The Law of Angels

by Cassandra Clark

  “It was the look on the leader’s face as his guts spilled out…” she whispered when she managed to speak. “His awareness that it was all over. I felt such compassion for him but there was nothing I could do. Not one thing. The rest of it was horrific. An atrocity. No standards of civilised feeling. No humanity. Broken skulls. Brains revealed, still pulsing. The sound of swords grinding through bone. The horror. And for what? To stop a group of people with no real power thinking and speaking the truth as they see it?”

  Another thought surfaced, based on something Hubert de Courcy had told her during that strange, revelatory night of vigil in Beverley Minster last year.

  He confessed that he had been a knight in the service of a French duke before he became a monk. “I have killed men,” he had told her. She saw his face in her imagination now. The horror in his eyes. I have killed men.

  She lifted her head. “I can’t make sense of it at present, Ulf. To hear stories of battle is one thing. Chivalry. The glory of it. All the glitter and romance. But to witness it is different. It’s brutal. I can never feel the same again.”

  He looked down at her in consternation.

  “Go now, if you will.” She touched the back of his hand. “I need to think about it. Don’t worry about me. No one will come looking for the cross here. I’m sure the rebels—the one or two who survived—have more pressing concerns on their minds just now. They won’t risk showing themselves in York. No one else will know that I was present. Whoever was pulling the strings probably wanted only to exterminate a cell of the brotherhood. Constantine’s Cross was merely the lure to that end.”

  When he saw she was determined to stay where she was, he reluctantly took his leave.

  After he left, for once the yard was empty. It seemed to pulse with heat, the sun a small, burning disc in a cloudless sky.

  Agnetha and Thomas had gone back to their duties earlier and the widow was out visiting in the town somewhere. Baldwin and Julitta were inside their house with the shutters across.

  Even Edric had retreated indoors to the cool of the workshop and could be seen sprawling there, half-cut, in Dorelia’s chair next to the cold kiln, another flagon of wine at his feet. Gilbert, at work on the vidimus, was visible as a patch of silvery light in the window of the otherwise shadowless grey of the workshop.

  She had reassured Ulf that the surviving rebels would have more pressing matters on their minds than the cross. Now she was alone with her fears she was not so sure. And there was Bolingbroke to consider.

  She recalled that flash of light from the vessel in the bay. There had been no ensign. It was a ship that could have belonged to anyone, to any fleet. It was a fact, however, that no one had made much of a search for the cross in the aftermath of that surprise attack.

  The few survivors had given only a cursory inspection of the battle scene. Once they had dealt with their dead they had set off by way of the carters’ track over the moor. She had seen them leave. It suggested that they were taking the same long route back to the camp.

  And yet, according to Roger, they had not returned there. He and his men had met no one on the road from York, and when, following Danby’s instructions, they had found the camp it had been deserted.

  The surviving rebels had probably turned north, maybe hiding out in the woods again, maybe even making for Durham where they might expect to find a safe house in the wake of the magister.

  Hildegard was familiar with the moors. She had crossed back to York by the narrow trail that was used by travellers unencumbered by carts. The moorland eventually gave way to the vast tract of royal forest known as Pickering Vale. There was a well-fortified castle on a rise in the middle of it. It commanded a view over the forest for the purpose of keeping the king’s deer safe from poachers. She had avoided it. It belonged to John of Gaunt.

  It occurred to her that any survivors with an affinity with Gaunt’s son would probably make for Pickering Castle. There they were sure to find food, shelter and a change of horses.

  She was convinced no one had followed her by the less well known route she had taken.

  If, however, Bolingbroke’s men were in fact looking for the cross, they might now turn their attention to the place where information could be more easily picked up.

  To the nearest town of any consequence.

  To York.

  Ulf was right. There was no protection here.

  * * *

  The town stables were situated down Walmgate and conveniently next to them were the kennels. As soon as she appeared in the yard the kennelman hurried up to Hildegard with a look of relief. “Am I glad to see you, sister. We had a bit of trouble early on—”

  “What, with my hounds?” she demanded in astonishment.

  One of the kennel lads stood grinning nearby. “Not their fault, sister,” he broke in. “They’re fine characters.”

  His master gave him a scowl. “You speak when you’re spoken to. Nobody wants your opinion.”

  The lad didn’t wipe the grin off his face but he kept his mouth shut to allow his master to tell Hildegard what had happened. “Some visitors came roaring in here this morning asking about hiring a brace of hounds to help ’em fetch back an absconding servant, and your two animals were out in the yard being exercised by that grinning young devil and they nearly had his arm off, trying to get at ’em. I can’t be having my customers frightened off by undisciplined animals—”

  “I’ve come to take them anyway,” she told him, not wasting time by trying to defend them. “I never intended for them to be here for so long. Can we settle up now?”

  “Gladly.” He cuffed the grinning lad on the head as he passed him on the way into his office. It was a lean-to shed on the side of the kennel compound. When, business done, Hildegard came out, the lad was still there.

  “So you got on all right with my hounds, did you?”

  He nodded. “Sorry to see them leave, sister.” He eyed them both as if they were old friends and they returned the look with kindness.

