“I’m not sure I understand how those crossbow-men set fire to Stapylton’s workshop and the booths,” Hildegard said as they splashed through the puddles in Stonegate.
“I’ve had my ear to the ground,” replied Theophilus. “It was the work of a free-lance. They simply capitalised on it. They themselves had something bigger in mind as we nearly witnessed.”
Gilbert frowned. “Who set those smaller fires then?”
“It was the work of that fellow working for the sisters of the Holy Wounds, a fanatic, over from a house in Flanders—”
“Matthias?” Hildegard exclaimed. “He blames his mother superior. He says he was only obeying orders.”
“But why Stapylton?” Gilbert asked.
“The Corpus Christi candles,” Hildegard suggested.
“And he hoped the White Hart fellows would be blamed because that’s what happened in London during the Rising.” Gilbert wrinkled his nose.
“I doubt whether he could work out a bluff like that for himself,” said Hildegard. “He needed someone to suggest the idea to him.”
She recalled the virulence of the mother superior when she tried to prevent Maud, her little martyr, escaping her control. It was easy to see how she could have instructed Matthias to act on her behalf, or at least put the idea into his befuddled head.
“And then the bowmen joined forces for what was to be their final killing attack. There would have been no bluffing then.” It had come to be known that a river man had been commissioned to provide a boat so that the bowmen could escape by water when the town went up in flames.
Theophilus came to a halt in the shelter of the archway leading into the yard. Rain was still gurgling in the gutter down the middle of the street. “I’ve already had a message from Wakefield, you know. Dorelia’s betrothed is fetching a char in order to take her home. He’s going to be a lad of some means himself now he’s finished his apprenticeship as a goldsmith. He wants to take Dorelia back as I knew he would.”
“Will she regain her inheritance?”
Theophilus shook his head. “I doubt it. But some of us are determined to do our best for her. The law may yet be used for good. But you know what it’s like—it could drag on for years. And no doubt Baldwin’s wife will deny all knowledge of receiving any gain from the transaction.”
“She may have to explain where her husband got such a large and costly jewel from,” murmured Hildegard, suspecting now that it was genuine after all.
“He made a good living from his trade in girls,” said Gilbert.
“Poor Danby,” she said. “He’ll be heartbroken over that and heartbroken when Dorelia leaves him.”
“It might bring him to his senses,” said Gilbert. “He’s got a little daughter who’s been having visions of the Virgin Mary and creating a great furore down by the camps.” He turned to Hildegard. “You saw her on the river bank that evening when I first pointed Baldwin out to you on his way to the mill.”
“In the little boy-bishop’s procession?”
“The girl was Danby’s daughter. Remember when Dorelia said she tried to escape and a child saw her in the woods? That was Lucy. It must have been too much for her to understand so she convinced herself she’d had a vision.”
“Poor child.” Hildegard’s voice was full of pity.
The mage said that seemed to tie things up and that he now intended to transfer as much silver as possible from other people’s money-pouches into his own before they wasted what little they had left on ale. With a bow he turned to go.
“Wait a minute!” Gilbert had heard about the miraculous flame the mage had made appear. “How did you do it?” he asked.
The mage tapped the side of his nose. “I have a friend in Outremer.”
* * *
Hildegard and Gilbert went back to the yard. The guards outside Baldwin’s cottage were in some turmoil as they approached. For a moment she thought Baldwin must have escaped.
“Sister!” one of them shouted when he saw her. He hurried over. Rain was trickling down his face. “It’s the prisoner. He’s been taken bad. Can you come?”
With Gilbert at her heels they squelched across the puddled yard, bending their heads under the lintel of Baldwin’s front door.
He was lying on the floor in the kitchen, still wearing his manacles, and writhing about as if in pain. One of the guards was looking doubtful and his companion was holding him back saying, “It might be a trick. You can’t unlock him. He’s a cunning bastard. This is probably all a show so he can escape!”
Mistress Julitta was sitting calmly on a bench against the wall. When Hildegard asked her what was going on she shrugged and made no comment.
Hildegard bent down to put a hand on Baldwin’s forehead and found it burning to the touch, but there was nothing she could do without knowing what had caused his collapse. It was certainly no fakery. She opened his jerkin and at once closed it again.
She stood up. On the table was a half eaten bowl of pottage. She went over to it, sniffed it, scooped some onto a spoon and inspected it by the light of the window. She gave Julitta a glance. The woman stared brazenly back.
“Did Baldwin eat this?” she asked the guards.
“Took half a dozen mouthfuls,” one of them replied. “Is it poisoned?”
“Not exactly.”
Just then Baldwin gave another great roar of pain and thrashed wildly from side to side clutching his stomach. There was blood coming from his mouth and a terrible stench filled the chamber. Before anybody could think what to do for him he arched his back and, with a piercing scream collapsed as if felled.
Julitta got up from her place by the wall and went to stand over him. She did not speak. After a moment she bent down and unclasped the silver chain carrying the jewel from around his neck. Without a word she pushed it inside her bodice and went out.
Hildegard picked up the mortar from the sill. A few shards of glass still glinted at the bottom.
