CHAPTER 17

THE PLAYERS

 

 

 

Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter

 

Your knowledge is nothing when no one else knows that you know it

 

 

 

Rugge is in a foul mood. The council of bishops has removed most of the sacraments from these new articles of faith. Pacificus barely registers it under the numbness of his desolation at the pilgrims’ deaths. In his head, he’s ranting at heaven again.

The God he has served all his life does not exist; is that not now true beyond dispute? This God of his imagining, this robed deity of his childhood training, has refused Catholic England, though it be delivered to him on a silver platter. The north would have risen in arms to defend the traditional religion of England, but this God – whoever he is or was – would not have them, would not own them. Yes, there should be martyrdoms and the intermittent triumphs of wickedness over virtue – he knows all this – but somehow he also knows that this defeat, this rejection, is different by kind, not degree.

In this despair, Pacificus feels as if he is reliving the fall of Rhodes all over again. For many men the defeat of four hundred knights and four and a half thousand regulars to two hundred thousand infidels, after an eight-month siege, would seem an inevitable result. But to Pacificus the knights were God’s elect, garrisoned by angels, fortified by the Holy Spirit. They never turned, never armed their backs, so to speak. For them to lose the last of their fifty-six cities was to lose divine sanction. Eight years the knights had been homeless wanderers, feared and misunderstood by many monarchs in Europe, for they had sworn first allegiance to the Pope, but were also under oath never to lift a sword against another Christian. In the great age of the emerging nation states and the wars of religion, the Hospitallers seemed like a medieval curiosity, out of place and out of time. The emperor had finally relented and given them a windblown patch of rock called Malta, for the simple reason that these knights had become so effective as holy pirates, draining Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman coffers in raids and naval engagements. Pacificus had long since resigned himself to the fatal conclusion that for all their sacrifice and long tradition, God was no longer with them.

And this is how he sees the defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace, too. He does not for one minute think God has metamorphosed into the brutal, conniving God of Cromwell, or the regal puppet of Cranmer – damn them to hell! But neither can he now have such an overarching confidence in his own papal God, his own Constantine church. What did Christopher say about a sow’s ear? Easy to jump ship when the wind’s contrary, too easy. And it’s not that he is so base or so blind as to overlook the church’s vices or crimes, for in these he is a realist. The church is a place for men, not angels. And men are born to sin, as sparks fly upward. And if he loved the church of the living God, it was always more for what she was intended to be amidst all that – the valiant bride of Christ, as tender as a dove in fledge, yet also as terrible as an army with banners. He loved her, or the idea of her, as men should love, with faith in the beloved’s full and eventual loveliness. For surely everything that will be lovely must be loved beforehand to make it so? Men loved a patch of swampy ground near the Tiber, and it became Rome. A mother buys a new bonnet for her baby not to make the baby beautiful but because to her – even if to no one else – the child is what she adores beyond all else.

Men like Cromwell and Cranmer have no right to criticise what they have not loved, and Norfolk, damn his caprice, has no right to breathe the same English air as men like Percy and Aske. Norfolk had Aske’s body hung by chains from the walls of York Castle, as Saul’s and Jonathan’s were hung by the Philistines from the walls of Gath. In those days the valiant men of Gilead travelled all night to steal back the bodies for proper burial, but no one did it for the lawyer, not in this day and age. Pacificus takes his black thoughts back to Saint Benet’s during what is an oppressively humid July. He is about to receive two very different visitors.

 

Her cloisters bring him little comfort, for if there is glory here, he knows now that it is certainly the glory of a setting sun. Lincoln and York were the test of that, and even though in all ways right, they have utterly failed. In this light he cannot now look at any of the monastic routine without prophetic nostalgia mixed with cynicism. For he cannot be sure any more what God wants from men. This monastery is not his whole life as it has been for others. He has travelled, seen the world. He could travel again, perhaps rejoin his old order at Malta, or a quiet house among the Angevin Benedictines. But it is precisely in this that the deepest wound aches most; he does not now believe that even this will please whatever deity is left in his cosmos. He is like a moth drawn to an unknown light through a maze of cobwebs, whose wings now have no more strength to struggle free and find the way.

