Dissolution

by C. J. Sansom

  And then I saw a tiny flash of bright gold from the corner of my eye, descending through the air. Something hit the tiled floor a couple of feet away with a tinkle. It spun and came to rest. I stared at it. It was a gold coin, a noble, King Henry’s head staring up at me from the floor.

  I looked upward. I was standing under the bell tower, above was the tangle of ropes and pulleys that had been the subject of the jests against Edwig at supper. But something was different. The workmen’s basket was not there. It had been pulled up into the bell tower.

  ‘He’s up there!’ I breathed. So that was where he had hidden the gold, in that basket. I should have looked more carefully at what lay under the cover when I had seen it before, the time I went to the bell tower with Mortimus. It was a clever hiding place. So that was why he had stopped the repair work.

  I had been fearful when I climbed the winding stairs to the bell tower with Prior Mortimus, but this time I felt nothing but savage, determined fury as I struggled upwards, ignoring the screams of protest from every limb. Emotion had not been drained from me after all, it merely slept. Now an anger such as I had never known before impelled me on. I reached the tower where the bell ropes were. The basket was there, lying empty on its side, a couple more gold coins on the floor. There was no one in the room. I stared at the steps giving access to the bells themselves. More gold coins had been spilled there. I realized anyone here must have heard me climbing up; had he retreated to the bell room?

  I climbed the steps carefully, holding my staff before me. I turned the handle of the door and quickly stepped back, using my staff to thrust it open. It was just as well I did, for a figure shot out and swung an unlit wooden torch at the space where I would have been standing. The improvised club jarred harmlessly on my staff and I caught a glimpse of the bursar’s face, red and furious, his eyes wide and staring as I had never seen them.

  ‘You are discovered, Brother Edwig,’ I called. ‘I know about your boat to France! I arrest you in the king’s name for theft and murder!’

  He darted back inside and I heard his feet pattering away across the boards, accompanied by a metallic chinking sound that puzzled me.

  ‘It’s over,’ I called. ‘There’s no other way out of there.’ I climbed the last steps and looked in, trying to get a glimpse of him, but from this angle I could see only the floorboards and the great bells beyond the rail. More coins lay scattered around the floor.

  I realized this was an impasse; he could not get past me, but I was trapped too. If I were to retreat down the spiral staircase I would be vulnerable to an attack from above and the man I had once taken for a penny-pinching clerk was clearly capable of anything. I advanced into the room, swinging my staff ahead of me.

  He was at the other end, behind the bells. He stepped out as I entered and I saw he had two big leather panniers tied together with a thick rope round his neck. The chink of metal sounded from them as he moved. He was breathing hard, brandishing the club in his right hand, the knuckles standing out white and hard.

  ‘What was the plan, Brother?’ I called out. ‘Take the money from the sales and flee to a new life in France?’ I advanced a step, trying to distract him, but he was watchful as a cat and swung the torch threateningly.

  ‘N-no!’ He stood there and bawled out the word like a child falsely accused. ‘No! This is my fee to enter heaven!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She refused me and refused me and then the Devil filled my soul with anger and I killed her! Do you know how easy it is to kill someone, Commissioner?’ He laughed wildly. ‘I saw too much killing as a child, it opened the door to the Devil, always he fills my mind with dreams of b-blood!’

  His fat face was scarlet and the veins stood out on his neck as he screamed at me. He had lost control; if I could surprise him, get close enough to ring the bells—

  ‘You’ll find it hard to persuade a jury of that,’ I called out.

  ‘Pox on your juries!’ His stammer vanished as his voice rose to a shout. ‘The pope, who is God’s vicar on earth, allows the purchase of redemption from sins! I told you, God figures our souls in heaven, the credit balance and the debit! And I will make him such a gift he will take me to his right hand! I am taking almost a thousand pounds to the Church in France, a thousand pounds from the hands of your heretic king. This is a great work in the eyes of God!’ He eyed me furiously. ‘You will not stop me!’

