Belladonna at Belstone (9781471126345)

by Jecks, Michael

  ‘What was she doing? From what you say, your entire sisterhood seems unable to sleep,’ Simon commented drily. He hadn’t taken to the treasurer.

  It was mutual and she gave him a cold look. ‘Some of us, when we are concerned for the future of our convent, will waken. I daresay Moll was of that temperament. Perhaps she went to pray for the security of our nunnery.’

  ‘I see. So what else did she have to say?’ Baldwin asked.

  Margherita took a long breath as if to control her impatience. ‘Sir Baldwin, she told me that she saw a man going up the stairs, and yet when she followed, there was no man in the dorter. Where else could he have gone, but into the prioress’s private room?’

  ‘I still don’t understand what this has to do with the death of the girl,’ Bertrand put in.

  ‘Moll liked confronting her sisters with their failings. I think she told the prioress what she had seen, and Lady Elizabeth killed Moll to hide her guilty secret.’

  Chapter Ten

  Luke walked slowly across the grass of the cloister-garth, and at the middle, he turned to look back the way he had come. He always enjoyed this view. From here, within the quadrangle of the southern, canonical side, the church rose upwards majestically. It had no great tower, but it was rather wonderful in its simplicity.

  He stepped sideways to avoid a pile of dog’s turds on the ground – damn the prioress’s terrier! – and surveyed the eastern side. The first little block was that of the chapterhouse, where the canons held their morning meetings; next was the calefactory, in which a fire was kept roaring all through the day; then the dorter block at the cloister’s south-eastern corner, with storerooms beneath and latrines behind, their chutes dropping down into the pit which was washed by the stream flowing from the kitchen’s leat.

  Southwards was the frater and more storerooms; the kitchen hidden beyond, far enough away to ensure that stray sparks couldn’t set light to other buildings. Last, on the western edge, was the lay brothers’ dorter and storerooms.

  All was enclosed and secure from the outside world, and was practically a mirror image of the nuns’ precincts. It gave Luke a sense of belonging, seeing all these buildings designed simply to protect the inhabitants from the brutal realities of the world outside – not that anywhere was overly safe any more. The news of war brewing on the Welsh March had reached Belstone, and Luke knew only too well that when armies began to move, they would often invade nunneries for their pleasure – being places holding both women and stores of food; in the mind of the common man-at-arms they could hardly be surpassed.

  Luke shook his head. He knew how even modern men could become brutes when there was money or when there were women to be had, and warfare meant that all the usual rules were discarded. If that were to happen, if it looked likely that an army could come here, he would leave, he promised himself. He wasn’t going to run the risk of being murdered just to protect a bunch of nuns.

  But for now there was no need to worry. And his life here was supremely comfortable. He had services to hold, but they weren’t a burden, and there was always the compensation of the younger nuns and novices.

  He had not come to this benighted spot through choice. If he’d had his way, he’d have taken a position as priest in a little church somewhere, so that he could get the benefit of the annual income, and then pay a pittance to some impoverished fool to actually see to the souls within that parish while he went back to Oxford to study.

  Oxford. A great city – he’d loved it there, he recalled glumly. He’d enjoyed a flirtation with a merchant’s daughter, but the silly wench had allowed herself to be caught while trying to meet Luke. Her father was a patron of the college, so Luke had been thrown out. The bishop, Walter Stapledon of Exeter, was unimpressed by what he heard of Luke’s behaviour, and removed him from Oxford, writing to Bertrand suggesting Luke should be sent far away.

  Luke had expected to be pushed off into the wilds, and indeed that was what Stapledon had intended; but the clerk who supervised such postings was a friend of Luke’s who, even if he didn’t approve of Luke’s whoring, was happy to alter the instructions dictated to him by Stapledon’s suffragan in exchange for a small barrel of wine. There were many similar areas of confusion which the good Bishop of Exeter would have to sort out when he retired from his position as Treasurer of England; cases where the bishop’s clear instructions became muddled and were interpreted wrongly.