  Hildegard pondered the three for a moment. “Mm, well…” She couldn’t think of any particular use she could make of his enthusiasm. “These fellows they took exception to, what were they like?”

  “Usual swaggering types with big money-pouches, sister. One had a hawk on his arm.”

  “Maybe it was the hawk my hounds didn’t like?”

  He pushed his hands in the pockets of a rather grubby tunic and, evidently unconvinced, kicked a stone. “Mebbe.”

  “What would your master say if I asked to hire you to help with these beasts for a few days?”

  He looked up with shining eyes and demanded eagerly, “Might you think of asking him then to find out?”

  One of the swarm of children who ran about the town, he was unkempt, skinny with lack of regular meals and destined to a life of servitude. That was the best he could expect. The worst was to lose his work and have to beg with all the unpleasant consequences that would entail.

  His master’s eyes gleamed as he pocketed his fee and willingly gave him leave to go. The lad himself almost danced along as he accompanied Hildegard and the hounds back to Stonegate.

  * * *

  Danby was surprisingly coherent when she appeared at his door with a request. “Plenty of room in that back kitchen of mine for a little’un. Let him curl up on a pile of straw with my kitchen lad.” He eyed the hounds. “They’ll look after you. Is that the idea?”

  “I thought they would be no problem out here in the yard,” she told him.

  He nodded. “Take the lad through if you like. See if it suits.”

  To Hildegard’s surprise the workshop opened out into a substantial living chamber with a brick-arched fireplace at one end. An old woman was bent over a cooking pot and a small boy was chopping something on a wooden board close by. Straw bedding jutted from an alcove near the fire. Through the window was a parched-looking garden enclosed on all sides by the backs of other houses.

  “This all right for you, young Ki
t?” she asked her new kennel lad.

  “Better’n what master has.” He went over to the small boy, slipped out his knife from his belt and without being asked, started to help him with the chores.

  “I’ll call you when I need you.”

  The old woman hadn’t looked up once.

  Danby beckoned when she came out. He led the way to the inner workshop and invited her inside. For once Gilbert was not at his bench. He closed the door.

  “I went over to Stapylton while you were gone. It sounded urgent, what he had to tell me.”

  “Yes?”

  “He thinks Gilbert set fire to his workshop.”

  Hildegard frowned. “I thought that was the way his thoughts were wending. What would make him think that?”

  Danby was grim. “Gilbert was there, down below by himself, while we were talking guild business t’other morning. Then we leave. Then the fire starts.”

  “But why would he want to set the place on fire? Does he have a grudge against Stapylton?”

  “I can’t see why he should. No, it’s more than that. At least, this is Stapylton’s thinking.”

  Danby seemed to be finding it difficult to get things straight in his mind and he went over to the bench and gazed down for a moment at Gilbert’s meticulous and graceful drawings. His expression was sad and the words seemed to be forced from him.

  “I told Stapylton that we’re all on the same side. Gilbert wouldn’t cause malicious damage. I told him that and do you know what he said? He said: ‘These young hotheads, who knows what they won’t do in the name of the cause? They see us as old has-beens, waiting patiently for a change that will never come. We’re on the same side as far as our hopes go, but they’re impatient with our methods. They have no faith in us.’”

  Danby gave her a bleak glance. “So, after that, it’s in my mind that Gilbert might be willing to put lives on the line in the mistaken belief it’s going to further our aims.”

  “Lives?”

  Danby nodded. “Anybody’s—and maybe even his own.”

  Hildegard went to the window.

  Her hounds were lying in the shade next to a bowl of water. Duchess had her head between her paws and her ears over her eyes and Bermonda was sitting upright as if on guard. They took it in turns. First one, then the other. In the manner of wolves. The sun was beating down without mercy. There was no breeze at all. She decided she would take them to the river to allow them to cool down. While this was running through her mind, her thoughts were going over what Danby had just told her.

  When she turned round he was touching the edge of the whitewashed trestle marked out with Gilbert’s drawing. He wore an expression of such deep sadness her heart turned over.

  When he felt her watching him his head jerked up. “It’s a powerful thing when it happens. When it happens twice in as many days it can break a man.” He touched the region of his heart.

  “Betrayal is difficult to live with. But don’t lose faith just yet. Gilbert may have no thought of violence,” she told him. “This is only the master chandler’s guesswork.”

  “What do we do? Wait and see? Let more folk be burned to death?” He gave her a swift glance. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “What?”

  “That market trader they dragged free. He died yesterday. Still raving about crocodiles, they say.”

  Hildegard felt a pang of grief. She had almost forgotten him in the sequence of events that had taken place since she had last seen him at St. Leonard’s. “I think I know why he was talking about crocodiles. It was because he knew the fire was started in the puppet booth. You know there’s a crocodile in one of those little plays?”

  Danby nodded. “That’s it, is it? He was trying to warn us. Meanwhile, I worry. Where is Gilbert now? Is he setting another fire somewhere where he’ll kill and maim many more? Does he imagine he’s going to persuade folks to his views that way?”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He sits in the minster, he tells me. Looking at glass. Learning from the ancestors, he calls it.”

