that they cannot light fires, or even candles when it gets dark. They cannot even stir the food in the pots, so they employ Christians to do these things for them, and it was then that I used to listen to the stories the old women told to tell to pass the time, tales of sheidim and of angels, of brides possessed by dybbuks who slay their husbands on their wedding night and foolish old men brought to wisdom by their daughters.’

  ‘That’s where you heard the word Pleasance used?’

  ‘I do not think she meant to say it,’ Rodrigo said gravely. ‘Maybe she did not know that it would mark her out. Words are woven into stories; they cannot easily be separated.’

  ‘So when Adela drew attention to it by asking what it meant, you tried to cover for Pleasance, telling us it was a local village word.’

  Rodrigo nodded. ‘I hoped that no one else would understand. I prayed they would not. I feared Zophiel might, for though he would not know the word, he is clever enough to realize it was no English word, but his mind was distracted by the wolf and only half on the tale.’

  He lowered his voice and glanced uneasily ahead, though the wagon was some way in front of us by now. ‘Zophiel would not have hesitated to expose her if he suspected, and she knew this. Zophiel plays cat and mouse with Cygnus by threatening to hand him over; maybe she thinks he plays the same game with her. And after she saw what they did to Michelotto, she thought it better to take her own life than wait for them to come for her.’ Anger flooded his face. ‘It is that pardoner and Zophiel who together are to blame for her death. Zophiel’s vicious words…’

  I remembered what Pleasance had said the morning we were stuck in Northampton: ‘sometimes you have to leave’. I wondered if she had any inkling then of how final that leaving might be. If only she had walked away from us that day.

  Rodrigo turned to me, his face suddenly pale. ‘But what if Zophiel did realize she was a Jewess? The pardoner said they hanged Jews. What if he hanged her for a Jew?’ He gripped my arm fiercely. ‘Camelot, is it possible? Do you think he killed her, not just with words, but with his hands?’

  ‘But why? I can see that a man with his hatred of the Jews would want her dead if he knew what she was, but why kill her himself in secret rather than hand her over to the Church? I’d have thought a man like Zophiel would get far more satisfaction from seeing her humiliated and executed in public.’

  ‘But he has not handed over Cygnus either, though twice now he has had the chance. I am beginning to think perhaps Zophiel has his own reasons for not wanting to draw attention to himself with the authorities.’

  16. The Chantry

  ‘What say you, Camelot?’ Cygnus asked. ‘Are they dead or fled?’

  It was a good question, for the chantry chapel certainly appeared to be abandoned. The chapel stood hard against the central arch of the stone bridge as if it was propping it up on one side. The stone pillars which supported the base of the chantry rose out of the middle of the fast-flowing river below. Two steps led up from the bridge to the heavy wooden door of the chapel itself, but peering down over the bridge wall, I could see that there was a second chamber underneath the chapel, hanging just a foot or so above the churning water. I hoped it was a sacristy and not a burial chamber. It made me shudder to think of bodies being interred there, suspended for ever above that dark, rushing water.

  The chantry was newly constructed. Many of the saints and grotesques which ran around the roof were still just rough shapes blocked out by an apprentice in readiness for a master stone-carver to chisel in the fine detail. The walls and slate roof were complete, though none of the stonework had yet been painted.

  But although the building was not finished, it already had an air of neglect about it. Drifts of brown leaves had accumulated in the corners of the steps and the door and more were blocking waterspouts on the roof. Several blocks of masonry were piled against one of the walls, some half-worked as if the workmen had just downed tools that afternoon, but the cut faces of the stones were covered with a green bloom, indicating they had not been moved for some time.

  I walked back to join Cygnus and the others by the wagon. ‘Whoever was working here looks to have departed in some haste, but whether it was into the next town or the next life, is hard to say.’

  ‘Let’s pray it was not into the next life, if Adela is going to have her child here,’ Cygnus replied.

  Adela, sitting on her usual perch on the wagon, looked aghast. ‘I can’t give birth to my baby in a chapel.’

