The afternoon was already darkening under a scud of racing clouds from the east. Further snow looked likely, but so far it had held off. When they reached the guest house, after persuading the reluctant porter to open the night door for them, they discovered that the other guests were already forewarned and on the point of leaving.
‘This is unexpected,’ complained lady Amabel as soon as she saw Hildegard. ‘We thought to celebrate here but it looks as if we’ll be on the road during the Feast.’ She pulled a reproachful face at her husband.
‘Not so, sweeting. I have friends at a manor near Guisborough. If we start now we shall arrive not long after nightfall. It’s safer to leave at once and, besides,’ Sir Ranulph gave his son a covert glance, ‘I have finished my business here.’
Darius raised his surly countenance from inspecting the straps on his bags. ‘And what business might that be, my dear lord and father?’
‘Ha! That’s surprised you, hasn’t it! You don’t imagine I’m here for mere pleasure, do you?’ He patted Amabel’s hand to take the sting out of his words and indicated a velvet bag containing something not much bigger than a man’s hand waiting to be taken out with his personal baggage to where the wagon would convey their possessions northwards. ‘I consider I have had a profitable few days here. When you find out why you’ll congratulate me.’
He was looking so extremely smug that Hildegard paused to hear him say, ‘I’ve always told you wealth resides most securely in land. I now have in my possession something a buyer is willing to exchange for a very large piece of land indeed. If you’re still set on running sheep over it, so be it. I don’t object to that. But it’s land, Darius, land, and one day you’ll learn there’s nothing more valuable, not even sheep.’
Darius looked put out. Then the corners of his mouth began to lift. ‘Why, you old schemer! Is it what I think it is?’
His glance fell on the velvet bag.
His father tapped the side of his nose and the two of them turned away with Sir Ranulph putting his arm round his son’s shoulders like man to man.
Before he left he went over to Gregory and Egbert and extended one hand. ‘A good joust, brothers, but Master Buckingham’s need for payment, a bill I was willing to settle in full, swung the abbot in my favour. I hope you don’t think it was underhand?’
‘Well done,’ murmured Gregory. ‘It’s good to know that after the imminent attack by the mariners the abbey will be rebuilt again by so prodigious a master builder.’
Sir Ranulph looked puzzled and when he worked it out he gave a bark of laughter. ‘Quite so, friend. Quite so!’ Still chuckling, he ushered his entourage towards the door with Sister Aveline, giving Hildegard a final smile, tagging along behind.
‘Did he mean what I thought he meant?’ Egbert wrinkled his brow. ‘But, Hildegard, I thought you told us that the Glastonbury merchant had obtained the relic?’
‘That’s what Aveline told me.’
At this moment the two body servants from Glastonbury were heaving a chest down the stairs, one at each end and when, puffing, they gained the ground floor, they dropped it down to have a short rest.
Behind them came the merchant himself in a blue hood, ready for the road. It was generally known that he had dined almost every day in the abbot’s lodging. Now, before going out he offered a few opinions about the coming siege and wished the Cistercians well.
As he went to the doors he added, ‘We’ve had a successful visit. Well worth our journey to this wild region. I’ll have many stories to tell the monks when I return south. My commiserations to you fellows, however, and to you, domina. It is not without a qualm that I take home the very thing you yourselves hoped to obtain. However, we can but abide by the abbot’s decision, can we not?’
With that he swept out followed by his two servants, his metal-bound chest, and he himself carrying a carefully wrapped object – no bigger than a man’s hand.
The others looked at each other in astonishment. ‘So who has the original and who the fake?’ Hildegard’s expression was close to hilarity as she looked from one to the other. ‘I told you horse-hair didn’t cost much!’
‘They may not agree. It may have cost the buyers much indeed. I wonder what they paid!’ The men themselves were close to hilarity too as they guessed what must have happened.
When they told Luke, who had tracked them down after a word with the infirmarer, he was incredulous. ‘But do they not suspect?’
Gregory explained what the abbot had told Hildegard earlier, that the bidders in this sale had been sworn to secrecy.
‘Each one will believe he has the genuine relic. Later in the year when they have a ceremony of dedication on St Hild’s Day the truth may slowly filter out. But who will doubt that he himself does not possess a genuine lock of Abbess Hild’s precious hair and that the others are fake?’
‘Sir Ranulph has already got someone to give him land in exchange,’ Hildegard told Luke. ‘He’ll deny any suggestion of its being a fake should he be questioned.’
‘A case of caveat emptor, indeed,’ concluded Gregory with a wry grimace.
