The Abbey Close

by Steven Veerapen

  ‘I can understand that, knowing this burgh as I have come to.’ Silently Danforth wondered if it was she who would play the jester in any such performance. ‘Tomorrow we might fetch an apothecary who can give aid. There is one, I think, off the market cross.’

  ‘Apothecaries, fie. They’re no better than the physicians, and they’re goddamned fools,’ said Martin.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘A new man, come here in the summer. Though I’ve no knowledge of his skill, for I’m ever in rude health. But can you do nothin’ for him tonight?’

  ‘We might put him to bed,’ said Martin, sheathing the dirk still clutched in his hand. ‘There’s a flock bed in your rooms, I think?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘Come, Tam.’ She pulled him up with a grunt, and Danforth and Martin were surprised at the height of him. In healthier days, he must have been a rare giant, and even in his shrunken state he was a tall man. The three of them managed to manoeuvre the delirious, ranting Kennedy through the small passage and throw him down on the bed, his wife patting and fussing and making soothing noises. The big man closed his eyes and began snoring instantly, his untamed beard quivering.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ said Caldwell, in her element. Danforth smiled at her. He felt sorry for handling her so roughly the previous day. There was something pathetic in seeing the unkempt ogress suddenly transformed into the picture of wifely devotion by the reappearance of a man who had humiliated and demeaned her. ‘I’m sorry that your evenin’ has been disturbed.’

  ‘It’s no disturbance, mistress, when Odysseus returns to Penelope,’ said Danforth, drawing confused looks from Martin and Mistress Caldwell. ‘But I should like to sleep properly; I find my strength peculiarly sapped of late.’ He gave her a little bow and turned towards the stairs, joined by Martin, who whispered, ‘she’s a damned fool to accept that wreckage back. Better to live alone than with such a man as that.’

  ‘She has little choice in the matter,’ said Danforth when they reached the top. ‘She married the brute, and has the fault of it. Though I doubt he will prove a help to her, nor a support, even if his presence is a comfort. That creature is not like to live long. He has come hither to die; I heard it in his chest. And did you note the colouring of him? His skin turns to wax; it is almost luminous. I have seen that before. It presages death, as though the skin dies first, knowing what it protects has no chance of life.’

  ‘Mon dieu. You are right, then, to let the damned apothecary find the will to tell her. It shall serve the bugger right. They’re too smooth of tongue, that breed, like the devil himself. At any rate, I shouldn’t fancy the job of it. Not for wealth or a pretty girl, even. Goodnight, sir.’

  ‘Goodnight, Martin.’

  The Book of Hours was open again. He read through the parable of the lost son, but found nothing in it. He flipped backwards. November was proving a busy month for entries. ‘Men alter’, he wrote, ‘very greatly in their travels, whether by vice or virtue. Pray God that I am not like he.’

  He returned to his mattress, hoping to regain his dreamless, interrupted sleep. He pulled out his rosary, but only got to six before his mind wandered and he had to put it down. In being forced to think again about death, something had begun to trouble him. The word ‘war’ played on his mind.

  14

  He rose before the sun, and padded around his bare room, thinking, before Martin woke. He lit a small nub of candle that had lain buried in his pack, and looked again over the papers that had been dropped around the High Street. Something about them was vaguely familiar, but whenever it drifted close enough into his mind’s eye that he might grasp it, it danced away again, laughing, before he could reach out.

  As he sat looking, his stomach growling, he was startled by a loud bang at the front door of the inn. The window in his room was too small and mean to allow him to see anything, so he went downstairs. Mistress Caldwell was blocking the front door. ‘On no account,’ she was saying ‘this is no fault of mine nor any of my folk. That place is intended for the security of the burgh, and this is no’ the first time that a creature has–’

  ‘Trouble, Mistress Caldwell?’ asked Danforth. She turned to him, looking irritable, her eyes ringed with black. She must have lain awake through the night tending her ruined husband, although at some point she had changed into a gayer dress, more befitting a merry goodwife. She attempted to give him a smile, with ghastly results.

  ‘Mr Danforth. You’re a man of authority, and lately engaged in the business of that foolish Brody girl. Please, come, you won’t believe this. They’ve let the man go!’

