[Sir Richard Straccan 01] - The Bone-Pedlar

by Sylvian Hamilton

  ‘So you lost the eye,’ he said to Sulpice.

  ‘The arrow pinned eyelid to eyeball.’ Sulpice frowned. ‘They got the arrowhead out but it went bad on the ship. It was all very nasty, cautery and that, you know, but here I am and the other eye still serves me. I don’t remember how you got me away when we were ambushed.’

  ‘The arrow hit you and you fell from your horse. I took a slash across the collarbone but it wasn’t too bad—it knocked me out of the saddle, though, and I fell on you. We rolled down a sandbank. You were dead to the world with the arrow sticking out of your eye socket. I just dragged you. There were some rocks and a hollow behind and beneath them. We tumbled into it; I remember praying there would be no snakes. Nobody noticed. It was a nasty hot little fight up above us. Our lot was wiped out. The Saracens cut their heads off and dragged the bodies away behind their horses. When it grew dark and you had come round, we started walking.’

  Sulpice turned to his uncle, smiling. ‘He dragged and supported me twenty miles,’ he said. ‘At the end, I kept passing out and he carried me like a child, on his back.’

  ‘We propped each other along much of the way,’ Straccan said. ‘It was only the last mile or two that you couldn’t stagger.’

  The archbishop leaned forward, his elbows on the board and his chin in his hands. ‘Tell me, Sir Richard, what is your errand here?’

  ‘I want to buy one of your relics, Your Grace.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The finger of Saint Thomas.’

  Bane reached Stirrup again a few days after Straccan’s return.

  ‘You’re thinner,’ said Straccan as Bane hobbled into the central courtyard, leading his limping horse.

  ‘I’ve got a blister the size of a duck egg,’ grumbled Bane.

  ‘Adeliza! Bring food and ale! Come into the office. You can stick your feet in a pan of water, and tell me your story!’

  Chapter 8

  ‘Robert de Beauris of Skelrig is your man,’ said Bane. ‘It’s his picture. He sent his servant Crimmon with it to his sister at Arlen Castle.’

  ‘Arlen Castle?’ Straccan rubbed his unshaven chin with a rasping noise. ‘What does the lady there?’

  ‘She’s the baron’s wife.’

  Startled, Straccan said, ‘What was the man doing, carrying such a precious thing to a noble lady with no escort? Why a man alone, skulking through the country like a felon?’

  ‘It’s all a bit queer,’ said Bane. ‘After they shuffled me off at Berwick I asked around, quietly, and found people who knew this Crimmon. He came from Mailros, they said. So I rode south out of town, as if I was going back home, and then turned back west. There are three big hills; make for them and you’re there. There’s a fine abbey and a bit of a town, not much, but growing. I presented myself at the abbey, told them Prioress Rohese had sent me and showed her token. Here it is.’ He pulled a cord over his head and dropped the prioress’s token on the table. ‘They were hospitable and the lay brothers were gossipy. They fed me and gave me a bed, and told me all they knew about the lord of Skelrig. He’s some sort of nephew to Gerard de Ridefort.’

  ‘Exalted circles we move in,’ said Straccan. ‘Barons and their ladies, and now de Ridefort! He was Grand Master of the Templars at Jerusalem, twenty years or so gone—which makes the business of the paltry messenger stranger still.’

  ‘This Robert has been away from his barony for some time, they said, on knight-service. He returned just after Christmas. Seems he asked to enter the abbey at Mailtos as a novice, but the abbot wouldn’t have him. Robert got very worked up and begged to be let stay, even as a lay brother, but the abbot said no and threw him out. He went back to Skelrig, and hasn’t been seen since.’ Bane yawned and stretched, wincing as stiff muscles pulled. ‘So I went there, and as soon as I asked to see Lord Robert I was grabbed and shoved into a nasty little hole next the stable, and locked in. They seemed scared stiff of me. They shouted through the door, who was I, what did I want. I said I had business with Lord Robert and they’d better let me see him or they’d be sorry, all the usual stuff. Everything went quiet after a while and I reckoned it must be night-time so I had a go at the lock, but there was a bolt outside as well.

