Hill of Bones

by The Medieval Murderers

  Her gaze travelled to his hands, bound tightly against the dark wood. They were as soft and elegant as a highborn lady’s. This man was no sailor, that much was plain. She felt her pulse quicken. He must have been a passenger on the ill-fated voyage, a gentleman perhaps, even a noble. What might such a man have concealed beneath his sodden clothes – ingots of silver or gold, a jewel?

  She ran her hands over his chest and felt the cord beneath his shirt. She traced it down with her fingertips to the bulge of what felt like a leather pouch. Joan slid her knife from her belt. It would be easier to cut the cloth than to try to drag the pouch up under his clothes.

  ‘Spare me, I beg you!’

  Joan started so violently that her legs shot from under her and she found herself sitting in the shallow icy water.

  The man on the cross ran his tongue over parched lips and his voice, when he spoke again, was cracked and hoarse. ‘Almighty God has brought me safe through the storm and raging seas. His curse will be upon you if you harm me now, for I am under His protection.’

  Joan could scarcely take in what he was saying for the sheer amazement of his being alive. He turned his head towards her, and now that his eyes were opened she saw that they were a brilliant green, like the first flush of grass in spring.

  The bell in the parish church began to toll, calling the villagers to prime. Joan suddenly remembered that this was the morning of Good Friday, the day Christ had hung on the Cross. And now, here, right in front of her, was a man who might have been the statue of Christ sprung to life. With a look of wonderment dawning in her eyes, Joan struggled to her feet. Heedless of her sodden skirts she began to run as fast as her old legs would carry her, stumbling back towards the main beach and the other villagers.

  ‘A miracle! A miracle. It’s our Lord. He has returned!’

  Godfrey pressed his ear closer to the door of the royal chamber where his master, King Henry VI of England, slept, dressed and these days even ate, if you could call the meagre amount he consumed ‘eating’. Godfrey was sure his master was alone, he usually was. Even the Queen seldom entered his chamber and would wait patiently in her own apartments for him to visit her, but those visits too had become less frequent of late. Godfrey, his head hard against the wood, strained to listen. On the King’s orders, he had kept guard outside the door this past hour and had admitted no one. Yet now he could hear voices inside.

  Henry had retired to meditate and pray, something he did several times a day, a practice that was growing more frequent, much to the mockery of the Court, but His Majesty was resigned to being interrupted. He would never send his ministers away with an angry word, but that only made them despise him the more. A gentle, meek, forgiving king was no king at all.

  The voice was rising inside the chamber, shouting and raging. The words were pouring out too hysterically for Godfrey to distinguish them, but it was Henry’s voice, he was sure it was, though he’d never heard it raised like this.

  Godfrey hesitated, his fingers gripping the metal ring of the door handle. Should he enter, despite the King’s orders?

  ‘No, no, have mercy!’ The voice was shrieking in fear.

  Someone was surely threatening the King’s life. An assassin must have crept into the chamber and hidden there, one of Richard of York’s men, maybe even Richard himself. Henry would never offer any resistance if attacked, but even if he tried, his efforts would be as useless as an infant’s, for he refused to practise any form of fighting.

  Godfrey snatched his fingers from the handle and backed a few paces away into the shelter of a doorway. If this was an attempt to murder the King, he certainly wasn’t going to prevent it. He shrank into the shadows and waited. But there was no sound of violence coming from the small chamber, no furniture overturning, no one came running out.

  Taking a deep breath, Godfrey crept back towards the solid oak door. Someone was still talking, but the tone was low and dull now.

  ‘Sire, are you in need of assistance?’

  He called out to warn of his approach to anyone who might be with the King. He did not want a dagger intended for the royal heart to be plunged into his own.

  Receiving no reply, Godfrey turned the handle and made to enter, but the door would not move more than an inch. He put his shoulder to it and shoved; slowly it grated open just far enough for him to look through the gap. The chamber appeared empty save for Henry himself, who was crouched beside his bed, muttering under his breath as if he was praying. The bedcovers were crumpled and half tumbling off the bed. A small wooden table had been wedged against the door. Godfrey gave a violent shove and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Sire?’

