The Sacred Stone

by The Medieval Murderers

  Judith didn’t know how long she stood there staring at that nightmare vision, but then cold fear pushed her into action. She’d been right all along. Aaron had killed Nathan and now he was going to do the same to her. That’s why he had lured her to an empty house. She ran back through the hall towards the stairs and clattered down them, slipping on the final steps in her haste and having to grasp the rail with both hands to stop herself crashing backwards on to the stone. She flew at the door, twisting the great iron handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. She could hear Aaron pounding down the steps behind her and she turned, trying to make for the door to the lower chamber, but at that moment Aaron reached the bottom of the stairs and stood barring her way.

  He held out his hands. Terrified, she backed away. A look of bewilderment crossed his face.

  ‘I’m sorry, Judith. I should have warned you instead of showing you, but I didn’t know how to say it. I thought you wouldn’t believe me unless you saw for yourself. Judith, you’re the only one I can trust now. I must leave today, before the city gates close. I’d take you with me if I thought you wouldn’t be in even greater danger if they come after me, but I couldn’t leave you here with them without warning you.’

  ‘You think I’d go with you, a murderer?’ Judith screamed at him.

  ‘I told you I didn’t mean to kill the friar.’

  ‘Nathan! I’m talking about poor Nathan lying up there. What did you do, go back and strangle him after you’d finished butchering the friar?’

  Aaron sank down on to the bottom step. ‘Is that what you think, that I killed Nathan? Judith, I swear that Nathan was alive when I left him, and I did not go back. I thought . . . I really thought he’d run off with that girl, until this afternoon when I removed that panel and found him there. I swear to you on my life, I did not kill him.’

  ‘Who else could have done it? Who else could have put him there?’ Judith raged at him.

  Aaron covered his face with his hands and moaned. ‘I wish for your sake I had killed him, Judith, because the alternative . . .’ He raised his anguished eyes and looked at her. ‘Only five people knew of the existence of that recess. Jacob, Nathan and the three little boys Nathan was playing with that day. There was no one else Nathan would ever have shared the secret with except me, Isaac and Benedict. I know I didn’t kill Nathan, so that leaves only two others who could have done so and hidden his body here – your brother or your future husband.’

  Judith sat shivering in her room. It was growing dark, but she hadn’t bothered to stoke up the fire or prepare supper. She couldn’t seem to think how to carry out even the simplest of tasks which she had been performing since she was a child.

  Aaron had left Norwich. She had given him the small silver amulet in the shape of a hand that she wore around her neck. She didn’t suppose it would fetch much, but it was all she had, and Aaron had been grateful. Her mother had given her the amulet the day she and Judith’s father had fled before the trial. Judith remembered the fierce hugs. How she’d clung to her parents, desperate for them to stay, but urging them to go, scared that if they didn’t leave at once it would be too late. She’d felt that same fear again that afternoon when she hugged Aaron and pleaded with him to go quickly. His last words to her had been, ‘Take care of yourself.’ Her mother’s last words had been addressed not to her but to Isaac. ‘Look after your little sister, Isaac. You must be father and brother to her now.’

  Was it true that her own brother had killed their best friend? She could not, she would not believe that, but if it wasn’t Isaac, then the man she loved even more than her brother, the man she had pledged her life to, must be the murderer. And that was equally unthinkable.

  She tried to reason it out. Why had Isaac been so desperate to convince her she had imagined the corpse? Was he the shadow she’d seen under the apple tree? He could have waited until she left and then moved the body while she was searching for him. Not to Jacob’s house – there wouldn’t have been time – but he could have dragged the corpse from the chamber into the synagogue and moved it to Jacob’s house later that night. But why would he want to kill poor harmless Nathan?

  She tried to visualize the room as she’d seen it that day, but all she could remember clearly was how it had looked this morning. The jumbled parchments and books piled up hastily as if someone had been impatient to get on with another task – those lists of words!

