Prior Alan sat in the great carved chair in his solar, and pressed his fingers to his throbbing temples. Subprior Stephen and Custodian Will de Copham slumped opposite him, gazing equally morosely into mid-space. The bells for prime and for the early Mass for the servants had long since rung, but none of the three of them had moved.
‘You’re sure that is the hand of the dead actor, Father Prior?’ Will asked.
He glanced uneasily at the small lead-lined casket, which had been hastily emptied of its scrolls of parchment to provide a temporary resting place for the offending appendage. Fortunately the seal on the box was tight enough to stop the smell from escaping, but his stomach still heaved every time he remembered picking it up.
Alan grimaced. ‘Unless we dig up the body and match the bones to the arm we can’t be certain, but it seems most likely. I could ask the infirmarer if he’s heard of anyone in Ely who has recently lost his hand in an accident, but even so, men don’t normally leave such things lying around in the street.’
‘Then whoever put the hand in St Withburga’s coffin murdered Martin,’ Stephen said, ‘and that means those three actors must be innocent, for they’ve been in gaol ever since the body was discovered.’
‘I don’t see how that proves their innocence,’ Prior Alan snapped. ‘They could have placed the hand in the coffin before the body was discovered and that wasn’t until well past midday. Men who are capable of the heinous murder and mutilation of one of their own would think nothing of desecrating the body of a blessed saint, which is why we must redouble our efforts to capture the rest of the actors. Since the three felons in gaol didn’t have the hand of St Withburga in their possession when they were searched, then one of their fellow conspirators must have it.’
Will rolled his tongue around his mouth in disgust. He could still taste that stench. He rose and poured himself another goblet of wine in the vain attempt to settle his stomach.
‘But what I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is if they intended stealing the saint’s relic, why draw attention to the theft by placing the severed hand in the coffin to stink. If they hadn’t done so the theft would have gone unnoticed for years.’
Prior Alan shrugged. ‘Perhaps they thought the hand would mummify and, in time, become indistinguishable from the other remains. As indeed it might well have done had the coffin lid not accidentally been left slightly ajar, allowing the flies to get in.’
‘But why replace it at all? Why not just take the relic?’ Will persisted stubbornly.
‘To mock us,’ Stephen said firmly. ‘It’s the Dereham men who have done this, not the actors. This is their way of thumbing their noses at us. I’m sure their plan was to display her hand in the church in Dereham, knowing we’d be forced to open the coffin before witnesses to prove we still have the body intact. Then the rotting hand would be revealed and we’d be a laughing stock.’ He turned eagerly to the prior. ‘We should send men at once to Dereham and—’
Alan held up his hand to silence him. ‘Have you forgotten half the men are out combing the fens for the other actors and the rest are trying the keep the townsmen and pilgrims from killing one another? Besides, we’ve no proof that Dereham men did this, and I certainly don’t intend letting them know the hand is missing. You said yourself, Brother Stephen, whoever put the hand in the coffin murdered Martin. What cause would anyone from Dereham have to do that? Unless you’re suggesting that they murdered the first stranger they came upon just to obtain his hand, and if that’s so, why cut off his head and remove it? No, only his fellow actors had sufficient grudge against him to do that.
“Beware the sins of envy and vainglory,
Else foul murder ends your story.”
Isn’t that what is written at the end of that wretched “Cain and Abel” play? And when a man such as Prior Wigod of Oseney writes such words it is never for his own amusement. He wrote it as a warning, a warning you should have heeded before engaging those players, Brother Stephen, for I can think of no breed of men more steeped in the sins of envy and vainglory than base actors.’
Stephen’s mouth fell open, but before he could speak Will leaned forward frowning.
‘But even if it was the actors, Father Prior, what I don’t understand is, how could they have accomplished it? All the time the cathedral is open to the pilgrims, I insist on there being a monk on duty up in the watching loft, in addition to the lay brothers keeping guard at ground level. A skilled thief might manage to snatch one of the offerings, or even a precious stone from the outside of the shrine if he was working in league with others who could set up a distraction for him, but to get inside the shrine and open the coffin unseen, that’s beyond the powers of any mortal man.’
