by Non Bramley
By rights I should have immediately made a search of every house and hovel in the Abbey Close. I should have turned out every cupboard, lifted every board and combed every cellar and attic. With things as they were, with every square inch of space crammed with pilgrims it wasn’t feasible.
I searched where I could – the kitchens, the stables – but it was hardly a thorough job. I comforted myself with the thought that if I was hampered then so was this thief of women and children. They could hardly remove evidence or shift a rotted body with so many eyes watching.
I visited all the pilgrim houses and in every overcrowded room I spoke of my search. I talked to hundreds of souls, hoping that at least some might have passed this way a year ago. No one knew or had seen anything.
The days went on and I had nothing to show for them.
I made a painfully slow search of the abbey church by candlelight. Every night, Johanna would unlock the doors and I would spend hours, chilled to the bone despite the heat of an unseasonably warm May, looking for something, some clue.
I opened the tombs and searched the crypt. Bodies stink for many months and they would be as ripe as all heaven by now, perhaps one of the tombs held my missing girls, its heavy lid sealing in the corruption. Quietly, I even searched the shrine tomb of Saint Credan. It just contained a few shards of yellow bone.
I shuffled on my knees through the nights, searching an acre of floor for a stone that could have been lifted. I found no evidence of any recent tampering, but the floor was so strewn with mud and worse brought in on pilgrims’ boots it would have been hard to tell, so next I searched any stone or wall that rang hollow, as if covering a hidden hollow space. I found three treasures in total and they all contained crimes - of a sort.
The first stone I lifted was close to the entrance of the chapter house. It was worn thin from the passage of hundreds of feet and easy to lift. Under it I found the broken remnants of a stone box, carved with the image of an angel – its almond eyes and stylised curls looking foreign to my eyes. I showed the fragments to Johanna. She was fascinated.
‘It’s been deliberately smashed and then buried,’ I said. ‘There are axe marks here.’
‘An empty box that was important enough to keep in this holy place, even when it had been broken,’ she mused. ‘It must have held something sacred. Maybe a reliquary?’
I had to admit I was getting tired of holy bones.
Two weeks into my search I came across a hollow wooden panel in a side chapel that swung open at the application of enough force. Inside was a body and for a grim second or two I thought I’d found one of my missing souls. But this corpse had been sealed in many years, perhaps centuries ago. It was the body of a woman. Scraps of leathery skin like autumn leaves fell from her as I lifted her out of the cramped space. She was as light as a doll. A long, metal bodkin pierced her skull. It would have taken some strength to force it through bone. I offered up a prayer and placed her back where I found her. This was a crime too old for me to ever solve; anyone who knew her would be long dead by now.
Let her rest.
When I had searched every inch of the cathedral on the ground floor, I moved upwards into the library and Saint Credan’s Head Chapel, tapping out my nights like some lonely deathwatch beetle. Finding nothing I climbed again, up into the roof and the maze of stairways, beams and cramped chambers that hung over the heads of the congregation and were never seen.
Dust lay thick under my feet. No one had come this way for years but still I searched.
I found the mechanism that powered the abbey clock – weights and ropes primed by a hand-turned winch.
At the top of the very highest steps a cobwebbed door led on to the roof, its lead patterned with ancient graffiti – stars, circles and outlined hand-prints.
Out on the leads a plastic box lay wedged into a corner where the tallest spire pierced the roof and soared upwards. It was decades old and bleached by the sun. Inside it were more plastic coverings, and inside that thin printed sheets of some sort from before the fall.
Cocooned inside all of these layers was a book, its leather cover hard and brittle. I turned the pages and the world was filled with colour. Hand-painted men and women, hares, dogs and angels looked out at me with solemn eyes. I had found an illuminated gospel that was perhaps over a thousand years old. It had been hidden and kept safe up here in God’s good air by someone who never returned to retrieve it. This precious thing had been left here to sleep out these violent times, and so I wrapped it carefully and hid it. Our world was not fit to care for it, not yet.
