Belladonna at Belstone (9781471126345)

by Jecks, Michael

  More embarrassment for the priory, Lady Elizabeth thought, turning and walking back along the cloister. She went to her desk and sat. The account books were ready for her, but she couldn’t pretend to read them. Katerine’s death had affected her more than she would have expected.

  The child was not special. She had not possessed any particular skills, but was pleasant enough, even if she had displayed an unedifying greed, as Rose said. Katerine had been friendly with Agnes for a while; the two had been quite close when Agnes had first arrived, Lady Elizabeth recalled, but then their friendship had cooled. At the time Lady Elizabeth had thought it was girlish jealousy or pride, but now Rose had enlightened her: they had both desired the same man.

  It would have been a surprise if they could have remained friends, one being the daughter of a nobleman, the other a bastard; it was much the same as she and her treasurer. Lady Elizabeth had been born to a great family and Margherita had not.

  Her rivalry with Margherita had begun long before either of them had anticipated leading this community. Perhaps Elizabeth should have been more conciliatory towards the younger woman, but there was so great a chip on Margherita’s shoulder that any overtures on her part caused offence and were rejected with contempt. Margherita was the one who had decided that they were enemies, not Elizabeth – and this for the simple reason that Margherita could not envisage being the friend of someone who was of noble birth.

  Margherita was Sister Bridget’s illegitimate daughter. Elizabeth remembered Bridget. Friendly, she was, always smiling. She had run away the last time while Elizabeth was herself a novice, little more than a child. Margherita seemed to think her mother was cause for shame and embarrassment, although Lady Elizabeth had no idea why. As far as she was concerned, the sins of Margherita’s parents were not their child’s responsibility, and in any case, Lady Elizabeth was the daughter of an old-fashioned nobleman. She was fortunate to have been born to his legitimate wife, and not to one of the many other women with whom he was wont to spend his leisure. Illegitimacy was no slur on the character of a good person.

  Lady Elizabeth picked up her reed and idly scratched at the page before her. She had no regrets about being on adversarial terms with Margherita – although right now it would have made her life a great deal easier to have the woman as an ally.

  Especially, Lady Elizabeth realised, since the local peasants were bound to start talking about the convent.

  Her scalp crawled: the death of Moll was bad enough, but it would have been perfectly simple to hush it up. It was in nobody’s interests to bruit knowledge of it abroad, and even the suffragan, who would have been happy to use it to his own advantage, should he manage to find the murderer, would still only have told the Bishop of Exeter. Even that idiot Bertrand could see that there was no benefit to anyone, to allow information of that kind to be spread.

  But now a second death had occurred, and while one dead novice could be put down to bad fortune, two in as many weeks was news of the most dramatic kind imaginable. Lady Elizabeth knew perfectly well how people who had nothing to do with the cloister would dream up the most incredible stories about nuns, and to add two dead novices to such gossip would have the effect of putting oil to the flames of rumour and conjecture.

  It was intolerable, but it was a fact. Then another thought struck her, with sufficient force to make her drop her reed.

  Sir Rodney had wanted to put his money into an institution where he thought there could be no hint of scandal. He would be able to ignore the death of one novice, but this second would lead to gossip of the most prurient kind. Lady Elizabeth had seen it all before: when an accident occurred in a nunnery, people were always prepared to put the worst possible slant on it. Hearing of two novice nuns dying, Sir Rodney would assume it was proof of the unsanctity of the place. He was a pious knight, and wanted his bones interred in a sanctified chapel where they would be protected, along with his soul, by the constant prayers of the nuns. If the site was rendered unholy in his eyes, he would withdraw his money.

  Lady Elizabeth stared up at the window, searching for an answer to the perennial problem of where to find the money to maintain the convent. Without Sir Rodney’s contribution, she couldn’t keep the nunnery from collapse.

  If Sir Rodney heard a series of suspicions and half-garbled rumours, he would feel justified taking his patronage elsewhere; the only defence for the convent was proving who had murdered Moll – and why. At least Katerine’s death couldn’t be murder, Lady Elizabeth thought. A doubt pricked at her mind, but she thrust it away. Katerine had fallen while . . . while playing on the roof ?

