Hermitage, Wat and Some Nuns

by Howard of Warwick

  Eventually the voice of Balor rose in command, ‘Eggar, go and let them in this minute.’

  They waited at the door while Eggar’s slow steps brought him to the ground floor. This didn’t stop the debate above, which Hermitage assumed must be between Hendig and Balor.

  Eventually the main door crept open and Eggar appeared. ‘Apparently you’re to come in,’ he said, plainly thinking this was not the best idea.

  Cwen bustled past him and walked across the main ground floor room to the stairs at the back corner. Hermitage followed and couldn’t help but notice the state of the place.

  All the furniture, not that there was much of it, had been herded into the middle of the room and the few tapestries which draped the walls (decent scenes without a hint of Wat about them,) were heaped on top. Where there was a simple panel of wood on the wall, this had been ripped off, or kicked in, and even some of the floor boards had been lifted away.

  With a leap of deduction which made him feel rather proud of himself, Hermitage concluded that Hendig and Balor were looking for Gilder’s coin. He further concluded that they hadn’t found it. Otherwise why were they still here?

  He followed Cwen up the stairs and heard Eggar close the front door and come up behind.

  Just before he entered the upper chamber Hermitage hesitated. Last time he had been here the remains of Gilder had been laid out for all to see. He sincerely hoped something had been done with the remains since then. To leave the body untended would not be decent at all. Not to give Gilder the rights due to the dead, and arrange a decent Christian burial would be unthinkable. He also thought that if the body was still there he might be sick again.

  He closed his eyes as he entered and opened them slowly. The whole place was in disarray, as the ground floor had been, but at least there was no body.

  ‘Has Gilder been attended to?’ he asked, wondering if perhaps Father Cuthbert or one of the nuns had done the necessary.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Balor confirmed, ‘he’s in the yard.’

  ‘In the yard?’ Hermitage asked. Maybe that was the local name for the burial ground.

  ‘Yes,’ Balor said, absent-mindedly, ‘there’s a small yard to the back of the place, where deliveries come and the like. We’ve put him there.’

  ‘In the yard?’ Hermitage repeated, in a much higher and more outraged voice this time.

  ‘We don’t want him in here stinking the place out, do we?’

  ‘I think we want him decently buried,’ Hermitage suggested.

  ‘You might,’ Balor retorted. ‘I’m sure he’s not going anywhere. You can have him if you like.’

  Hermitage couldn’t immediately think what the suitable words for this situation would be.

  ‘Looking for the coin then,’ said Cwen, ignoring the appalling treatment of the dead.

  Hermitage moved his attention on from Gilder’s mortal remains and examined the room. Everything was there, just not where it should be.

  ‘Without any luck,’ Cwen nodded toward the upturned bed, the lifted boards and the damaged panels.

  ‘It must be here somewhere,’ said Balor. ‘Where else could it be?’

  ‘In the yard?’ Hermitage asked, immediately feeling guilty for the implication.

  ‘We checked,’ Balor confirmed. ‘No sign of any digging or hiding places.’

  ‘And I imagine you want to find it on your own,’ said Cwen, glaring at Hendig.

  At least the young man had enough shame to look away.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re not interested in having your money.’ Cwen went on, ‘Your idiot moot have decided to execute Wat. If we can show that this was a simple robbery, they might change their idiot minds.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Balor, and he seemed genuinely shocked. ‘Surely Wat would be the last person to kill Gilder.’

  ‘Why so?’ Hermitage asked.

  ‘Stands to reason,’ said Balor. ‘Gilder was a big collector of Wat’s tapestries. Why would the weaver want him dead? Not going to make any more sales to a dead customer.’

  Hermitage’s immediate thought was that “stands to reason” was a fascinating expression. Something stood up to reason. He would ponder that when he had the time. His second thought was more prosaic.

  ‘Wat was not, I mean is not making any more tapestries of that nature. His works are much more wholesome now.’

  Hendig frowned at this. ‘More reason for Gilder to kill Wat, I’d have thought.’

  ‘What? Why?’ Hermitage asked in shock.

