Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3)

by David Crossman

  “When was the church built?”

  “Under our notorious, aforementioned King John. Early 13th century.”

  “Wicked King John.”

  “The same. Hence the reason there are no subsequent English kings by that name. Understandable. Who wants to be named after a king whose name has become a synonym for wickedness? Keeps weaving his way into our conversations though, doesn’t he?”

  “Can we take it off; this plaster?” said Albert, poking the wall with his finger.

  It was the Rector’s turn to be startled. “Remove the plaster, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, as to it being physically feasible, yes. I suppose. But, I mean, the cost would be . . .”

  “We can do it,” said Albert. “Just you and me. Do you have tools?”

  “Of course, yes. Any Rector who’s not half-handyman will soon find himself preaching among the ruins—and I don’t mean the congregation. At least not in this instance.” He laughed again. That meant he was having a good time.

  “But why?”

  “I want to read the curse.”

  Simon, though eager to please so illustrious a visitor, was clearly reticent to dismantle the church. Albert thought he might know a way to prompt him. “I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars.”

  Where the figure came from, he couldn’t say. Nor did he have any idea of its value relative to the needs of the church.

  “Twenty thousand dollars!”

  Wrong guess. “Fifty thousand?” said Albert, a little unsurely. He preferred Jeremy Ash to handle negotiations like this.

  Not that tearing down plaster in churches was something he’d ever negotiated before. Probably even Jeremy hadn’t and, if the rector’s expression was anything to go by, the practice was new to him, also.

  “I couldn’t possibly . . .” Couldn’t possibly what? Hadn’t he been praying for just that amount to repair the foundation under the north wall and the roof over the western celestory? And here it was, dropped in his lap by someone who wouldn’t even miss it! All for tearing out five square feet of plaster. “I’ll get my tools!”

  In fact, in very short order, he came up with two mallets and two chisels.

  Albert had never had so much fun in his life as he did pounding the chisel into the plaster and watching it turn to dust, or collapse in tiny avalanches onto the red carpet. Left to his own devices, he might have carried on until the whole edifice was reduced to debris and memories.

  Maybe that’s what had happened to all those ruins he had noticed England had a lot of; somebody had started innocently chipping away with a hammer and chisel and before they knew it . . .

  Between them, it took no more than fifteen minutes to chip through the three or four layers of plaster that revealed the original wall. Albert, his hands, clothes, face, and hair covered with the siftings of several hundred years, brushed at the stone with his sleeve. There was no curse. He hadn’t really expected to find it, if it existed at all. Which is not to say he didn’t find the outline of exactly what he was looking for.

  He blew on the surface, producing a cloud of powder, fine as chalk that, as it settled, added another layer to the diggers. It had the desired effect, though. When Albert and the rector opened their eyes again, a rough indentation in the stone indicated that there had once been something set into the wall; something that had been dug out.

  “The Foss cartouche!” said Simon.

  Albert agreed.

  “Then,this is the original Foss Wall!” The Rector slapped the stone.

  “Yes.”

  “What made you think to look here?”

  “It’s different.”

  “Different? Different than what?”

  Albert gestured from one side of the church to the other. “Six windows on that side. Six on that side. Eight pillars . . .”

  “Piers, yes. Eight on each side.”

  “It’s symmetrical,” said Albert. “Except for this . . .”

  “TheHonor Charles,” said the Rector, somewhat breathlessly. “Amazing.”

  Albert smiled, thinking how amazed the Rector would be if he knew what he, Albert, suspected.

  “But who was he? Why was it moved to that other wall?”

  Albert was reminded that the Rector didn’t know who Foss was, so he provided a bare outline.

  Even a sketch was enough to impress Simon. “You don’t say! King John’s jester! A dwarf! Well, I’d never in a million years . . . But what is the significance of that stone, with his name engraved on it, being set into this wall? And who moved it over there?” He pointed across the sanctuary at the ‘new’ Foss wall. “And why?”

  Answers were fertile seeds, Albert had come to believe, inevitably producing new crops of questions.