And so he sits one Tuesday afternoon, eating his bread – or more accurately, pulling weevils from his bread – in the porch of Saint Helen’s at Ranworth, when yet another illustrious visitor appears.

Aged and more tanned than the average Englishman, he sits astride a grey gelding. He is certainly old enough to be Pacificus’s father – though he dismounts without obvious stiffness or complaint. He wears his collar in the old style, without ruffle or ornament – and certainly has no foolish codpiece as is popular among the young. His clothes speak of the faded glory of a gentleman once loved – his doublet well styled, but jaded at the elbow in a way no wife would have countenanced, and his hose almost worn to a thread at the crotch. His grey beard is long like that of an Athenian philosopher, though perhaps less densely populated, for he is clean, whatever else he may be. No sweat or stain in the collar, no grit under the fingernails.

“Good. You are alone,” he says, casting a hooded grey eye about the churchyard. “You are the monk Pacificus, are you not?”

Pacificus nods, tilting his head slightly as if to say: And you are? But the gentleman merely smiles expansively, striding past him towards the church door. His face is familiar.

“I am minded to see what you have been up to in here. I’ve heard you are a queer fellow, as delightfully out of step with the times as I am.”

Pacificus follows him in. “Heard from whom, sir?”

“Hah! From your bishop, for one.” He does not look back to answer, but continues walking with purpose down the nave. “But I’ll tell you now, brother, it was poor Tom Percy who mentioned this rood screen, and, as you probably noticed, he is – or was, God rest him – not the sort of man to take time over little things like painting. Ah.” At this point he stops and views Pacificus’s work. “Ah, yes. He was right to mention it, yes. Yes, indeed.”

And so here he stands to take it in, before moving forward and across the individual works which by the summer of 1537 are beginning to form one grand panorama, not just at the east of the nave, but also to the two smaller altars at the east end of the north and south isles. In the middle range, the twelve apostles. In the south aisle chapel, the three Marys with Saint Margaret. In the north aisle chapel, Saint Etheldreda, Saint Agnes, Saint John the Baptist and Saint Barbara. But it is these side chapel reredos, that catch his eye most and make him almost grab at his own beard. “Yes, yes! You have it here, brother! Dear Saint Felix – yes, you have him!”

Pacificus is resisting the urge to point out where he has not finished, and what he hopes to add. On the north side, Saint Felix and Saint Stephen the Martyr are joined by Saint George. Similarly, opposite, Saint Thomas of Canterbury and Saint Lawrence the Martyr are joined by Saint Michael. “Ah, the three dragon killers! God help us, how they are needed in our time. Did ever a saint sit more foul of the polity than you, dear Becket? Your bones cry out against this very age. But tell me something, brother. I am not long returned from the continent and there I met a Signor Buonarroti – ”

“Michelangelo? You met Michelangelo?”

“You know him?”

“Yes, very well, but many years ago – fifteen years before the sack of Rome even, when he was doing the ceiling of the papal chapel and other things…”

“Well, in my opinion he is very ill favoured and self-important – and he paints his Cappella Sistina in a way I cannot fathom. He has…” he turns aside and almost whispers confidentially, as if not to upset Saint Barbara, “employed the use of pagan sibyls in his Christian themes!” He raises a knowing and bushy eyebrow. “And his Last Judgment! Pah! He fain would have Christ judging us quite naked, if some sensible man had not restrained him. And all this business of realism, this New Learning, this spitting in the wind… have you heard of anything more naive and foolish?”

“I do know,” Pacificus tries to sound as humble as he can, “that Michelangelo cannot paint without a model.”

The old man slaps his thigh and waggles his finger. “Exactly! And did the Evangelists ever sink so low as to give us a mere physical description of Christ?”

“I believe that reality is too deep a thing for paint. I acknowledge the limits of art and am resigned to paint symbolically, for the little facts of nature may mislead us into thinking they are all there is.”