‘Are you suggesting that this was the devil’s work, Brother Will, witchcraft?’ Stephen said, his eyes widening in alarm.
Prior Alan leaped from his chair. ‘No!’ he said firmly. ‘There is to be no talk of that. I forbid you even to think of it. If rumours should start to circulate in the town that the cathedral can’t even protect one of its own saints from the forces of darkness, then—’
But whatever warning Alan intended to issue was severed by a scream that rang out over the priory, a shriek that continued so long, it seemed that whoever was screaming had forgotten how to stop.
The stonemason’s apprentice was still howling when Prior Alan, Stephen and Will, all panting, emerged from the narrow spiral staircase onto the roof of the octagon tower. He was several feet higher up and further out, clinging to one of the little stone pinnacles. A narrow, rickety wooden scaffolding bridged the gap between the pinnacle and the roof ’s parapet, behind which the stone mason and two anguished-looking monks were gathered.
‘What ails the lad?’ Prior Alan asked. ‘Has he suddenly grown afraid of heights?’
It would hardly be surprising if he had, it was a dizzyingly long way down.
‘Can’t get any sense out of him, Father Prior,’ the stonemason yelled above the boy’s shrieks. ‘He bounded up there like a squirrel, same as always, next thing I know he was screaming like a girl.’ He raised his voice still louder, fingering the stout leather belt squeezed around his corpulent belly. ‘I’ll give you something to yell about, my lad, when I get hold of you.’
‘Threatening the boy isn’t going to make him come down,’ Stephen said. ‘Are you stuck, lad? Don’t look down. Just try to climb back slowly.’
But the boy’s arms seemed have become part of the turret they were clinging to, and he would neither loose his grip nor stop shrieking. Prior Alan glanced down at the swelling crowd of pilgrims and townspeople who were gathering below, all craning up to see what was amiss.
‘Someone will have to climb up and fetch the boy down.’
The stonemason was clearly too stout and aged to climb the narrow scaffolding to retrieve his apprentice. Alan glanced around him and selected the lighter and more nimble-looking of the two young monks for the task.
But even when he climbed up and grabbed the boy around the waist, the lad would not budge and the monk came perilously close to toppling from the scaffolding himself as he wrestled with the boy. Finally he was forced to deliver a few sharp slaps to make the lad let go. But as the boy, sobbing, dropped down from his perch, it was the monk’s turn to cry out in horror as he glimpsed what had been hidden behind the boy. It was too far round the turret to be visible from the parapet, but up on the scaffolding it was all too evident what had scared the wits out of the lad. For there, among the grimacing grotesques and carved saints, was a human head, not made of stone but of rotting flesh and blackened blood.
Prior Alan stared dismally out of the casement of his solar. Masses of delicate pink and white apple blossom covered the trees below like a fall of new snow, but that sight, which normally lifted his spirits, did nothing to raise them now. The blossom was abnormally late this year, yet another sign, if one were needed, that chaos was once more descending upon the fragile world.
‘A t least now we have the
whole corpse,’ Stephen said, desperate to break the icy silence. ‘We can bury the head with the rest of Martin’s remains and his spirit will surely rest easier for it.’
Prior Alan turned and glowered at his subprior. ‘His spirit will not rest easy until his murderer has been punished, and nor will mine. We may have been able to keep the theft of St Withburga’s hand between ourselves, but thanks to that wretched boy screaming from the rooftops, news of what he found will be across Ely before nightfall and what the townspeople lack in facts they will surely make up.’
‘They already have,’ Will said grimly, striding through the door and closing it firmly behind him. ‘I’ve just come from Steeple Gate. The crowds are as thick as flies on . . . ’
He closed his eyes briefly and swallowed hard. He’d never thought of himself as a squeamish man, but being forced retrieve two maggot-infested body parts in one day was enough to sicken any man’s stomach.
‘The rumours have already started, Father Prior. They say a demon must have placed the head where no mortal man could.’
