CHAPTER 9

THE WHORE

 

 

 

Deos enim religuos accepimus, Caesares dedimus

 

The gods we inherit but the Caesars we created ourselves

 

 

 

It is his longest journey from Norwich. Not the ruts and mud of the road but a journey of a thousand thoughts. How all things conspire against him – the children’s plight, the father’s words, and now the mother’s face – is he to have no peace?

Fenton’s courage moved him, but he has seen infidels with courage on the field to shame Christendom; you can be wrong and still bear yourself like a man. No, it’s not the courage but the tranquil serenity in the face of death that really sticks in Pacificus’s throat. He sees nothing of the birds building nests, nor hears the larks. Even the heady fragrance of the hawthorn fails to reach him; his senses only yearn towards the peace that Fenton had. He’s like a man who doesn’t know he is hungry, forgets what food can be, until the smell of dinner greets him. Fenton had something, but can it be trusted – is it real? How is a man this side of eternity to really know? To serve God was his earliest and most earnest wish, his vocation. He staved off the doubts and disorientation after the fall of Rhodes, taking a place for himself and his brother at the abbey – which seemed to present itself timely and with great providence. Abbot Rugge had been beneficent, but now look – he’s turning the tables; he wants paying out for his loyalty and his silence on their behalf.

Perhaps, he thinks, Rugge was sincere enough in the beginning; it’s only the times have turned him. What did Grandmaster Villiers say? “Judge no man ’till thou hast trod his ramparts, fought his battles”? Is this what God requires of him, then? To stand with Rugge against the king, against this new world order? For what? The old world, the Pope, to save St Benet’s? Certainly as a younger man he might have seen it no other way than this, but now, now he stands beyond a river of blood, an ocean of gore, which baptises every question, colours every motive, sullies every simple pleasure that might have been on the other bank. Damn Rugge! Damn Cromwell! Yes, and the king too.

 

He is late, past Vespers and supper, only just in time for Compline. Others have heard already about their abbot, that he has acknowledged Henry, that he is released, that he shall be bishop and abbot. Even through the customary silence after Compline, Pacificus can see they are all buzzing with the news, it’s all over their faces – dying to ask him for more detail now he is back from Norwich. But he will not break silence. Let them wait ’till Chapter. He eats nothing, even after the walk, and sleeps ill, rising for Nocturne in the small hours, doing his best to purge the memories of all he’s heard in the last two days.

The psalter is good for clearing the mind. He is comforted to hear the lusty but flat singing of his friend the almoner. Pacificus begins once more to think that he could go on like this forever, forget the world and its troubles, shut them all out, the heroes and covetous men. But then he remembers that the world and its troubles will not forget him, and that no matter how clever a web Rugge spins, it is probable that the old ways and the world they have known will not survive the decade. What was it Rugge said? Ah yes, the afterglow – that’s what this was: still the sun, still round and warm, still beautiful even, perhaps even more sublime as the horizon nears, but a setting sun nonetheless.

Later on at Chapter the prior gives them the news in person. An act of parliament will have the bishopric of Norwich surrender its ancient lands to the crown – old Bishop Nykke will turn in his grave, Pacificus muses – and in its place Saint Benet’s and Hickling Priory and its possessions will be given to the said bishopric in commendam, and divine service thereby maintained. From henceforth the Bishop of Norwich will also and hereafter be Abbot of Saint Benet’s too. As Prior Thomas reads the words, a look of relief spreads from face to face like an incoming spring tide fanning out over the saltmarshes. Few are thinking about what it cost to secure such an unprecedented assurance from the state; for now all that is in their minds is that he’s done it, bless his soul. Father Abbot has done it; we are spared.

These things, along with the turmoil of his recent, vivid experience, Pacificus thinks on all that next day at his work on the rood screen. Rugge’s big gamble, his only hand in the game and it’s all aces; Saint Benet’s will survive the dissolution under the skirts of the bishopric. Pacificus holds his relief back. He knows princes and the games they play – this side of heaven the house wins. How will they word that act of parliament? The devil is in the detail. How many monks will stay on? How many men does it take, for example, to maintain divine service? Ten, twenty? Surely not the whole sixty-something now in residence. He knows these lawyers, these courtiers, their usually hidden intent behind their words. Why did it not say to keep a thriving house of prayer, a just economic community, a bulwark for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the leper against a sea of troubles? Why just divine service? There is mischief enough here. And how, with their £585 income, will they cover the outgoings of both the abbey and the Norwich diocese? The bishop’s palace alone would swallow two years’ income without any trouble at all, let alone cathedral repairs.