  Danforth crossed to the door, his heart thumping. Baillie Pattison stood there, his face even more drawn than usual. The matter, he realised, must be important to have got a town baillie out on a cold morning. In his hand, he carried an unlit lantern, its shutters closed. He could not even muster up scorn for Danforth. Instead he said quietly, ‘Brody is gone. In the night. He has flown the Tolbooth.’

  Danforth was momentarily lost. ‘How can this be? He was kept close.’

  ‘That fat fool Logan, our gaoler. He opened the cell to make sport of the man in the night, and claims Brody leapt at him, struck him down. He will face punishment for it, be assured, and none of his badly written reports protesting innocence will plead for him. It is not the first time he has allowed a prisoner escape the Tolbooth. It’s not as secure as it ought to be. Might as well have given him a key. Perhaps if we had hanged the beast immediately...’ he added, the scorn finally making an appearance.

  ‘Then you might have been brought to task rather than Logan. Have you any idea where the man has flown?’

  ‘None. Although he railed against the monks. Semple is informing the Prior. They are quite safe from the rabid fool though, behind those walls. It would take an army to bring them down.’ A red blush crept into his sallow, gaunt cheeks at the ill-chosen words, and he hurried on. ‘My guess is he has fled the burgh, but we are searching the town lest he has crept into some hole hereabouts. In fact, we’re minded to search each house, as we have searched along the High Street, the Causeyside to the Espedair, and into the Oakshawside and Prior’s Croft. If Mistress Caldwell would allow us entry, we could finish here and turn to the Well Meadow and Under the Wood.’

  ‘My husband,’ announced Mistress Caldwell, her voice turned haughty, ‘has returned.’

  ‘Kennedy is back in the burgh?’ asked Pattison, raising an eyebrow. ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday evening, about seven o’clock,’ said Danforth. ‘Mistress Caldwell, I shall show the baillie through the house and garden, if you wish to attend upon your husband.’

  ‘Very well,’ she shrugged. ‘Keep your voices low. I don’t wish Kennedy disturbed, no’ in his condition.’ She retreated through the passageway to her husband who, by the sound of it, still snored.

  Danforth led Pattison upstairs and showed him into his room. The baillie eyed the libellous bills curiously, but when he spoke it was not about them. ‘So Kennedy is returned.’

  ‘It would seem so.’

  ‘And fit to return as a burgess and make this place profitable, I trust. God, but look at it – a fine home turned into a pit. If he’s not to be hauled before the courts ecclesiastical for his spiritual crimes, of course.’

  ‘I doubt that Mr Kennedy will answer to anyone save God,’ said Danforth, crossing himself.

  ‘He’s in a poor state, then?’

  ‘Look upon him yourself when we venture down. He is not like to live long, by my reckoning, though I shall summon the apothecary to attend on him.’

  ‘His whore must have ravished him to death. I can believe that,’ said Pattison. ‘A forward bitch if ever there was one. Married a man near seventy when she was sixteen, and then all the time taking old Kennedy in sin.’ Pattison smiled at the reheated gossip of yesteryear. ‘Still,’ he said with a wink, ‘if Kennedy is suffering now for it, I reckon those two years will have been worth it to the old dog, with such a wife as her down
stairs. I wouldn’t mind going that way myself one day.’

  Danforth said nothing, already tired of the man. They woke Martin who, rubbing sleep from his eyes and throwing on his clothes, absorbed the news of Brody’s escape from the Tolbooth with avid interest. ‘Well it’s not exactly the Bastille, is it?’ was his assessment.

  ‘Pah,’ snapped Danforth. ‘Frenchman are so backward they wouldn’t walk out of an unlocked prison without the express command of their masters.’ Martin only laughed. Danforth felt a strange stab of jealousy; Martin could only be six or seven years younger than himself and yet he seemed able to snap from sleep to alertness in a click of the fingers. Danforth himself usually required a quarter of an hour’s burrowing and rolling in his bed before his mind adjusted to temporal concerns. The trio then stumped downstairs and into the Kennedy living quarters. Pattison’s eyes ran over the master, and it was his turn to cross himself, drawing a frown from their hostess. Danforth averted his eyes from the wasted form, turning his attention instead to the meagre possessions with which Kennedy had left his wife, and to which he had returned: her chipped washbowl and chairs, her tattered account rolls and sagging, bare walls. The only valuable thing left had been the immoveable bed that he was once again infecting. They passed out of the backdoor and into the garden.