“As I see here, brother!” The old man paces the rushes once more, one finger pointing to the rood screen and another waggling in the ether against the sons of Vitruvius. “I tell you, sir, these new men take upon themselves a burden that will unhinge us all! Can a man, for all his studies of the human form, really show in oil or pastel the glory of the saints, let alone the glory of the Son of Man – nay, any man? I tell you, they have lost all humility – some even desecrate human bodies in their lust. But also I tell you, brother – and I mean it – that I have seen the frescoes of Fra Angelico, Lippi, Duccio and that godly man Francesca, and you are not in the least behind them.”

Pacificus has seen their work too when he passed through Italy and he assumes the old man’s eyes must be failing. He wants to join the old man in scoffing, in thigh slapping; wants to pour scorn on these latest geniuses: the “Divine Michelangelo” and “Divine Raphael and Leonardo” – damned Italians. There are no “divine geniuses” in England, not sunk that far yet. But inwardly he sighs, knowing – or at least suspecting – that it is he who has dug in his heels on the wrong side of history’s curve. He is the relic, his is the image and not theirs that will be forgotten, discarded. He tears his mind away from these morose speculations to this other archaic character before him.

“I did not catch your name, sir.”

“I did not give it.” He looks Pacificus over head to toe once more, and then, drawing breath as if he were a runner unable to talk until he had drunk water, says, “Jeffrey de Hastings.”

“My Lord Hastings, of course!” Pacificus makes to bow.

“Come, Sir Hugh, no need for that here. Yes, I know who you are, dear boy. Rugge had reason to tell me. But do not worry, your secret is safe with me. That is why I have left my retainers in Norwich and sought you out like this. As a friend of your father, God rest him, I must say that you look ill, boy. Do you not have red meat at your house, or is it all carp, eel and oats?”

“My humours have been out since God abandoned us to despotism and slaughter.” Pacificus puts a brave face on it, and stares towards Saint Michael, but where was he when it mattered?

“Tush, what talk! The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church; it was ever thus!”

But Pacificus does not answer. He is too weary for optimism now. Do not all men claim to have God’s approval, or claim a martyr’s crown for their dead, these days? How can you validate his backing when he himself is so silent? By his silence he makes fools of us all.

“But let us not talk of that now, for I have a reason for being here. I am travelling back to my estates which, as you know, are fast to the former lands of Binham Priory.” Hastings begins to scrunch his velvet cap between gnarled fists. “This is a delicate matter, Hugh, but Bishop Rugge says you may be depended upon.” He pauses and screws up his face like a man about to make a grave confession.

“Would you like to sit down?” Pacificus says.

“No, my lad, I will stand. As perhaps you may know, Wolsey had me in the papal states some twenty years ago, all through that terrible war that engulfed the continent and brought Christendom so much disgrace.” Pacificus realises he means the French–Muslim alliance forged by King Charles’s mother after he was captured by the emperor at the battle of Pavia. Every nation and canton forgot its own broken treaties and rose in high indignation when one mother’s treachery fractured the Christian world.

“As I fear God, it was a sorry business and, as you will see, I had no honourable part in it. You see, brother, when King Charles came over the Alps, all Italy was in an uproar, his forty thousand seemed to be unstoppable, and so many efforts were made to deprive the likely conqueror of his spoils. And so – I won’t bore you with the detail – it came to my care by the hand of a papal legate – for we were leaving by sea – the reliquary of Saint Helen.”

“The reliquary?” Pacificus’s mouth drops open as he begins to join the dots. No wonder the bishop had high hopes.

“The very same, kept in the same chapel since the fourth century, perhaps the most valuable reliquary in all Christendom, fashioned to the design given by her own son Constantine at her death.”

“And you are about to tell me this is the great secret kept by Prior Wulfric and the Binham brothers?”

“God forgive me, I broke the trust of the church, bringing that and a huge quantity of gold coin home on my return, even after I heard of Charles’s defeat at Pavia.”

