Blood Moon

by Stephen Wheeler

  ‘Oh don’t look so shocked,’ said my mother, eyeing me. ‘You knew - you must have known.’

  I shook my head. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Then you’re an even bigger fool than I took you for. Even Joseph had an inkling.’

  ‘He never said anything to me.’

  ‘Probably because he knew you and that you’d disapprove.’ She looked askance at me. ‘You do disapprove, don’t you?’

  Did I? I didn’t reply.

  ‘The letter,’ I said quietly. ‘The one you had me take to Hugh Northwold. The letter that was no letter but a blank sheet of parchment.’

  ‘A necessary precaution,’ she sniffed. ‘Regrettable - but necessary.’

  She looked at me expecting me to understand - but I didn’t.

  ‘Hugh is sympathetic to our cause,’ she explained, ‘but he would not join us. He would not betray us either. So it was better he was kept completely out of it. If he’d known about the meeting in the abbey he would have felt duty-bound to tell the king, whatever his sympathies, and withdrawn his candidacy for abbot of Saint Edmunds. We couldn’t let that happen. We need men like him in high places.’

  ‘And you thought I would go to him with what I knew. So you had to discredit me in his eyes.’

  She had the good grace to look ashamed. ‘You have to understand - greater things are at stake than any one man’s sensibilities.’

  ‘I am not any man, I am your son. Could you not have trusted me?’

  ‘Would you have joined us?’ she asked.

  My king or my friends?

  When I didn’t reply she smiled wryly and nodded. I looked down at the document on the table. It was quite a thing. I’d witnessed many a charter in my time but never one quite like this. It was written in Latin and in a very fine hand but my eyesight was not what it once was. Realising this, my mother brought out her own reading stone and laid it on top of the document. It magnified the letters four-fold so I could read them. Each line I saw contained a clause, each numbered.

  ‘See that one?’ she said pointing half way down the document. ‘That’s mine.’

  ‘You sponsored it?’ I asked.

  I wrote it,’ she said proudly.

  Why didn’t that surprise me? ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Read it yourself. It is to do with the rights of widows to marry whom they please and not who the king dictates.’

  ‘But that’s absurd! No woman has ever had such a right. The king -’

  ‘The king!’ she snorted. ‘The king, the king - do you know what that little mongrel wanted me to do? Marry some Limousine low-life. Me, whose forebears came over with the Conqueror when the Angevin counts were still copulating with rabbits.’

  ‘So, it’s just an old woman’s petulance,’ I said dismissing the document with a wave of my hand.

  ‘Don’t be impertinent!’ she snapped. ‘Some of the finest minds in England worked on this.’

  ‘What of the rest of it?’

  ‘Legal matters.’

  I nodded. ‘Money you mean.’

  She shot me a look of anger. ‘No, I’ll tell you what it is. It is to do with the rights of every Englishman to live in freedom as his forefathers did. Rights they once had by natural law. Rights stolen from them by greedy and avaricious kings.’

  ‘Every Englishman did you say?’

  ‘Every Englishman - and Englishwoman.’

  ‘Even the common folk?’

  ‘Well now, I don’t know about that,’ she smirked. ‘Let’s ask them, shall we?’ She stepped aside to reveal Onethumb and Rosabel standing meekly behind her.

  Throughout our sniping my two friends had remained silent. Once again I’d forgotten they were there. I don’t know how seriously my mother would take their opinion, but if by suddenly thrusting them forward she expected to intimidate them, then she didn’t know my Rosabel. Onethumb could not speak - so Rosabel did for them both.

  For a long moment she said nothing. But finally she did speak, and when she did I thought I could hear the voice of every English-born man and woman, high and low, throughout the world.

  ‘Kings come and kings go,’ she mused reflectively. ‘But it seems to me little changes when they do. We ordinary folk live and let-live, work and die and pay our dues. Whoever governs over us, it’s all one to us.’