  Not much had changed, save the rain turning much of the space into a marsh. They skirted the puddles and inspected the back fence, which formed a makeshift town boundary. Mistress Caldwell’s brambles and nettles were still serving as defences. Some dew and lingering rainfall had left little pearls of water between the twigs and branches, and the strong smell of wet greenery wafted from them, an antidote to the foul airs that Kennedy had brought home as a souvenir. The branches beyond rose like a cluster of arthritic, badly burned hands. They swayed, creaked and crackled in a light breeze, disturbing some birds.

  Satisfied that Brody had not broken the fence, they crossed back towards the house, detouring right to the low wall that formed the back of Archie’s squalid little wooden hut. Pattison rapped and eventually Archie appeared, bundles of wet straw in his arms. ‘Ho, wretch – did you see anyone abroad in the night?’ Archie shook his head. ‘Speak, boy, or I’ll rip your tongue from your head.’

  ‘Och’ said Martin, ‘there is no need to be so hard on the boy. Archie, did anyone rouse you last night?’

  ‘No, sir,’ he said, trembling under the baillie’s stare.

  ‘And how fare our horses?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ he said, looking up and smiling. ‘Very well. Ah had a care whit ye said and gied them extra care, an’ Ah don’t ‘hink an ostler anywhere’d dae better. No, sir, no’ even the king’s.’

  ‘That’s very good, Archie. Thank you.’ The boy beamed, gave them a bow and returned to the horses.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, the accursed fellow has not passed through here, nor any other house in the Oakshawside or Prior’s Croft. I doubted it, in truth. If he has even a little wit to him, he will have run quickly, and like as not he will fall as a beggar or die on the road. The hue and cry is out; if he’s found, he’ll hang for escaping and if he’s not, then the matter is likewise at an end. His daughter murdered and he, the accused, flown. It is not the end I would like to have made to it, but it need concern us – and you, and the Cardinal – no longer. Good morning to you, gentlemen.’ He gave them a stiff bow and walked back towards the house, his lantern tucked under an arm.

  Danforth and Martin waited for him to depart before they re-entered the house. ‘What news?’ asked Mistress Caldwell.

  ‘The devil has not molested your garden,’ said Danforth. ‘And Pattison thinks the matter may now lie. Brody will be dead on the road from a journey he cannot hope to make, else found and brought back to swing.’ His voice was emotionless. ‘But we have other business, and we have neglected it too long. I came here as a pilgrim, not a coroner, and yet I have let my former trade catch me and bend me to it, as Zeus condemned Sisyphus to continually roll his boulder uphill. But first we pledged you an apothecary.’

  Before they left the inn, Danforth returned to his room and, finding the rejected apple Martin had brought him – still serviceable – the two went outside. Further down the street huddles of people were gossiping on their way to Mass. Danforth turned his back on them and went to the gate of the stable. Finding the latch hanging loose, he went in and split the apple, giving half to Woebegone. The Cur would not take anything from him, so he passed his half to Martin, who split it into quarters and gave one apiece to Mistress Caldwell’s palfrey and Coureur.The black horse gobbled, its tail swishing. Archie appeared from the garden, stepping over the low wall. A sheepish look stole over his face. ‘Ah’ve fed the horses,’ he volunteered.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Martin.

  ‘But you have let them stamp at the lock.’ Archie peered around Danforth, to where the gate was lying open, its bolt shaken loose. ‘The runaway could have taken any one of these if he’d come this way.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Archie.

  ‘Have it fixed.’

  ‘And do not,’ said Martin, reaching into his robes for coins, ‘let your mistress know of the expense or the oversight.’

  They left the boy hiding his meagre placks, exited the stable – shutting it lightly so that it would not swing open – and strode down the High Street. The clouds hung low above them. The weather had turned mild. Although it was not falling, the prospect of more rain loomed. ‘They are quiet now, but the Hyades beckon,’ said Danforth as they passed the poorer tenements.