With drooping shoulders and sunken eyes, Hastings walks slowly under the statue of Saint Helen on top of the rood screen. “Ambition makes scoundrels of men, Hugh. My father was Lord Chamberlain to King Edward, before Richard and Buckingham had his head. I was only a young man then, and the doors of preferment were suddenly closed to me. It is hard when you have certain expectations. I think you understand that.”

There is another pause as Hastings feverishly thumbs the edge of his cloak. “God alone knows what I intended, for I did not. My wife Catherine, God rest her, would have no part of it. Women are so sensible, so immune to ambition. I entrusted them to the secrecy of Binham Priory. Wulfric knew, and their priest Jary, as did your abbot of course, but no one else. So the matter was closed for a time until I could decide what to do, never thinking the king would start searching out every cellar and crypt of every holy house. God’s teeth, did any man predict that?”

“But Augmentations never found it at their first visitation?” Pacificus says.

“No, quite, and I was abroad at the time when I heard of Jary’s sad demise.”

“The vicar at Binham – dead too?”

“Oh yes; didn’t you know? Bludgeoned to death in front of his own altar, like Becket, poor fellow.”

“And was Wulfric suspected then?” Pacificus says.

“Well, why would he be? The sheriff was out looking for thieves, for many of the chalices and plates were missing from the vault too. But now – well, now it looks very different. We must assume Prior Wulfric has made some of the other brothers aware of the gold and the reliquary.”

Pacificus nods. “I have observed them, seen their private conferences. It would explain a great deal.”

“And this poor novice, Bede? Got cold feet?” Hastings says.

“Perhaps,” Pacificus says with a smile, though Hastings does not notice the pun. “But what did he get cold feet about? I mean to say, what could they hope to achieve with such a relic in days like these?”

“Oh, I know exactly what they intend – well, almost exactly. Wulfric shares your pessimism; he has written off England, and petitioned the emperor to set them up on the continent in their own monastery, where they can be the keepers of the relic.”

“You know this for sure?” Pacificus says.

“I am not without my contacts where it matters. But if they think the foreign court will treat them fair, they are mistaken. It is far more likely – for all their piety – that some cardinal or abbot will seize the relic and make them disappear. I have it on good authority that the emperor’s ambassador, Chapuys, has hired men to negotiate with them, and who knows where that will end? So we must act swiftly.”

“Hurry to do what? I cannot but see that you and the bishop are at odds here,” Pacificus says. “You, presumably, want to ease your conscience and return the saint to her true home, whereas the bishop wishes to have her work miracles for Saint Benet’s.”

“And you are the bishop’s man?” Hastings asks wearily.

“I am my own man in matters of conscience.”

“Really? You are aware that these relics could save your abbey?”

Hastings is a strange one. Even against his own expressed intentions he would look for any excuse to have his spoils remain in England.

Pacificus’s countenance takes on its stormiest aspect, shadowed by memories of the bloody scaffold on Tower Hill. “My lord, if God will not save the monasteries by his grace, nor good men, should we ask the devil to do it?”

The old man might have been affronted, but is rather pierced and humbled. “No, indeed, my boy, quite right. But you will help an old man ease his conscience then, and perhaps save the lives of some of your own brothers? It gives me no sleep to think of Chapuys’ spies lurking about your precincts with their long knives and continental morals.”

Pacificus says he will do what he can, and the old man seems happy with that.

 

That same afternoon Pacificus revisits the riverside sandbank where Bede was murdered. Simon is with him and Pacificus relays to him all he has now come to know about the matter. Simon says he remembers old Hastings at their house one Michaelmas, how he swung him round and round by the fireplace. Pacificus cannot remember these happy things nowadays. His childhood memories lie dormant like forgotten bulbs under long ages of winter. He lets Simon reminisce about their father, so different from his own memories, as the firstborn – he could almost be a different man. He died less than a year after their mother, and the house was sold to cover the endless re-mortgages and relentless taxes. Nothing is left; no property, and even the title will die out with the brothers.

“Would you want to go back – be a child again, I mean?” Pacificus asks him.

“That, and many things,” Simon says, “but time slips away from us, does it not? They say you never stand in the same river twice.”