  Henry was hugging his long black coat tightly across his chest, like a beggar on a cold winter’s day. He slowly raised his head. His tight black cap, the one he always wore, made him seem more pale and haggard than usual.

  ‘Shall I fetch the Queen, sire?’ Then seeing the look of incomprehension on Henry’s face, Godfrey added, ‘Margaret, sire, your wife, shall I send for her?’

  Henry adored her and when he was in one of his reclusive moods only Margaret could coax him out of his chamber.

  ‘I saw a face,’ Henry said. He pointed across the chamber.

  Godfrey crossed to the casement. On such a bitter day the gardens below were almost deserted, save for two gardeners tidying up the fallen twigs and branches after the storm.

  ‘Not the window, in there. That!’ Henry gesticulated wildly at an object on the floor just as Godfrey stumbled over it.

  He stooped and retrieved it. It was a silver mirror, perfectly circular and about the breadth of a man’s hand. The reflective surface was set in a silver frame gilded with gold and decorated with rubies and pearls. Godfrey knew it well. It had once been a gift from King Richard II of England to Henry’s maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France. Now it belonged to Henry. But normally it rested on a stand.

  He peered about. The stand was lying smashed in three pieces in the corner of the room. He glanced at the King, who was staring at the mirror with an expression of horror in his eyes, as if Godfrey was holding up a severed head.

  ‘Sire, it was just your own face you saw reflected in the mirror. Sometimes if I catch a glimpse of myself unawares, I am startled—’

  ‘No, no!’ Henry waved his hands agitatedly. ‘It was not my face . . . it was my grandfather’s face staring out at me.’

  ‘Some say you favour your grandfather in appearance,’ Godfrey replied cautiously. He could not think what else Henry meant.

  ‘It was Charles’s face, I tell you . . . the face of my grandfather, watching me. Look in the mirror. Look! Can’t you see him in there?’

  Godfrey struggled to think of a diplomatic answer that would not suggest that he thought his master was a raving lunatic. ‘Sire, a little diversion might dispel these phantasms – some dancing, perhaps, or music. You should not spend so much time alone.’

  ‘Dancing is a sin, don’t you know that? And it is sin my grandfather is trying to warn me of. I must meditate upon the mirror. I have to pray! I have to pray!’

  Godfrey looked down at the object he still held. On the reverse of the mirror was a scene engraved on gilded copper. The figures were set on a background of translucent red enamel and depicted the murder of St Thomas Becket by the knights in Canterbury Cathedral. Godfrey grimaced. Staring at that bloody murder for hours on end was enough to addle anyone’s wits.

  ‘Majesty, the stand is broken. Shall I not send it to a craftsman to be mended? Then when it’s returned, if the mirror distresses you, you might bestow it as a gift on—’

  He staggered backwards as the King leaped to his feet, snatching the mirror from his hands and sending him reeling.

  ‘I must not let it out of my sight. My grandfather is trapped in that mirror and I must release him. I have to help him, don’t you see? I must help him.’ He clutched the mirror to his chest, rocking back and forth like a child cradling a precious toy.
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br />   Then, as if he was awakening from an enchantment, he slowly let the mirror fall upon his bed.

  He grasped Godfrey’s arm, his voice now tremulous and his eyes full of fear. ‘Tell me, Godfrey, speak the truth. Is this madness? Is my grandfather’s madness coming upon me at last?’

  William broke off a morsel of the bitter salty bread and wiped it around the bottom of the bowl, cleaning up the last juices of the fish stew. Joan’s grandchildren stared bug-eyed at him as if they had never seen a man devour three great bowlfuls before. With a slight twinge of guilt, William wondered if he had just eaten their meal for tomorrow as well as today. But it was only a momentary pang, like the twitch of a wasted limb, for guilt was an emotion William seldom experienced.