  ‘The whom?’ sighed Martin wearily.

  ‘The rainy ones. The daughters of Atlas who open the clouds and let the water pour.’

  ‘I do wish they’d find some other occupation.’ Danforth chuckled. They attended St Nicholas first, where the churchyard had turned into a pond overnight, and then went in search of the apothecary, Martin grumbling all the way that he would have no traffic with the man. The shop lay down one of the narrow vennels off the market cross: one of the dark alleys which turned into a place of festivity and carousal whenever night fell. The haphazard buildings on either side hung over it like crooked judges.

  The inside of the shop was the usual jumble of items designed to cure the sick and hoodwink the gullible. Along the shelves were bottles of varicoloured syrups and potions, magnets and lodestones, herbs and delicate little animal bones. The whole place smelled strange, sweet and spicy. That was, thought Danforth, part of its allure. Always that which was unknown – the cause of a knotted stomach or a pain in the joints – must be countered with something equally unknown, foreign and exotic. Martin was reaching for a bottle of some black substance, when a nervous voice caused him to jump.

  ‘The remains of an Egyptian prince from Africa, ground into a tincture most meet to staunch bleeding under skin.’ Danforth and Martin turned in unison to the shadows in the rear of the shop, where a nervous young bespectacled man stood watching them. His gingery hair stood up in tufts around a patch that was prematurely thin. Before him was a counter sagging under the weight of scales, pestles and mortars. ‘I do not mean to cause affright, gentlemen,’ he said, looking at their robes. His eyes fixed on Danforth, and hope mingled with clinical interest, both magnified by the glasses, rose in them. ‘You are ill, sir,’ he divined. ‘No flux of the stomach, I think, but it is lack of sleep from an ache in the head that ails you. Rhubarb, mace and wormwood–’

  ‘I am not ill,’ said Danforth, his voice tight and his tone short.

  ‘Then you, sir? You look closely at me. If it is your eyes which ail you, I have had some success with slugs–’

  ‘As full of vigour and spirit as a young bull.’ Martin flashed him a nasty smile. ‘My eyes are sharp and my teeth are complete and unmarred. You’ll get no bloody business by me.’

  The apothecary’s tone changed, something business-like taking charge. ‘I am very busy, gentlemen, mixing some herbs for customers. What brings you?’

  ‘We have a grievous sick man i
n our lodging,’ explained Danforth, ‘For myself I cannot see that he will live. But we have given our pledge to the hostess that we should bring her one skilled in physic to examine him. What is your name, Master Apothecary?’

  The apothecary gave them a long, measuring look, full of doubt. He then cast a glance around the shop. ‘Zachary, sir. I am engaged in labour here, delicate work.’ He waved his hand towards the scales, on which was piled a little pyramid of sparkling powder. ‘And I cannot leave this place unattended; these items are of great value. There is a burgess in town – I shan’t name him – who finds hair on his mattress each morning, and would have me mix the grease of a fox with crushed beetles, to form a paste that I know prevents baldness. I am expecting a lady who wishes to pay the credit she owes for my salving her belly worms – most expensive stuffs, she took. I regret I have no apprentice; I’m new to the burgh. I would not have my name and credit slandered by visiting private homes as though I were a physician. I supply medicines only – that is my trade.’

  ‘Yet I have no doubt you will do it for coins, as any of your profession will,’ asked Martin, and Danforth gave him a sharp, silencing look.

  ‘We are not come hither to examine your ethics. There is no physician in this burgh to whom we can turn. Master Apothecary, I am certain you do not work, sleep and live in this place upon each hour. You might lock it for a spell and accompany us. You will,’ he added, sighing, ‘be paid for your labour and the loss of your earning.’

  The apothecary needed no further encouragement. With a grin, he disappeared under the counter, rummaging for a cloak and his key. Martin gave Danforth a quizzical look. ‘You’re generous, Mr Danforth.’

  ‘Not so very,’ he returned, smiling. ‘I shall deduct the sum from our payment to Mistress – or, I suppose, to Mr Kennedy. The Cluniacs are unparalleled tutors indeed.’

  15