As far as I know it’s there still.
—Levi, I hid the book somewhere it won’t be found for a long time. There’s no point in searching for it. Let the people who come after us find it now.
—It’s a treasure, Jude. You’ve no right to keep it hidden.
—It’ll be found when God wants it found.
Of the missing I found no trace.
At the end of a search that had taken me over a month to complete I was confident that they didn’t lie in this church. If a corpse was hidden elsewhere in the Close a hundred human noses or the abbey’s many stray dogs would have sniffed it out by now. If they were dead, they were not within the abbey precincts.
Unless the odours surrounding it were pungent enough to hide the stench.
Laundry was too grand a word for it. Standing on its own against the east wall this tall house stank of old piss and ashes. As I opened the door the fumes were strong enough to bring tears to my eyes. Peter Piss Pot, so named because his job was to collect the abbey’s bodily waste, looked up from carefully tipping his bucket of foamy golden urine into a hogshead barrel. Some of it soaked into his shirt-front but he didn’t leap back as I would have done; he didn’t even notice.
Old piss has an odd odour – almost meaty, sulphurous – and Peter carried its aroma with him everywhere. The poor man was short and startlingly ill-favoured but friendly enough and he placidly agreed to showing me around. He was rather proud of the place.
The vats on the ground floor housed the urine Peter collected. There, it matured and settled, eventually fermenting into a thick brown liquid known as last.
‘It’s the thing for really worked-in grease,’ he said, leading me up to the next floor. ‘Strips it right out. You can use fresh piss to fix dyes too.’
The second floor was one long light-filled room with floorboards that seemed varnished but were slick with moisture. Rope lines were draped with cloths dyed the colours of autumn – yellow, brown and red.
‘Lichens for red, onion skins for yellow and walnut husks for brown,’ Peter said, wheezing a little after the climb. ‘You boil ’em up and dip the cloth. The more times you do it, the stronger the colour. Then piss makes the colour fast. Useful stuff, piss.’
‘Who else works here?’ I said.
‘Susan, from the choir, and Francis over there who looks after the stables.’ He gestured to the young brother who was hunched over something in the corner. ‘They’re our dyers and we have whoever Johanna sends to do the washing.’
The third floor was filled with tubs and barrels. A pile of filthy sheets and other linens had been dumped near a large fireplace and cauldron, to heat water I presumed.
‘It’s not wash day, there’s no one here now,’ Peter said. ‘It’s this place that makes the rest of ’em godly, you know. They make the filth and we use it to make things clean. It’s like magic. They call me Peter piss pot, I know they do. I’d rather be a piss pot than hypocrite or lecher. Piss washes off.’
‘You think there’s lechers here? Hypocrites?’ I said.
‘There’s lechers everywhere. How do you think the filthy whores earn their pennies? It’s not just pilgrims they spread their legs for.’ Peter stopped and gave me an odd smile. ‘I’ve not seen any of ’em, not with my own eyes, but I know they’re all at it.’
—I’ve met a lot of whores over the years, Levi. Most were decent women. There’s no scarlet mark. None of them do anythin
g more than any other woman who has lain under a man. It’s the same mechanics of prick and cunt, but there’s such shame heaped on them. Not so much when they’re young, but when they’re old the hatred is oddly ferocious.
Maybe it’s because they have the audacity to realise their worth, to realise the value of the pleasure they provide. They look at a man with a hard cock and make a bargain, calculate the price of their cunt in food and clothing and wine. We’re not supposed to do that. Publicly, we’re supposed to pretend that the fact that we have a cunt is somehow a surprise to us. Privately, we are meant to guard it like it’s the seat of our value, our honour, our worth.
