by E. M. Powell
Her cheek pressed against his, her flesh cold as stone. ‘God help me: I was so afraid.’ The last word came out on a choked sob.
‘But you were brave, Agatha.’ He held her tighter. ‘So brave.’
‘Hugo, I nearly died.’ And then her tears came, broke from her as she sobbed and sobbed, clinging to him as if she clung to life itself.
‘You didn’t, Agatha. You’re still here.’ He held her tighter still, the better to drive the cold from her.
Stanton made his way into the guesthouse, numb with cold. He’d left his retrieved horse in the stables and Agatha with Brother Lambert. She’d told Stanton as they made their way down to the monastery gate that she’d been ordered away by an angry Maurice. But she’d left it too late and had become lost in the snowstorm. Lambert had been pleased if somewhat surprised to see her return.
Whether they got up to sin or not, Stanton didn’t really care. Agatha had worn her brazen look again, a look that he now knew to be a mask, but she wouldn’t be swayed by Stanton. She’d insisted that Lambert’s gatehouse was where she wanted to be. At least she’d be safe and warm in there and that was all that mattered. As for him, he was hugely relieved he’d saved her. Proud, too, of his actions. But devastated that he’d not succeeded in the task given to him by Barling, a vital one. He knocked on Barling’s door to tell the clerk of his failure, but the room was empty.
Forget drying off. Barling had assured him he’d be fine while Stanton was gone, but even though he was back so soon, he needed to make sure that he was. He needed to find the clerk.
Stanton hurried back out and over to the main cloister. To his immense relief, he saw Barling walking towards him, the clerk’s black robes standing out against the snow.
‘Stanton!’ said the clerk. ‘Praise God you are safe.’ He took in Stanton’s appearance with a swift glance. ‘I feared for your life as the weather worsened so badly.’
‘I’m sorry, Barling.’
Barling held up a hand. ‘There is no need for apologies. It is I who should be apologising for asking you to try to make such a perilous journey.’
‘It wasn’t only me out there.’ He explained what had happened, about turning around in the snow, returning to the valley and finding Agatha.
‘Then the girl was indeed fortunate that you happened to be nearby,’ said Barling. ‘Maurice will be very displeased that she has returned. He told me that he ordered her away.’
‘Better an angry Maurice than her drowning or freezing to death.’ Stanton could hardly control his own shudders.
‘We need to get you warmed up, my boy.’
‘I don’t care. What I care about is what I’ve seen of the conditions further up the valley.’ He swallowed hard. ‘We’re trapped here now, Barling. Trapped with whoever has committed these murders. And no one will be able to help us.’
Barling nodded slowly. ‘Then we must gather all the monks together at once. They need to know of the danger they are now in. That we are all in.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Barling hurried along the claustral walk with Stanton.
He could hear a single voice, reading loudly, steadily and calmly: that of Abbot Philip.
Barling turned to Stanton. ‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘The monks are still gathered at collation. We will not have to waste time bringing them together. He raised his own voice as they walked up. ‘Abbot Philip. My apologies for breaking the silence of the cloister. But I must disturb you and the brothers from your prayer.’
The other cowled monks turned unsure faces towards the arrivals as Philip looked up from his book with an irritated frown at being interrupted. His face fell when his gaze lit on Stanton. ‘What’s happened, Barling? What’s going on?’
Barling lowered his voice again, his words for Philip’s ears only. ‘The weather has closed right in. Stanton had to turn back. He would have frozen to death otherwise.’
‘Then thank God you are safe. This valley can be treacherous.’ His troubled look met Barling’s. ‘We should not have been so insistent. I fear our decisions are becoming ill-thought-out and dangerous.’
‘It was worth a try, my lord abbot,’ said Stanton. ‘It got a lot worse very quickly. More than I’d have expected.’
‘Yet if we had not sent him,’ said Barling, ‘someone else would have lost their life.’ He related what had happened to Agatha.
‘Then you were sent by God’s hand,’ said Philip.