‘Utter nonsense!’ The words exploded from Alan’s lips. ‘Any man who was reasonably agile could have climbed that scaffold and put it there. After all, you climbed up and you’re certainly mortal.’
‘I certainly felt my mortality up there,’ Will said with a shudder. ‘But the trouble is, Father Prior, the crowd can’t see the scaffolding from the ground and they’re not in a mood to listen to reason. They’re claiming a demon flew down from the octagon tower, slew Martin, then carried his head back up to the tower to devour at its leisure.’
Prior Alan shook his head in utter disbelief at the notions that filled the heads of men. As sacrist, he had designed the octagon himself, after the original tower collapsed, and he always took any slight directed at his beloved creation as a personal affront.
‘And that’s not the worst of the rumours, Father Prior . . .’ Will saw his superior’s jaw clench in anger and hesitated, but Alan had to be told. ‘The townspeople may not know we found Martin’s hand in the shrine, but they do know there was a stench as foul as hell coming from St Withburga’s tomb. Now they’re saying that a great evil has come upon the whole priory and cathedral, because of that play. The Glovers have wasted no time in telling everyone the play of “Cain and Abel” is cursed and that by performing it on cathedral grounds we’ve raised a demon of death, which is hunting human prey. Apparently not a man, woman or child in Ely is safe. It will slay them all just as surely as Cain slew Abel.’
‘This has gone far enough!’ Prior Alan slammed his fist down onto the wooden table so hard that both Will and Stephen flinched. ‘I hold you entirely responsible for this, Brother Stephen. If you hadn’t given them leave to perform that wretched play, there’d never have been a murder, never mind these bits of rotting corpse popping up all over the cathedral.’
Subprior Stephen open his mouth to protest, but Alan hadn’t finished.
‘We have to do something to bring these rumours to an end before the townspeople take it into their heads to storm the cathedral and tear down my tower, stone by stone. Fetch those murderers from the hell-pit at once. I intend to confront them with that head and force them to admit they killed Martin. I swear on God’s bones I will wrench a confession out of those actors even if I have to make them eat that head to do it.’
Henry, Cuddy and John stood unsteadily in the prior’s hall, blinking painfully in the light. It had been two weeks since they had been able to stand up and now their legs trembled beneath them, not helped by the weight of the chains shackling their wrists and ankles. Henry glanced at the other two actors. They were filthy, covered in bits of mouldy straw and excrement. He noticed the monks wrinkling their noses and discreetly taking a few steps back and he was suddenly aware of how much he himself must stink.
But it was nothing to the stench that filled the hall when the lead-lined box was opened and the rotting head and hand were laid out on the great long wooden table. One glimpse of the empty blackened eye sockets, where the ravens had been at work, was enough to make Henry collapse to his knees and start retching.
The prior gestured to one of the muscular lay brothers, who reached down and hauled Henry back to his feet by his hair, dragging him closer to the foul remains.
‘Too cowardly to face the sight of your own crime, are you?’ Alan thundered. ‘Gaze upon the ravaged countenance of your cousin, and weep in shame for what you have done.’
The lay brother pulled Henry’s head up, forcing him to look. At first Henry was too appalled to take in what he was seeing, but something finally worked its way up through the fog of his dazed mind.
‘That . . . isn’t Martin. It can’t be Martin.’
‘Even his poor mother would not know him now that the maggots and birds have been to work on him,’ Alan said sternly.
‘No, not the face . . . ’ Henry swallowed hard, trying to bite back the bile that had risen in his throat. ‘His hair . . . Martin was blond. That hair is dark.’
At once everyone else in the room who had been studiously avoiding looking at the head now stared at it.
‘He’s right!’ Stephen said. ‘I spoke to Martin several times. His hair was the colour of ripe corn, and even allowing for the dried blood—’
Prior Alan rounded on him. ‘Then why didn’t you say that as soon as Brother Will retrieved the head?’