  She fingered the corner of the document laid out on the table before her.

  ‘I don’t know what’s written here but whatever it is, will it feed my son? Will it give back the crops stolen from us when armies march across our fields, or rebuild the houses they torch?’ She turned to smile at Onethumb and gently stroked his cheek. ‘Will it restore my husband’s speech or his hand so he can caress me at night? If not, then I don’t see what it has to do with me.’

  That’s my prickly rosebud, I thought. If nothing else she managed to silence my mother - something I’ve never achieved. But while she was speaking another thought had struck me.

  ‘This project you are building - it is at a critical stage,’ I said to my mother. ‘One loose word now could pull it down – am I right?’

  ‘You won’t get the opportunity.’

  ‘I’ve done it once. Even your friend Geoffrey de Saye only just managed to stop me. And now that I know the full extent of your treachery I have an even greater incentive to alert the king. Who’s to say this time I won’t succeed?’

  ‘What do you want, Walter?’

  I thought for a minute. ‘I want you to include in your charter some easement for those living under the forest law.’

  I was thinking, of course, of Gil and his friends. But if I thought I was going to make a contribution to the Great Matter I was sadly mistaken. My mother merely smiled smugly and waved her hand over the document like a conjurer performing a trick.

  ‘Your request is as by magic fulfilled.’

  She placed the reading stone over another clause in the document. I leaned over to read it. Like everything else in the charter the clause was written principally to favour the barons who drafted it, but it did appear to offer some relief for those living under this malicious law - too late to help Gil and his friends, alas, for they had by force of circumstance committed too many more “crimes” to be absolved. But it might ease the condition of others that come after them.

  ‘Your friend Geoffrey seems to have thought of everything,’ I acknowledged grudgingly. ‘But there is one other issue that we still have not addressed. The small matter of a murdered maid.’

  My mother shook her head vehemently. ‘No, son Walter. He had had nothing to do with that. I have his oath on it.’

  ‘And the word of Geoffrey de Saye is to be believed?’

  ‘No. Brother Clementius’s here.’

  For the first time I took notice of the anonymous monk who all the while had been standing quietly in the corner listening and saying nothing. I now turned to him with curiosity, and as I did so a memory came to me.

  ‘Dominic mentioned a brother was looking for me. I thought he meant one of Prior Herbert’s men, but he meant you didn’t he? What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘My name is Clementius,’ said the man.

  I nodded. ‘A Latinized form. Unusual amongst us Benedictines. But then you’re not a Benedictine, are you? Your robes - you’re a Gilbertine.’

  ‘Clementius came to the abbey to warn you,’ said my mother. ‘But he was too late. You had already left.’

  ‘Warn me? Warn me of what?’

  There was a sudden thump on the floor above our heads.

  My mother looked up at the ceiling and drew in her breath. ‘Raoul and Adelle!’

  I swung round to her. ‘You mean they’re here?’

  ‘Of course they’re here,’ she snapped. ‘Where else did you think they were?’

  The door burst open and Oswald appeared in the frame, his face as white as a sheet. ‘Oh Master Walter, sir, come quickly! The boy!’

  No time for questions, we all raced from the room and up the stairs
– me, Oswald, Onethumb, Rosabel and Clementius. But for once I was the first. When I got to the top of the stairs I stopped abruptly as though hitting an invisible wall of stone. There in the middle of the landing was Eusebius. He was standing in much the same attitude as he had been in the cloister before the statue of the Virgin: Arms outstretched in the shape of a cross and dressed in the same robes as Clementius had downstairs but with his white cloak and hood still attached. His face was contorted with…what? Euphoria? Enlightenment?

  ‘Eusebius!’ I gasped. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I did it, Master Walter. Look, I have done as you said. I have cut out the offending sin. He cannot despoil again. I am the kindred of the Angels, I am the destroyer of darkness, the refresher. I am the White Angel!’