‘However,’ said Barling, ‘I think you need to speak to the monks about being particularly vigilant. The extra help you and I sought is not available. We are no nearer to identifying who the killer is. It may be that the snow is actually protecting us and stopping anyone who had murderous intent from coming here. But the very opposite may be true. We are effectively trapped in this place now.’
Philip’s pale face blanched further. ‘May God protect us.’ He turned to his monks and raised his voice. ‘Brothers, I need to inform you that our abbey has been cut off from the outside world, as has happened in the past.’
A low, unsurprised murmur met his words.
The abbot went on. ‘Because we are blessed with good fortune, we need not fear starvation or want. Our cellars are full and our supplies can last us for many weeks. I would ask that you further temper your appetites to make sure that is the case.’
All cowled heads nodded in instant obedience. ‘Yes, my lord abbot.’
‘There is one more thing that I would ask you to be mindful of. As you know, the greatest of evil has visited this house three times now. I would ask that you remain alert at all times and advise me or the King’s men at once, should you see anything untoward.’
Anxious looks stole across many faces.
‘We need to inform the lay brothers as well,’ continued Philip. ‘Osmund, can you do that, please?’ His gaze sought out the cellarer.
Silence met his question.
He frowned. ‘Osmund?’
Still no reply, just the whistle of the wind and a sudden whispering amongst the monks.
Barling’s frown met Stanton’s.
‘Where is Brother Osmund?’ asked Philip.
The whispering got louder.
Philip tried again. ‘Does anybody know?’
‘No, my lord abbot, no.’
‘Not I.’
The answers were many and all the same. Nobody knew.
‘Perhaps he is already with the lay brothers, my lord abbot?’ This from Elias.
Maurice got to his feet. ‘I’ll go and ring the bell for Compline, my lord. For it is already time. I am sure the bell will summon him from wherever he may have got to.’ The novice master headed off towards the door of the church, shaking his head. ‘Probably got lost in his own cellar,’ came his audible remark as he left.
The abbot ignored the old monk’s open rudeness. ‘Then let us go and pray the Office at the close of this day.’ Philip raised a hand in blessing and the monks started to file off to the church. He turned to Stanton. ‘Thank you once again for your courageous endeavours. I bid you both a good night.’ He hurried off after his monks.
Barling looked at Stanton, who was shuddering hard. ‘Thanks will be of little good unless you get warm and dry. Otherwise you will catch your death.’
‘In truth, that doesn’t feel so far away,’ said Stanton, his teeth chattering hard.
As they headed back into the snow towards the guesthouse, the deep bell rang out its usual regular toll for Compline.
But only a few yards further on and Barling could hear it no more, swallowed up as it was by the howl of the storm.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Barling sat at his little table in his room in the guesthouse as the storm raged on outside. Stanton had gone to bed, the young man’s face etched with the exhaustion of his battle with the snow and wind. Tiredness threatened to consume Barling too. But he needed to make notes on all their findings to this point. He and Stanton had found out a great deal. But, to Barling’s rising consternati
on, none of it was making sense. Worse, the deaths were continuing. Updating his written record might help to reveal some answers. He held a fervent hope that it would.
As ever, the smoothness of the wax on his writing tablet helped his thoughts and his written words to start flowing.
He listed the three people who had been murdered:
Cuthbert, the sacrist – strangled and burned.
Silvanus, the guestmaster – pitchfork through the chest, skewer in the neck. Wood tar in mouth.
Juliana, a benefactor – blow to the head. Drowned?
He looked at the names on the tablet for some time, thinking about any possible reasons for their deaths or connections between them. But his eyes kept going back to the copy of The Vision of Tundale that was on the table to one side. He hauled his mind back from Elias’s theory. He needed to have his own.
Next, he moved on to consider what he knew about those who were alive. First, the monks:
Philip, the abbot. A man who was bending under the huge weight of the office of abbot, an office that carried great loneliness as well as great responsibility. And a bending branch could snap suddenly and without warning.
