Abbot's Passion

by Stephen Wheeler

  ‘But you did know.’

  ‘And I tried to own to it. But you saw the result. God would not permit it.’

  I shook my head. ‘That was before all the facts were known. Now that they are what’s to stop me going to the sheriff with them?’

  ‘Because this confession I make to you under the Seal of the Confessional.’ He went down on his knees and made the sign of the cross. ‘Bless me father for I have sinned.’

  ‘No!’ I said backing away from him. ‘I refuse to hear it.’

  ‘Too late. It’s already begun. As a priest of the church you must now hear me and when I have finished grant me absolution. If you do not you will have betrayed your calling and I will die with the stain of murder on my soul - and you will have condemned me to becoming Fidele’s last victim.’

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  IRRESOLUTION

  I’d been tricked. Everything that happened in that room had been a trap even down to leaving the notebook so conveniently placed under his bed where I was bound to find it. That was the real reason he kept it, as a snare. And like one of his dim-witted trout I’d swum right in and swallowed the bait whole.

  He knew it was just a matter of time before I realised it wasn’t him who had gone to fetch Reeve Alwyn and once I did I would know who the murderer was. So he wanted to get to me before I had a chance to expose him. That was the purpose of this new confession. Those two earlier confessions were never meant to be taken seriously. But this latest one was, and having made it under the Seal of the Confessional, that sacred bond between confessor and confessed, as an ordained priest I was bound never to reveal what he told me. My lips were sealed.

  Why had he done it? To ensure my silence of course, but also I think out of fear for his eternal soul - that was genuine enough. Murder is a mortal sin for which we are condemned to the torments of Hell if left unrepented. He wanted both forgiveness and anonymity, and by confessing to me in the way that he did he was guaranteeing both. But as well as my duty to the penitent I also had one to the victim. Whatever Fidele was in life, and from the sound of him he was a thoroughly unsavoury character, he was still worthy of redemption in the eyes of God and his soul would never rest while his murderer remained unpunished. So to whom did I owe the greater duty: Fidele the blackmailer or Jocellus the murderer? To honour one would be to betray the other. It was an impossible moral dilemma.

  I passed a sleepless night wrestling with all of this, but by morning I was no closer to a resolution. Perhaps I should simply go to Samson and tell him all I knew - or as much of it as I could within the limits of the Seal. I could just imagine the conversation:

  Me: ‘Father, I know who murdered Fidele.’

  Samson: ‘Who?’

  Me: ‘I cannot say for it is knowledge obtained under the Seal of the Confessional. But I have the evidence.’

  I would then show him Fidele’s notebook.

  Samson: ‘Where did you find it?’

  Me: ‘I can’t tell you that either. But it contains the name of the murderer and his motive for committing it.’

  Samson opens the notebook.

  Samson: ‘It’s full of gibberish.’

  Me: ‘There’s more. There’s also the rod that was used to kill him.’

  Samson: ‘Where is it?’

  Me: ‘At the bottom of the fishponds.’

  Samson: ‘You wish me to drain the fishponds?’

  He wouldn’t, of course. And even if he did, any evidence that might have been on the rod will have been washed away by now. It was hopeless. In desperation I sought the advice of Brother Solomon, the novice master and my own confessor, without telling him the details. But even Solomon could offer no comfort this time. His conclusion was uncompromising:

  ‘It is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray a penitent in word or manner for any reason no matter what the sin. It has to be that way otherwise his admission may not be full and his soul thus placed in peril. That is why trust between confessor and penitent must be unqualified. And remember, a priest who breaks that seal of trust incurs automatic excommunication for himself.’

  ‘Even if he hears the confession unwillingly?’

  ‘Even then.’

  So there it was. A choice between my duty to a friend and my duty to a dead man who I’d hardly known and who by all accounts had been little better than a criminal himself. If I said nothing then I would be condoning murder. But if I revealed what I knew I would condemn Jocellus to certain death and myself to the agonies of excommunication and all that that meant for my own immortal soul.