  He drained his beaker of ale and leaned back in the low narrow bed. The one-roomed cottage stank of fish, wood smoke and what William thought might be dried seaweed, which he suspected was a major ingredient in the strange-tasting bread. The priest had wanted to conduct him to his own house, but one glance at the little man’s patched habit and pinched sallow face had convinced him that Father Jerome ate no better than his parishioners, probably worse. So when Joan had claimed him firmly as her prize and insisted on caring for him, William had graciously agreed, kissing the old woman’s hand with murmurs of gratitude that had made her simper like a virgin maid.

  But much to his irritation, Father Jerome had insisted on accompanying him to Joan’s cottage and, having firmly shut the door on the other curious villagers, sat patiently in the only chair watching William eat. Now he cleared his throat with a dry nervous cough and leaned forward.

  ‘I have known men lash themselves to masts to keep themselves from being washed overboard in a storm and if that mast should break, they have drifted ashore upon it, but . . . both your hands were tied. A man cannot tie himself like that. For what crime had you been bound up in such a manner by your companions?’

  ‘What are you saying, Father?’ Joan asked in a scandalised tone. ‘Crime indeed. It was a miracle, Father. A miracle for Holy Easter. God has sent us a saint.’

  She glowered at Father Jerome. It had taken a lot of persuasion on his part to convince the old woman that William was not Christ returned, but she was determined not to be done out of a saint.

  The priest gnawed anxiously at his lip. ‘I did not mean to accuse . . . it may be that this man was the victim of pirates who had captured him and bound him as their prisoner. If I am to bury their corpses on the morrow, I must know what manner of men they were and if they should be accorded a Christian burial.’

  Father Jerome had presented William with a perfectly reasonable explanation, furthermore one that the priest was bound to accept since he himself had fashioned it. But William had never settled for merely reasonable. When both the priest and the old woman turned to him, the words slid as smoothly as melted butter from his tongue.

  ‘Father, you are astute indeed. For I was a prisoner of pirates, wicked, godless men, heathens who prey on the innocent.’

  Joan’s granddaughter, Margaret, shook her head in disbelief. She had not said a word up to then; now she made up for it with a defiant tilt of her head. ‘But some of them was good Christians, I know, ’cause Anne showed me the crucifixes and rosaries her father had taken from the bodies.’

  ‘I’ll speak to her family tomorrow,’ Father Jerome said sharply. ‘Such things should have been given over to the Church.’

  William noticed the priest did not object to the dead being robbed. But he ignored Father Jerome’s indignation and turned a beatific smile on the annoying little brat.

  ‘Such pious objects that were found on the men were stolen from the good Christians they robbed and murdered, even . . .’ and here he shook his head in grief, ‘. . . even from girls as young as you, and they did worse than steal from those poor girls, far worse.’

  Old Joan crossed herself and spat three times on the back of her fingers to ward off such a dreadful fate ever befalling her innocent granddaughter.

  ‘How then,’ Father Jerome asked, ‘were you spared?’

  ‘It was as this good woman says, a miracle. I have a gift, a rare gift, of prophecy. I am shown many mysteries, given many warnings of things to come that are denied to other men. It is as if I walk as a seeing man in a world where all others are blind. I saw in a vision how a great storm would rise up and destroy the ship. I warned the pirate captain to put in to port, but he wouldn’t believe me, for there was no hint of cloud in the sky, nor any sign of rough weather approaching. He accused me of trying to spread fear and mutiny amongst his men. When I told them I could plainly see it, he said that if I wanted to see clearly, he would oblige me. He gave orders that I be hauled up to the top of the highest mast and tied up there in the burning sun till I died of thirst. As I hung there they all mocked me, saying to be sure to tell them if I saw a cloud.

  ‘I saw the storm flying towards me. I saw black hounds with eyes of fire streaming across the sky, howling our deaths, their slavering jaws opened wide to devour us. But I said nothing more, for I give warning but once. Even when they too could see the weather turning the captain refused to lose face and furl the sails, too proud to admit I was right. The first crack of lightning severed the mast and I was cast into the sea, thrown safely away from the rocks upon which the ship foundered, and so upon my holy cross of wood I floated ashore.’