The night passed in a state of uneasiness throughout the abbey. The guest house on the foregate sounded strangely hollow when the guests left and the kitchen staff disappeared with no work to do. The three corrodians had taken shelter in the dortoir with the monks. Hildegard, in the guest chamber inside the infirmary, was glad to be surrounded by some stalwart young men to supplement her own ability to fight should there be violence.
The definite loss of the holy relic, if such a thing had ever existed, still disappointed her. With the help of pilgrims who came to pray before it, the nuns at Swyne would have been able to finance an extension of their own buildings to take in more sick and elderly with no homes of their own. The prioress had mooted the idea of an extension to the choir too, with the idea of taking in more pupils to prepare them for the Song School in Beverley. Now those hopes would come to nothing.
Before they could leave they had a mystery to clear up, but ahead there was the confrontation with the mariners to face. Although it was difficult to imagine that they would actually storm the abbey precincts, and even more difficult to believe they would attack helpless patients in their beds, it was an uncertain atmosphere that pervaded the place. As Vespers and Compline came and went, night extended its dark mantle over the world and the Great Silence fell.
Dunstan went round to make sure the doors were barricaded. ‘Just in case,’ he muttered when he came to offer a few words to Hildegard about Hertilpole’s madness. ‘He’s sleeping now and we must pray that tomorrow his reason will be restored to a semblance of what it was.’
She wondered if the fishermen were waiting in the expectation that he would send someone to parlay with them after discussions in Chapter, and she wondered how long it would be on the morrow before they realized they were the victims of a hoax. The thought of their disappointment and rage was frightening. To the abbey it was a matter of showing who was boss. To the mariners it was a matter of life and death. With nothing else to lose it wouldn’t matter to them what they did.
Now, on the surface, everything continued as usual. The bell tolled at midnight, bringing the silent monks down the night stairs and into the nave to worship at the great altar while Hildegard, somewhat uneasily, stood almost alone at the west end behind the screen.
A few servants showed up and at the last minute she noticed Torold slip inside with a couple of companions. One was the silent boy who had done as he was told on the day of her arrival. The other was Miggy.
They were up to something. When everybody began to leave, Hildegard went as far as the west door then lingered out of sight while the boys remained. Duke had evidently been told to guard the exit and was sitting erect and in silence when Hildegard patted his head in greeting.
As soon as the boys heard the main doors slam they started to behave in an extraordinary manner.
The silent boy was instructed to walk from the screen at one end of the nave towards the west doors where Hildegard was standing out of sight. The other two stationed themselves at a short distance on each side of him and watched carefully as he began to pace forward.
He was almost up to the doors when Hildegard stepped forward. Before she could speak there was a frenzied scream and the boy fell to the floor, his face pressed to the tiles and both arms outstretched as if grappling with an enemy.
Hildegard ran to him. ‘Child! What is it?’
From both sides came gasps of shock and as Miggy ran up he was babbling about St Hild and ghosts and how you had to walk in a straight line down the nave and not deviate and she would appear to you in a white shift, but it was the domina, whose name was almost the same, who appeared but she was real.
He took a breath and clutched at her arm. ‘You are real, aren’t you?’
‘You sot-wits!’ she hissed. ‘Look at this poor lad, frightened out of his senses. What are you doing making such fools of yourselves?’
Then she began to laugh. The atmosphere of impending doom seemed suddenly as ridiculous as these children playing at magic to summon a dead saint.
‘Don’t you know it’s not true?’ she demanded, ruffling their hair and holding the shivering silent lad against her to comfort him. ‘It’s just a tale people tell round the fire in winter. Heaven and Hell may exist for all we know, but it’s as sure as anything that no-one has ever returned from either place to prove it. We only have the word of a few old men who want to keep us in awe of them, and story-tellers who share their outlandish fantasies merely in order to amuse us. Come back to the infirmary kitchen and have a tisane, then it’s off to bed with you all. I’m ashamed sensible boys like you should believe such stories!’
As they calmed down and sheepishly followed her out through the side door with Duke’s claws clicking over the tiles beside them, she asked, ‘What would you have said if St Hild had appeared? Did you have some questions ready?’
Torold replied. ‘We’d have asked her if she knew who killed my father.’
‘That’s the reason we cannot leave yet. Young Torold needs answers and nobody but us seems interested in finding any.’ Hildegard and the other three Cistercians were walking up to the headland away from the abbey.
For a time their images were captured by the luminous dawn between Lauds and Prime, when even in winter the northern sea thickens the reflected light and mirrors it back to the land. Their faces were bathed in silver light like the features of saints drawn on grisaille glass.
They had decided to walk up the rise above the fish pond for no other reason than a desire to escape the gradually increasing hysteria inside the cloisters.