Today he will try to finish his Saint George panel. He starts filling in the detail on the dragon under Saint George’s feet, remembering the lively dragon’s head from Toppes’ hall. He is not pleased with the eyes but makes a good start at George’s face. The parish clerk, clutching the chalice and primers, says he thinks George looks like Richard II in his youth, before he was corrupted. They have a brief exchange, but Pacificus does not look away from his work.

“Why must kings always become so?” Pacificus goes on painting as the clerk muses aloud. Is he luring me into something here? Perhaps he’s in Cromwell’s pay, setting me up, just to denounce me later – it pays to be paranoid sometimes.

He makes some quip about his coracle; says he wishes someone would stop it corrupting, or else one day he’ll sink before ever he makes Saint James’ staithe. The clerk goes his way, but Pacificus still thinks on his words; it is a good point well made. Richard failed to exert the people’s rights against the high-born – surely a monarch’s prerogative. He was strong enough to face Watt Tyler, but not strong enough to rein in the aristocracy. Pacificus’s own grandfather had told him so repeatedly. “In my grandfather’s time,” he’d say – meaning their illustrious forebear, the great Sir Thomas Erpingham – “the earls and barons had a limit to how high they could ascend. In those days the king was anointed, untouchable, the defender of the poor. But that was before Bolingbroke rose like Icarus towards the heavens and took all unto himself.” He always omitted to mention it was his Thomas Erpingham more than any other man that helped Bolingbroke establish the house of Lancaster, for in the intervening years the family had all become good Yorkists. “Since then the curse of God is on our realm – the curse of God!” Perhaps he is right; now we have a grasping Bolingbroke and a Watt Tyler ruling from the same throne.

 

Later that day, he stops by the Bure on his return, to bail out the coracle. Gus disappears into the reeds after fowl. While tethering at the staithe later, Pacificus sees a young peasant girl, thick auburn hair and ragged clothing, trudging along the road from the causeway to the hospital. He has seen her this winter among the poor at the gate. He watches closely as he climbs the same rise towards Saint James’, for he cannot get the thought from his mind that something about her is not quite as it should be. And then he knows; it is her feet. She is not barefoot but wears turnshoes, simple leather shoes notable for being in the older style, but also far beyond her purse, or foot size. In a trice he remembers his suppressed envy at the monks of Binham, for having an able cobbler in their precinct, and how, being only few in number, they had arranged brass buckles rather than laces for their shoes – which were turnshoes too.

“Prithee, damsel!” He catches her before they reach the hospital. “How do men call you?”

Her freckled cheeks are crimson from the walk, and with a saucy lilt of the head she says, “Margaret, though no saint, if you’re buying.” Gus sniffs her and she bends to ruffle his head.

“Maid, I am not!” He knows others of the order have done so. Great saints, she cannot be older than twelve or thirteen.

She smiles, then indicates towards the staithe. “You’re the one who paints the saints at Saint Helen’s. I expect they visit you, the saints?” He shakes his head but she continues as if she were talking about the weather or the harvest. “They came to me once, there at Saint Helen’s, in the Lady chapel.”

“You? What… what do you mean? Visited you? Who, child?”

“I cannot say. When I was of an age for my first communion, me and the other girls took turns to keep the light for the Virgin – that it should always be lit. I was there on my own one evening, summer last; it was a week after my mother took ill with the sweats and died. I was about my work when I felt a burning warmth all over, and a light behind me – not so much to see with the eyes, but to feel, if you can understand my meaning. It was like being immersed in love and comfort. If heaven is like it, it shall be well.”

“There were no voices?” he says. She shakes her head. “And yet you remember clearly this comfort?”

“It was for my mother’s passing, I thought, now that she was gone and I was left on the parish. The priest took me on as his maid.”

“I’ve heard tell he has a short temper,” he says, meaning nothing much by the remark except to set her at ease. Yet instantly her face clouds over and she exhales painfully through clenched teeth, and then in a shudder, she says, “Aye. And he has no wife.” Her eyes stare across the marshes south to where Saint Helen’s spire pierces the skyline. “So I ran – ran away across the river.”

“It’s not too late, you know; not for anyone.” Does he really believe that?

She detects the pious rhetoric and responds, “Oh, you would save me! What, join a nunnery?”

“They’ve had worse, child.” He meant himself, but she’s in no mood for humour and doesn’t take his meaning; thinks he considers her beneath him, something bad.