  As an explanation it was as good as any other, she thought.

  Paul, the canon despatched by Godfrey to take his alarming message to the prioress, hesitated at the connecting door in the church. He tapped on the wood, trying to gain the attention of the sacrist, but dared not walk straight into the nuns’ cloister. It was something he knew others occasionally did, but Paul had scruples about obeying God’s commandments, and even if Godfrey wanted him to go straight in, Paul was quite sure where Godfrey stood relative to God in Paul’s scheme of things.

  There was no answer; nobody answered his anxious rapping. Screwing up his courage, he pressed the latch and opened the heavy oaken door, peering round it. There was no one there. Hurriedly he pulled the door shut and stood nervously tapping his foot and sucking his lip. He daren’t return to see Godfrey without attempting another means of speaking to the prioress.

  Not that he wanted to help her. The Lady Elizabeth had not controlled the place as efficiently as she should have, and Paul, who although slightly eccentric was still enthusiastically religious, felt that her tenure had not served to honour God as it should have. He could see the advantage of another prioress taking over. Apart from anything else it would free him from that horrible old man Jonathan.

  Paul pulled a face as he recalled that Jonathan had asked him to go and walk with him in the garden. The very idea made his flesh creep, and Paul shuddered. If the prioress was doing her job, an ageing satyr like Jonathan would be controlled. Margherita wouldn’t allow Jonathan to try to seduce other canons.

  Suddenly, Paul realised there was another way to get a message to the prioress via the grille in the herb garden. He could call through it and ask a nun to fetch the Lady Elizabeth to come and hear Godfrey’s words.

  But arriving there, he saw Elias already at the grille, eagerly peering through it. Paul stopped and frowned. This was outrageous: didn’t the smith have any sense of wrongdoing? It was just one more example of the slack discipline at Belstone. The prioress was responsible; she was in charge. It was wrong! She shouldn’t permit such open communication between canons and nuns. If Elias was guilty, then so was she. It was high time the Lady Elizabeth was removed and someone else took over.

  All this passed through his head as he stood watching Elias at the grille. Paul tutted to himself. He had a message to pass on, and how could he do it now? If he was unable to speak to a nun, how could be bring the news to the attention of the prioress? Of course . . . he could tell someone else – someone who was known by all in the convent to be the implacable enemy of the prioress: Bishop Bertrand!

  If Paul told the suffragan, Bertrand would be bound to take action – and it must surely help remove Lady Elizabeth. Even she would find it hard to survive an apostate canon, a nun turned apostatrice, as well as two deaths and the near death of the knight.

  In confiding in Paul, Brother Godfrey had unwittingly ensured that his message went to the one man he wished to remain ignorant.

  Bertrand led the way through to the cloister and in at the frater’s door. Here Simon and Hugh found Baldwin unconscious lying on a trestle table. A perplexed Godfrey stood cleaning Baldwin’s scalp with a cloth damped in warm water; he gave the men a cursory once-over before returning to his work, utterly absorbed.

  ‘Baldwin? What has . . .?’

  ‘He was walking out in the cloister, when a terrible accident hap
pened,’ Bertrand said. He stared at Baldwin’s hideous wound; the sight of the long flap of flesh slashed away with such precision was horrible, but fascinating. ‘A novice was up on the church roof, and slipped. The poor girl fell to her doom, but as she toppled, she dislodged slates, and one of them did this to your friend. Only God’s own grace saved his life. If the slate had fallen an inch to one side, he would be dead.’

  ‘He’ll be fine, Bailiff,’ Godfrey said, reaching for a pair of scissors and beginning to cut away the knight’s hair. ‘For so old a man, he’s healthy.’

  Simon nodded distractedly. To have woken from his nightmare to be presented with a real one was appalling, and for a moment he seriously wondered whether he was still dreaming. He took a step forward. ‘He will live?’

  ‘He’s fit enough. Leave him to me.’ Seeing the fearful expression on Simon’s face, Godfrey’s voice became more kindly. ‘Don’t worry, Bailiff. I’ve seen to many similar wounds, and he’ll be all right.’