  “I don’t know the answer to those questions,” he said truthfully. He did, however, know the answer to another question.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The River Smite,Nearing Langar, Nottinghamshire, October 20th, 1285

  Mirth was an enchantress, and her power over Foss’s donkey was immediate and absolute. Even Pike, a misogynist by nature, took to her company as readily as if she’d been swaddled in shiny objects, and before the irregular quartet had traveled a mile the girl was riding the donkey—who had never allowed Foss, though a much lighter burden, such a liberty—and the raven was riding the girl, hopping from shoulder to head to shoulder.

  “What’s that you say?” said the girl, inclining her ear toward the raven. “A secret?

  “He says he has a secret, Mr. Foss. What kind of secret do you suppose that would be, then?”

  Foss was only too aware of the secrets to which Pike was privy, and, though perfectly happy to humor the girl in her little game, was oddly discomfited by this particular remark. “The kind he had best keep to himself, unless he wishes to end up baked in a pie, I should think.”

  Mirth giggled. “What’s your secret, Mr. Pike?” Once again she leaned toward the crow, that pecked softly at her earlobe. “You don’t say! In these sacks!

  “Why, Mr. Foss, you should have said,” said the girl.

  Foss was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. He had long entertained the suspicion that Pike hadn’t been born a raven, but, due mostly likely to an ill-considered comment, had been turned into one by a witch whose sense of humor he had overestimated. This suspicion, however ludicrous, formed the cornerstone of their relationship and was the main reason he spoke to Pike as he would have a human companion; a mute companion.

  But how mute?

  “He told me what’s in these,” said Mirth, playfully patting the sacks that hung in front of her to either side of the donkey.

  Perhaps, thought Foss, the King had been right about the black-hearted cluster of feathers and malice. “If he has, then I’ll eat crow.”

  “A great treasure, he says,” said Mirth, mirthfully.

  Foss had led the little menagerie down Connery Lane until it petered out at the River Smite whose course, until the tower of Langar Chapel was in sight, they had paralleled across the muddy furrows of fallow fields, keeping clear of the main road. He stopped, his brow concussed by the revelation. He gazed critically at the raven, who returned a ‘Who? Me?’ cock of the head. “You oughtn’t listen to Pike, missy. For one, he’s a notorious liar,” he said, “for another, he’s poorly informed. But if you must—and being a girl I suppose that is inevitable—never,never repeat what you hear. Not if you wish to keep your head.”

  He laid his hand upon her knee and looked up at her, staring deeply, willing his gray eyes to bore indelibly into her brain. “And I’ve severed prettier necks than yours, Missy.”

  Mirth was stunned and shaken. “I was only playing, Mr. Foss. Honestly!”

  “I was not,” said Foss. He gave her knee a parting squeeze, turned, tugged at the rein and led on.

  Mirth turned to the crow. “See the trouble you’ve gotten me in!”

  Pike cawed, but it sounded to Foss like laughter.

&nbs
p; Langer was dark, which was no more than Foss expected of a village of farmers in the wee hours after midnight. The moon preferred playing hide-and-seek with passing clouds, only now and then taking time for a peek at the activities of the odd little parade turning off the Cropwell Road onto Church Lane.

  “What’s here?” said Mirth, whose recent, meaningless monologue had indicated that she’d gotten Foss’s message.

  “The chapel.”

  “Matins won’t be for hours yet!”

  “We’re not going to Matins,” said Foss. He pictured himself, striding bold-as-you-please down the aisle of the church for morning prayers, wearing John’s crown, and imagined the looks on the faces of the farmers and their wives, and smiled. Of course, whether their surprise would be owing to the sight of a dwarf in church, or of John’s crown, which was an equally rare sight in holy precincts was a toss-up. Foss giggled.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Life,” said Foss, tying off the donkey at a post near the entrance to the churchyard. “Life is funny, Mirth. And the part that isn’t funny, is a joke awaiting the punch line.”