“Don’t ‘child’ me! I have wits at least, and I know there’ll be no nunneries or monasteries in a year or two – no alms for the poor neither, so we must look to ourselves.” Her defiant glare subsides to a hollow smile. “At least the priest showed me what men like, so I’ll not starve.”

All right. Back to business. He points to the shoes. “How came you by these?”

“I… er… I have… that is… men pay in different ways.”

“Think carefully before you answer this.” He looks at the buckles, and gambles on a bluff. “Those shoes belonged to the monk whose body was found just down there. Are you telling me that Brother Bede gave these to you? Speak fairly to me now; remember a dead man’s reputation is in your hands. I’ll do what is in my power to protect you, and him if he lapsed, only I must have the truth.” But he need not have cautioned her, for he can tell instantly by her half-open mouth that she did not know it. “Ah, very well. Then tell me how you came by them.”

“I found them, by the river, but there was none to claim them, I swear it.”

“Here?” He points to the staithe and the area where the body was found.

“No, and I didn’t filch them from no corpse neither.”

“Whence then, if not here?”

“Up river, not far.”

“Up river?” This is strange news indeed. “You will take me?”

She nods. “If I can keep them.”

“You’re in no place to barter, Margaret. Just take me there, now, if you will.”

“Suit yourself, monk – if you don’t mind being seen with me going into the woods.” She raises a cheeky eyebrow and vaunts her lips, the sapphire gaze at once drawing him, for she is a beauty in her bedraggled way, yet angering him that such a one has been so ill used. He tells her to wait past Saint James’ settlement in the copse by the road to Horning and that he will attend her presently. She asks him for food, if he has any. He says he will bring what he can, and Gus approves with a sneeze – surely it is time for a little something. She sets off into the trees, and Pacificus goes to find Simon the leper. He is working on some weaving behind the lazar house.

“You again.”

“You have not lost that bile on your chest. Do they treat it?”

“What is it, brother? Be brief. For you see – ” he lifts his basket – “I am busy with making amends for my life, adjusting to my new destiny, as you so eloquently put it.”

“I must needs speak with you, Simon.”

“Again? What this time?”

“Away from here,” he whispers. Simon sits out of earshot of the others, but even so… He hesitates, and Pacificus presses his case. “Please. I’m begging you.”

 

They walk to the copse, Simon slowly and wheezing, his distemper of the lungs not shaken since the winter, Pacificus explaining about the girl and the shoes. They reach the copse and see the girl’s pale face looking out for Pacificus and the promised food from among the trees. Catching sight of Simon she is seized with dread, regretting the lost chance to make herself scarce.

“I will cover myself, child,” the leper calls out to her. He buttons the linen napkin across his lower face and then continues, “Are you not afrighted of this monk, then? They say he killed poor Bede!”

Pacificus does not rise to this, and Margaret takes him by surprise with her reply. “I know what they say, but the same people would swear the prior a virgin; they know nothing. Besides, he has not the face of a murderer.”

Simon laughs. “Very good! And me? What of my face?”

There is a hush, and then she says to Simon, with more tenderness and sympathy than Pacificus would have imagined possible from such a one: “My mother said that if I believed the sacrament, and said my Aves and Paternosters, there would be new bodies one day. When these…” she looks at her feet, “when these ones is used up.”

“And all sins will be forgiven,” Simon adds.

“You’re making a mock of me,” she says.

He mutters in response nothing more than, “No. I wasn’t thinking of you.”

Then Pacificus intervenes: “Now, about these shoes you took…”

 

She leads them down through the woods to a place where the alders give onto the reed banks hiding the river, sometimes fifty feet of reeds before the open water on this stretch, sometimes only ten or twenty. It is little frequented because the road is near and direct. She says she came here collecting wood – why should she not be telling the truth? She points them to an area of mud bank between the reeds and the alders, about fifty feet long. It lies just opposite the cutting joining Ranworth Broad to the Bure. If tall enough, it’s possible to see straight down the dyke to Saint Helen’s from there, for it runs straight. Pacificus interrupts her: “You have not been back since?” She has not. So he and Simon go forward slowly, scanning the ground. Albeit smudged by rain fallen over the last three weeks, small barefoot prints are still clear enough to see, indenting less than an inch.

“You came this way, I see; but what is this?” Another set of prints enters the place from the alders. They match the shoe size: Bede’s, for sure. “So he comes here, a strange spot for spotting the abbey swans – they usually go downstream if at all. But perhaps he didn’t know. So – what does he do next?”