  Cygnus tested the door before replying. The iron handle was stiff but the heavy door was unlocked. He pushed it open but did not go in. An odour of musty dampness oozed out, but there was no hint of the putrid smell we had come to dread.

  ‘Why not? It’s solid, and once we have a fire going it will be warm and dry. Besides, it’s unfinished, so it cannot yet be consecrated, in which case it is just an unused building, not a chapel.’

  Zophiel’s eyes blazed. ‘It is nevertheless a sacred building and it would be a desecration to pollute it with childbirth.’

  Cygnus wiped the rain from his face and pointed up to a sculpted panel immediately over the door, depicting the Virgin and Child, the only carvings on the outside of the chantry which had been completed. ‘Surely Mary would not consider childbirth a desecration of her chapel?’

  ‘Hers was a sinless birth, but this… this…’ Zophiel was so outraged that for once he could not finish his sentence.

  Rodrigo, who had been leaning over the bridge staring at the raging water below, straightened up and glared pointedly at Zophiel. ‘Murderers and thieves claim sanctuary in churches. Why not an innocent mother and child? Do you think that the birth of a baby pollutes the house of God more than the blood on the hands of a murderer?’

  Rodrigo still blamed Zophiel for Pleasance’s death. Whether she had taken her own life or had it taken from her was one and the same to him, Zophiel was responsible, of that he was certain.

  I tried to bring us back to the purpose before war broke out between them again.

  ‘Cygnus is right; there is no reason why as travellers we should not take shelter in a chapel for a few days. Consecrated or not, the Church permits it. But we still don’t know if it is safe to enter. We haven’t resolved what happened to the workmen. This work was stopped abruptly. Granted the chapel does not smell of death, but there is a chamber below it. If we find someone dead down there, it will be too late, we will already be exposed to the contagion.’

  Cygnus nodded. ‘Then I’ll go in alone and search the place. If someone lies dead in there, I’ll call out to you from inside and you must go on without me.’

  Rodrigo stepped between Cygnus and the chapel door, holding up his hands. ‘No, no, Camelot is right, if you stumble across a body, it will be the end for you. You heard Hugh at the glassworks, the woman they found in the village had died in agony. We cannot let you put yourself in such danger. If we cannot be sure it is safe, we should all go on.’

  ‘We are in danger at every turn at the road,’ said Cygnus. ‘We could walk into someone who is dead or dying round any corner. If we don’t take this chance there’s every possibility that Adela will have to give birth on the road. The baby could come at any time and we don’t know if we shall find anything better.’ He gestured to the road that led away from the bridge. There was not a house or barn within sight. Nothing but leafless trees and open scrubland lay in that direction as far as the eye could see and what lay beyond was concealed by the rise of a distant scarp. ‘We can’t risk going on for much longer.’

  He pulled the neck of his hood up over his mouth and nose and twisted it firmly in position. Then he thrust Rodrigo aside. We stood in the rain and waited.

  We all knew Cygnus was right. The business of
where Adela would give birth was becoming more pressing by the day. Although many women, of necessity, deliver their babies on the roadside, many women die there too, and Adela, for all her Saxon blood, had not the strength of a woman bred to such hardships. It was almost Christmas and as Cygnus said, the baby could come at any time. Jolting along in the wagon over washed-out roads, stones and potholes in the chilling rain was surely enough to open any woman’s womb. Adela had already begun to have the false pains which often precede labour and these had terrified her so much she had convinced herself that unless she found a midwife to help her when the time came, she would die in childbirth. Since Pleasance’s death, Adela’s spirits had sunk so low that not even Osmond could coax a smile from her, and despite his entreaties to eat, if not for her sake then for the baby’s, it was all she could do to swallow two or three mouthfuls. I began to fear that her dark forebodings would prove justified and she would not survive the birth.

  We had, several times, suggested taking her to a nunnery for the nuns have well-equipped infirmaries and great medical skill. Indeed, many wealthy women send for the nuns to assist them in their confinement. But at the mere suggestion of a nunnery, Adela became hysterical, shouting that she’d rather die on the road than go into such a place. I told her we weren’t suggesting that she took the veil, merely that she was delivered of her baby there, but to my great surprise even Osmond seemed vehemently opposed to the idea.