  Mirth slid from the animal in the manner of Mary arriving in Bethlehem, and looked up at the chapel, a deep gothic shadow cut from the sky. Pike fluttered and came to rest on the churchyard gate. The donkey sighed as Foss untied the sacks and let them fall to the ground, then turned his attention to a succulent plume of still-green grass as the bass of the post.

  “You get that bag,” said Foss from his side of the donkey. “I’ll get this one.”

  “We’re taking them into the church?”

  “We are.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s where they belong.”

  “What’s in them?” said Mirth, easily hoisting the burlap sack to her shoulder, though it was half her weight.

  “I thought Pike told you.”

  Mirth laughed. “Well, you said he’s a liar.”

  “So I did, lass. So I did. And so he is. From the yoke he was. Told his mother he was a chicken.”

  From a distance, their levity, as they tip-toed toward the church, pillowed the night and listening ears with laughter.

  Churches, because they were built to dwarf everyone equally, made Foss feel very republican. Langar chapel, while nothing like the cathedral at York—in fact, would have fit into it any number of times—still imposed the same ‘look how insignificant you are’ feel about it.

  The solemnly still atmosphere—not yet old enough to be burdened by countless prayers, sermons, and secret confessions seasoned with generation-upon-generation of village gossip—was perfumed with the unmistakable, musty aroma of relatively new plaster, reminding him of the errand he had completed for the King on his last visit. Could it really have been only four days ago? It seemed a lifetime.

  “They’ll be ripe by this time,” he said to himself, as he crossed the transept, his sack dragging on the not-yet worn flagstones. He came to a stop by the steps.

  “Up there?” said Mirth, heaving the bag from her shoulders and allowing it to drop heavily to the ground with a metallic chatter that would have waken the dead had the walls, floors, and crypt not been still awaiting their first tenant.

  “Take care with that!” said Foss. “It’s not rummage sale goods there.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes, well, take better care.”

  “I will. Are we? Going up there?” Mirth said, pointing up the little flight of stairs which terminated in a shelf not much higher than her chin. “There’s nothing up there.”

  “Oh, but there is,” said Foss, pulling himself up the steps by hand and foot. “You turn around, Missy.”

  Mirth turned around and, finding herself suddenly face-to-face with Larky and Welf the Potter’s son, her eyes widened. Larky quickly slipped the point of his dagger under her chin, while holding a finger to his lips. He pressed just hard enough to puncture her skin. A fine trickle of warm blood oozed from the wound and down her chest.

  “And take care you don’t peek.” Foss having dragged himself to the shelf, stood up and waddled toward an unused sconce in the corner, the ornate bottom finial of which he could just reach on tiptoe.

  Almost involuntarily, Mirth made a choking sound at the back of her throat, and was immediately rewarded with the sharp prick of the point of Larky’s blade. To underscore the threat, he seized her by the hair and bent her head backward.

  “Patience, girl. Patience,” said Foss, misreading the noise. With the tip of his finger, he nudged the sconce to the right, then the left, then back to the right. He dropped to the flat of his feet and waited expectantly. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, then a low rumbling sound, as of approaching thunder, cleaved the silence.

  “Ha!” said Foss, clapping his hands as he turned toward Mirth. At once, in the stark tableau of pale blue moonlight and shadow, he perceived a startling change in the trajectory of his expectations.

  The thunder had coalesced in the great square belfry looming over the church, and one of its two great bells, brushed lightly by its startled clapper, tolled a muted, solitary note.

  “Look!” said Welf the Potter’s son. He pointed at the stunted set of steps leading to Foss’s shelf as it swung away from the wall with only a slight scraping sound, revealing the inky blackness of a large cavity.

  Almost immediately the stale air of the chapel was sauced with the aroma of decaying flesh.

  “Dios! It’s a tomb!” said Larky, dropping his knife from the throat of his captive and covering his nose with his free arm. With the other hand he gave a reminding tug at her hair. He spoke through his sleeve. “What are you up to, Foss? Who’s in there? What’s your business with ‘em?”

  The thunder slowly rumbled to silence, and the mechanism stopped moving.

  Foss’s brain was a fever of activity as he struggled to seem calm. “You seem to have lost a friend,” he said. “Careless of you.”