  Luke wondered how Stapledon would react when he found out that Luke had been given the position of priest in a nunnery. The thought that he, who had been driven from college for his womanising, should be placed in charge of young and impressionable girls in a convent, would make the good bishop furious. And the beauty of it was that the clerk who took dictation would blame Bertrand; it was Bertrand, he would say, who gave dictation. If the visitor had intended Luke to be sent to a small monastery on the wild, wretched coast of Cornwall, surely the name of the place would have been in the document which was sent to Luke? And because the document read ‘Belstone’, and the document was signed by Bertrand, Bertrand himself must surely have said that Belstone was the place to which Luke should be sent.

  Luke sighed and made his way to the frater, feeling the need for a drink before he went to conduct Compline, the last service of the day.

  If he was to meet Agnes as he had promised, he would need to keep his strength up, he thought, and grinned to himself.

  The door lay in the eastern side of the cloister. The sleeping hall was a two-storeyed building separated from the church by a narrow alley which led to a dead end, and which had once been roofed to create a small storage area. Now the little lean-to had lost its roof, which had been deposited on the floor to form a mess of broken spars and slates.

  Baldwin gazed at the dorter. The nuns slept on the first floor; the entire ground area was given over to a large storage room. Inside were barrels of wine, salted meat and fish, haunches of meat and sacks and boxes. The smell was wholesome and spiced, not at all musty, although there was a slight tang in the air – probably rats. A solitary cat stood and arched its back at him from its vantage point on a tun of wine. From the look of this place, no matter what privations the nuns suffered, with the loss of roofs, the damp and so on, at least they wouldn’t starve.

  Simon suppressed a grin when he saw Baldwin graciously motion the visitor towards the dorter’s entrance. Bertrand glowered, but jerked the door wide and stepped inside. From his expression Simon felt sure that he was beginning to regret having asked Peter Clifford to advise him on whom he could bring to Belstone.

  When Simon trailed after them, he found that just inside the doorway was a staircase, roughly formed of square-hewn blocks of wood which had been sawn on the diagonal to give a triangular section, then fitted to planks at either side to produce uneven steps. It was the sort of arrangement Simon had been thinking of putting into his home for some time – for he and his wife still depended upon a ladder to reach the bedchamber in their little house.

  At the top of the stairs, Simon found Baldwin staring at a heavily built partition. Simon himself had eyes only for the ceiling and the hole in it. While outside in the cloister, Simon had thought the breezes almost unnoticeable, here within the sleeping quarters there was a constant low moaning as if the souls of the damned were filing through in an unending procession.

  It was only with difficulty that he dragged his attention away and studied the room. The dorter was perhaps sixty or seventy feet long, and all along it, on either side, were wooden screens, each open to the hallway, which separated the sleeping cubicles one from the other. He took a few paces forward and peered into one. It contained a rough mattress and pillow, covered with a blanket and some sort of coverlet, and a three-legged stool at the side. By the wall stood a large chest, its lid down and apparently locked. Certainly the hasp was firmly shut.

  Idly he wandered along the corridor formed by the outflung partitions. Some beds were made, but equally many were not; some had chests, and tho
se with the more ornate ones had chairs. A few of the beds appeared not to have been slept in, and when he looked up he could see why. Directly above was the hole. Beyond, several of the partitioned areas seemed more heavily used, and Simon rightly guessed that here nuns and novices shared beds to keep away from the rain or snow that fell in.

  At the far end was a billowing curtain, and he was about to haul it aside and glance behind it when Bertrand coughed. ‘No! You don’t want to . . . That’s the rere-dorter, Bailiff!’

  Simon quickly drew his hand from the curtain. Thank God Bertrand had warned him. It would have been appallingly embarrassing to have entered the nuns’ toilet and encountered one of them in a – in a compromised position. He turned and made his slow and thoughtful progress back along the dorter to join the others. They were still standing at the partitioned area near the door. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You are not aware of the strictures of the Rule, of course, Bailiff,’ Bertrand said stiffly. ‘No nun – and that includes the prioress of a convent – should divide up the dorter so as to give herself more space than other nuns.’