  She reached into her scrip and pulled out the sheaf of parchments. Lighting a candle from the embers of the fire, Judith examined them again. Temple, burned offering, consume. Some of the words had been crossed out and different words written over the top. But the random letters alongside the words made no sense at all. Then, with a sudden flash, it came to her. Hebrew letters were also numbers. The letter Dalet was the number 4 and the letter Resh was the number 200. Every word on the list had a number beside it, and that number was the combined value of the letters in that word. The letters written on that stone – Hay,Shin and Mem – each had a numeric value too. Hay was 5, Shin was 300, Mem, 40; that made a total of 345. Was that important?

  Judith glanced up. It was dark outside now, and Isaac still hadn’t returned. Something was wrong. She stuffed the parchments back into her scrip and, snatching up her cloak, hurriedly left the house. The streets were almost deserted, save for scavenging dogs. A couple of drunks reeled out from one of the taverns, holding each other up. One of them called out to her, but Judith kept her arms tightly crossed over her chest to hide her white badge and hurried on. The synagogue and the study chamber were in darkness, and there was no sign of Isaac there. She prayed she’d find him at Benedict’s lodging and turned to retrace her steps.

  The wooden shutters on the apothecary’s shop, like all the others in the street, had been dropped down, sealing off the shop entrance, but Judith slipped along the alley to the side of the shop and knocked tentatively on the narrow door. Silence. Please be at home, Benedict, please. After the third time of knocking, the door opened a crack and Benedict peered out.

  ‘Is my brother here?’ Judith asked.

  Benedict stared at her distractedly as if he wasn’t really taking in what she was saying.

  ‘I have to talk to you. It’s about Isaac. I’m worried he may be about to do something stupid, dangerous even. Benedict!’

  He finally jerked out of his reverie and, with a worried frown, gestured for her to enter. Judith followed him through the storeroom, threading her way between barrels and great earthenware pots. Shelves were crowded with phials of green, brown and gold liquids, some opaque, some as transparent as the coloured glass in the windows of churches. Sacks of dried herbs lay in dusty corners and bunches of them hung from the beams, thickening the air with a potage of spicy scents. Roughly hewn tables were scattered with yellowing animal bones and black wizened roots like tiny shrivelled babies.

  Benedict held aside a leather curtain that separated his own small chamber from the workroom. His bedding was rolled up in one corner, and a small table with two stools occupied another, but the rest of the room was taken up with piles of scrolls, sheaves of parchment and teetering stacks of books. Judith wondered where Benedict found space on the beaten-earth floor to lay out his thin palliasse when it came time to sleep.

  He gestured to one of the stools but remained standing himself, hovering awkwardly in the doorway and wiping his grimy hands repeatedly on his sacking apron. Judith realized she had interrupted him grinding up some herbs for the shop.

  ‘What’s this about Isaac?’ Benedict prompted. ‘It must be serious for you to come here alone.’ There was a reproving note in his tone. Though they were betrothed, tongues would flap if she was seen entering his room at night, and such things mattered to Benedict, Judith thought with sudden irritation. She tried to ignore his frown. She had to tell him about Nathan, but she was unsure how to begin. If he disapproved of her coming to his room alone, he would certainly not like the idea of her going off with another man to an empty house.

  ‘
Aaron has left Norwich, but before he left he told me he found the body of Nathan.’

  Benedict stared at her in horror, then his legs seemed to give way and he crumpled against the door frame, pressing his fists to his eyes. Judith wanted to throw her arms around him and hold him, but she knew she had to keep talking or she’d never bring herself to tell him what she feared.

  ‘Nathan’s body was hidden in Jacob’s house in a secret recess that only you, he and Isaac knew of. Aaron swore that he didn’t put him there, so he reasoned it had to be either you or Isaac. And I’ve been thinking: when I told Isaac about the body, he ran straight to the study chamber, not the synagogue where I told him it was. Then he did everything he could to persuade me that I had imagined a body.’

  Benedict thrust his hands palms out as if to push away the very suggestion. ‘You can’t believe your own brother is guilty of murder.’