* * *
“As one might say, all’s well,” commented Gilbert harshly when they eventually took their leave.
Hildegard had explained to him what she thought had happened. The coroner had been called as a matter of urgency but had not yet arrived. The guards remained.
He turned to Hildegard. “If you don’t need me I’m going to sit with Dorelia for a while.”
“What about the play you’re in?” she asked.
“Four lines? They can surely get somebody else to mouth them for the last couple of stations. They’ve got my wings, those glued together paper feathers. Let somebody else put them on and play the fool!”
She noticed that when he went upstairs he left his pattern book and charcoal in the workshop. It was not to be a working visit then but social.
As for Baldwin, when she had bent down to see what ailed him a small piece of vellum on a cord lay next to his heart. On it was a drawing of Dorelia.
Julitta had seen it. That’s when their eyes had met.
As Petronilla might have said, the angels punished him according to their law.
And none shall escape.
* * *
Around midnight Hildegard dragged herself out of her chamber at the Widow Roberts’s house in Danby’s yard to see what was happening in the town. Gilbert saw her leaving and came out to join her.
After the storm the night was clear and cool. A moon rode high shedding a silvery light over the roofs. In the narrow streets the crowds were as thick as ever but they had mellowed now, exhausted after a day of indulgence.
A massive audience was gathering round the final pageant on Pavement. Master Stapylton and his guild had done well by the onlookers. The stage was ablaze with candles and on all sides hundreds of little flames glimmered like stars as if the heavens themselves had fallen to earth. Their soft glow lit up the faces of the people nearest the stage, gilding signs of poverty and ill health, of grief, pain, lack of hope and all the ills of being human, and for this short time everyone was bathed in their benediction.
Gilbert found a place at the back for them both, close to where Kit and Danby’s kitchen boy were sitting on a wall from where they could watch the final scene of judgement. As they arrived Agnetha slipped in beside them. “I knew you’d come. I’ve been watching out for you. There’s Roger’s steward with Maud,” she whispered. “Look, down near the front.”
Ulf, with Maud perched on his shoulders, her hood back, her face alight, was attended by a retinue of de Hutton retainers with Petronilla in their midst. Their faces were turned to the candle-lit stage.
It was Judgement Day.
With anguished howls the bad souls were pitch-forked into the mouth of hell. The good souls were lifted up by choirs of angels to a life of eternal bliss. And God intoned his final lines:
“Now is fulfilled all my forethought
For ended is all earthly thing—”
Gilbert caught Hildegard’s eye. She thought he might be thinking of Jankin. Of Dorelia. Of his own strange and powerful gift and what he might do with it for the good of all, and she rested her hand on his arm.
“They that would sin and cease not,
Of sorrows sere now shall they sing,
And they that mended them while they might,
Shall belde and bide in my blessing.”
The actor drew in a deep breath after his last line and there was a pause as if the audience too was holding its breath.
“So sad,” Hildegard whispered. She meant life. Everything.
And it ended with the melody of angels crossing from place to place.
Epilogue
Hildegard emerged out of the morning mist under a sky as sheeny pink and lavender as the inside of a mussel shell. First into view was the tower above the trees, then the crooked roofs of the buildings, and finally the grey arch of the gatehouse. Not as grand nor as forbidding as the Abbey of Meaux, the priory of Swyne was a pleasing arrangement of turrets and trees. It looked deserted.
With no one to greet her Hildegard took her hired ambler into the stables herself and saw to his needs. Then she fed and watered her hounds. Finally, she made her way over to the main building. The sound of singing came from the chapel, antiphon and response.
Soft-footed she let herself inside and slipped into a seat near the door. The voices rose sweetly all around and she gave a long sigh. Home at last.
* * *
The prioress was standing up as usual, her gaunt frame still erect, but her face more lined in the twelve months since Hildegard had last seen her. The private chapel in which they stood was as cold and austere as ever.
Everything was explained, all questions answered, remarks on the way things had turned out had been offered and reciprocated. Her account was nearing its end.
Maud would remain as Roger’s ward until fate maybe decreed a husband. Her persecutors had been brought to account.
Petronilla was to continue as Melisen’s damozel of the bedchamber. Her father and his retinue of little girls had found a sponsor in old Robert Harpham, who, astute in the needs of the market, had backed his attempt to export his handmade toys to the Rhineland with hard cash and some useful contacts.
Even the fate of Kit had been settled. Hildegard told the prioress how, when she went to speak to Danby about his keep, the boy had been busily helping Gilbert in the workshop. Observing his dexterity and Gilbert’s delight with his progress, she had not even mentioned her idea of bringing Kit to Swyne to assist their falconer. “I believe he has found his life’s work,” she said.
And Danby had invited his sister and her brood to come and live within the city walls in the now empty house at the top of the yard so that his daughter, his little Lucy, could live at home and still have the care and kindness of her aunt.
And finally, she told the prioress, Danby had made Gilbert his partner and they vowed to make their workshop the most famous glazier’s in England.
By the time Hildegard concluded her story the prioress was looking thoughtful. Now she said, “And the cross is safe. Despite the terrible events it brings in its wake you must be pleased it still survives after having gone to so much trouble to bring it back to York in the first place.”