  ‘Increase the value. If Wat’s not making any more, the price of those he has made will go up. If he’s dead he really can’t make any more, can he?’

  ‘What an awful way of thinking.’ Hermitage shook his head.

  Hendig shrugged.

  Cwen folded her arms and looked at Hendig through narrowed eyes. ‘You really are a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?’ Her tone said that she knew exactly what she wanted to do to nasty pieces of work.

  Hendig just shrugged again.

  ‘If anyone was going to see Gilder out of this world and take his coin, I’d put you top of my list.’

  ‘I never,’ Hendig protested.

  ‘Knew his secrets. Could well know where he kept his coin, even though you say not.’

  ‘What am I doing here then?’ Hendig asked. ‘If I’d taken his coin I’d hardly be hanging around, would I? And I could have been in and out of the treasury without saying a word.’

  ‘Hm,’ Cwen grumbled, clearly unhappy that the explanation was half-reasonable.

  ‘We haven’t found any coin anyway,’ Balor complained. ‘Goodness knows what the old privy-head did with it. Trust him to find a hiding place no one else would think of.’

  ‘Hiding place, eh?’ Hermitage asked, his curiosity prodded by the question.

  ‘Well, we can’t find it,’ Hendig complained. ‘And Eggar knows the place better than anyone.’

  Eggar nodded silently at Hermitage’s unspoken enquiry.

  ‘Obviously not in the walls or the floor or the furniture,’ Hermitage concluded, looking at the wreckage of the room.

  ‘Or the fireplaces, or the yard,’ Balor added.

  ‘The roof?’ Cwen suggested.

  They all looked up.

  ‘Unlikely I’d have thought,’ Eggar spoke up.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was as much as the old master could do to stand on two feet recently. I can’t imagine him climbing into the roof with a sack full of coin.’

  ‘What if it’s not here at all?’ Cwen asked. ‘Did he ever go anywhere else?’

  Eggar shook his head. ‘People tended to come to Gilder when he wanted them. Whether they wanted to or not, usually.’

  ‘So,’ said Hermitage, thoughtfully, ‘let’s think this through.’ He tried pacing up and down the floor but the place was such a mess of bits of furniture and house that he had to keep still.

  ‘Someone comes to the house with their rent. In coins?’ He asked the question of Eggar.

  ‘Years ago one of the farmers tried to pay with a chicken,’ Eggar said, with a cautious tone.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’ Eggar looked away. ‘Suffice to say the farmer said he’d never be able to look his chickens in the face again. He moved out of poultry.’

  Hermitage looked at him.

  ‘Very carefully,’ Eggar concluded.

  Hermitage shook his head at this nonsense. ‘Where did Gilder receive the rents?’

  ‘At the front door,’ Eggar confirmed. ‘He’d never let any of the tenants into the house. Said they made it smell.’

  ‘Charming. So he took the coin at the door. Then what did he do with it?’

  ‘At the end of the payments he’d have me take it to his chamber for the fourth count.’

  ‘The fourth count?’

  ‘That’s right. He made the tenants count it out in front of him while he wrote it down. Then he counted it again in front of them and made the
m put their mark. Then he counted it again after they’d gone. Then he counted it all again, in his chamber.’

  ‘I can’t imagine the individual rents were very large amounts,’ said Hermitage.

  ‘Not usually,’ Eggar acknowledged, ‘a few coins here and there. Soon adds up though.’

  Hermitage nodded.

  ‘Not soon though,’ Eggar went on, ‘not when it has to be counted four times.’

  ‘So why did Gilder do it himself? Why not have someone do it for him? He seemed to command the place.’

  ‘He liked money,’ Eggar said, simply. ‘Liked to see and touch it but most of all….’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He liked to take it off people.’

  ‘And you never saw it come out of his chamber?’ Cwen confirmed.

  ‘Never saw any of it again. Not even to buy food.’

  That puzzled Hermitage. ‘How did you do that then?’

  ‘Gave his note to tradesmen. Strange way of doing business if you ask me. They’d take a note of what he’d had, add it all up and come and get it from him later.’