  There were still two other people who knew the truth: Joseph and Alice Nevus. Joseph had already made it clear he was not willing to speak. And who could blame him? Neither the church nor Abbot Eustache had much love for him. Why should he help them? And it wouldn’t be fair to ask Alice Nevus to do what I would not. It would be like passing the cup from my lip to another’s. No, the choice had to be mine and mine alone.

  But in the end there was no choice. Whatever I thought of the Abbot of Fly I could not in all conscience allow him to leave Bury not knowing the truth of what happened to his clerk, nor could I let Fidele’s soul languish in the afterlife in perpetual torment even at the risk to my own immortal soul. It was therefore with the heaviest of hearts that I made my way over to Eustache’s rooms in the abbot’s palace.

  Even as I approached the door I was still hesitant. What would Eustache’s reaction be? Would he want another inquest? The thought of starting all that over again and this time with Jocellus in the dock made me pause one last time. But there was no alternative if justice was to be done. Setting my mind I raised my hand to knock.

  But just as I was about to bring my knuckles down on the door I heard a sound coming from behind it - a groan. What was this? The abbot abasing himself again? What for this time? For failing to achieve his ends? I vacillated. Did I really want to witness this?

  Another groan - and this time not that of a man.

  A female voice?

  Lifting the latch I gingerly pushed the door open - and nearly fell back at what I saw inside. Eustache was not on his knees on the floor flailing his own naked flesh again as last time but was leaning forward in his chair fully clothed and gazing intently at the scene before him. And what a dreadful scene it was! The Flemish giant, Sterk, was holding Cathrin from behind pinioning her arms back. Cathrin was naked from the waist up while another guard was about to do unspeakable things to her. And before her, tied to another chair and being forced to witness this barbarity, was Hamo.

  ‘What on earth?’ was all I managed to gasp out.

  Eustache spun round in his chair, his eyes manic. ‘You!’ He barked and glanced back at the appalling scene. ‘See where your blasphemies have led you? I told you I would get the truth one way or another.’

  I wasn’t prepared to argue with him. ‘Release her!’ I ordered. ‘At once or I won’t answer for the consequences!’

  Eustache jabbed a finger at Hamo. ‘He murdered Fidele. If he will not admit his guilt willingly then he will be made to do so by other means.’

  ‘God has judged him, and you were quite happy to let him do so when you thought you would win. But you didn’t. So let them go, both of them. Now!’

  Eustache snorted contemptuously. ‘You think you can threaten me?’

  ‘No, not you.’ I turned to Sterk. ‘You! I know the identity of vechter who defeated you before,’ I said recalling the word he had used to describe Chrétien. ‘He is my creature and will do my bidding. Do you want me to unleash him again? For I will, and this time he will finish the job.’

  The threat seemed to hit its mark - long enough, at least, for him to slacken his hold on Cathrin who managed to wriggle free and rush over to Hamo. As quickly as I could I grabbed the remnants of Cathrin’s smock and covered her naked breasts. I then untied Hamo’s restraints and before their torturers could regain their wits I hurried the pair out the door. Behind us I could hear Eustache’s plaintive voice: />
  ‘I will not forget this day maître. And there will be others.’

  But I was no longer listening.

  I didn’t bother telling Samson about the things I had witnessed in Eustache’s room. Such was my contempt for the man I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Nor did I impart the thing I had gone there to tell Eustache. Somehow none of it seemed important anymore. All I was concerned about was getting Hamo and Cathrin out of Bury and back to their home village where they belonged and which I did by requisitioning Samson’s second best mule, Agamemnon. Samson didn’t ask where he had gone - no doubt still shamefaced over the business with the thief and the moneybags. As far as I was concerned it was just recompense. But I could tell by the look on his face as he bade farewell to the abbot-legate that he was just glad it was all over. Eustache didn’t wait another day before leaving and Samson wasn’t going to dissuade him. He merely accompanied the legate as far as the gate before smartly turning on his heel and leaving him to depart alone without so much as a Nunc dimittis. I watched him go with an enormous amount of relief but also with a slight pang of apprehension. His type never forgets a slight and I had slighted him more than most. As things turned out I needn’t have worried. The Abbot of Fly never returned to Bury but went on to greater things in the service of the church eventually dying quite young and being made a saint by a grateful pope.