  ‘When they opened the door it was mid-morning, and there was this little priest standing there shaking and as grey as my shirt, and half a dozen fellows with bows and swords huddled behind him like children behind their mother. He started shouting Latin and suddenly chucked a cup of water over me—holy water as it turned out—cos when I didn’t vanish in a puff of sulphur he turned pink again right away, and the others shoved him aside and took over. Before they could really get started on me I shouted, ‘Crimmon, Crimmon’s dead,’ and they listened to the rest. Someone went off to tell Lord Robert and I was taken into the tower. It’s just a very small tower with a few outbuildings, though they say he’s a very rich man. Anyway, three floors up, there he was, behind a closed door and shouting through it just like we’d been doing below!’

  ‘Mad?’

  ‘Barking. And terrified.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Demons.’ Bane poured and drank more ale. ‘He’s shut himself up in this room. He let me in after I’d yelled all about Crimmon and the picture and the Prioress of Holystone. Well, he didn’t let me in, he had a lad in there with him, a dumb boy, to do things like that—fetch and carry, open doors, empty pots—because he, de Beauris I mean, is sitting up there inside a great circle, all made of candles and incense-burners and bowls of holy water and crucifixes and relics and bunches of herbs. No one else goes into it, and he won’t budge. He’s got a bed in the circle, and a table and chair, and a chest full of money. He’s wearing a monk’s robe over a hair shirt, he’s festooned with relics and crucifixes and he stinks to high heaven.

  ‘I told him the whole story: how his man died, how the prioress got his letter and the picture and wanted to know what to do with them. And after going over it again and again for hours, he finally told me he’d sent it to his sister Julitta, the lord of Arlen’s wife.

  She knew what to do with it, he said. Then he opened the chest that’s how I know it was full of money—and took out a handful of coins and threw them into one of the bowls of holy water, and told me to take it, and thank you very much, and why didn’t I start back right away?

  ‘I headed straight for Alnwick. The roads up there are unbelievable. Thank God it was dry; if it had been wet I’d never have got there. I might never have got back home either; it’s all bog when it isn’t flood. On the road a galloper passed me, going my way head down, but I’d seen him before back there at Skelrig. And there he was again, in Alnwick when I stopped for the night, lurking about and watching me. So when I’d had enough of it I gave him the slip and followed him for a change. He panicked about a bit when he realised he’d lost me, and then went into a house and presently came out again with another man. And this is where it gets queerer still. Guess who the other fellow was.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That Gregory’s man, the one who came here after the finger of Saint Thomas.’

  ‘His name’s Pluvis,’ said Straccan thoughtfully. ‘You’re sure it was him?’

  ‘No mistaking him, ugly sod.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘He didn’t know me. I watched them while they talked, and then the Skelrig man got on his horse and set off back the way we’d come. And wotsisname, Pluvis, shouted to a servant and went back inside, and presently five horses were brought to the door, and out he came with two other men and two archers. Now one of the men I’ve seen before; he was Eustace de Vesci. The other I didn’t know. White face, black hair and moustache. He and de Vesci wore mail. The archers looked foreign, I think they were Saracens. I whined for charity and one of them threw a handful of horse shit at me. De Vesci went off by himself and the others rode north. I hung around a bit to ask who the pale man was ‘

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Nobody wanted to talk about him. I couldn’t find
out a thing beyond his name: Rainard, Lord Soulis.’

  Chapter 9

  The small thick gold coins felt unpleasantly greasy, and Straccan rubbed his hands on his tunic after counting them, glad to be rid of them. Pluvis had taken the relic, paid the balance due and gone. The strange figure on the ugly coins wasn’t an octopus, it was no creature Straccan had ever seen—something like a toad with tentacles round its mouth. Whatever it was, he disliked it and the gold it decorated, and took it all to Eleazar the Jew to change for other coinage, keeping just a few for curiosity’s sake. That done, clean silver in his purse and more at home in his safe place, he rode again to Holystone to tell Prioress Rohese what Bane had discovered.