Simon points his crook to the broken reeds: “He walks into the water!”

“But he takes his shoes off first,” Margaret says hastily, pointing to the place where there is a jumble of her prints and his. “That’s just where I found them, set neatly side by side. But then – where did he go?”

“Into the water – look at the reeds, all snapped as they are.”

“To swim on an afternoon that cold?” Simon sounds sceptical.

“No. No, obviously not.” Pacificus thinks back to the tidemarks of mud around Bede’s knees. “No. I think he went in to kneel and pray.”

“But… a strange place to come, withal?”

“It’s quiet here. Perhaps he was desperate to find the damned swans and get in out of the cold, sank to his knees to implore the help of the Virgin? Or maybe he was doing penance for some sin, and wanted peace?”

“Plenty of places nearer.” Margaret looks unconvinced, bending to touch the place where the shoes had been. “Even the reeds in a hundred feet of the abbey can hide a man’s sins. I should know.”

It is a point well made and Pacificus knows it, but now Simon is getting impatient. “So. He kneels up to his waist in water to pray, freezes his humours and dies, and is swept downstream.”

“But… how can he?” Pacificus looks perplexed. “There are still ten feet of reeds. If he died here, he would have stayed here. And another thing – his mouth was filled with mud. No. His face was held into it until he drowned. Mayhap someone forced him to kneel. They launched him elsewhere, but where?” He steps slowly, searching along the shore, looking for all the world like a bittern on the lookout for fish, until at last he sees the indents in the sand that tell a stranger tale still. Something is dragged along, leaving a double trail – a man’s feet, he thinks. But who – or what – does the dragging? This is strange indeed: deep, almost triangular ruts, quite like the hooves you would see on a devil in the old paintings; leaning hard into the mud, as whatever made them dragged the weight of the dead body?

“Hmm,” he says, “this is… odd.”

“Demons?” Simon says.

“No. I think not.”

“But verily – you do still believe in their doings?” Simon challenges him.

“No, I did not mean that,” Pacificus hedges, pausing to examine the mysterious hoof-ish marks again. Does he believe in devils that walk in our world? Many books attest their existence, not least the Scriptures, he thinks. Layamon’s Brut shows he believes in daemons and spirits, but for all that, not as a savage believes in them, for he has learnt these things from Wace, who in turn had what he knew from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and he from Apuleius – and who did they track back to then, these tales of mystery and legend, the stories of Arthur and the times of old? Perhaps Plato’s phenomenology of the life-world; and perhaps Plato met Epicurus – and certainly he was on the side of the devils, whether he knew it or not. But then, he supposed most of the devil’s men serve him unawares, and perhaps do it better for that, too.

“Well, what prithee did you mean?”

“What? Oh!” Pacificus comes back with a start from his rambling thoughts. “I meant… er… that the trail leads to where the reeds are almost non-existent – where a body would easily catch the tide.”

“But… why not conceal a body here? There could be nowhere better.” Simon looks in puzzlement at the place.

“No, his body was meant to be seen – a warning perhaps?”

Simon shakes his head, unconvinced. “I still say they look like the hooves of devils.” Prodding at one of the deep prints with his crutch, he adds darkly, “They say ’tis the Antichrist reigns; why not have his ghostly minions murder good monks and send them floating past their abbeys?”

“It’s not a jesting matter. You don’t believe that, Simon!” Pacificus speaks sharply. He doesn’t like this talk.

“Well, I don’t know. Diabolic hoof prints that appear from nowhere and disappear without trace – it is an omen of some sort, or perhaps a portent of things to come.”

“Avaunt!”

“Well then, brother, you tell me. If they are the prints of a man – where does he come from and where does he disappear to, eh?”

“You forget the lass; her prints are here too.” He whispers, though he judges her not near enough to catch their words.

“Her? She has neither the strength nor the passion – ”

“To drown a half-frozen monk with a pair of good shoes when she is barefoot? She does indeed have a choleric temperament along with that hair, believe me, and you should have seen her eyes when she spoke of the man who wronged her.”

“Oh yes, but Bede? Pacificus, can you really imagine him taking advantage of a woman?”

“Who’s to say? We have all failed women one way or another at some time in our lives.”

“What? Meaning? Why did you say that?” Simon clutches and re-clutches his crutch, caught on the raw.

“Later, man, later – first this damsel.” She is wandering closer now, the dog sniffing about her feet. Pacificus gives her the promised food from his scrip, but he charges her straight to tell no one about any of this for the moment. She is glad to go, and Gus trots alongside her, the little Judas – seems even dogs cannot resist the warmth of a female spirit.