  ‘Especially,’ Baldwin added, ‘when that nun intends to shut herself off from her sisters. This is almost sacrilege. You see, she is not superior to her sisters, just an elected leader.’

  ‘This is not the worst, Sir Baldwin,’ Bertrand intoned ‘That was one of the points I was forced to include in my report to the Bishop of Exeter, but so was the fact that the prioress has seen fit to permit her nuns to keep their own possessions. She allows them to keep personal items locked away in their own chests.’

  Simon could see that Baldwin was surprised by these revelations, but the knight was determined not to jump to conclusions. ‘Fine. Now, we were going to see whether the man Margherita saw could have gone anywhere else other than into the prioress’s chamber, weren’t we?’

  Returning to the top of the stairs, Baldwin looked about him. There was a small landing, created by the prioress’s partition and a large board which was evidently designed to limit the draught that howled through the room. Beyond the prioress’s wall was a small doorway.

  ‘The infirmary,’ Bertrand confirmed.

  ‘Margherita said that the infirmarer prevented her from entering, didn’t she?’ Baldwin mused. He made as if to walk towards it, but then gave the visitor a quick look. ‘What else was in your report, Bishop?’

  ‘About the prioress? Well, I had to comment that she keeps a pet dog . . .’

  ‘That is hardly a crime.’

  ‘. . . and takes it to Mass with her.’

  ‘I see,’ Baldwin murmured. Being fond of his own hounds, he was not prepared to condemn the woman for that, but he could see that the visitor was working himself into a fine fever. To stem the flow of outrage, Baldwin held up his hand and smiled soothingly. ‘We were told that the lady would see us after Vespers, were we not? Shall we see whether she is here now?’

  Bertrand shut his mouth and nodded. Half-heartedly he knocked on the door to her room but there was no response. She hadn’t yet returned. ‘Where can she be?’ he muttered.

  ‘Perhaps while we are here, we should take a short look at the infirmary?’ Baldwin suggested.

  Bertrand agreed ungraciously. There was little point, he felt, in going to take a look inside, not when the treasurer had already told them that the prioress had been making love with a man. Wasn’t that enough?

  A good oaken door on well-greased hinges opened silently, and they walked inside quietly. The infirmary was a small hall, but warm and comfortable. A fire burned steadily in the grate, the glowing logs throwing out a golden light that invited drowsiness after the chill, wind-swept atmosphere of the dorter. Baldwin felt as if his face was absorbing the whole of the heat from the flames.

  Down the left wall three wooden partitions jutted into the room, making four units in all, each holding a large bed so that eight invalids could be accommodated with ease.

  At one end was a small altar with a cross so patients could always see the symbol of their faith; at the other was a screen with a curtained doorway. The only noise was a snoring from the bed nearer the curtain.

  ‘Is it time for Compline?’

  The reedy voice came from an old nun huddled near the fire. They had not seen her at first because she was so low in her chair that her head hardly rose above the bed between her and the three men.

  Bertrand made no effort to speak; he was still furious that the prioress was not attending to him, and so Baldwin answered. ‘Not yet, Sister. Compline will be a while yet. What is your name?’

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked in a quavering voice. ‘What are you doing here? Men aren’t permitted inside the nuns’ cloister.’

  ‘It was the visitor who invited me in, Sister. I am the Keeper of the King’s Peace in Crediton.’

  She studied his face with frowning concentration for a while. ‘If you say so. You look more like a lay brother, though. Are you sure the visitor invited you?’

  Baldwin showed his teeth in a grin. ‘He’s here. Why don’t you ask him?’

  She followed his gesture and stared full at Bertrand. ‘Him? A visitor? He doesn’t look like he’s got the bollocks for it . . . Looks more like a pox-ridden tranter.’

  ‘Oh, damn this community!’ Bertrand exploded. ‘I will not stay to be insulted by a decayed and ancient vixen! If you wish for me, I’ll be in the quadrangle.’

  With a glance towards the woman in which loathing and rage were equally mixed, Bertrand stormed out of the room. Baldwin could hear his boots stomping down the stairs, and then out into the yard.

