Sword of Shame

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘When I interviewed her, she admitted that she intended to forge a codicil that favoured the priory. She said she is obliged to eat too much bread and not enough meat, and wants better things in her old age. And then she intended to have Prioress Christiana dismissed for incompetence and herself put forward as a suitable replacement. As I said, Matt, she is wholly devoted to herself and her own wants and desires.’

  ‘Did she kill William, too? I suppose she must have done, so he would not tell anyone what was really in Lymbury’s last testament.’

  ‘When we recovered Lymbury’s will from Hog’s house, we found it was not as controversial as we were led to believe. He left the bulk of his estate to his wife, and gave his friends Dole, William and Askyl forty marks each. It is not a fortune, but it is a respectable declaration of friendship.’

  ‘But if Joan dies childless, then Askyl is to have everything,’ elaborated Bartholomew, who had also listened to the reading, ‘on the grounds that William and Dole have received lucrative posts and Askyl has not yet had anything. Joan had better hurry up and bear a son, or we may be called to investigate another murder in Ickleton.’

  ‘The priory will get nothing, though. I suppose Lymbury thought the ten marks he gave Christiana was sufficient.’

  ‘But why did he give away money that belonged to Michaelhouse?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘It does not sound like something an orderly man would do–and Lymbury was orderly.’

  ‘That was Pauline again. She persuaded him to donate the money to the priory immediately, and she wrote the letter to Michaelhouse. She denied it when we asked her, but she was not telling the truth.’

  Bartholomew snapped his fingers. ‘Of course she wrote it! It is obvious now. William was Lymbury’s clerk, but he said he had scribed no letter to Michaelhouse, and there was no reason for him to lie. And because Lymbury could not read, he had no idea what Pauline had told us.’

  ‘Precisely, Matt. Christiana told me that Pauline sometimes kept the records of Lymbury’s dealings with the priory when Dole or William were unavailable. Also, I looked through Pauline’s possessions once she was safely incarcerated in Christiana’s cellar, and found an early draft–no doubt the one Lymbury had originally dictated to her. What he had actually asked her to write to us was a polite request for a delay until after the harvest, when the debt would be paid in full with interest. I think she changed the wording from spite.’

  ‘Or perhaps she intended to keep the interest for herself,’ suggested Bartholomew. He glanced at the monk. ‘What will you tell the Sheriff about James? Unlike Dame Pauline, he cannot claim benefit of clergy. He will hang–although it seems unfair.’

  ‘You said he will die soon anyway.’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘You could tell your Bishop the story, and ask him to advise the Sheriff. He is not very efficient, and it will take him weeks to draw up the proper writs. And by then…’

  ‘That is a devious solution, Matt. But it is one that has already occurred to me.’

  Bartholomew dismounted. ‘I am going to find out what is taking Joan so long. If we do not leave soon, we will be travelling in the dark, and that would be unwise with a silver chalice in our bags. It would be a pity to lose it, after all we have been through.’

  He stepped into the solar, but stopped short when he saw Joan lying on Hog’s beautifully polished floor. Askyl stood over her, Lymbury’s sword clutched in both hands. When he saw the physician coming towards him, Askyl hurled the weapon at the hearth. Part of the hilt snapped off on the unyielding stone, and a carved dog-head from the cross bounced away under a bench. A distant part of Bartholomew’s mind thought how William would have deplored the damage.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asked. ‘Where is Rose?’

  ‘Gone to the kitchens for a cloth to bind the wound,’ said Askyl in a low voice. ‘She is taking a long time. Dole has gone to fetch his Bible.’

  Bartholomew moved forward cautiously. Joan was still alive, but barely. He heard Michael enter the hall behind him.

  ‘I asked Sir Elias to marry me,’ Joan whispered when the physician knelt next to her. ‘Philip left me a small fortune, and I need a husband. But I wanted no secrets.’

  Bartholomew caught one of her fluttering hands and saw blood on her sleeve. It was not her own, because it was dry. ‘You killed William?’ he asked, grappling with the implications. ‘I said he had struggled with his attacker–and that his killer would be stained with his blood.’

  She started to cry. ‘I killed William because I believed he had murdered Philip. You and the monk said he had good reason for doing so. But then you deduced that Pauline and James were the culprits. I told Elias about my mistake…’

  ‘You told him you murdered the man he loved more than anyone in the world,’ said Bartholomew softly. ‘And he was not very understanding about it.’