  ‘I don’t want to believe it, but who else could have known about the hiding place? Isaac went to Nathan’s house that very afternoon. He must have seen the key there and taken it, just as Aaron did, then slipped it back when he returned later to ask if Nathan had returned.’

  ‘But why would he want to harm Nathan?’ Benedict asked.

  ‘I think he wanted the stone. Maybe he didn’t know that the Black Friar had already taken it. There’s something else.’ Judith pulled the lists of words out of her pocket. ‘Look, he has been practising gematria. I think he is trying to find words that add up to the same numeric value as the word on that stone.’

  Benedict lunged forward and snatched the lists from her and examined them closely. ‘How . . . how do you know about gematria or about the word on the stone?’

  Judith shook her head impatiently. ‘I overheard you all talking, but that’s not important. What matters is what Isaac is going to do with these words.’ She pointed to the lists.

  Benedict took a deep breath and spoke without looking at her. ‘On Erev Shavuoth we were trying to meditate. We had almost succeeded in raising a powerful spirit, one who has the knowledge of the future, at least that’s what Aaron and your brother believed. But Nathan panicked and sent everything crashing to the floor before the spirit could materialize properly.’

  ‘Did you see it?’ Judith asked

  Benedict shook his head. ‘I felt something, a force. It was as if I was hollow and a great wind had roared through me, and for a moment I felt such . . . but I saw nothing. There was nothing coming to our aid,’ he added bitterly. ‘Isaac wants to try again. But he is not as skilled in the art as Aaron. And it’s dangerous to attempt these things alone. Your brother doesn’t have the strength or knowledge to control what he might raise, and such a powerful spirit can take possession of you or even destroy you if you cannot master it.’

  Judith leaped up. ‘We have to stop him. But I can’t find him. He didn’t come home, and he’s not in the study chamber.’

  ‘I think he will try to raise the spirit somewhere in the heart of the Christians’ world, so that it can destroy them. He will have used the words as a sign of where he should go.’ Benedict rifled through the lists, then he pounced on one and held it up. ‘This is the one. Cup – that is 170, gold, 14, temple, 65, idol, 148, daybreak, 508. They all add up to 905, the same number as the letters on the stone.’

  Judith frowned. ‘But the value of the letters in HaShem is only 345. I worked that out myself. Never mind how I know,’ she added impatiently, seeing the astonishment on Benedict’s face.

  Still staring at her in disbelief as if she was a cock that had laid an egg, Benedict said slowly, ‘Isaac was using the mystic numbers. If Mem is a final letter it has a greater value – 600, instead of 40.’

  ‘But even if these words add up to 905, what do they mean?’ Judith asked. ‘Temple, cup, idol and gold – that could be a church; they have statues, gold and chalices in the churches, but there are fifty or sixty churches in Norwich. We can’t search them all.’

  Benedict studied the words again. ‘Daybreak.’ He shook his head. ‘Cup – that must be it,’ he said finally. ‘All churches have chalices, but the cup is the specific emblem of one of their saints, John the Evangelist. There is only one church in the city with that name, and it’s in Conesford Street, not far from Jacob’s house.’

  ‘Then we must go there at once.’

  ‘This is no task for a woman,’ Benedict told her firmly. ‘You shouldn’t even know about the stone, much less the numbers. Alone, I can reason with Isaac quietly. If you’re there, his pride might make him do something foolish. You go home and wait for us. I’ll find him and bring him to you.’

  As if to show that he would not be swayed on this, Benedict walked ahead of her out of the room, holding the lantern. Without really thinking what she was doing, Judith scooped up the pieces of parchment and followed him outside.

  ‘You will find him?’ she begged. ‘Whatever evil he’s done, he’s still my brother and I love him. He can’t have meant to kill Nathan. He must be ill or maybe whatever was conjured in the room that night . . .’

  Benedict squeezed her shoulder. ‘Go home. I have to hurry!’