  So since neither could be persuaded to it, we had no other option but to look for an inn that was still open to travellers and prepared to take in a woman so obviously near her time. Most innkeepers are not, as we soon discovered. For as they told us, their other customers would soon be demanding their money back if they’d paid for a bed only to be kept awake all night by a woman screaming for hours. Then, they said, there’s the mess which someone has to clear up, as if their serving maids didn’t already have enough to do. And who’s going to pay for a ruined pallet, they’d like to know. Not to mention, they added, lowering their voices to a stage whisper, the trouble it brings if the woman dies. With things being as they are, no innkeeper wants it spread abroad that he has a dead body on his hands. They were not heartless men, but business is business in these troubled times.

  The last town we’d passed through, a mile or so back, had brought us no nearer to a solution. At first sight it had appeared promising. At least the town gates were wide open and the jovial gatekeeper refuted any suggestion of the pestilence having reached them. According to him, everyone was as fit as a flea inside. This hysteria about the pestilence was nothing but a pig’s fart. He wasn’t worried about being struck down, for only those with a guilty conscience need fear it and his own conscience was as clean as a newborn babe’s for he went to mass as often as any man could. He eyed Adela shrewdly and directed us to the Red Dragon, an inn near the main square, which he said was run by a decent enough old biddy who could brew a good drop of ale when she’d a mind to. She’d not turn anyone away, whatever their condition, if she was offered a little extra for her trouble. Had some friendly girls working for her too, he added, giving Zophiel a broad man-of-the-world wink. Our hopes rising, Zophiel led Xanthus through the gates.

  If every town has its own smell, this one was the stench of the midden. The main street was wide enough for a wagon to pass, but ankle-deep in slimy mud, and the open sewers were clogged with refuse, so that the foul water spilled out over the road. On either side of the main street, a maze of snickets and lanes ran between huddles of squalid wooden houses and workshops, their overhanging top storeys almost touching the house on the other side. These mean little alleys were so dark and cramped that daylight never reached into their depths, where pigs, dogs, chickens and children scavenged and fought among the piles of stinking rubbish. As soon as we entered the town, a mass of bow-legged urchins swarmed alongside the wagon begging for coins. Several of the bolder ones tried to clamber into the moving wagon to see what they could steal and it took several cuts of Zophiel’s long whip to send them packing.

  We found the Red Dragon Inn easily enough. It looked as filthy and neglected as the other buildings in the town and an unappetizing smell of sour ale and boiled cabbage hung about it. Despite the cold and rain, a girl lounged in the doorway. Her hair had tumbled from her cap and her kirtle was stiff with grease. There was a ring of sores around her mouth, though she was, as the gatekeeper had told us, friendly enough and her face lit up at the sight of us. She sauntered across the street, swinging her wide hips. Her gaze roved first to Zophiel, then to Rodrigo, Jofre and Osmond in turn as if deciding which to try her luck with. She seemed to conclude that Zophiel was the man in charge. With a saucy grin, she nudged him aside with her hip and caught hold of Xanthus’s bridle to lead her into the yard.

  ‘You come along with me, sir,’ she said. ‘Stable’s round back. I’ll show you.’

  But Zophiel seized her wrist and thrust her firmly aside, pulling Xanthus forward and leaving the disappointed girl shouting in our wake that the beds were clean and she’d warm them herself for us.

  ‘Zophiel, that was the Red Dragon we just passed,’ Osmond said, catching up with him. ‘Aren’t we stopping?’

  ‘Would you really have your wife give birth in there?’ Zophiel snapped. ‘If she did manage to survive the birth, she’d be dead within the week from the dirt and stench.’

  ‘It might have been better inside,’ Osmond said weakly.

  ‘If that slut had the cleaning of it, I very much doubt it.’

  Osmond looked up at the white-faced Adela, who was swaying from side to side with the movement of the wagon. Her eyes were closed and her forehead furrowed as if she was in pain.