  ‘Hm,’ Hermitage pondered, ‘I have heard of such practice. But to be honest it’s usually been the case that the payment ends up not being made.’

  ‘Or it gets argued over for weeks on end,’ Eggar added, ‘which was always the case. The tradesmen would come here and there’d be lots of shouting and thumping of things and they'd go out grumbling that they hadn’t got half what they were owed.’

  ‘So Gilder did give some coin out then?’ said Cwen.

  ‘He did. From a small purse at his belt. And you could see that it hurt him like hell.’ Eggar gave a hollow laugh at the memory.

  Hermitage weighed all this up in his head. If the coin went into Gilder’s chamber in large quantities but only came out again one purse at a time, the rest of it must still be in there. Unless, of course, he sneaked it out again and hid it somewhere else. But as Eggar had said, the man was old and probably couldn’t manage that.

  ‘It must still be in the chamber then,’ he announced.

  ‘We’ve looked,’ Hendig confirmed.

  ‘Then we must look again. You didn’t even find a hiding place?’

  ‘Nothing at all. No secret panels in the walls, no loose boards on the floor. Not even anything in the bed.’

  Hermitage looked around the room. There didn’t seem to be anything left that hadn’t been turned over or destroyed completely.

  ‘You’re not going to be able to use any of this again,’ he gestured at the broken bed and a chair in pieces.

  ‘That’s alright,’ said Balor, ‘we can bring some of the good stuff up from the treasury. Don’t know why he wasn’t using it anyway. Sat in this miserable place, living like a beggar when he had a whole store full of finery.’

  Hermitage had no answer to this so he paced as best he could over and around the wreckage. He went to each corner of the room in turn, to see if the view from there would reveal anything. No revelation presented itself.

  In the final corner, the one to the right of the window over the street, the free-standing, upright screen was knocked over and leaned against the wall. It was a lightweight and flimsy thing of wood and simple cloth and Hermitage was reluctant to look behind it.

  He pulled it out of his way and saw exactly what he had been fearing.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘not again.’

  ‘What not again?’ Cwen asked.

  Hermitage pointed a shaking finger at what the screen had been concealing. The privy. The night pot sat on the floor but the corner was dominated by a simple hole in the floor with a seat above made of wood. It was very clear what it was for.

  ‘Disgusting,’ said Eggar. ‘I never knew why he had that thing in his room with him. Why couldn’t he throw it out the window like normal people?’

  ‘And what do you mean, not again?’ Cwen pressed.

  ‘I, erm, had to deal with an incident involving a garderobe a while ago.’ Hermitage took a breath. ‘It wasn’t very nice.[

  You’ve been referred to The Garderobe of Death so have probably bought it already.]’

  ‘An incident?’ Balor asked.

  ‘A death,’ said Hermitage, ‘on the privy.’

  Everyone turned their noses up at this.

  ‘Yeuch,’ said Hendig, ‘what on earth had he eaten?’

  ‘Oh, it was much more complicated than that,’ Hermitage explained, ‘so complicated you could write a book about it.’[

  There you are, see.]

  ‘So what does this one have to do with anything?’ Cwen asked, bending her head in its direction but not going any closer.

  Hermitage gave them all a knowing look. ‘Very good hiding place, a privy.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Hendig’s nose was most turned up of all, ‘he wouldn’t.’

  ‘He would,’ said Eggar. ‘Don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. It’s just the sort of thing he’d do. Who’s likely to go poking down his privy looking for anything?’

  Hermitage broke the ensuing silence with the inevitable suggestion, ‘We have to go down and look.’

  No one moved.

  ‘Can’t we go to the street and look up?’ Balor asked. ‘I mean, it’s only a hole.’

  ‘But the hiding place is likely to be in the walls of the privy,’ Hermitage pointed out. ‘There would be no point putting his coin down there if it simply dropped to the street. There must be a spot he could reach easily, if he was as decrepit as Eggar suggests.’

  ‘More so,’ Eggar confirmed.

  ‘Unless he lowered it down to someone to take it away to the gong house treasury,’ Cwen observed. ‘Be a perfect way of moving it.’