  He held up his hands. Both were dripping blood, the right one clutching a knife, the other clutching…I reeled backwards for there was no mistaking the thing he holding in his left hand. Without thinking, I clasped my own two hands together and brought them down smartly onto Eusebius’s forehead knocking him to the ground. Then I ran into the room where Raoul de Gray was crouching in the corner. I dropped to my knees before him and turned him over. But apart from a few smudges of blood on his face and hands he seemed fine.

  ‘I don’t understand. I thought -’

  ‘Not me,’ Raoul said trembling. ‘Him!’

  Him? Who was he pointing to? The only other person in the room was Adelle. But then I saw she was lying on top of the bed and drenched in blood. The Lady Adelle - but not Adelle.

  There was no time for questions or explanations. The life blood was rapidly draining out of her. I ripped off the clothing to expose the wound, the most ghastly butchery I’d ever seen in all my years as a physician. Behind me Onethumb and Rosabel were staring motionless, paralysed and fascinated at the same time.

  ‘Sheets!’ I barked. ‘Blankets - anything you can find.’

  They both continued to stare without moving.

  ‘Onethumb!’ I yelled earnestly. ‘I need you to concentrate. This wound has to be stopped or he will die.’

  Still he did not move.

  ‘Onethumb!’

  Rosabel was the first to come to her senses. She punched Onethumb on the arm and continued punching him until he shook himself and then they both rushed out of the room together. But the blood continued to pump out of Adelle’s body so fast it was going to be impossible to staunch. I could see it was hopeless.

  I knew then that I had but moments to act.

  ‘Quickly,’ I said to Adelle. ‘Do you confess of your sins and acknowledge Christ as your Saviour? – say “I do”.’

  She moaned something incoherent and I made the sign of the Cross over her.

  ‘Then having come freely of your own will to Christ Jesus, by the power vested in me as priest ordained in the only true living Church I grant you absolution in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’

  I clutched Adelle’s body tightly in my arms and rocked backwards and forward and prayed as I had never prayed before:

  ‘Please, please, dear God, for the love of your only son our saviour Jesus Christ grant this child your salvation and accept him to your bosom. I beg you, I beg you - I beg you!’

  Adelle was dead before Onethumb and Rosabel could return.

  Chapter 27

  …AND EXPLANATIONS

  For the sake of their sanity I sent the others out of the room. No-one should have to witness such bestial carnage, least of all an innocent young girl like Rosabel. Eusebius had been bound and quickly bundled off to the stables to be guarded by some of our farm workers, Brother Clementius with them, while I remained with body until a local priest arrived. When I finally made it downstairs again I was still trembling.

  ‘Here,’ said my mother handing me a goblet.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Brandywine. It will steady your nerves.’

  It was not a drink I knew but I gulped it down just the same coughing at the fumes. When I looked round at the assembled company I got the distinct impression they knew something I didn’t.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I kept saying. ‘I just don’t understand.’

  ‘You will,’ said my mother patting my shoulder. ‘But first, let me introduce you to Thomas.’

  I looked at the young man she was indicating. ‘But you’re Raoul,’ I said pointing stupidly at him.

  ‘No,’ said my mother. ‘That was Raoul, upstairs. This young man is Thomas, Raoul’s manservant.’

  I pointed up at the ceiling. ‘That was Adelle.’

  But my mother shook her head impatiently. ‘There was no Adelle. Adelle was a fiction. The person you thought of as Adelle de Gray was really Raoul de Gray.’

  ‘You mean Adelle isn’t… I mean she wasn’t…’

  ‘A girl? No, he wasn’t.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because Raoul had a secret.’

  I gave a snort. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Not that sort of secret. Something far graver.’

  I shook my head. ‘No no no. She had a baby. I saw it - I delivered it.’

  ‘No you didn’t. You said so yourself - you arrived a few minutes later. Frankly I’m surprised you missed it, great physician that you are.’