  Joan gave a sigh of satisfaction and wonder. Her old eyes gazed upon him with such adoration that William felt a sudden thrill course through him, like the fire that surges through a man’s belly when he stakes all the money he possesses on the single tumble of the dice.

  The burial of the sailors’ corpses was a hasty affair, delayed only by the length of time it took for the sexton and his sons to dig a grave large enough to contain all the bodies. They buried them on common ground. Heathen pirates were not to be accorded a good Christian burial. All the same, Father Jerome was uneasy. He only had this stranger’s word for the fact that the men were pirates, but a man who so miraculously survives the waves must be, if not exactly a saint, at least blessed by divine favour, and God would surely not save a liar while He let good Christians perish.

  William asked to be shown the bodies that he might forgive the men who had so cruelly wronged him, a gesture of compassion that brought a tear to the eye of many a woman in the village. He walked along the line searching each face carefully. Finally he turned to Martin, the sexton’s youngest son, leaning wearily on his spade.

  ‘There were more men aboard the ship than this. Where are the other bodies?’

  The lad pointed to a mass of gulls circling out over the bay. ‘See those birds flying there where the ship was lost? Those gulls are the souls of the men who drowned and they’ll not leave that spot ’cause they know their bodies are still down there beneath the waves. Not every man who’s lost in these parts washes ashore. Sometimes the current carries them out instead of in, and they pitch up weeks or months later further along the coast. My father reckons if the sea wants them for her own she’ll never give them back.’

  William stared at the row of corpses. There was one face he had been desperate to see lying among the dead, but it was not there. He hoped with every fibre of his being that the sexton’s lad was right and that Edgar was lying somewhere at the bottom of the bay. He had to be dead. He must be. No one could have survived that wreck. Yet he himself had survived, hadn’t he?

  That Easter Sunday the little church of St Bridget was crammed to the door with villagers celebrating the holy feast and for once they had something to celebrate. There was not a family in Brean who didn’t have some of the spoils from the wreck hidden under their byre floors or concealed in the thatch of their roofs. And when, out of sight of Father Jerome, they’d swum the Easter sun in a pail of water, the reflection had been clear and strong, a good omen for the rest of the year.

  Even Father Jerome, worn down by years of battling against poverty, superstition and the cruelty of the sea, felt a little of the
old joy returning that he had once felt as a newly ordained priest. But his contentment was short-lived for, as he was in the very act of raising the Holy Chalice before his little flock, Joan’s granddaughter, Margaret, gave a cry of pain and fell to the ground clutching her belly, her face blanched to the colour of milk.

  The congregation crowded round, the Mass forgotten in their concern.

  One woman prodded the child. ‘Get one of the lads to carry her to my cottage, Joan. I’ve a good strong purge ready.’

  As people bent to lift her, Margaret fought and screamed. ‘I won’t drink any purge. It makes it hurt more.’

  Joan folded her lips grimly. ‘Now you know fine rightly Martha’s treated every man, woman and child in this village since afore you were born, and her mam afore that. If she’s says a purge is the cure, then it is.’

  But Margaret stubbornly resisted every attempt to lift her.

  William pushed his way through the crowd. ‘Let me examine the child.’

  ‘Are you a physician?’ Father Jerome asked.

  But William ignored him and, kneeling, took Margaret’s hot little hands in his, stroking them until her fists unclenched. ‘Now look at me, child.’

  Reluctantly she opened her eyes and looked into his startlingly green ones. He did not blink and after a few moments, neither did she. He was muttering, softly at first, in a language she did not understand, full of strange guttural noises that seemed more like the warning growl of some wild beast. As his voice grew louder and deeper, his hand pressed down upon her belly. She screamed, arching her back, trying to squirm away. Joan and the priest started forward in alarm, but William waved them back.

  In that touch, he had felt all he needed to know. His former master, a physician and alchemist, had taught him well. William had paid scant attention to his books and dusty phials, finding girls and cockfighting far more to his taste; nevertheless, he learned easily, though more by absorption than conscious study, and had acquired a knowledge that sometimes even surprised him. Purges would not cure the child, nor indeed would any physic. She would recover for a while, but the pain would return and one day kill her. There was no cure.