  ‘There might be another inn or lodgings somewhere in the town, if we ask.’ Osmond sounded desperate.

  ‘Look around you, boy. The gatekeeper said they don’t have the pestilence, but that ignorant fool will still be denying it exists when they are slinging him into the burial pit. There could be a dozen dying already in the backrooms of those filthy houses and we’d not know it until it was too late. You and Adela can stay here if you want, but you’ll be on your own. Shall I stop and get her down? Because believe me, I’d be only too happy to leave both of you here.’

  Osmond dropped his gaze and shook his head.

  ∗

  Cygnus was inside the chantry for a long time. His examination of the chapel had not taken long, but then he called out that he was going down to the lower floor. We heard nothing more. Xanthus shifted restlessly in the shafts, her head down against the pouring rain. Strange how you seem to get wetter in the rain when you are standing than when you are walking, more conscious of the coldness seeping down your neck. Zophiel was impatient to move on, muttering that it would be God’s punishment if the boy did meet death in there after what he’d had the audacity to propose. Finally he turned and pulled on Xanthus’s bridle.

  ‘Come,’ he said coldly. ‘We are leaving.’

  Narigorm, curled up as usual in the well at the front of the wagon, lifted her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘It’s not time to leave yet.’

  Zophiel, furious now, ignored her and tried to pull the horse forward but Xanthus braced herself and refused to budge. She seemed to know that Cygnus was missing and was not going to take a step without him. Zophiel was reaching from the whip when there was a loud flapping above our heads and several pigeons flew out of the small bell tower. Minutes later, Cygnus’s head appeared at one of the small openings in the tower.

  ‘It’s safe,’ he called. ‘There’s no one here. I’ve searched everywhere.’

  Zophiel turned and stared hard at Narigorm, but she scrambled from the wagon and in a moment had disappeared though the chapel door.

  We followed her cautiously. It was cold and damp inside, colder even than standing outside on the bridge, but it was surprisingly light. On each of the three sides of the chapel were three square-headed windows, with smaller, higher windows on the east side. Niches were hollowed out round the w
alls which were intended one day to contain the figures of saints, perhaps of the Virgin Mary herself, but these had not yet been filled. At the east end of the chapel was a raised dais on which stood a stone altar elaborately carved with the five glorious mysteries of the Rosary. Unlike the carving on the outside of the building, these had been painted, the robes of the figures picked out in rich blues, greens, yellows and reds, and touches of gold. Directly behind the altar, wooden scaffolding had been erected against the wall on which the painting of a scene appeared almost complete, but the other walls of the chapel were as yet bare.

  To one side of the sanctuary was a door opening on to a narrow spiral staircase leading to the crypt below. It was smaller than the chapel and lit only by two loop windows high up on the wall. In one corner was a small angled recess containing a privy hole which emptied straight out over the river. A heavy door on the north wall led to the outside. When the river was lower there was probably a small island in the middle of the river to which the door gave access, a way into the chantry for people and supplies arriving by boat. But now the steps outside leading up to the door were all but covered by the turbulent water. If the river rose another foot, water would pour in under the door straight into the crypt.

  A few planks and trestles were scattered about the chamber, together with some empty flagons, barrels and a brazier with blackened pieces of wood and a few charred bird bones in the bottom. A heap of fine grey wood ash still lay in the pan beneath. Some old fowling nets and tangles of line heaped in the corner suggested that the workmen had supplemented their rations with whatever they could catch in the river. But other than this jetsam, the crypt was empty of furnishing.

  Although it was damper and colder than the chapel, we decided to both cook and sleep in the crypt. The brazier had evidently been brought in by boat through the crypt doorway and would not easily be carried up that narrow staircase. Cygnus also pointed out that the windows in the chapel had been designed to allow any light from candles inside to shine out over the approaches to the bridge, and while there was no good reason for travellers not to take shelter in a chantry, we did not want to draw attention to our presence at night, for who knew what vagabonds and cut-throats might be abroad?