If being fucked is shameful, what creates the shame? For a whore it’s something to do with her lack of exclusivity. Her cunt is not for one man or woman alone. It is a tool that she uses to make her living. But cunts are tools, they make life, they’re not a cross between fairy-land and the holy grail, only the soul is that. Maybe this is the point, that we still, instinctively know that sex without love – sex without soul is a sin.
To the world, the truth of it is this. When a whore makes a bargain to open her legs, she has also placed a price on the value of her whole self. She exists only as her cunt. A customer doesn’t just buy her cunny; he buys her dignity; he buys her essence. He buys her life. Her soul can fall away and wither with no one to catch it, and the pity of that should bring us all to our knees.
—Man is not God, Jude.
It took me only a day to search the laundry thoroughly. It was probably the most interesting, if malodorous place in the whole Close. In between my searches, Susan, with her strange blue-dyed hands, showed me how to make a caustic soap by pouring water over wood ash, the liquid straining through a bed of straw. The resulting stuff was potent enough to burn skin if not diluted.
‘Caustic enough to dissolve a body?’ I asked her.
‘I’ve never tried!’ she said, eyes wide.
The next day I dropped a dead rat into a pan of the innocuous-looking stuff. It stripped the hair and whitened the skin. Given long enough it might have liquefied the flesh, but it seemed a long-winded way of getting rid of a body when you could simply dig a hole.
The tide of pilgrims was slowing a little. There seemed to be a slightly greater stream of souls leaving than arriving. The heat made everyone fractious and I broke up fights every day, gaining a new scar when a particularly violent bastard decided it would be a good idea to gut me. I turned and the blade feathered across my belly. It was nothing, but made sitting sore for a while. I cut off two of the bastard’s fingers and kicked him back out on to the road.
I got used to sleeping through the sounds of hundreds of people living in close proximity – the shrieks that turned into laughter, the calls of the hawkers and stall owners who set up shop outside the great west door.
Next I walked the abbey walls, sweating in the heat of full summer, pushing at each stone and searching for a place a wolf could enter and snatch an unsuspecting soul in the night. I often had company – a little entourage of amused pilgrims who had come to see the mad woman sniffing about the place like an old dog. When I’d had enough of their comic suggestions I would turn and roar, taking some satisfaction from the speed of their flight.
The walls proved to be as a sealed as an acorn, every door locked and guarded, the keys kept on a great iron ring that hung from Johanna’s belt. She supervised their locking before dusk and their unlocking after dawn light.
It was just possible that a wolf could climb the walls, but no way it could climb out with prey in its jaws. If it had found some quiet place to eat its meal and then left, the remains would have been found by now.
This was no wolf in the dark.
I had made no progress in either of my tasks. The girls remained as stubbornly lost as ever and I’d not even made a start in locating the village of Witner, where I was to dig up and steal away the bones of an ancient saint, if she was even there.
The absurdity of this case wasn’t lost on me. It made me glad I’d been born with an ability to see the humour in life. I needed it when I asked around for directions to the lost village; no one had ever heard of the place. My thoughts about Prior Richard on that day were not fit for Christian ears. If he wanted these bones so badly, he could damn well come and get them himself.
I started to make preparations to go home, convinced that Artie Cohen’s fate was known by her great-grandmother, who had simply forgotten it; Anne Mercer had run away from a loving but overbearing father, and that Magdela and Rebecca could be anywhere.
I was done chasing shadows. Nevertheless and much as it pained me to do it, my Reeve’s mind would not let me leave a job half done. I had one more task to complete – a search of the broken buildings that surrounded the walls.
If that proved fruitless, the girls might well have left on their own two feet and with luck would be living still – praise God. I would leave and search the missing out at any place that could possibly have been their next destination, gradually making my way back to Saint Ivo’s.
Chapter Six
Summer was turning to early autumn when I met Johanna at the abbey’s tithe barn - an ancient beamed building that faced the north door. She wore trousers and overshirt belted at the waist with rope. She was skin and bone, worked to a lath. For once, she didn’t greet me cheerfully but simply nodded, making calculations under her breath.