She turned to look at the rough wooden relic on her private altar. “It was clever to hide it on full display in St. Helen’s Church,” she approved. “Of course, if we were merchants we would now be sniggering into our money-pouches.” She sighed. “It must be returned to its guardians in Florence. I imagine that journey across the Alps last year was something not to be endured more than once in a lifetime?”
“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The tragedy was that my escort was murdered there.” She referred to a tourney knight, Sir Talbot.
“So you would do it again?”
“I imagine it would be pleasant enough in summer when the snows have melted.”
“Indeed?” The prioress gave a brisk movement of her hand. “More of that another time. I have a matter of a different nature to bring to your notice.”
This is where she mentions the abbot’s threat of punishment. Hildegard braced herself.
The prioress gave her a hard look. “Yes. Abbot de Courcy.”
Hildegard’s heart missed a beat.
“A serious matter of discipline or so he claims.” The prioress sighed heavily. “What seems to have urged him to press for censure is the fact that he saw you, as he puts it, ‘in the arms of that steward of de Hutton’s,’ by whom I take it he means Sir Ulf. Is this true?”
“Of course not! Is the abbot mad? I’d just escaped from that brute employed by the Sisters of the Holy Wounds, barely escaping with my life I might add, when Ulf appeared outside Harpham’s house having been told by Maud about the brute’s attempt to abduct me.”
“And?” The prioress gave her a searching glance.
“Ulf was merely inspecting the bruises on my face under the light of the cresset outside the house. It was a professional examination of my wounds, who better to do it? De Courcy must have just arrived through the postern at Micklegate Bar and was presumably already deluded by his travels. I gather he had just arrived from Avignon.”
The prioress raised her eyebrows. “And you imagine that warped his judgement?”
“I would imagine it was already warped to make him choose to go there in the first place.”
“Ha!” Her eyes flashed with humour.
Hildegard knew she was stepping out of line but she had to speak honestly. The prioress continued to raise her eyebrows for a moment or two as Hildegard described in greater detail her ordeal just before coming across Ulf and his men in the street.
When she finished the prioress gave a grim chuckle. “That sounds far more plausible than de Courcy’s version. Leave it with me, sister. I assume you told the abbot nothing of what had preceded this incident?”
“Wild horses wouldn’t drag it from me.”
“In that case this misunderstanding might continue for some time, don’t you think? As will yours over his reason for sojourning with Pope Clement until you discover the truth.”
She flapped a hand and Hildegard was dismissed.
* * *
Not much later, three days at most, Hildegard was summoned to the Abbey of Meaux. Expecting a harsh penance for her alleged activities she was surprised by the abbot’s genial mood, if genial was a word that could ever be applied to so driven a man.
Nothing was said about Ulf. Indeed, the abbot invited her to sit beside him in his private garden after compline to watch the sun go down over the canal as if a harsh word had never come between them.
She was careful to make no comment about Avignon. If the prioress considered him trustworthy, it would have to be good enough.
Instead talk turned to Wycliffe, the sadness of these latter months when, forbidden to preach, he was rarely seen in public.
Then they turned to the border wars with Scotland and how it would be to everyone’s benefit if both sides could shake hands and settle down to an agreement.
After that the
y covered the topic of how young King Richard was losing his popularity and whether the rumours about his erratic behaviour could be trusted or whether they were stories spread far and wide by his enemies.
Hubert then told her a little about his pilgrimage and his ensuing concern for the Byzantine emperor with his ceaseless efforts to maintain a Christian region in a hostile territory and how no one in the west—“neither pope, in Rome nor Avignon,” he pointed out—seemed at all interested in going to his aid. “Despite all efforts to persuade them,” he added.
Then the abbot turned to matters closer to home, to the exceptionally dry weather and the effect it had on the crops but how the sheep appeared to be surprisingly unaffected, and how the recent storms, sad though it was that they had drowned out the pageant, had not doused the town’s enthusiasm.
“It was an evil thing for Mistress Julitta to put glass in her husband’s food,” he observed. “And how strange that the coroner took so long to arrive that she had already vanished.”
“If Petronilla’s view of angels is correct,” she told him, “she will not escape punishment.” She explained what the girl believed about the law of angels and they exchanged glances without comment.
And then, finally, Hubert mentioned the disappointment Hildegard must feel at having all the hard work at Deepdale come to nothing.
“I know how much effort you and that handful of nuns must have put in to establish the place while I was away. I’ve been given a most careful accounting of what you achieved over the last year. And then to have it destroyed like that.” He shook his head. “It must be a grave disappointment.”
“I hope to return soon to see what we can make of it,” she replied. “The bees were dispersed when the men put their swords through the hives. The geese will have flown. And no doubt the hens that survived will already be working hard for the inhabitants of the next vill. But there must be something we can restore.” She smiled ruefully.
“Of course, I will never give permission for you to return there,” he told her emphatically. “I remember clearly the first time we ever met…” he hesitated then added, “I remember how I expressed doubts then about your ability to defend yourselves against marauders. And how you assured me that you could take care of yourselves.”
The Law of Angels Page 40