  Hendig folded his arms. ‘Well I never took anything out of his privy to go to the gong house.’

  ‘Someone must have done,’ Hermitage pointed out, ‘otherwise the privy would be full now, wouldn’t it?’ He did risk a look down the hole and saw that it was a pretty simple drop to the street below. There would doubtless be a small door at the bottom from which the contents would be taken away to the gong house at the appropriate time.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Hermitage announced, ‘someone has got to go down there.’

  ‘Someone young,’ Eggar immediately spoke up.

  ‘Someone dressed for the job,’ said Hendig, gesturing at his fine clothing.

  ‘Someone light and small enough to drop down the hole,’ said Balor.

  They all looked at Cwen.

  Caput XX

  Down the Hole

  The prospect of getting a rope tied round Cwen and dropping her down a privy did not sit well with Hermitage. He did think that at least there were four of them to hold her down while they fixed the rope, although he wasn’t entirely confident that would be enough.

  In the event she seemed quite taken with the task. She did glare at everyone as she stepped over to the hole and looked down, but she hadn’t dismissed it out of hand.

  After a very cautious approach she even slowly knelt, put her hands on the seat and lowered her head into the space.

  Hermitage ignored the sound of Hendig gagging.

  She emerged and faced them with a frown on her face. ‘Doesn’t smell like it’s ever been used.’

  Hendig’s cough sounded quite weighty.

  Hermitage looked to Eggar.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Eggar protested. ‘I’m hardly likely to watch what he does on the privy.’

  ‘I can’t see a thing though,’ said Cwen. ‘We’ll need rope and a torch.’

  ‘I wouldn’t advise that,’ said Hermitage. ‘I’ve seen the effects of putting a lighted torch into a privy. The whole thing sort of blows up.’ He shrugged, not having a better description.

  ‘We open the door at the bottom then. That should let some light in. Hendig, go and open the door. Eggar, find some rope.’ Cwen sounded like she was enjoying being in charge.

  Eggar nodded and left the room.

  ‘Why do I have to go?’ H
endig complained.

  ‘Because it’s a job I can trust you with,’ Cwen mocked. ‘Opening a door. Not much opportunity for cheating at that.’

  Hendig looked shocked at the insult but Balor was giving him an impatient look. He left, grumbling about his lot.

  ‘What am I looking for, exactly?’ she asked Hermitage.

  ‘I don’t know really. I would imagine some sort of recess in the wall of the privy. Probably near the top so it would be easy to reach. And I can’t imagine Gilder letting his coin too near the street. There may be a small chest there, or some loose coin. Anything really.’

  Balor went over to have a look down his father’s privy. ‘I can believe it,’ he said, enigmatically.

  Eggar returned with a good length of rope which looked in fine condition. ‘Used to threaten the tenants that he’d hang them from the front door if they didn’t pay,’ he explained.

  Cwen took it and quickly tied it round under her arms.

  ‘Now, gentlemen,’ she addressed Balor, Hermitage and Eggar, ‘you are going to lower me down this privy on the rope. You are going to hold it strong and firm because, believe me, if you drop me you will never hear the end of it. Never. Am I clear?’

  The three men nodded as sheepishly as a lambing shed.

  They gathered at the privy seat and could see that some light was emerging now. Hendig must have opened the door.

  Cwen called down, ‘Hold the door open Hendig.’

  A muffled reply came back up.

  ‘Because if you don’t,’ Cwen went on, ‘I shall come down there, slam the door on you where it hurts most and lock you in.’

  The next muffled comment from below sounded more cooperative.

  Cwen climbed up on the seat and sat to lower her legs into the hole. Taking her weight on her arms she gave a last warning glare to her rope-men and let them take the strain.

  It was obvious now that Cwen was the only choice for the job. She barely fitted through the hole and had to wiggle to get her shoulders down.

  ‘How big is the door at the bottom?’ she called up.

  ‘Not very,’ Eggar replied.

  ‘You’ll have to pull me back up again when we’re done then,’ Cwen instructed.

  At least Cwen was no great weight so Hermitage, Balor and Eggar found it easy to support her as she dangled in the privy.