  ‘Thank you for your assistance,’ Simon said, and made to walk out of the room, but then he stopped and gave a quick frown. ‘Hugh, you wait here,’ he said in an undertone. ‘Stay with Baldwin and don’t let anyone near him if you don’t trust them.’

  ‘Why? He is perfectly safe here,’ Bertrand said.

  Simon glanced at Godfrey. ‘You say a second novice has died?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with the death of poor Moll . . .’

  ‘Perhaps, but seeing my friend here like this, I am not prepared to take the risk. Baldwin was certain that Moll’s death was murder, and I find this “accident” to be suspicious. Now show me where this all happened.’

  Bertrand agreed with a bad grace, convinced that the bailiff was allowing his imagination to run on a light rein, but Simon didn’t care. He knew that accidents happened at the worst possible moments; a tile falling from a roof wasn’t rare even in better maintained places. All the same, he felt deeply uneasy.

  It was ironic that this should happen just as Baldwin and he had been ordered home. Home! With an inward groan, Simon thought of Jeanne: she must be told – but not until later. For now, Simon must concentrate on how Baldwin had been wounded.

  ‘He was here,’ Bertrand said, motioning towards a thick sprinkling of slates on the grass. Thin snow had been trampled, but two clotted spills of blood stood out distinctly.

  Simon peered upwards. The cloister roof had been wrecked, but it was a good twenty or thirty feet from the church roof in a direct fall, and a body weighing some stones would have dislodged them without difficulty.

  ‘Did anyone see what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘There was a canon here called Paul: him.’

  Simon followed his pointing finger and saw a gawky young canon entering the cloister. Walking up to him, Simon asked, ‘You saw my friend hit by the slate?’

  Paul forgot Elias at once. Seeing Simon’s serious expression Paul was reminded of Katerine’s body, her wide, scared eyes, the way her head rested at such an impossible angle. It was enough to make him want to weep with sadness. When that tile had fallen, he had been in the middle of copying a book, trying to ensure a perfect replica of the writing, but it was a dull treatise, and when he saw Baldwin in the cloister, Paul had been distracted and had watched him. It took little time for Paul to tell Simon what he had seen. While he spoke, Simon was aware of Bertrand joining them. Paul’s attention went to the suffragan while he talked.

  ‘So my friend was out there looking upwards?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Yes, but then he turned away, and rubbed at his eye, and a moment later the slate struck him. Then there was an awful crash, and the next thing I knew, something was rolling down the roof above me, and fell almost on top of Sir Baldwin.’

  ‘How do I get to the roof ?’

  There was a stone staircase inside the church. Soon Simon was hurrying along the cloister towards it.

  When he was gone, Paul turned to Bertrand. ‘My Lord, may I speak to you a moment?’

  It was very windy on the roof and Simon had to take a good breath before he dared approach the edge. He was afraid of heights. Looking down, he found himself staring at the upturned face of Bertrand, who remained standing in the quadrangle with Paul.

  To take his mind off the suffragan, Simon peered straight down on to the roof of the cloister. Some twenty yards farther along, he could see the point where the novice’s body had struck it. Not only was there a roughly circular pattern of dark, wrecked slates showing through the snow, which corresponded to the place where she had apparently fallen, there was a broad red stain. He’d heard Katerine had broken her neck. Hitting headfirst, she must have wrecked her skull.

  Simon was aware of an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Usually he could rely on his native intelligence to solve local mysteries, but today, with his best friend unconscious and unable to aid him, he felt all at sea.

  From the corner of his eye he saw movement, and when he glanced down he saw the suffragan walking with Paul towards the stables. The sight of the two men drew Simon’s attention back to the present, and he found he could concentrate once more.

  Very well, the girl had fallen from the church roof. Either she had slipped – in which case what was she doing here? – or perhaps she had jumped and it was pure mischance that she happened to land on Baldwin, dislodging a slate on the way . . .

  Simon caught his breath. The canon had said that he saw Baldwin look up, saw him turn away, saw the slate strike, and then heard the girl hit the roof.