“Yes. I see.” Pacificus gazes, lost in thought, across the sparkling waters, down the dyke to Ranworth Broad and the spire of Saint Helen’s.

“What was that novice doing here, that afternoon when he met his end?” He points to the reeds. “He knelt here in the water – we assume from his own free will, because he left his shoes on the sand. But, why? And why here?”

“Well, we know he was a tender youth,” Simon says.

“So?”

“So, suppose he happened upon this place while he was out counting the swans.”

“This place?” Pacificus says, trying not to let the impatience of an older brother sour his tone.

“Yes, this place; the first point at which the vista leading to Saint Helen’s opens up.”

“Saint Helen’s… of course!” Pacificus exclaims. “He was kneeling and praying to her, asking the saint for forgiveness.”

“And perhaps too loudly, for if I’m near my mark, someone else heard him praying.”

“In a boat perhaps – sound carries that way, and it was misty,” Pacificus says.

“And that would explain the footsteps coming from nowhere.”

“Yes, yes! But the strange triangular shape of them?” Pacificus says.

“Ah, well, I’ve been thinking about that.” Simon glances at him, his eyes bright, interested. “Let’s say Bede is overcome in the reeds and drowned there, and then the murderer drags the body down the beach where he can launch it. He’s facing backwards, so we only see his heels raking up the sand. They’re at quite a depth because the body is heavy.”

“No return footsteps though?” Pacificus ponders. But as soon as the words leave his mouth he grasps what that must mean.

Simon, seeing the change come over his face, nods grimly. “Aye, brother, there was more than one in on this. An accomplice brought the boat round to pick him up.”

 

Meanwhile on the Ant another conversation is taking place.

“Caught much?” Beth is at her thinking tree upriver with a thousand yard stare when Richard and Piers row past on their way back from the nets.

“Some, but not much. Give you a ride home?” Richard calls back. She clambers in absently, wondering how she will put it to them.

“Why such a long face?” Piers asks impudently, mimicking her expression and earning himself a clip on the ear.

“Shut up. I’ve got something to tell you.” She sits on a sack at the rear of the boat, arranging her dress just as their mother would if she were about to tell them a story, and begins to explain how Simon – that is, Sir Cecil – is really her father. She sketches out for them the events that led to her birth. Richard stops rowing, goggling at her in amazement.

“But… why did Mother never tell us?” Piers says.

“You will understand when you’re older.”

“But – but – you’re still our sister?” Piers’s eyes are starting to fill with tears. A few years back he hadn’t wanted to marry anyone else but her, despite all the arguments.

“Of course I am, silly boy!” she says. “We have the same mother, only you have a new uncle.”

“And, and Sir Hugh is our uncle too – sort of,” Richard points out. “Have you told Pieter and Sarah?”

She nods. “Yes, I told Sarah.”

“What did she say?” demands Richard, all agog.

Beth shrugs. “Not much. You know Sarah. Just gave me a hug, that’s all; said it didn’t change anything.”

 

Pacificus asks at the abbey gate for information about any strangers in the outer precinct – foreign types – but Brother Porter is as helpful as ever. “What? You wants an inventory now, brother? By the saints, I wonder you don’t think I’s got better things to do!”

In truth, the outer precinct is a daily throng of tradespeople and visitors. If spies want to find a foothold, it will be no hard thing. He makes the mistake of adding, like some clueless under-sheriff, “So you haven’t noticed anything you thought suspicious?”

This was enough to get the old boy ranting a full ten minutes, during which monologue Pacificus happens to glance up at the spandrels in the vaulting of the gatehouse where the coats of arms of the abbey’s original baronial benefactors were carved, among them de la Pole, Beauchamp, Clare, Valence, Warren and Arundel. He sees his own family shield next to the Hastings shield – what a strange thing is providence! But Pacificus is jerked back from his wandering by his instructor. For Brother Porter, like all those sent to try the saints, is famed not so much for his prodigious ability to hold forth, as for his insistence on being heard. And amongst his tirade on the suspicious types that frequent the abbey precincts, he makes mentions of a travelling troupe of players only just arrived.