  “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” said Larky, his sneer almost visible in the dark.

  Foss moved toward the steps. “Tch, tch. I calculate the loss to have cost you half your stock of friends.” He looked at Welf the Potter’s Son. “Bear that in mind, Welf.”

  “You shut up, midget! Tell me what’s in there, or I’m going to bloody my blade!” He swung his knife up to Mirth’s throat again and poked her just enough to produce a squeal.

  “Shut up and tell you,” said Foss calmly, stopping half-way down the steps and, therefore nearly eye-to-eye with both of the unwonted visitors. “The command is oxymoronic. Which do you want? I can’t do both.”

  “You know what I mean. What’s in there?” Larky nodded toward the opening.

  “Well,” Foss sniffed at the air, “it would be a guess, but I’d say something dead.” He sniffed again. “Perhaps several somethings.”

  “And what else?” said Larky. “No one went to all that trouble for a tomb.”

  Foss had settled on the hand he would play. “There’s nothing in there.”

  “And you came all this way, for nothing! Ha! You want to know my guess?”

  “I’m breathless.”

  Larky tugged Mirth’s hair again, producing another of the girlish ejaculations he seemed to find satisfying. “My guess is that them jewels you tried to buy us off with is just the thin edge of what you’ve got in them sacks you drug in here.

  “And you know what I wonder?” He pulled Mirth to the floor. “You sit there, missy, and don’t you twitch.” He walked to the steps and, head-to-head with the dwarf, fixed him with a knowing eye and kicked at the nearest sack, sending a metallic shudder through the contents.

  “Hear that, Larky!” said Welf the Potter’s son, dancing from foot-to-foot. “That’s gold and silver, or I’m a pig’s foot!”

  Larky paid no attention. “I wonder if our good King’s treasure really went down in the Wash, like is the patent news around the countryside. That’s what I wonder.

  “Old John, he’s a great one for architecture and me
chanical things, ain’t he? You know what I wager?” This time he didn’t allow time for Foss to reply. “I’ll wager all this witchery is part of his plan to keep his treasury out’ve unfriendly hands; that the wily ol’ reprobate meant to dupe all and sundry, and sock the booty away right here, in a place bespoke for the purpose, safe as can be for as long as it takes. And who’d be least likely to put the plan into action, than the King’s fool? What do you make of that line’ve thinkin’, Fossie?”

  Larky had clearly been thinking on the fly, but he warmed quickly to what he was hearing.

  Foss gestured widely. “I presume you intend to back your wager with shoe-leather?”

  “That I do.”

  “We do,” said Welf the Potter’s son, particularly sensitive to being omitted from the negotiations.

  Foss put his hands defiantly on his hips. “I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of beast your prodigious brain summons from dormant soil.”

  “‘ey?” said Welf.

  “Nevermind,” snapped Larky. “He’s just warmin’ his lips.” He crouched to his knees between the sacks and, with a flick of his dagger, sliced the string wrapped around the neck of the one on his left, spilling a noisy cascade of treasure and trinkets to the floor, among them a golden crown set with priceless jewels, that rolled between his knees.

  “Ha! Ha, ha! I was right! Lookie here, Welf you witless sot! The crown jewels themselfs! Ha! Ha!” He put the crown on his head and let it settle on his ears. “Lookit me! King Larky!” He spread his arms wide. “Everybody get busy grovelin’.” Laughing, he stuffed the remaining items back into the sack, then stood to face Foss. “I figure if his majesty went to all this trouble to keep from havin’ to lug this lot about the countryside—well, least I can do is take advantage of his efforts. If this hidey-hole is good enough fer His Majesty,” the thief resolved, “it’s good enough for me.”

  “Us,” Welf amended hastily. “Good enough forus!” he added, lest his point be lost.

  “I confess,” confessed Foss, “I’ve underestimated you. And I can’t, in good conscience, gainsay you on any count. A good general knows when he’s beaten, and sues for peace.” He made a, exaggerated gesture of surrender. “We’re at your mercy.”