The brotherhood were behaving as if annihilation by the sword was inevitable. Some were desperately ready to be martyrs. A few silent ones were detached from it and moved about with thoughtful faces, but the rest flaunted their righteousness in loud condemnation of the mariners’ defiance. It was as if Hertilpole’s shattered mind had shed its fragments among them like the pieces of a broken mirror.
‘There is yet time for the prior to assert himself,’ Luke said in a tone that suggested he had not much hope of that.
Egbert mocked the idea. ‘Do you seriously see him going out on to the foregate to talk to them? He hasn’t the nerve.’
‘I would talk to them,’ Gregory admitted. ‘But it’s no good promising them what the abbey will not deliver. I don’t understand how the abbot can believe it will end in satisfaction for either party. Violence will achieve nothing. It begets only more violence. The fishermen cannot pay with what they do not have. Is the abbey going to ruin them? Where will that get them? The abbey needs them as much as they need the abbey.’
‘It will go to law,’ Hildegard suggested. ‘They say the old abbot was always in and out of the courts.’
‘Will this one choose that route? He’s a sad example of what lack of leadership can do to a fraternity.’ Egbert gazed moodily out to sea where the horizon was streaked with crimson as the sun began to shrug itself out of the water. Millions of red and gold lights began to blink across the surface. Everyone turned to watch.
Despite the daily yet always awe-inspiring beauty of the dawn, Hildegard’s thoughts were still with Torold. He was right to ask who had killed his father, but she was beset by the creeping suspicion that the murderer might have slipped through their fingers.
The idea was too vague to share with the others yet. It made little sense. What if, she wondered, Aelwyn had known that the relic was a fake? He had obtained the old, discarded bursa that had covered the reliquary and given it to his mistress. It was a pretty thing. He could have sold it on behalf of the abbey to bring in some needed revenue, and the fact that he had not done so made one want to ask how he had obtained it. Sabine had kept her keepsakes in it. Did she, too, know that the relic it had once housed was a fake? Would Aelwyn have told her – or not told her?
She gnawed over other possibilities. They seemed endless. They led nowhere. But what if, by some process she had not yet worked out, somebody thought Aelwyn was about to announce the truth? He appeared to have grown into an honourable man after his rampaging novitiate. His actions showed that. Maybe this subterfuge about to be practised regarding the holy relic now went against the grain? Again she asked herself, what if, getting wind of his intention, someone had decided to shut him up?
Then there were the guests to be accounted for.
It was in Sir Ranulph’s interests to have a genuine relic, and the Glastonbury merchant would be of the same opinion. What if some loyal person among either entourage thought up that diabolical way of keeping the truth secret.
The same theory might be applied to Edred. He was considered by everyone but the bursar to be an honest man. For that very reason he might have decided it was time to reveal the truth.
Remembering the conversation in the hall between Sir Ranulph and Darius as they were leaving, it began to strike Hildegard as too overt, like a scene by a couple of mummers acting out a pretence at secrecy. It might have been intended to demonstrate their belief in the absolute genuineness of the relic – a ploy to cut off any suspicion that might arise about their involvement in keeping the truth out of it.
Darius seemed the type to have no compunction in getting rid of any man who stood in his way. There was that bruise he had been so keen to explain away, and he had been inside the laundry and must have seen the novices’ little surplices hanging up to dry. Maybe they had given him the idea of stopping up the vents and thus preventing the truth coming out? The more she thought about it the more credible it seemed, even though it was all based on supposition without a shred of hard evidence.
Then there was the Glastonbury merchant. The loyalty of his servants was not in doubt but he had played such a small part over the last few days it was difficult to make much of him. Of course, he had dined regularly with the abbot and maybe a hint had been dropped, no-one the wiser. Will no-one rid me of this troublesome knight? Aelwyn, silenced, would safeguard the interests of both.
This brought her thoughts to the abbey men. What might be true of the guests might also be true of the abbey obedientiaries, the bursar in particular, either acting alone or on orders of Abbot Richmond?
It was almost inconceivable that a lord abbot, a figure near the top in the hierarchy of the Order, should allow matters to drift so far out of his control that they were being forced to sell off their assets. It would be an affair of burning concern to him that the abbey should continue to pay its way. If a word of suspicion reached his ears that someone doubted the authenticity of the relic, wouldn’t he want the truth smothered?
The manner of both deaths suggested a perpetrator without a weapon, or someone lacking the nerve to use one to draw a man’s blood. And the battering of Edred with an iron weapon more usually used as a seal was something a desperate man might wield in the heat of the moment. The seal had not necessarily been stolen from the abbot’s chamber where he conducted business affairs. It might be carried by anyone who needed to seal a document on behalf of abbey business – the prior, the bursar certainly, and others, chamberlain, sacristan, cellarist, bottler, almoner. The list was long. Every document that left the abbey would be moved by it and payment authenticated.