  Judith crossed to the casement for the hundredth time that night, but there was still no sign of Isaac and Benedict. The curfew bell had long since sounded, signalling that all house fires must be damped down for the night and made safe, but still her brother had not returned.

  Suppose Benedict had been too late or had gone to the wrong place? Could cup mean something else? But she couldn’t think what else it could mean. Frantically, Judith pored over the lists again. If only Aaron was here – he was more skilled in the art of the mysteries than any of them. She wondered where he was sleeping tonight. She prayed he was safe and the silver hand amulet would protect him; if only Isaac had such protection.

  She began adding the words again, looking at each list in turn. None of the other lists added up to 905. Then finally she saw it: there was a second list that added up to that number. She’d almost missed it because of the repeated crossings-out. Two words on this other list were the same as the first, gold and daybreak, but the others were different. To cross, or pass over: the number 272 had been written beside this; and next burned offering: against that had been written 111.

  To pass over, to cross: what did you pass over? A river, a bridge. You crossed over a river using a bridge. But which bridge? Coslany, Blackfriars, Fye, Whitefriars, Bishop’s Bridge? They were scattered right across Norwich. She stared at the other words, gold, burned offering, daybreak. These weren’t the names of any of the bridges. A bridge of gold? None of the bridges was made of anything but wood and stone, though some said the Bishop’s Bridge was paved with gold, given the money he gathered in tolls from those entering the city. That had to be the answer! Bishop’s Bridge was the only one of the bridges that formed an entrance to Norwich. And the tolls from this entrance went not to the city but straight to the bishop’s coffers. That’s what Isaac would want to destroy, not some little church. Benedict had gone to the wrong place.

  Judith snatched up her cloak and a lantern and rushed out into the streets. Most of the houses were in darkness, though here and there a pinprick of light shone between the cracks of the shutters. The alehouses had long since emptied, and the brothels were silent. Norwich was sleeping. A mist was creeping up from the river and ditches, rubbing and curling around the houses. There was a squeal behind her and Judith whirled around, but her lantern caught only the great green eyes of a cat with a mouse dangling from its mouth. The cat glared at her before bounding lightly over a wall and disappearing.

  Fog hung over the river like a white prayer shawl. Judith could hear the water rushing below her, but she couldn’t see more than an arm’s length in front of her. She crept as quietly as she could across the bridge, clinging on to the side to guide her way in the mist. Below her was nothing but swirling whiteness, as if the stones were floating on clouds. The bridge had never seemed as long as it did now. She hadn’t thought the river so wide.

&nb
sp; Judith stopped with a gasp. She had almost walked straight into the wooden hurdles on the far side. Two of the bishop’s soldiers lay with their backs to her on the other side of the hurdles, their task to see that no one entered or left by that bridge until after prime in the morning when the tollbooth was open for business. She could hear the men snoring, confident in the knowledge that no one could drag those hurdles aside without waking them.

  Judith backed away as quietly as she could. She had been so sure that Isaac would be here. How could she have been so arrogant as to think she had worked out what Benedict could not? He had already shown her to be wrong once that evening over the number. There was nothing for it but to return home and wait, as he had instructed her.

  Then, as she had almost reached the city end of the bridge, she heard a scraping as if something heavy was being dragged over stones. She stopped and listened hard. For a moment or two she could hear nothing more over the sound of the rushing river, then she heard the noise again. It was coming from beneath her feet. It was probably just a piece of driftwood being ground against the pillars of the bridge by the force of the river. All the same, suppose Isaac was under the bridge, not on it.

  Where the bridge joined the road on the city side, Judith left her lantern hanging on a tree and scrambled down the bank, sliding on her bottom until her foot encountered solid ground. Pressed against the wall, she edged forward gingerly. The mist billowed in waves, curling away, then closing in again. She thought that she could see a thin strip of flickering yellow light and someone or something moving. But each time her eyes fastened on the shape, the mist would obliterate it again. She edged forward, afraid that she would walk straight into the river, but just at that moment the white fog parted.