Reginald, prior to Philip. Advanced in years and no doubt suited to the post of abbot, and yet now that opportunity had passed. His eyes went to the book again. Scribe of the late Abbot Ernald’s copy of The Vision of Tundale.
Vision. The word stared back up at him.
Maurice, the novice master. Maurice had spoken at length about monks being assailed by visions. Maurice was also advanced in years and a very close friend of Reginald’s.
Elias, the library monk. A learned, intelligent man. One with no obvious close friendships. Shared space with Cuthbert. One who also had a link to the book. Not only had he brought it to Barling’s and the abbot’s attention, but Elias was also the keeper of the book.
Barling’s pulse went a little faster. Written down like this, it looked as if the book was indeed linking them all. His eyes went back to Philip’s name. So what was Philip’s link? Yes, he knew the book well from the old abbot’s enthusiasm for it and his many sermons which took its contents as their theme. But so would most if not all of the other monks. Barling hauled himself back to his list, scolding himself for getting distracted. Order, always order. That was the way to proceed.
William, the infirmarer. A man skilled in his profession at tending to the living and who prepared the bodies of the victims for the grave.
Lambert, the gatekeeper. A drunkard who lusted after a young woman. He wrote her name down, just in case.
Agatha, a beggar. Most likely a prostitute. A woman who needed the abbey for her well-being, if not her very survival. A sad existence for one so young, and, truth be told, so fair.
But no links to the book with these last three names. Barling gave a frustrated sigh.
Osmund, the cellarer. A man who wore the burden of his office even more heavily than Philip. Mocked by his peers and his subordinates. Again, there were no links to the book. At least, none that he knew of.
Daniel, a lay brother. A man who worked like a plough ox. A man who despised the monks. A man far too close to the murders for Barling’s liking, though Stanton had argued against that. A man who could not read or rather was not allowed to read. So had he been reading the Vision?
Barling was back to the book again.
He looked at his notes once more. It seemed so difficult. In such a confined community there were so many links and connections between all the names, including the victims. The lady Juliana had been fond of Silvanus, for instance, and his endless flow of flattery.
Wait. Juliana. She had donated a valuable collection of books.
And there it was – books. Again.
There was only one thing for it.
Barling pushed his notes away.
He would have to read The Vision of Tundale for himself. Even if it took all night.
Reginald lay in his bed in the quiet of the shadowed infirmary, listening to the relentless noise of the storm outside as he waited for the relief of sleep. Pain coursed through every bone and joint in his body and would do so for every moment he was awake. Usually, after a bloodletting, he would have slipped into slumber by now. All of the other patients in the infirmary seemed to have managed it.
But his disagreement with Philip about the King’s men continued to play on his mind, making him fretful and unable to settle, no matter how much he needed to. He could not agree that Philip’s actions were the right ones, despite the abbot’s insistence.
He thought back to what Philip’s predecessor, Ernald, would have done in these circumstances. Reginald reckoned that Ernald would probably have kept them all in chapter till the crack of doom, waiting for somebody to finally confess. Yet Philip did not have the same authority, nowhere near it. The man was a poor father to this house.
A new spasm of pain shot down Reginald’s back and he shifted a little beneath the coverlet with a stifled groan to try to ease it.
He tried to picture Abbot Ernald’s face at being told he needed outside help to run his abbey. Despite his pain, he smiled. The sooner they saw the back of the King’s men, the better.
If only Ernald had outlived him. Then his world could have carried on as before. He would not have had to get used to new ways, new methods, different approaches to doing things. It made him weary, weary in a body that was already exhausted from pain, from joints that ground against each other and sent agonising pulses through his limbs even when he barely moved.
On many days and nights, it could be demons stabbing him with knives.
Just like one of the fates in The Vision of Tundale. He scowled to himself. What had prompted the King’s man to ask about the book, one of which Abbot Ernald had been particularly fond? It seemed as if nothing at Fairmore, past or present, was exempt from Barling’s unwanted intrusion.