  ‘Will it buy you forgiveness for Simon and Gabriel too?’

  He pointed the torch at me. ‘Whelplay guessed what I had done to the girl and would have told you. He had to die, I had to complete my work! And you should have died instead of Gabriel, you crow, God will hold you to account for that!’

  ‘You madman!’ I shouted. ‘I will see you in the Bedlam, displayed as a warning of what perverted religion can do!’

  Then he grasped his club in both hands and ran at me with an eldritch scream. The heavy panniers slowed him or he would have had me, but I managed to dodge aside. He whirled round and swung again. I raised my staff, but he knocked it from my hand with the torch. As it clattered to the floor, I realized he had got himself between me and the door. He advanced slowly, swinging the torch, and I backed up against the low railing separating me from the bells and the great drop below. He was cooler again now; I saw those wicked black eyes calculating the distance between us and the height of the rail. ‘Where is your boy?’ he asked with an evil grin. ‘Not here to protect you today?’ Then he flew at me and landed a clout on my arm as I lifted it to defend myself. He pushed me hard in the chest and I fell back, over the low railing.

  I still relive that fall in dreams, the sensation of twisting as I fell, my hands grasping at empty air. Always I hear Brother Edwig’s triumphant shout in my ears. Then my arms slapped against the side of a bell and instinctively I threw my arms round it, clutching at the metal surface, grinding my fingernails into the ornate design on the surface. It stopped my fall, but my hands were slick with sweat and I felt myself slipping down.

  Then my foot hit something and I came to rest. I flattened myself against the bell and managed, just, to link my fingers together around it. Glancing quickly down I saw my foot had come to rest on the plaque on the old Spanish bell. I clung on desperately.

  Then I felt the bell start to move. My weight was causing it to swing outwards. It hit the neighbouring bell and a deafening clang echoed through the bell tower as the juddering impact threatened to dislodge me. The bell swung back, with me clinging on like a limpet, and I had a glimpse of Edwig taking off his pannier and bending to the floor to pick up the coins he had dropped, all the while glancing malevolently at me. He knew I could only hold on for moments more. Far below I heard faint voices echoing up; the crowd outside must have run in at the unexpected peal of the bell. I dared not look down. The bell swung back and hit its neighbour again; this time it set the whole lot clanging with a noise I thought would burst my ears and now as the bell vibrated with the impact I felt my hands slipping apart.

  Then I did the most desperate thing I have ever done in my life. I only made the attempt because I knew the alternative was certain death. In a single movement I let my hands fall apart, twisted in the air and used my foot against the plaque as leverage to hurl myself outwards, towards the rail, commending my soul to God in what I knew was probably my final thought on earth.

  I hit the rail with my midriff, knocking the breath from my body. It shook with the impact as my frantic hands grasped the inner side and I hauled myself over, how I do not know. Then I was lying on the floor in a heap, my back and arms an agony, as across the room Edwig knelt clutching a handful of coins, staring at me in angry bafflement as the clangour of the bells rang and sang in our ears, the vibration now shaking the very floorboards.

  He was up in an instant, grabbing for his panniers and running for the door. I threw myself at him, clutching for his eyes. He thrust me off, but was thrown off balance by the weight of the bags. He staggered and came up against the rail as I had d
one a minute before. As he did so he dropped his leather bags. They fell over the edge, and with a cry he leaned over and snatched at the rope holding them together. He caught hold, but the movement overbalanced him. For a moment he lay spreadeagled across the rails and I believe that if he had let go the gold he might have saved himself, but he held on. The bags’ weight tipped him forward and he fell over head first, bouncing off the side of a bell and disappearing from view with a scream of terrified anger, as though in his last moment he knew he faced his Maker before he had made his great gift. I ran to the parapet and saw him still falling, his habit billowing out around him as he spun to earth in the middle of a great shower of coins from the panniers. The crowd fled in panic as he hit the ground in an explosion of blood and gold.