As the two men turn back into the copse, Pacificus feels Simon’s eyes on him. He must tackle this with care and diplomacy. It will not be easy. They retrace their steps in silence as far as the road, and as they rise from the marsh, a chill easterly wind catches them. The alders shudder, their catkins fall like stars. How to start? How to begin this?

“Cecil – ”

“Don’t play up to me, brother! My name now is Simon. Let’s not complicate things.”

This is not going to go well. “Forgive me – Simon. I… I suppose you heard. Fenton was burned this week.”

“They gagged him, I hear,” Simon answers tersely. “The Lutherans do so to many of his sort, that they may be dispatched at night – you know, avoid an outcry.”

“Yes, I’ve heard it is so, though his end was nothing secret. Well, anyway, I spoke with him before his ordeal. He let slip that the oldest child was not his, and then I remembered what you said when we had spoken last – when I mentioned the maid Beth. You… well, you behaved yourself in such a way as I could not forget. I had not thought to know all the business from home after I left for Rhodes, but I am surprised you never mentioned this matter, particularly because – ”

“Because what? Because it would affect my oath as a knight? Or cast doubt on the authenticity of my vocation?” Simon turned and stood sideways on the path, struggling to face his brother. He was speaking quickly now, as if he had known this conversation would one day find him, as if a good defence could ease a man’s conscience. “Or is it because a true knight never runs from difficulty? Like you, I suppose!”

“Cecil? I joined the order with a clear conscience! My vocation was from boyhood – you know that.”

“Oh yes! And nothing to do with running from the marriage Father wanted for you!”

“Oh!” Pacificus waved the thrust aside. “You know our father – always some scheme to restore our position. But uniting with the Howards was never going to happen. Norfolk would never have consented. We’re yesterday’s family – it was just a fancy.”

“Really?” The leper’s voice rises in sarcasm and rage now. “Father’s oldest dream – planned from your cradle; Mother’s dying wish?”

Pacificus grabs a fistful of cloth at the man’s chest in fury. “Don’t you dare speak of her like that! You leave our mother out of this, or we are no longer brothers, so help me we are not!” His face contorts, saliva running through his gritted teeth onto his chin. “I sought a heavenly city and incorruptible crown. Mother knew that!”

“And so you abandoned us all for a patch of Mediterranean dirt instead, to become – become what, pray? The great Sir Hugh?” Simon now grabs him likewise and the two stagger unevenly in the trees. “So, don’t you judge me then about the girl’s mother! What have you ever loved but bloodshed and your own glory? Yes, all right then, I wronged her – and I carry that, and I pay for it. Mary and Joseph, brother – look at me!” His voice breaks into an anguished cry, repeating it, “Look at me!” He brings the scaly, white fist down before both their eyes and the heavy sobs convulse him forwards. Little by little they disentangle, and they embrace – a long, heaving, crumpling embrace. And even with the anguish, with all that has gone sour and died, it feels good to be close again, even like this. For until recently, these two had been close all their lives. His slow, inexorable deterioration and Pacificus’s agony of mind had locked them both away. It feels healthier to have that prison broken open, even like this.

Eventually they sit side by side with their backs against the alders, spent, vulnerable. Simon scrubs the tears from his face with the linen cloth, and lets it drop. “Father threatened to disinherit me when I told him of Elizabeth’s condition, for we were betrothed, secretly. He would not have it. Not good enough for us, the noble family, sans terre.¹⁵ He said he would disown me!” He breaks off at this point, tearing impotently at sparse weeds under the trees here with his clawed fists. “I couldn’t face myself afterwards – or think of any other woman. I couldn’t. So I ran to you – to take it out on the Saracens. Some penance that was.”

Some more ripping at the undergrowth, more choking breath. And Pacificus stares sightlessly towards the reeds, the broad, the sky, wondering at how things could ever have played out as they did. He remembers the broad-shouldered, cheerful seventeen-year-old he left on the quayside at Yarmouth all those years ago. Who could have foreseen what life held in store? So many threads, such a large tapestry. Eventually he hears the abbey bell ringing out and remembers the present with its duties and obligations. Getting up stiffly, wiping the last traces of his own tears away, he says, “You say you lost interest in women? Even mine intended fair lady Howard?”

Simon’s ruined face twists into a grin. “What? That sour-faced pudding? No fear, Hugh! And you were well away from that, too!”