‘Not enough, Jude,’ she said. ‘There’s not enough brought in and what’s in the fields will rot if there’s rain. There’s no hands to bring it in.’
I kicked at the barn floor. It was covered in grain to only a few inches depth.
‘For the love of God, Johanna, make the pilgrims work. Drive the lazy bastards out into the fields or kick them out of the door.’
She looked at me as if I were an idiot.
‘There are twenty of us, Jude, and more of my people leave every year. There are hundreds of strangers within our walls, how long do you think we’d survive if we started making threats? We live in a hornets’ nest. We open our door to everyone because if we didn’t they’d break it down. The only reason why this place hasn’t been taken from us is because in the winter it’s a promise of slow starvation.’
‘I could make them,’ I said.
‘If we go down that road you’d have to stay here for good. Is that what you want?’
I didn’t answer.
‘You could leave, find another place. Look at you – you’re nothing but bones.’
She shook her head. ‘If we abandoned this place it would be overrun by wolves, and what of the sick who come to us? They can’t travel.’ She sighed, squeezed my arm and changed the subject. ‘How are you progressing? Any news?’
‘Very little. I need to make a search outside the walls. It may take some time and I’d like some help if you can spare one or two people.’
‘I’m sorry – we need everyone out in the fields. Maybe in a week or two.’
These are the terrible decisions our world is made of now. Abandon the trail of a lost child to feed a few more souls.
‘I’ll make you a deal,’ I said.
The next day I called on Will Mercer, and the day after that Will, his shy apprentice Anice, myself and a tough elderly woman named Lollis – who Will introduced as the abbey’s Infirmarian met at the borders of the abbey fields.
We worked all day, cutting and spreading stands of tough-stalked grain. In the afternoon Lollis called us to her and told us that the rest of the crop, luckily the smaller part, was lost. She opened an ear of wheat and pointed to small black specks on the grains.
‘Ergot. It’s a fungus. It’ll make you see visions and kill you dead if you eat enough. The rest of this will have to be burned.’
She collected a few grain-heads and put them away in a pouch. Seeing my curiosity she explained that ergot also makes a useful abortifacient if used in very small doses. I liked Lollis and was surprised that she was so open about what many considered a sin
�
�I have seen children of twelve, thirteen years old try to birth a child. It seldom ends well,’ she said.
For the next few days, we worked in the pea fields, collecting the dry plants and thrashing them to loosen the peas from the pods.
August brought us rain. I dug and hauled and slithered in mud and fell into my bed every night.
Within a week the contents of the tithe barn were looking a little less desperate and I had a broken blister on my left hand that wept green pus. Seeing me wince over my shovel, Will took my hand and whistled when he saw the deep wound. ‘That, my friend, needs looking at.’
He called Lollis, who scolded me and demanded that I present myself at her infirmary that evening.
‘They put shit on these fields, Jude,’ she said. ‘You’re big but you’re not invincible.’
I had to admit that I felt feverish and my hand throbbed like the devil. I was off my food too.
I didn’t get to the infirmary.
Instead, I threw up.
The next few weeks were nightmarish. I would wake in my bed a pool of my own sweat that smelt odd, like vinegar. I would vomit helplessly over myself, too weak to move my head, the bile simply spilling out in great gouts.
I remember Lollis, who came and made my hand burn with pain. Once I swiped at her and knocked her off her feet. Johanna came too, and I remember Will reading to me, but I don’t remember what. I raved at monsters who weren’t there. Once I dreamed that a wolf, a big male beast came and sniffed at me, the dream so real I felt my fist connect with its bony face.
I hovered between this world and the next for some time but eventually the fever receded a little. I was still too weak to move or speak, but aware enough to be ashamed when Johanna came and removed my piss and sweat-soaked sheets, turning and washing me expertly; combing my hair and cutting my nails that had grown so long I’d left red claw marks on my own face and chest.