  Samson was as good as his word and gave Fidele a requiem mass before the high altar of the abbey church and then his body was interred in the monks’ cemetery. As far as he was concerned that really was the end of the matter. He stuck to his theory that Fidele’s death had been a tragic accident and as time passed and there appeared to be no further consequences he felt he was justified in his opinion.

  Of course there were consequences. To say Jocellus was left completely unpunished would be wrong. Every time he and I saw each other thereafter we were both reminded of the thing that both joined and separated us. Over time I had to witness his slow disintegration unable to speak out but disinclined either to offer him comfort. But that was the punishment he chose for himself. Towards the end of his life his mind was touched I think by the pain of having to carry the burden of what he had done alone and in silence. He would often be seen loitering by the abbey gate where he would introduce himself to passing strangers with: “Hello, my name is Jocellus and I am a murderer.” Of course no-one believed him.

  One thing about all this did make me sad, however. I said at the beginning that my assistant Gilbert held me in some awe. That was not something I particularly sought or particularly relished and by the end it clearly was no longer the case. I had noticed that he had become more withdrawn in the weeks following the departure of the abbot-legate. I let it go for a while but eventually I felt it my duty to confront him as to the reason suspecting I might already know the answer. It turned out he had been thinking long and hard about his future in my service. After some prompting he told me he wasn’t sure medicine was the course God had planned for him after all. I hesitated to ask my next question fearing what the answer might be:

  ‘Was it through some fault of mine that you have come to this decision? I know you were somewhat disappointed when I did not arrest Hamo when I had the chance, and you also disapproved of my feeding him in sanctuary. Then there was that business with Cathrin being alone with me in the laboratorium - which, incidentally, was entirely innocent.’

  His reply surprised me:

  ‘Oh no, master, none of those things. It was the battle in Lakenheath. I had never witnessed so much violence before. I never knew men could behave so towards one another.’

  ‘But Gilbert,’ I said. ‘That was but a little battle.’

  ‘I know, master. But if I could not cope with that how would I be if there was to be a major conflagration like the one you described at the Field of Saint Genevieve? I would not be much use to my patients if I froze with fear and horror the way I did that day. It is best I find these things out now. I think God may be guiding me to another calling, possibly the sacristy.’

  ‘As you wish, my son. I shall be sorry to lose you. Naturally the final decision would be for Abbot Samson, but if you think it would help I will support your wishes.’

  Well, Abbot Eustache had his uses after all - if only of a negative kind.

  *

  What is justice? Is it a panel of men deliberating over evidence and then meting out punishment? Or is it the outcome of a battle of arms between two unequal combatants? Was it justice that Samson should have won in his struggle with the Bishop of Ely merely because his army of sixty thugs was able to overwhelm a handful of peaceful market traders in a sleepy Suffolk village? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. Perhaps Prior Robert with his fractured expertise in the law would understand it better. Unfortunately I was not able to ask him for he finally died peacefully in his bed a few days after Abbot Eustache left us.

  The mystery about who really killed Fidele would have to remain unsolved along with so many others. I will carry the secret to my grave bound by my oath of silence and reveal it only now in these pages which I trust will not be read until long after I and all the other protagonists in the affair are dead. As far as Sheriff Peter was concerned the matter had been settled in Palace Yard. Abbot Eustache was gone and so was Coroner de’Ath. As for Samson, he had other more pressing matters on his mind. At Whitsuntide King John summoned all the chief vassals of England to Portsmouth, Samson included, and at the end of May they had landed in Normandy. The intention was to cement the peace achieved at Le Goulet the year before. But, careless as ever, John again insulted the powerful Lusignons who appealed to King Philip of France as John’s overlord. John then compounded the offence by refusing to submit to Philip’s mediation. Peace negotiations broke down and within a year England and France were at war again. The death of one Cistercian monk in an obscure corner of this small island was all but forgotten. Perhaps, like Gilbert, we all have to await that final adjudication that is not man’s to give, but God’s.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Abbot’s Passion is a work of fiction but it is written around real events and real people. Wherever possible the narrative keeps to known facts the primary source for which is the Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds written by a twelfth-century monk at the abbey, Jocelin of Brakelond. Jocelin was a local man from a northern quarter of the town which still carries the name today - Brakelond, or Brackland possibly denoting an area of heath or marsh. The characters in the story are a mixture of the actual and the invented. Abbots Samson and Eustache, Priors Robert and Richard, Brothers Walter, Jocelin, and Jocellus were all real people as was Sheriff Peter de Mealton, although his sartorial tastes are imaginary. Everyone else is fictional.