  ‘He has a temper like a visitor,’ the nun observed calmly.

  ‘What is your name, Sister?’

  ‘I’m Joan. I used to be the cellarer,’ she grinned, ‘but now I can spend my time in contemplation.’

  Baldwin smiled back, sinking down to his haunches. ‘I expect you have seen many changes here.’

  ‘Things move ahead, but often too fast. It’s not right that the prioress should be looking to so much building. She ought to take stock, think about what she’s doing. We’re not some sort of business; we’re God’s house, and ought to behave like it.’

  ‘You think the prioress is failing in her duty to the convent?’

  ‘Don’t assume things like that, young man,’ she said sharply. ‘There are too many tales being told in this convent about people. It doesn’t do the place any good, and only leads to us all looking like fools. I never said the prioress was failing. She’s a good woman, in her own way, and shrewd too, which is more than you can say for some. No, I only meant that I don’t agree with her way of trying to ensure the future of the place. Building another chapel won’t help much.’

  ‘But you need the money from Sir Rodney’s church.’

  ‘Oh, piffle! So what if we do? If the convent has need of the money, wouldn’t we be better off saving it for the use of the church and protecting some of the existing buildings rather than putting up yet another?’

  ‘That is what you would do?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or maybe I’d prefer to spend it on ale and crumpets! There are worse things, when you pass your life sitting before a fire in the cold weather. At least you can eat crumpets without teeth.’ And she opened her mouth wide to display toothless gums.

  ‘It must have been a great shock when the novice died,’ Baldwin said gently.

  ‘At my age you’re used to the sight of death,’ she shrugged matter-of-factly.

  ‘Did you know her well?’

  ‘Young Moll? Yes. She wasn’t a nice person, but then so few of them seem to be. All outward penitence and humility, but too keen on seeing what others are up to rather than making sure their own behaviour is beyond reproach.’

  As concise an obituary as he had ever heard, Baldwin thought to himself. ‘Did you hear anything on the night that she died?’

  Joan pulled a face. ‘No. Nor did the other girl.’

  ‘The lay sister?’

  ‘Cecily.’ S
he nodded towards the snoring figure huddled in one of the beds. ‘She’s got a broken wrist. The infirmarer made us dwale to help us all sleep. Needed it with Cecily’s racket.’

  ‘Is she asleep now?’

  ‘Listen to her!’ Joan cackled. ‘She couldn’t be much more asleep whatever you did to her!’

  Dwale, Baldwin mused. Not a flavour to be mistaken: although the precise mixture varied, it was inevitably sour and unpleasant. Dwale was another name for belladonna, deadly nightshade, but leeches used it mixed with henbane or hemlock and a soporific, usually poppy syrup, to comfort those in pain. Many patients took it – especially when their surgeon needed them quiet. ‘You all slept when Moll died?’

  ‘The infirmarer had made it a powerful dose, but even the smallest amount knocks me out at my age. I know Cecily was well gone, because she spent all her time whining with pain beforehand. After she’d drunk it, she went quiet.’

  ‘Was Moll served first?’

  ‘No. I asked Constance to give Cecily hers first. The poor girl was in terrible pain, and I couldn’t sleep with the row. Then Constance brought me mine and Moll last.’ She shifted slightly, and now her face was turned to the fire. Her features were lighted by it, and the benign flickering of the flames tended to smooth some of her wrinkles, lending her a more youthful aspect, but the sadness of old age was upon her. Although she had no apparent regret, her life was almost over, and she was contemplating the life to come. She had little interest in earthly matters.

  Baldwin glanced at the beds. When he asked, Joan pointed at the bed nearest the door. ‘That was hers – my bed is that one.’

  There was a third bed between them, Baldwin noticed. ‘Did you fall asleep soon after drinking?’ he asked.

  ‘Very soon,’ Joan agreed. ‘As I say, Constance had made the potion strong and I remember Constance smiling at me as I drank, then going to Moll. I saw Moll take a sip before putting the cup on her table, but then I began to feel drowsy. Soon I was asleep and I didn’t wake until morning.’