  His confidence returned. He marched along the roof until he was in a line with the mark on the grass and the ruined slates on the roof. Here it was maybe fifteen or twenty feet to the cloister roof, Simon guessed. A light dusting of snow clung to the vertical stonework of the church. A line showed where the snow had been swept clear as the girl fell down the wall. Simon had a vision of her toppling headfirst, her skull grating down the stone and losing the flesh.

  Struck by vertigo, Simon had to close his eyes and lean away from the terrible drop. Rather than gaze down, he decided to survey the roof.

  There was no lead here. The convent had not enough money to fully waterproof the place; only the greater houses could afford that sort of luxury. Instead, like the cloister roof below, this one was slated. Each slate had a pair of holes drilled through it so that oak pegs could be thrust through, hooking the tile to the lathes beneath. There were no slates missing nearby, but Simon had hardly expected to see any gone. If someone had done as Simon suspected and thrown one at Baldwin, it would have been an act of extreme stupidity to pull one from the roof. That would prove ill-intent.

  However there was a pile of unfitted slates near the low parapet, as if the builders had left them for use as spares as and when needed, or perhaps the canons thought this was the best place to leave them, rather than taking up storage space in the undercrofts. When Simon examined them, he was struck by their new appearance. All looked unused. Even the top one was perfectly cut, its surface a smooth blue-black colour.

  Simon turned slowly back from the pile and stared down at the roof at his feet. The girl had obviously been up here a while, for the snow had been swept clear of much of the area, and where she had clambered over the parapet she had cleared a small space of snow.

  He froze; utterly immobile for a moment, he held his breath. It was so obvious, so clear that someone had tried to murder Baldwin that Simon was unable to turn and confirm the proof for a moment, fearing to find his recollection was wrong.

  Slowly he swivelled around and walked the two steps back to the pile of new slates.

  The slates which had no snow upon them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Constance returned to the infirmary and found Joan sitting before the fire. Pouring her a cup of spiced wine, Constance stood back to watch the older woman drink. It was peaceful now that Cecily was asleep again, this time drunk on wine rather than dwale and poppy seed, and Joan was clearly enjoying the quiet.

  There was no such
peace for Constance. She was confused, anxious and scared. It was while she was still talking to the prioress that the message had arrived that poor Katerine was dead, fallen from the roof, almost braining Sir Baldwin en route.

  Everyone had heard stories of nuns who lost their faith and believed that they had the right to end their lives, denying God’s own supreme responsibility for choosing how and when to call His people to Himself, but Constance would never have believed that of Katerine. Especially since she had always appeared so full of life. She was the last person to look for death. Constance privately thought the girl must have slipped – but that begged the question of what Katerine was doing on the roof in the first place. Spying on the canons?

  It was a thought. The girl was always happy to use information to her own advantage, as Constance knew only too well, although what she could have hoped to have seen up on the roof was a puzzle.

  Constance left the jug by the fire and walked back to the little chamber, standing in the doorway and staring about her.

  Only a few nights ago, when Moll died, she had told Elias of their joint parenthood, while they lay naked in each other’s arms on her mattress. At first he had not wanted to believe it, his face registering shock, but that was only for a moment. Then his expression changed. His eyes had creased, his mouth broke into a wide smile and he had pulled her towards him, embracing her fervently.

  It was his idea to leave the convent. How could they stay? he had demanded, his strong, muscled arms wrapped about her, talking softly into the side of her neck while she stared up at the ceiling, tears filling her eyes.

  He still wanted her to go with him, she knew; he would be waiting for her down at the iron grille that separated the nunnery from the canons. Waiting for her answer.

  And she would have gone, if Katerine hadn’t accosted her. That had forced her to decide: Elias or the convent. At least the prioress had been kind; understanding. There were rumours that she herself had once fallen in love, and had only come to this convent after being thrown from another in disgrace. Perhaps that was why she was less harsh with her nuns and novices: because she knew what it was to hold a man in her arms, to feel doubt and dual loyalties, one to God, and the other to a man.