‘It’s going to be a fair day,’ Luke said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Nothing to stop the prior sending someone down that cliff side with a message of conciliation.’
The sky above the headland was now flooded with crimson light.
‘Red sky in the morning,’ warned Egbert. ‘Does that tell us something?’
With the feeling that they had witnessed an omen of things to come, they made their way back in gloomy silence towards the enclave.
When Hildegard entered the infirmary the old men in the beds lined against the walls were in a ferment of excitement. One had a piece of wood across his knees which he clearly intended to use as a club, another was flexing his fingers and saying with relish, ‘Leave them to me, brothers. I’ll show them what for.’
Brother Dunstan lifted his hands in mock despair when she asked him what was going on. ‘They imagine they’re young bulls of twenty. The years of living peacefully as cloistered monks have fallen away in the excitement of feeling young and unbound by any vows. They’ll settle down once their blood cools and if there is an attack I doubt not that they’ll sleep right through it.’
‘Did you say I could get my sleeve repaired where it was torn?’ she asked.
He directed her towards a door that led by a few winding steps up to a small tower room where the broiderers worked.
The broiderers’ chamber.
When she entered she saw that it was festooned with fabric and the tools of their Mystery. A couple of laybrothers were sitting cross-legged, gossiping and stitching. When she made her request to them they readily agreed.
‘No need to take the garment off, domina. We’ll have that stitched up in a trice,’ one of them told her.
He put aside the cloak he was working on. It was ripped on one side. Hildegard stared at it. ‘Whose garment is this?’ she asked as he searched around for light-coloured thread to replace the black he already had in his bodkin.
‘We have no idea. They just send them up willy-nilly and we stitch ’em.’
‘Is it possible to find out?’ she persisted.
‘Doubtless. Go and see the chamberlain. Do you know where he is?’
‘I can find him.’
Looking round while she waited until the seamster had finished with her sleeve, she noticed the stand containing different coloured threads. The men were obviously capable of stitching the complicated patterns required for a range of ecclesiastical vestments.
She saw gold and silver thread among the red, blue, green and yellow. A small piece of fabric stitched with a close pattern of daisies was lying half-finished on the side. The tips of the petals were picked out in red to represent the blood of Christ.
‘I think I might have seen something like this somewhere in the town,’ she told him. ‘Is it likely to come from here?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘It was being used as a little bag to keep things in.’
‘Mayhap it was no longer fit for its original purpose, or it might have been an off-cut from a larger garment. We re-use where we can.’
When he finished mending her sleeve she thanked him and hurried out.
The misericord.
The chamberlain was cutting off strips of meat and stuffing them into his mouth where he stood. He was shocked and surprised to see a nun at the door. ‘Are you permitted in this part of the enclave, domina?’
‘I believe so. I was directed here. I have a question about a garment that is being repaired. It’s a cloak belonging to one of the monks. I was told you would tell me to whom it belonged.’
‘I really don’t see what concern it is of yours.’
Inventing a lie with a speed that shamed her she said, ‘But the seamster cannot remember who sent it up and they are in a hurry to return it. He thought you would know.’
‘Ah, on an errand out of the compassion of your heart.’ He put another sliver of meat into his mouth and, chewing, gave her question some thought. Eventually he said, ‘Describe this cloak. I’ve sent several garments up there to be repaired.’
‘Black. Not unlike many others. But the tear, quite distinctive.’ She gave a small, false laugh. ‘Almost as if some wild animal had torn it!’
His eyes darted before he replied. ‘I might know the one you mean. I expect it was the cloak the bursar was wearing when he had a recent tumble down the night stairs. It’s ready, is it?’
‘Soon,’ she smiled, all meekness. ‘My gratitude, my lord.’
Bowing, she went out.
The bursar’s cloak?
Did that mean he was out last night stalking about in the darkness of the headland? Following her? After that gruesome attempt to rape her when his swift punishment had nearly burned him alive?
But how could that be?
She was certain that after Brother Dunstan’s assistants had rescued him and brought him back to the infirmary, mind-boggled and raving, he had been under the infirmarer’s watchful eyes all night.
Now she wondered why the chamberlain was lying. He must know that Hertilpole was in the infirmary last night, everybody knew, so to name him could not implicate him in anything else. The little lie about falling down the night stairs was extra confirmation of his innocence.
That meant that Hertilpole had his alibi but someone else did not – the wearer of the bursar’s cloak. If, in fact, it was the bursar’s cloak.