“Suspicious? By my soul! I’ve never trusted players, nor yet mimers and jocatores, no – not far as I could spit! If I had my way, I’d let happen what they did let happen in my father’s time – have all them cozens and caitiffs arrested and made useful somehow.”

Pacificus detaches himself with difficulty, but an hour later the porter’s words come back to him, prophetic indeed. In the lavatorium, washing his hands before joining the brothers in the refectory, Pacificus notices a guest lingering near the door – no doubt with the players; they do have a certain look and smell. But this lusty, long fellow waits until they are alone before taking a few steps closer from the doorway. Pacificus observes him from the corner of his eye, his pulse now quickening. Breathe slowly now, he thinks; probably nothing. It is only when he stretches his hands into the sink, thus exposing his wrists, that the man exclaims, “There! I knew it was your face, old comrade! Though for a surety, it’s the wrists that give us all away.”

Pacificus shakes the water from his hands and faces the stranger. Who on earth could this be? The doorway light is behind him. “Do you not recognise your old rowing partner, Hugh? Neptune’s beard! I had not thought to see you again – and so comfortable too.”

“Nor I you, Filcher.” Pacificus is hesitant. He spent many months chained to this horse thief on a Barbary galley. Back then, both of them were naught but a sack of bones, though Filcher’s bones had been considerably thicker. Now he was fleshed and toned like a wrestler.

“I see you and de la Valette got ransomed, then.” Filcher forces a malevolent smile. He has no love of the rich. Pacificus nods. He and his comrade from the French langue, an ebullient knight, John de la Valette, had been ransomed by Dragut – pirate and naval tactician par excellence, second only to the infamous Barbarossa himself. If there was any etiquette of the sea, this alone was it; the knights and the Mohammedans would always trade well for their own. Even Dragut had been a galley slave for the Genoese at one time; business is business. If no one traded for you, then you were dead in a few months, simple. Which makes Pacificus wonder all the more. “How did you escape?”

The man takes a step forward, walking on the balls of his feet like some courtly dancer. “Ah, well, now that would be telling, would it not, my noble lord knight?” Filcher’s eyes have that demoniac and predatory gleam about them, hungry to grind any opportunity for bread. He leans forward, and the cunning leer is not pleasant to see. “The question I asks myself is how one such as yourself is hiding out here.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“Oh! So they know you was a knight sworn only to the Pope, do they? No, thought not! And that being the case I’s a-guessing that someone with your past is up to no good in England, and that the secret of your identity is worth a great deal to you.” He gives a condescending cough. “Not that I think a godly monk would withhold worldly goods from a destitute player who has fallen on lean times.”

“So you are one of the players?” Small talk seems better at this point than knocking his teeth down his throat. For one thing, it would not look good if he were discovered doing it in the abbey, and for another Filcher is a big fellow and likely to be armed.

“I’m their captain, and though there’s not so many gold angels in it, we do get to meet people, see things – like you, for example.” The whites of Filcher’s eyes are jaundiced yellow, and from this distance the veins in them do not make for pleasant close viewing.

“You got the wrong man for bribery, Filch. I’m – ”

“What? Just a lowly brother what’s renounced all worldly possessions? Oh, very handy! But see, I know your sort: never without means, however humbly they profess it.”

He now closes with Pacificus and jabs his index finger into his chest as he speaks. “You used to say, on those long nights at the oars, that your people had lands hereabouts – yeah, I ain’t forgotten – and wealthy friends no doubt too. Now suppose you tap one or two of them for a favour, cross my palm with some gold…”

To hell with it. Pacificus is having a black day anyway, a black year, and there’s only one language a man like Filcher understands. He clips the man’s pointing finger upwards with his left hand, and delivers a hard right into his belly, putting his whole shoulder and body behind the blow so that Filcher first heaves into midair, then crumples to his knees. Weren’t expecting that, were you? Filcher reaches for the concealed knife in his breast pocket but Pacificus has anticipated him and – moving swiftly behind him – closes his own hand on Filcher’s. A bent arm like that is in its weakest position, and a good thing too, for Filcher is strong.