  But Joan was dead. There was a clatter of footsteps and Rose appeared, carrying a bowl of water and a bundle of rags.

  ‘You are too late,’ said Bartholomew.

  ‘These are not for her,’ said Rose shakily. ‘They are for Sir Elias. After he struck Joan, he made the mistake of turning his back, and she stabbed him with that little dagger she carries. A soldier should have known better.’

  Askyl crashed to the floor, and Bartholomew saw a bloody slit in his leather jerkin. ‘I want only one thing now,’ the knight gasped, pushing the physician away when he tried to inspect the injury. ‘I want to marry Sister Rose.’

  Bartholomew gaped at him, and so did Rose. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is the only way I can avenge myself on the woman who murdered my dearest friend,’ said Askyl hoarsely. ‘Here is Dole at last, and he has brought Hog and Prioress Christiana with him. They will be witnesses to the rite he is about to perform.’

  When Askyl smiled, his teeth were red, and Bartholomew knew the wound was beyond his medical skills. He shrugged helplessly when Rose raised hopeful eyes.

  ‘You cannot do this,’ said Michael, as Dole struggled into his vestments. ‘It is a ceremony founded in spite and deceit.’

  ‘It will give Rose a home, and her child a legal name,’ argued Askyl softly. ‘Joan died childless, and Lymbury’s will stipulated that I will inherit under those conditions. And my last testament–which Dole has already written for me–says I will leave all to my wife. Rose will rent this manor from Michaelhouse, with your blessing, and Hog will continue to be her bailiff. What is spiteful and deceitful about that?’

  Michael ignored the question. ‘You cannot marry Rose here–this is not a church.’

  ‘I shall ask the Bishop for special dispensation later,’ said Dole. ‘He will not deny a dying man’s last request. And you are not an unkind man, Brother–you will not stop us.’

  ‘Hurry, Dole,’ whispered Askyl. ‘My eyes grow dim.’

  The chaplain gabbled through the ceremony at a furious lick, while Askyl’s breathing grew more laboured as his lungs filled with blood. Rose cried when it was finished, and kissed his cold hand.

  ‘And now I shall absolve you of your sins,’ said Dole in a voice that cracked with emotion. ‘But I wish to God none of this had happened.’

  ‘I killed Curterne after Poitiers,’ breathed Askyl, almost inaudibly. ‘I did not do it because I wanted the sword, but because the sword had made him a coward. I never intended Lymbury to find it, or for us four to draw lots to keep it. I was going to drop it in the nearest river, but I did not have time…’

  ‘You did not have time because I suggested we search for Curterne’s belongings when his corpse was discovered,’ said Dole, self-disgust and bitterness strong in his voice. ‘I thought his armour and purse might soften the news of his death for his family. But Lymbury found the sword and declared Curterne’s family would have no need of such a weapon. We should never have let him convince us that keeping it was right. It was a shameful thing to have done.’

  ‘Lymbury and William were stabbed in the back,’ whispered Askyl with the last of his streng
th. ‘And now the blade has led a knight to slaughter a woman. It is truly a Sword of Shame.’

  III

  Rose’s child was born on a bitter January night. Prioress Christiana came to sit with her, Hog stood ready to run for the midwife should anything go wrong, and Dole whispered prayers for her safe delivery. Later, when the child lost the anonymity of babyhood, Hog liked to think the boy took after him.

  The bailiff was content with his life, although he grieved for James, who had died quietly in his sleep just after the harvest had been gathered. Rose never meddled with his running of the estate, and since Michaelhouse always received prompt payments, their distant landlords did not interfere, either. The villagers were happier once the spectre of vengeful Frenchmen had been erased, and saluted strangers who rode through their parish.

  Christiana received many piteous letters from Dame Pauline, begging to be allowed back because she was half-starved and constantly cold, but Christiana could not read, and her new secretary, Chaplain Dole, always told her the old nun was happy at Chatteris.