Stephen gulped. ‘I could only bear to look at it once and that briefly. I didn’t even notice the hair. I just assumed—’
‘Then if it’s not Martin, who is it?’ Prior Alan demanded.
There was a loud groan from Cuddy. He was swaying so alarmingly that two of the lay brothers made a grab for him, certain he was going to fall.
‘God in heaven, that’s Luke, that is,’ he whispered. ‘That’s my poor nephew, Luke.’
Shaking off the lay brothers Cuddy suddenly launched himself at Henry, but his chains brought him crashing to the ground before he could reach him.
‘You murdering bastard, you’ve butchered my Luke. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to rip you apart with my bare hands.’
Once again, Alan, Stephen and Will found themselves sitting in the prior’s solar in morose silence. None of them had been willing to eat at the common table, knowing that the wild speculations of their brothers would be even more lurid than those circulating in the marketplace. But they had hardly touched the meal of roast duck and stuffed eel that had been brought to them in the solar, for the day’s events had considerably blunted their appetites.
It had taken some time to clear the hall and return the prisoners to the hell-pit beneath the infirmary. Cuddy, for all that he had been kept chained and on meagre rations for the last two weeks, had surprising reserves of strength and in his rage kept trying to throw his chained wrists round the terrified Henry’s neck and throttle him. And Cuddy’s fury had only increased when he heard the order to return him to the gaol. But Prior Alan was in no mood to release anyone, not until he got to the bottom of this whole sordid mess.
Now Stephen glanced anxiously towards his superior. Stephen hadn’t become subprior by being timid, but all the same he was well aware that not only did his prior hold him responsible for staging the accursed play, but he was now also blaming him for failing to recognise the head. And when a man like Prior Alan was already in a black humour, adding to his fury was as wise as prodding a wounded boar with a sharp stick. Nevertheless, Stephen felt it his duty to speak.
‘Father Prior, now that we know the victim is his own nephew, this must prove the man Cudbert innocent. Surely he at least should be released. He has a wife and children to support.’
‘I see no proof of innocence,’ Prior Alan said sourly. ‘It’s been my experience that men are far more disposed to murder members of their own family than outsiders.’
‘But he seemed genuinely shocked to discover the dead man was Luke and not Martin. All three of the players did. Surely that shows they had no hand in the killing.’
&nb
sp; ‘Unless there were two murders,’ Will said. ‘We have a body, a head and a hand, but short of digging up the corpse, we can’t tell if they all belong to the same man, and even if we do, if the corpse is in the same state of decay as the other remains, it might be hard to be certain. Cuddy is just the sort of fellow who would’ve taken the law into his own hands and killed Martin in a fit of rage, if he learned that Martin had decapitated his nephew. You heard the threats that he made to Henry.’
‘Exactly so,’ Stephen said. ‘He accused Henry of killing Luke. He wouldn’t have done that if he knew Martin had committed the murder. Besides, he plainly didn’t know that his nephew was dead. He must have thought him fled with the rest.’
Prior Alan stabbed a piece of roasted duck with his knife and brought it to his mouth, then tossed knife and meat together back on the platter, clearly unable to bring himself to eat it. ‘So we now have two possible murders – Luke and Martin. But if the head does belong to our corpse, then Martin is not a victim but one of the murderers, fled with the other actors.’
He rose to his feet, wiping his hands on a linen cloth. ‘It seems to me the only thing we can be certain of is that the missing actors are in possession of the hand of St Withburga and they are hiding somewhere out there in the fens.’
He strode to the casement and stared out as if he could see right into the dark heart of the marshes. ‘I want every village and island out there turned upside down. Take the dogs skilled at tracking quarry. Recruit hunters from the fenland villages who know the marshes and the waterways. The fenlanders have no love for townsfolk or outlanders. They won’t hesitate to turn the actors in if the reward for their capture is big enough. Do whatever you have to, but I want those men found, and quickly.’
‘I’m not going begging,’ little Ben said furiously, blinking back the tears. ‘Father’d be as angry as a nest of wasps if he knew you were trying to make me.’
The First Murder Page 16