  THE BATTLE OF LAKENHEATH

  Jocelin claims that nearly six hundred well-armed men set off from Bury to destroy the market in Lakenheath village in the spring of 1201. But Bury at the time was a town of some four thousand souls and six hundred would have represented close to half the entire adult male population of the town. This seems an extraordinarily large number to descend upon a tiny hamlet of twenty-four (at Domesday) houses. Given the Medieval propensity for exaggerating numbers, I’ve plumped for the smaller and entirely ad hoc figure of sixty. Given the capacity of a handful of drunken louts to wreak havoc in an average English town centre on any Saturday night, I don’t think this number makes the battle any less credible.

  EUSTACHE DE FLY

  Saint Eustache was born in about 1178 at Beauvais twenty miles north-west of Paris. As a very young man he joined the Cistercians at nearby St. Germer de Fly, was elected its abbot in 1200 and a year later became apostolic legate to England preaching crusade and an end to Sunday trading. In 1209 he was sent by Pope Innocent III to help suppress the Cathar heresy in southern France in what has become known as the Albigensian Crusade, one of the most vicious religious wars of the Middle Ages in which torture, murder and rape were routinely used as weapons to convert the heretics to th
e Catholic faith. Exhausted by his efforts, Eustache then returned to Saint Germer where he died on 7th September 1211 possibly from an infected bladder and was subsequently canonized.

  SAMSON AND THE JEWS

  The past is famously a foreign country and we should be wary of judging events of eight hundred years ago in the light of subsequent centuries. But there is no doubt that Samson’s attitude towards Jews was ambivalent - a product of circumstances, his own personality and the politico-religious attitudes of the day. According to Jocelin, Samson was capable of bearing a lifelong grudge and he blamed Jewish money-lenders not only for the abbey’s crippling debts but also for stealing, as he saw it, the moneys he had amassed as sub-sacristan to build his beloved twin towers. No doubt he believed along with everyone else that the Jews were responsible for the ritual murder of twelve-year old Saint Robert whose body was buried in the abbey crypt. Then there was King Richard’s crusade to recover Jerusalem from the infidel, be they Arab or Jew. In that fevered atmosphere someone, possibly Samson himself, preached an anti-Semitic sermon to the townsfolk on Palm Sunday 1190 and in the subsequent riots fifty-seven Jews were massacred. Afterwards Samson’s solution to Bury’s Jewish problem was to expel them from the town which he did with King Richard’s blessing, and although King John later encouraged them to return they never again reached the numbers or the influence they had enjoyed before Samson’s time.

  SWW October 2014

  UNHOLY INNOCENCE

  May 1199. Richard the Lionheart is dead and his brother John has just been crowned King of England.

  John travels to St Edmund’s abbey in Suffolk to give thanks for his accession. His visit coincides with the murder of a twelve-year-old boy whose mutilated body bears the marks of ritual sacrifice and martyrdom. This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. Eighteen years earlier another child was murdered in the town in similar circumstances.

  Abbot Samson needs to find out if this is indeed another martyrdom or just an ordinary murder and appoints the abbey’s physician, Master Walter, to investigate. Walter discovers a web of intrigue and corruption involving some of the highest in the land but unbeknown to him his own past holds a secret which will put his life in danger before the final terrible solution is revealed.