  Dole baptized Rose’s child Elias Askyl. The boy’s mother wanted him to be a warrior, and return home loaded with the spoils of war, but Elias preferred ploughs to weapons, and showed no interest in the broken sword Rose kept hidden in a disused chimney. His son–also Elias, although he preferred the more refined ‘Haskell’ to Askyl–inherited his father’s love of the land, but he paid a smith to repair the sword, although the job was poorly done and the weapon was never the same again. Rose died at a great age bemoaning the fact that she had sired a dynasty of farmers, and the sword was consigned to the chimney again.

  Another Elias Haskell found it many years later, when he demolished the old manor house and built himself a larger, grander home. He polished it up and hung it over the fireplace, where it remained until a bitterly cold winter, when a stranger from the Globe Playhouse in Southwark, London arrived cold and weary at Valence Manor.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Michaelhouse was granted the hundred-acre Ickleton estate known as Valence Manor in 1349, and the rent was an important source of income for the College–it funded two fellowships and a chaplain. Joan and Philip Lymbury were lords of Lymburys Manor in the mid-fourteenth century.

  Ickleton Priory, a house of Benedictine nuns, was founded in the 1150s. Prioress Alice Lacy was deposed by the Bishop of Ely in 1352, and her successor may have been Christiana Coleman, who was in post by 1361. Other nuns were Pauline de Gras, mentioned in a deed of the 1350s, and Rose Arsyk. William the Vicar was priest of St Mary’s Ickleton after 1353, and the nuns’ chaplain in 1378 was Geoffrey Dole. An Ickleton villager, who destroyed all the convent’s deeds during the Peasants Revolt of 1381, was called James Hog.

  The Battle of Poitiers was on 19 September 1356.

  ACT FIVE

  Ickleton, 1604

  It was early afternoon but already the weather was closing in, so I was relieved to see the arrow-shaped spire of the church and a scatter of houses. The snow, which had been falling in a half-hearted fashion, was starting to come down in great wet gouts. I reined my horse in and took stock of the surroundings. What little I could see of the landscape stretched flat and lifeless beyond the confines of the village. Bare trees marked the lines of watercourses, before everything was swallowed up in the snowy haze.

  My hired horse shook his head as if in doubt over the whole enterprise. The horse’s name was Rounce. Rounce wasn’t happy. Well, that made two of us. The extra sense which animals are said to possess probably told him that I wasn’t comfortable in his company.

  I glanced over my shoulder as if I might have been able to glimpse the city of Cambridge but, of course, it lay several miles behind me. If I turned round straightaway, I’d probably get back by nightfall–or I would have done in the absence of snow. Now the track would be growing obscure and I risked blundering into some fen. There were more ditches, rhines and fens in this part of the world than you could shake a stick at. In any case, I was reluctant to give up my quest.

  I’d found the village of Ickleton, identifying it by the arrow-like spire of the church. An old fellow who was a member of one of the university colleges had been very helpful, even if he turned out to be somewhat deaf so that I’d had to repeat my request several times. He told me that the Maskells were long-time inhabitants of Ickleton, a village to the south of the city. The kind old gent had even traced out the route on a scrap of paper. Finding the house called Valence should be the easy part. And at least I had come this far, although the journey had taken longer than I’d thought and I hadn’t foreseen the change in the weather. My horse and I had started off on a cold, crisp morning with the sun burning fair in the sky. Now I was growing anxious about the return. But before I could turn round I had to reach my destination.

  If only this damned snow would lift for a moment…

  And, as if my thoughts had been overheard up above, it did lift when the wind dropped momentarily and the snow paused about its business. To my left was revealed a large house standing in isolation. Trees lined the sides of a track leading towards it. The house looked flat in the whitened air, as if cut from card. Instinctively I knew that this was the place I was looking for, the house called Valence. More cheerful now, I turned Rounce’s head in the direction of the house. But the animal’s gait altered within a few paces and I realized something was wrong.

  I dismounted thankfully–getting off a horse is always a pleasure as far as I’m concerned–and lifted Rounce’s front hoof, his left one. Sure enough, a stone was lodged there. I took off my gloves and tried prying it out with my fingers. But my hands were cold and clumsy, and the horse suddenly grew restive. Rather than attempting to get the stone out myself it would be much easier to lead him the short distance to the house I’d just glimpsed and let the stable-hand take care of him. Why, old Rounce might even be fed and watered there, and old Nick Revill receive some refreshment indoors.