Yanking his head back by its greasy hair, Pacificus forces the blade arm up tight to Filcher’s own jugular vein, his voice low. “You don’t know me, you never saw me, you will never speak to me again.”

Filcher is struggling all the while to get to his feet – he gasps and splutters like a sick pig. But Pacificus knows his own business too well and keeps him down by kicking his legs away. “Ever! D’you hear me?”

Whatever reply he might have given is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Prior Wulfric, whose hands rise up in horror at what looks like a murder in progress.

“Brother! Brother! Brother Pacificus! What is this?” he almost shrieks as he falls back against the doorway.

Filcher is not slow to grasp his advantage. “Brother – dear brother – oh, help!”

“Silence, knave,” Pacificus says.

“This monk attacked me, a guest,” Filcher whines. “He is deranged.”

Pacificus rams Filcher’s head against the wall to distract him, twisting his knife arm behind his back until he releases the blade. Pacificus recovers the weapon, drops the man with a final kick, and shows the knife to Wulfric at the door. “You will notice that he was holding the knife, not me.”

“Well, I… oh …”

“Liar! He attacked me!” Filcher is quick to his feet, his fingers feeling that his neck is not cut. “You saw him yourself!”

“Well, I don’t know… I mean to say, this is all very vexing – we must report it to Father Prior – ”

“No,” Pacificus cuts in sharply. “No, that won’t be necessary. This man had grounds for his hostility. He mistook me for another villain, that’s all. No harm done.” He let his eyes bore into Filcher’s. “He is our guest, after all, and will be gone on the morrow.”

“Well… I – er, I don’t know. Is this true, friend?”

Filcher sniffs and gives a sulky nod. Pacificus goes his way, hoping he has laid this to rest. He does not see, a few moments later, the rogue following Wulfric to talk to him in a quiet nook in the abbey court.

 

Pacificus does not attend the players’ performance that night. He wants some space and time to calm his nerves, and takes refuge in the quiet of the library. Mistress Fenton has requested any Langland, Gower or Marie de France he can procure for her. He told her he does not approve of Marie de France. She had smiled coyly, admitting there is much amiss with that lady’s moral views, but little to rival the breathless ease of her diction and characterisation. It makes the time hang less heavily. At this he felt more prudish than an Anabaptist, and said that perhaps he would look at her work again. Right now, in front of Father Aloysius’s disapproving stare, he’s feeling a mite hot under the cowl himself. He takes the books quickly to a window seat, where the evening sun pours onto an elm table in liquid bronze pools made more surreal by the window tracery. He sees diagonal cracking to the left of the mullions and remembers – or at least tries to forget – that he sits, as does the abbey – and everything else – on a shifting sandbank between two rivers.

He opens the Lais of Marie de France, and although his Anglo-Norman French is as dusty as an Angevin attic, he is nonetheless guiltily rapt by the poems that so easily draw forth memories and yearning habitually ignored. That forgotten voice, that soft, low murmur of sensuality that draws his mind back to her – her in the castle cell. And it’s times like this when his vocation to the celibate life sags under the pressure of other forces. It is easier as a knight; he knows that. Living by your sword and nerve will make you forget everything else – even food for a time. But it’s when the arms are laid down and the drama of action is spent that the longings arise. The need to be held, to find the comfort of another, fragrant, soft – pah! Pacificus shakes it off.

His best defence is to gibe at the passion of this poetry, and Marie de France gives him every opportunity for such easy diversion. Her love poems at once condemn yet then somehow condone infidelity. “When the deceived partner has been cruel and merits deception, and where her lovers are loyal to one another,” she says. What in God’s heaven is that supposed to mean? Is that the measure by which the French break covenants? No wonder Francis’s mother could betray Christendom to the Mohammedans with such a clear conscience. He is wrapped up in the uneasiness of such disturbing thoughts and vague hungers when the bell for Vespers echoes down the halls.

 

The evening offices are fulfilled in all peace and propriety. Not until a short while after Nocturne does the cry go up that a dead man has been found strung up like a butchered pig in the small granary.