  I leaned over the rail, panting and sweating, watching as the crowd slowly crept in again. Some looked down at the bursar’s remains, others peered up to where I stood. To my disgust I saw monks and servants get down on hands and knees and begin scrabbling on the floor, grabbing up handfuls of coins.

  Epilogue

  FEBRUARY 1538, THREE MONTHS LATER

  As I entered the monastery courtyard I saw the great bells had been taken from the church tower and now sat waiting to be melted down. They were in pieces, huge shards of ornamented metal piled in a heap. They would have been cut from the rings holding them to the roof and left to drop to the floor of the church. That would have made a mighty noise.

  A little way off, next to a large mound of charcoal, a brick furnace had been erected. It was swallowing lead; a gang of men on the church roof were throwing down chunks and strips of it. More of the auditors’ men, waiting below, fetched the lead and fed it into the fire.

  Cromwell had been right; the crop of surrenders he had obtained early in the winter had persuaded the other monastic houses that resistance was hopeless and every day now came news of another monastery dissolved. Soon none would be left. All over England abbots were retiring on fat pensions, while the brethren went to take up secular parishes or retire on their own, thinner, stipends. There were tales of much chaos; at the inn in Scarnsea, where I was staying, I heard that when the monks left the monastery three months before, half a dozen who were too old or sick to move any further had taken rooms there and refused to leave when their money ran out; the constable and his men had had to put them on the road. They had included the fat monk with the ulcerated leg, and poor, stupid Septimus.

  When King Henry learned of the events at St Donatus he had ordered that it be razed to the ground. Portinari, Cromwell’s Italian engineer, who even now was demolishing Lewes Priory, was coming on to Scarnsea afterwards to take down the buildings. I had heard he was very skilled; at Lewes he had managed to undermine the foundations so the whole church came tumbling down at one go in great clouds of dust; they said in Scarnsea it had been a wonderful and terrible sight, and looked forward to seeing the spectacle repeated.

  It had been a hard winter, and Portinari had been unable to get his men and equipment down to the Channel coast before spring came. They would be at Scarnsea in a week, but first the Augmentations officers had arrived to take away everything of value, down to the lead from the roof and the brass from the bells. It was an Augmentations man who met me at the gatehouse and checked my commission; Bugge and the other servants were long gone.

  I had been surprised when Cromwell sent a letter ordering me to Scarnsea to supervise the process. I had heard little from him since making a brief visit to Westminster to discuss my report in December. He told me then that he had endured an uncomfortable half-hour with the king when Henry learned that mayhem and murder at a religious house had been kept from him for weeks, and that his new commissioner’s assistant had absconded with the old commissioner’s killer. Perhaps the king had boxed his chief minister’s ears, as I had heard he was wont to do; at all events Cromwell’s manner had been brusque and he dismissed me without thanks. His favour, I had taken it, was withdrawn.

  Although I still held the formal title of commissioner I was not needed, the Augmentations officers were more than capable of carrying out the work, and I wondered whether Cromwell had thought to make me revisit the scene of those terrible experiences as a punishment for that uncomfortable half-hour of his. It would have been characteristic.

  Justice Copynger, now the king’s tenant of the former monastery lands, stood a little way off with another man, looking over plans. I approached him, passing a couple of Augmentations officers carrying armfuls of books from the library and heaping them up in the courtyard, ready for burning.

  Copynger grasped my hand. ‘Commissioner, how are you? We have better weather now than when you were last here.’

  ‘Indeed. Spring is almost come, though that is a cold wind from the sea. How do you find the abbot’s house?’

  ‘I have settled in most happily. Abbot Fabian kept it in good repair. When the monastery is down I will have a fine view over the Channel.’ He waved towards the monks’ cemetery, where men were busy digging up the headstones. ‘See, over there I am making a paddock for my horses; I bought the monks’ whole stable at a good price.’