  ‘I am amazed that your man was able to learn so much,’ she said. ‘Our bailiff’s son had no luck at all, and was a week away.’ (Straccan had given her an edited version of Bane’s account and a list of his expenses.) ‘He ate and drank enough for two,’ she observed sourly, casting a critical eye down the listed items.

  ‘Bailiff Ambrose’s son?’ said Straccan.

  ‘No, your man Bane!’

  ‘I told you he was intelligent. I never said he was abstemious,’ Straccan protested with a smile. ‘It was a long hard journey, and he was ill used by Skelrig’s ruffians as well.’

  ‘I am sorry for that, indeed. I suppose this precious thing must now go to the Lady Julitta. Do you think she might be persuaded to sell it?’

  ‘Who knows? I’ll ask her, if you wish.’

  ‘I know nothing of her brother,’ the prioress said. ‘I wonder where he got the picture.’

  ‘His uncle, or whatever he was, the Grand Master, would have been able to lay hands on almost any holy thing,’ said Straccan.

  ‘Julitta de Beauris was no great heiress,’ the prioress observed.

  ‘Her mother was Alice de Ridefort, the last of twelve daughters if I remember right, and her father some petty lordling, a Scot, I suppose. However, Julitta inherited nothing. What there was went to the heir, her brother, who was niggardly with her dowry. But she’s a great beauty. I have seen her, and all they say is true—a great beauty. Arlen would have her, dowry or none. It made quite a stir.’

  ‘Do you want me to take the picture to her?’

  ‘Yes. I will write and tell her how we came by it, and if you will be my messenger I’ll be in your debt.’

  ‘Not forgetting my charges,’ said Straccan. They smiled at each other with perfect understanding. ‘I’d like to see my daughter, while I’m here.’

  The lady was not at Arlen Castle but at her summer hall, which had no drawbridge. Its modest gate was guarded by men-at-arms and the largest hounds Straccan had ever seen: two enormous bandogs the size of small ponies, chained one at each side of the gate, straining at their collars and growling savagely, all white teeth and scarlet tongues. A thin dirty boy much marked by ringworm, sat by an iron winch from which chains ran to the dogs’ collars. As Straccan approached, the boy turned the wheel and the dogs were reluctantly hauled aside. As he passed into the inner court, one threw back its head and bayed after him, a chilling deep-toned sound that echoed back and forth from the surrounding walls. A steward called a boy to escort him to the lady’s solar above. There, a waiting woman looked up, harried, from piles of scattered garments and open clothes-chests trailing silks, velvets, cambrics and ribbons. She led him up a winding stair to a window, and pointed out across another inner yard.

  He found her at last in the stable, sitting in the straw in a tumble of soiled silks with a colt lying across her lap, its sides heaving as it drew in one painful breath after another, eyes bulging and suffused with blood, foam from its mouth everywhere. Her hands soothed the suffering creature and she bent to whisper in its ears, blowing her own breath into its red nostrils, regardless of the froth and muck on her gown and veil. The narrow long-fingered hands held the colt’s shaking head and, as Straccan watched, it grew quieter. The stertorous gasping eased, the congested eyes closed and opened, closed and opened, bulging less and less.

  The woman wiped its nose and mouth with a wet cloth, taken from a bucket behind her, that reeked of wine, squeezing the cloth so that a trickle of liquid ran into the animal’s mouth, keeping up a constant flow of whispered words, soft and soothing, just beyond Straccan’s hearing. Suddenly the colt, which had appeared dead a moment before, sucked in two or three deep breaths and raised its head to look round. It lurched to its feet, staggered, half fell, regained its footing, stood trembling on its thin long legs and uttered a lamb-like bleat which was answered instantly by a shrill anxious whinny from another stall.

  ‘That’s his mother,’ she said. ‘He’ll be all right now. Milon!’ A groom’s head appeared over the partition. ‘Take him to his mother.’

  Straccan stood aside to make room as the groom led the colt away. ‘What was the matter?’ he asked, extending a hand to pull the lady to her feet.

  ‘He began to cough, and couldn’t stop,’ she said, wiping her hands on the soiled silk of her skirts. ‘Then he had one fit after another.’

  ‘I thought he was dying. What did you do?’