  Missed it? Yes, I’d missed it all right. But how did I miss it? I’d met Adelle twice – no, three times. Ah yes, but always in a darkened room, always modestly veiled, and always from several feet away. And she never spoke, I realised now, not once except to say the baby’s name. I had vaguely wondered about that but never thought to question it before. Now I could see why. But I wasn’t the only one to be deceived: Prior Herbert, Guest-master Gregor, the gatekeeper and the gaoler – we were all duped. Weren’t we?

  ‘You weren’t though, were you?’ I said to her. ‘You knew. Even when I was here last time, you knew and yet you said nothing.’

  My mother lowered her eyes. ‘I couldn’t. You’d have alerted him. I know you, Walter. You could never keep a secret, you haven’t the guile. And we had to convince him his disguise was working. If you believed it, the chances were he would too.’

  ‘But why was he even in disguise?’ I asked somewhat peeved.

  ‘Because of who he was, of course.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start all that again.’

  She pursed her lips. ‘All right. But you have to understand, he knew about the…the…’

  ‘Rebellion?’

  She stiffened. ‘Had he been able to warn his uncle, Bishop de Gray would have alerted the king and then everything we have worked for – everything we have been trying to achieve since John came to the throne - would have been for nothing. We couldn’t risk that.’

  ‘So you had him arrested.’

  ‘We had no choice.’

  ‘I see. And what were you going to do with him? Kill him?’

  ‘There was never any question of that,’ she insisted tapping her stick impatiently on the floor. ‘We merely wanted to hold him, prevent him getting to his uncle.’

  ‘But he escaped, and you sent your rat-catcher de Saye to fetch him back.’

  Here she gave a wry smile. ‘Actually it was Archbishop Langton who asked Geoffrey to find Raoul. The ironic thing is it really didn’t matter anymore. Bishop John was already dead. He died a month ago at the Abbey Saint-Jean-d’Angély in Poitou. We only just heard. It seems the journey to Rome proved too much for him.’

  ‘How convenient,’ I smirked. ‘I suppose it didn’t occur to you that the good bishop might be yet another of de Saye’s victims?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Oh mother, open your eyes. You know the sort of man de Saye is. Good God, if he can murder a harmless old woman whose only crime was to offer sanctuary to -’

  I stopped. I hadn’t intended mentioning Mother Han’s murder, not until I knew for certain that she was dead. But now the cat was out of the bag. I looked at Onethumb who was gazing back at me with silent horror.

 
‘My friend I’m sorry, I should have told you before. I believe Mother Han is dead, most likely at the hand of Geoffrey de Saye.’

  ‘That is a very serious accusation,’ said my mother gravely. ‘I hope you can substantiate it.’

  I turned on her angrily. ‘For once I think I can.’ I fumbled in my belt-pouch. ‘This,’ I said retrieving the little silver knife I’d secreted there, ‘I found at Mother Han’s hovel – or what was left of it. Proof undeniable of Geoffrey de Saye’s murderous activities. It even has his insignia on it – GdeS - Geoffrey de Saye.’ I held the knife up triumphantly for all to see.

  Brother Clementius, who had quietly come back into the room, now stepped forward. ‘May I see the knife?’ he asked. I handed it to him. He studied it carefully. ‘This is a pen-knife. It is used for trimming the ends of writing quills.’

  ‘Well there you are, then,’ scoffed my mother. ‘What would a man like Geoffrey de Saye want with a pen-knife? I doubt he can write his own name.’

  ‘Then explain the monogram,’ I demanded.

  ‘GdeS,’ said Clementius thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. ‘Not Geoffrey de Saye. Gilbert de Sempringham, the founder of our order. This is Eusebius’s knife.’ He put it down, took out another from where it hung around his neck and placed it alongside the first. They were identical.

  My jaw dropped open. ‘B-but the knight - the White Angel,’ I stammered. ‘How -?’