  ‘I hope you have not put Augmentations men to that work, Sir Gilbert,’ I said with a smile. Copynger had been ennobled at Christmas, touched on the shoulder by a sword held by the king himself; Cromwell needed loyal men in the shires more than ever now.

  ‘No, no, those are my men, paid by me.’ He gave me a haughty look. ‘I was sorry you did not wish to stay with me while you are here.’

  ‘This place has unhappy memories. I am better in the town, I hope you will understand.’

  ‘Very well, sir, very well.’ He nodded condescendingly. ‘But you will dine with me later, I hope. I would like to show you the plans my surveyor here has drawn up; we are going to turn some of the monastery outhouses into sheep pens once the main buildings are down. That will be a spectacle, eh? Only a few days now.’

  ‘It will indeed. If you will excuse me for now.’ I bowed and left him, wrapping my coat around me against the wind.

  I went through the door to the claustral buildings. Inside, the cloister walk was dirty and muddy from the passage of many booted feet. The auditor from Augmentations had set himself up in state in the refectory, where his men brought him a constant stream of plate and gilded statues, gold crosses and tapestries, copes and albs and even the monks’ bedding - everything that might have value in the auction to be held in two days’ time.

  Master William Glench sat in a refectory stripped of its furnishings but filled with boxes and chests, his back to a roaring fire, discussing an entry in his great ledger with a scrivener. He was a tall, thin man with spectacles and a fussy manner; a whole raft of such people had been taken on at Augmentations over the winter. I introduced myself and Glench rose and bowed, after carefully marking the place in his book.

  ‘You seem to have everything well organized,’ I said.

  He nodded portentously. ‘Everything, sir, down to the very pots and pans in the kitchens.’ His manner reminded me momentarily of Edwig; I suppressed a shudder.

  ‘I see they are preparing to burn the books. Is that necessary? Might they not have some value?’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘No, sir. All the books are to be destroyed; they are instruments of papist worship. There’s not one in honest English.’

  I turned and opened a chest at random. It was full of ornamentation from the church. I lifted out a finely carved gold chalice. It was one of those Edwig had thrown into the fish pond after Orphan’s body, to make people think her a runaway thief. I turned it over in my hands.

  ‘Those are not to be sold,’ Glench said. ‘All the gold and silver is to go to the Tower mint for melting down. Sir Gilbert tried to buy some pieces. He says the ornamentation is fine and so it may be, but they’re all baubles of papist ceremony. He should know better.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he should.’ I put the chalice back.

  Two men carried in a big wicker basket and the scriv
ener began unloading habits onto the table. ‘These should have been cleaned,’ the scrivener said crossly. ‘They’d fetch more.’

  I could sense Glench’s impatience to be back at work. ‘I will leave you,’ I said. ‘Make sure not to forget anything,’ I added, taking a moment’s pleasure in his affronted stare.

  I crossed the cloister to the church, keeping a careful eye on the men scrambling over the roof; already fallen tiles lay dotted round the cloister square. Inside the church, light still streamed through the ornate stained-glass windows, still created a kaleidoscope of warm colours on the floor of the nave. But the walls and side chapels were bare now. The sound of hammering and voices echoed down from the roof. At the head of the nave the floor was broken, a mass of shattered tiles. It was the spot where Edwig had fallen and also where the bells would have landed when they had been cut from the roof. I looked up into the yawning empty space of the bell tower, remembering.

  Going round the rood screen, I saw the lecterns and even the great organ had been removed. I shook my head and turned to leave.

  Then I saw a cowled figure sitting in a corner of the choir stall, facing away from me. For a moment I felt a thrill of superstitious dread as I imagined Gabriel returned to mourn the ruin of his life’s work. The figure turned and I almost cried out, for at first I could see no face under the hood, but then I made out the gaunt brown features of Brother Guy. He rose and bowed.

  ‘Brother infirmarian,’ I said, ‘for a moment I thought you were a ghost.’