  ‘Oh,’ she gave him a sideways smile, ‘I talked him out of it. Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Straccan. I come from your brother, lady. Indirectly.’

  ‘Give me the icon.’ she said. She had washed, and changed her clothes. Her skin glowed, flawless, in the candlelight and her pale silver-blonde hair escaped in slippery gleaming waves from a red gauze veil. She sat with Straccan alone over the remains of their meal at a small table in her solar while her women came and went, chattering like birds, giggling and filling the room with scents and colours.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The picture.’

  He unbuckled the pouch at his belt, laid it on the table and took out the cylinder, handing it to her. She held it but did not open it.

  ‘There is also this,’ he said, taking out the brief message the unfortunate Crimmon had carried, ‘and this, from the Prioress of Holystone.” He proffered Mother Rohese’s letter. To his surprise, she cracked the seal and read the letter like any clerk.

  ‘I must reward you, Sir Richard, for all your aid and trouble.’

  ‘Prioress Rohese deserves your thanks, Lady. As for me, I ask only one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me about the icon.’

  It was said to be a portrait of Christ’s mother, she told him. It had been found in an ancient monastery in Egypt by an infidel king, the Emir Bahadur al-Munir, who gave it—in gratitude for the sparing of his life—to the Lionheart, King Richard. Richard, who valued nothing unless he could turn it to money to finance his crusade, sold it to the Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of Knights Templar. How it passed from his hands into those of his great-nephew was not dwelt on, but the lord of Skelrig wanted his sister to sell it for him; and she had a ready eager buyer.

  ‘I might outbid your buyer myself,’ said Straccan, eating dates, ‘if you would name your price.’

  ‘Are you so rash, Sir, as to outbid the king?’

  ‘Which king?’

  ‘The Lord John, of course.’

  ‘In that case, probably not. It would be a reckless man who tried to outdo His Grace in any matter.’

  She smiled and said nothing.

  ‘The Prioress of Holystone however is a formidable lady, and his kinswoman. She might reck to outbid His Grace,’ said Straccan. ‘Would you name a price for her?’

  ‘I would not. I am not his kinswoman, nor willing to incur his displeasure,’ she said. She leaned to pour him more wine and the scent of her was heady indeed.

  ‘I doubt if even a king could be displeased with you, Lady,’ Straccan heard himself say, dazzled.

  Riding away again, with a letter from the lady in his saddlebag for the prioress, he could not forget Julitta’s face. It shone in his memory all day, and when he stopped for the night he realised that the whole day’s long riding had passed unnoticed like a mere hour. He had left his pou
ch on the table in her solar and she had come after him with it herself, catching up with him at the gate; she took both his hands in hers, surely she didn’t farewell every messenger like that? Her hands were cool and light, and at their touch he felt a little static shock and a sudden rush of uncomfortably sharp desire.

  In the morning, after an explicit sensual dream which he found hard to clear from his mind, he touched spurs lightly to his big bay’s sides, eventually shaking off the dream’s sticky memory in the leaping delight of hard riding. At Holystone before noon, he gave Julitta’s letter to Mother Rohese.

  ‘A proper gratitude,’ she said. ‘Properly expressed. She has made over the revenues of her vineyard at Edgeley to the priory for a year.’

  ‘I hope that will comfort you for the loss of the portrait,’ Straccan said. ‘I did my best for you but it’s to go to the king.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ said she, dismissing her brother with a shrug. ‘I might have guessed. It’s said the lady is his very good friend.’

  For a moment Straccan didn’t take her meaning, and then he did and was conscious of a decided pang.

  Chapter 10

  The first thing Gilla could remember was her mother holding her, walking up and down and singing softly. She’d been plucked up from her cot, screaming from a bad dream. Even now, years and years later, she could still remember bits of the dream: running along narrow stone passages, closing door after door behind her but knowing some awful Thing was on her heels until in a tiny room behind the last door of all she could go no further. Long bony brown fingers poked impossibly through the keyhole, picking the wood of the door away like bread, until a dreadful bark-skinned face leered through at her while the gnarled and twiggy fingers crumbled more and more door away to make a hole big enough for the witch to clamber through …