Producing a copy of Tundale’s story had been one of the high points of Reginald’s scribing days. Not only had it been a privilege to scribe a copy by special request of Abbot Ernald, but the story of the knight had enthralled Reginald.
His one regret was that he had not been able to embellish it with pictures. He’d come to this abbey from a Benedictine house, already not only a talented scribe but also an even more talented artist. He’d been able to bring the first of those talents to Fairmore but alas, he’d not been able to use the second. Ernald had been a close follower of the rule that the White Monks should not insert lavish illustration nor colour into their manuscripts. Though it had almost broken Reginald’s heart, he knew he would have to accept it. And accept it he did, though with every word he wrote of The Vision of Tundale, he’d thought about how he would have shown the story and its lessons for sinners in the vivid way that he could.
Tundale, the sinful knight: he knew how he would have drawn him. A man with a face like any other, the better to show the reader that sin could be hidden deep within a man or woman, that hiding misdeeds did little good. His depiction of the feast would have been sharp and clear. The knight apparently safe in this world, sitting at table in company as people did every day. Yet, like so many, Tundale did not realise that his hour had come, and he would be struck down.
Then would have come the angel, appearing before the stricken Tundale: a being with sweeping wings and a halo picked out in the glow of gold. A being that would bear him away to the depths of hell. A great challenge, Reginald knew, to show those depths on the page. The colours used would have been very dark: shades of black and grey that might have become an indecipherable murk. But he knew that in his hands, his younger hands, he could have shown the abode of evil in all its foul, terrifying darkness. He had always mixed his own inks, the better to get the effect he desired. Anyone who looked upon it would have trembled at the sight, as Tundale himself did in the words of the tale.
Reginald lifted a throbbing hand slowly and carefully to push one of his pillows back into position.
And then would have come the fates of the
sinners, nine in all, each one deserving of the most careful illustration to hammer the lesson home.
The first, the fire that melted the murderers. He would have painted it in the fiercest, brightest yellows, the flames leaping from the page so vividly that the reader would swear that boiling heat came from it. For the punishment of the next, the souls of the false and the treacherous, he would have assembled a demon army. Every face of every devil would have been individually contorted with evil and each taloned hand armed with the sharpest trident, that they might pierce the bodies of the sinners and inflict the greatest of agony upon them.
It would have been more difficult to show the revolting pit of ordure into which the third group, the proud, were cast. But he could have shown the terror of those falling in, convey by the twisting of their bodies and horrified expressions the awareness of their suitable, unspeakable fate.
The image swam before him and he could almost hear the cries of the damned on the wind outside.
Yet the punishment of the fourth, the covetous, would have given him even greater pleasure to depict. The mouth of hell, opening wide in the manner of a great beast, with savage jaws ready to crush the sinners who were being driven in by more demonic hordes. The huge, dark beast would have loomed above all, sinners and demons alike, while deep red flames would spurt from its vile jaws. Ravenous creatures waited inside the mouth, each one with sharp teeth to consume those who had sinned.
The fate of the thieves, the next group, would have required a smaller scale, but would have been no less of an instruction. The Tundale sinners would have carried their spoils – a sack of grain, a stolen animal – across a perilous narrow bridge, which would not perhaps have been able to convey the severity of what awaited them. But the many metal spikes that drove into the feet of the sinners, bringing forth streams of blood, most definitely would.
His own feet pulsed in pain, as if spikes pierced them too. He changed their position as much as he dared but it was of little use.
As for the sixth, the fornicators, men and women alike: he would have had no difficulty in conveying what awaited them. Demon executioners would stand in bright, leaping flames, holding in their malformed hands the weapons of their art: coulters, axes, scythes, sickles, and every sort of the sharpest blade, that they might rend the sinners limb from limb. Yet there was more: vermin would be gnawing at the very site of the fornicators’ sin, showing Tundale and the reader what awaited those who indulged in wicked pleasures of the flesh. The worst fornicators made up the seventh: the clergy who committed sexual sin. Their bodies would flail as they drowned in an icy swamp, while vipers gushed from their privy members.