  While I was down at ground level I saw that I was having trouble with my own left foot. It wasn’t so much that my shoes weren’t watertight–nothing new there, I’m only a poor player who must wear his shoes to the bone–but that the copper buckle on the left one was loose. The buckle has no value but I like it because it is in the shape of a love-knot. Rather than risk the buckle falling off and getting lost, I detached it altogether and slipped it into the pocket of my doublet.

  Taking Rounce by the bridle I paced towards the house. The view down here wasn’t as good as it had been up on horseback, and the snow had started to fall again, but from what I was able to see it appeared a ramshackle sort of place. But I was glad to see smoke from a couple of chimneys mixing dirtily with the falling snow. There were people inside. There was warmth.

  While I walked towards the gatehouse whose thatched roof poked above the wall, I ran through the reasons for my visit to the Maskell household, rather as if I was accounting for myself like an everyday hawker or pedlar.

  Who are you?

  Revill’s the name, Nicholas Revill. I work at the Globe Playhouse in Southwark. That’s in London. (Pause) I’m with the King’s Men.

  The King’s Men!

  (Modestly) That’s right, the King’s Men.

  Sounds impressive.

  Now–and not that I’d repeat this to anyone outside the trade or mystery of playing, you understand–it may be that the best thing about being part of the King’s Men was the sound of those words rather than their substance.

  Soon after the arrival of James (the sixth in his native Scotland but the first of that name ever to rule over us in England), our playing company had been elevated from being mere Chamberlain’s Men to being the King’s. In truth, James the Scot wasn’t very interested in the playhouse, unlike his predecessor, Elizabeth. James’s consort, Queen Anne (hailing from Denmark), showed some taste for the theatre but her preference was for masques which, in my view, don’t have much to do with real playing. Just about all we’d received as a mark of royal favour were four and half yards o
f red cloth each to make doublet and breeches for the coronation procession. That, and a couple of guineas for the whole company which scarcely covered the cost of getting our collective beards trimmed for the great day.

  Don’t be dazzled by titles when it comes to patrons, then, however elevated they are. What we want above all from these gentlemen–or ladies, since we’re not particular–is a passionate interest in the theatre. And a deep purse. Or the other way round. As I say, we’re not particular.

  Which goes a little way towards explaining why I now found myself leading a hobbling horse up a snowy, treelined track towards a large, dilapidated house in the country. As you’ll have guessed, the time now was the middle of winter. But I’d been visiting Cambridge to discuss the possibility of the King’s Men doing a tour the next summer. Summer is the season when playing companies go on the road. It’s good to get away from the stench and heat of London, for all that it’s the finest city in the world. It’s good to bring the gift of our playing to different towns and parishes in the kingdom when people are in holiday mood. And, more practically, the roads aren’t so passable the rest of the year.

  We’d played Oxford before but never Cambridge. University towns are tricky places. They’re stuffed full of people who consider themselves to be clever. These clever people can be sniffy about ‘uneducated’ players, even if, in my opinion, our principal playwright, William Shakespeare, is cleverer and more witty than a whole college-full of students. In addition, the authorities sometimes take a dim view of players as likely to foment trouble. At least it had been so when we visited Oxford in the year of Queen Elizabeth’s death. But I enjoyed a warmer reception in Cambridge, where various civic worthies assured me that they’d be delighted to receive the King’s Men the following summer.

  So this was my business, entrusted to me by the Burbage brothers, Richard and Cuthbert, and the other shareholders who ran the Globe. Or part of my business. The other was to call on the people who lived in the house now looming through the snow. Like all playing companies, however humble or grand, we are quite happy to stage private performances as well as public ones. I had no idea why the Maskell family wanted us to perform in their house next summer, but the usual reason for a private show is to celebrate a wedding. We’ve done a few of those in our time, marking forthcoming nuptials with dramas such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet (though the last one’s a bit of an oddity if you’re planning on a long and happy union). What the shareholders wanted to know was whether there would be adequate playing space for us in this house. From the outside the place didn’t look very promising. I visualized an old-fashioned hall with a low ceiling, full of draughts in winter and stifling airs in summer. Still, as long as it didn’t fall down about our ears while we were mouthing our lines, it would do. And even if it did fall down, we’d probably be able to stage something in the grounds.