  “I saw him there the other day.”

  “Aye, the other day. But who does he meet there? Some fellow conspirator? And what’s more to the point, where is he now?”

  “I’ll go along to the minster and have a look. Even if he sees me he’ll have no reason to suspect I’m looking for him.”

  Danby’s eyes brightened for a moment. “It would set my mind at rest, sister. If I go chasing along there he’ll know there’s a reason and maybe it’ll put him on his guard.”

  Hildegard called her hounds. Duchess stood up and shook herself. Bermonda stretched her forepaws along the ground. Then they followed her obediently out of the yard. From now on she would go nowhere without their protection.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The great metal studded doors stood open. It was as busy here as in every other part of town. Strangers stood goggle-eyed in the nave. The soaring pillars drew exclamations of astonishment from those who had never been here before. They stood gazing up, lost in its grandeur, easy prey for pickpockets.

  A few craftsmen from other districts discussed the manner in which the columns must have been built and the possibility of them toppling to the ground should God so decree. A child hid itself underneath its mother’s mantle and peeped upwards with bedazzled eyes.

  Hildegard was used to the place. Even so, when she glanced up, she felt her spirits soar just as the columns soared. It was magnificent work. It made Gilbert’s visits here understandable. The glass within the slender windows dazzled with brilliant hues, shedding patterns of glowing ruby, sapphire and emerald over the flagstones and scattering the upturned, awestruck faces of the visitors with jewelled light.

  A hurried glance, however, showed no sign of Gilbert sitting in front of the windows, nor anywhere else within the building.

  Heart sinking a little, she walked slowly between the pillars with her hounds at her heels. She reached the end near the high altar then turned back. No one with that striking shade of hair was standing in front of the grisaille glass in the north transept. No one was sitting under the bell window nor anywhere else. She let herself out through the south door.

  The streets were full of angels.

  All shapes and sizes, young and old, they paraded in giggling bevies of a dozen or more, white robes trailing or hitched under glittering belts, wings folded or flaunted with pride and great inconvenience to everyday mortals making their way round the town. Hildegard circumvented these gorgeous obstructions until she reached the yard leading into Danby’s workshop.

  There she hesitated.

  More bad news might set off his drinking again. She saw the tablet of glass in his hand. Its cutting edge. Its dagger-like point. Its stain as dark as blood.

  She decided to hold off for a while. Give him a chance to strengthen again. It was still possible that Gilbert was on some innocent errand, that she had missed him in the packed crowds.

  She poked her head into the yard, caught a glimpse of Danby working alone in the workshop, confirmed that Gilbert hadn’t returned by a different route then, without being seen, went back into the street.

  She would set about finding him and if she couldn’t find him she would do what she had intended to do earlier. She would take her hounds for a bathe in the river before they expired in the heat.

  * * *

  Gilbert had vanished, just like Jankin and Dorelia. And yet, like them, his presence seemed everywhere. She looked in several churches where she knew there was good glass, but there was no sign of him. Praying that Danby and Stapylton were wrong in their suspicions she eventually headed towards the river with the feeling that she had done as much as she could.

  It was as crowded on the bank of the Ouse near Lendal as elsewhere in town. The heat had sent droves of people into the water. She strolled along, looking for a quiet spot where she could release the hounds, passing St. Leonard’s, going out farther to where the meadows began with thei
r hundreds of small encampments. Evidently people were still pouring in for the festival, and even in the stifling heat cooking fires were being stoked. Billows of woodsmoke drifted at the foot of the walls.

  Managing to find a shelving slope on the river bank that was less crowded she released the hounds from their chains. Duchess plunged into the water at once and began to swim strongly into midstream. Bermonda ran in and out at the water’s edge, daring herself to go little by little into ever deeper water until finally she launched herself in with delighted little yips.

  A crowd of children were playing nearby and she watched them enviously, dogs and children, wishing she could go for a swim herself. One of the boys was wading out to his waist, reaching for something floating on the water. It was a flotilla of white feathers and it made Hildegard imagine the miller upstream wringing the neck of one of his geese for his Corpus Christi dinner table.

  The boy splashed back to his companions with a shout of triumph, holding one of the feathers aloft. The others circled and tried to snatch it away but he ran, laughing, up the bank to store it in a little cache of treasures in the grass.

  Duchess swam back to shore and gave Hildegard the shower she desired. Laughing, she shook the water from her kirtle. Bermonda came up and did the same. She sat on the bank and spread the skirt of her habit to dry.

  It was a rare moment of peace after the horrors of recent events and, tired out after the hard ride over the moors, she allowed her eyelids to close. Little by little the tension of fear began to drain from her limbs. From far off came the shouts of children at play, and deeper and closer than that was the lulling murmur of conversation from around the campfires.

  Gradually the sound of distant singing detached itself from the rest. High and clear, it became louder as the singers approached. Stirring from her slumbers Hildegard imagined it must be a company of pageant players coming up from the meadows where rehearsals were sometimes held. After a moment or two she recognised it as the little dirge the children had been singing when she had arrived in York with Maud and Petronilla, an age ago.