“Now, Robert,” Brother Clayworth chided softly. “God does not forbid the meting of a little justice of our own. An eye for an eye, don’t you know.”
Brother Morrison’s craggy face rearranged itself to one of obvious disapproval. “You are taking liberties with the text.”
“Stop quibbling,” Brother Silsbury cut them both off. “There is no denying the breadth and reach of God’s will.”
“Amen.” Brother Morrison nodded before languidly crossing himself.
“Have you any idea how long you will need to stay?” Brother Silsbury asked as he turned to Colin, and I knew this was what these men most wanted to know. How long would it take before we solved this murder or gave up trying?
“I think we should be done by this week’s end,” Colin answered with the thinnest of smiles flashing across his face. “That should suffice.”
Brother Morrison spoke up again. “I have had a telegram this afternoon. Father Demetris informs me that he will be returning here at the behest of the bishop tomorrow morning. So it seems we will have no shortage of visitors this week.” It sounded to me as though he said the word visitors very much like he would have said annoyances.
“We must make Brother Green aware,” Brother Clayworth said as he turned and murmured to young Brother Hollings beside him. The solemn young man got up at once and padded over to the other table, where he leaned in by Brother Green’s hefty shoulders and whispered in his ear as though imparting a state secret.
A moment later Brother Rodney once again came through the doorway from the kitchen, this time cradling a huge wooden bowl filled with apples. He set it down at the farther table as he took his seat, but almost at once Brother Green swept it up and brought it over to the table where we were seated. “Our guests should have the first choice,” he said with his usual charitable grin. “And won’t it be wonderful to have Father Demetris back with us again?!”
“There, you see, Robert”—Brother Clayworth gave a sly smile to Brother Morrison as he passed the bowl of apples to Brother Wright without bothering to take one himself—“here is someone perfectly happy to entertain another guest.”
“Now you’re just being contrary, Brother Clayworth,” Brother Wright scolded as he turned back to Colin. “Can you tell us how your questioning is going, Mr. Pendragon?”
Colin looked up from the apple he’d just taken a bite of and was wearing the most curious expression. There was an unmistakable glimmer in his eyes and one corner of his lips was ever so slightly curled upward. Yet it was only after I noticed his left eyebrow slowly arching toward the ceiling that I sucked in a breath and girded myself for his answer.
“I’m so very pleased that you have asked,” he said too easily. “Everyone here has been most accommodating, though I have had a devil of a time trying to get my hands on some of the abbot’s papers.” His use of that vernacular made me frown as I knew he had chosen it with great purpose. But my belly sank even further when he quite suddenly rose to his feet. “Excuse me . . .” he called out across the room in his strong, bellowing voice. “Could the one of you who has borrowed the abbot’s journals from his sabbatical to Egypt please raise his hand. I am most anxious to get a look at them and promise to return them just as quickly as you please.” A sea of wide eyes and blank faces stared back at him, and I was certain that no one had ever made such a spectacle of himself in this refectory before. “Nobody?!” he pressed with great angelic innocence. “My, my . . .” He settled his gaze on Brother Bursnell at the far table, still maintaining the same pristine expression to match his carefree tone. “Perhaps they have been misplaced then?”
From where I was sitting it looked like Brother Bursnell flushed quite roundly as he continued to stare back at Colin. “I shall make it my priority to search the library first thing tomorrow morning,” he answered in a halting voice.
“There you have it,” Colin said as he resumed his seat and turned back to Brother Wright again, “everyone has been most accommodating.”
If Brother Morrison spent the majority of his time looking displeased, he looked ever more so now. “Really,” he grumbled as he stood up, leaving his half-eaten apple on his plate. “This is not some workhouse. We do not bawl across the room at one another.”
“You must forgive me,” Colin said at once as he stood up and nodded to the elderly monk. “I meant no offense—only to make use of this singular gathering of your brotherhood.”
Brother Morrison studied Colin a moment, his face pinched with his irritation, before giving a curt nod and heading out of the refectory, Brothers Silsbury and Hollings immediately falling in line behind him.
“I think you like to rattle him.” Brother Clayworth eyed Colin with a faint grin as he drained his mug of ale.
“I do no such thing,” Colin protested unconvincingly, which, though it only further amused Brother Clayworth, had quite the opposite effect on Brother Wright. Yet it was Brother Bursnell who caught my eye as he took his leave, for he cast such an indignant scowl our direction, the likes of which I had never before seen upon his face, that I was left wondering whatever to make of it.
CHAPTER 21
The silence was crushing.
Once dinner had been dispatched, some of the monks had shared a bit of communal time in the refectory, though it had been exceedingly polite and remarkably subdued. I could not discern whether this was a function of Colin and me being there or if it was indeed status quo, but I thought it somehow unnerving if it truly was a result of the latter. This spot of socialization did not last long and was highlighted by Brother Wright’s recounting of the loathsome weed whose central root had seemed to be fastened somewhere around the earth’s core, and Brother Green’s harrowing run-in with a quart jug of milk that had been delivered with a hairline crack near its lip that he’d been forced to find a substitute carafe for to ensure that no harm would come to anyone from the rapacious container.
Throughout it all I smiled and nodded and clucked my tongue at all the appropriate places, yet I could not help but wonder that these men did not seem to conceive of the stress and injustices that bombarded and shaped the lives of the people beyond their monastery’s walls. I had found it disheartening. But when Brother Morrison returned some thirty minutes later with neither Brother Silsbury nor Brother Hollings in his wake, I would have relived the entirety of the banal conversation rather than face what I knew was coming next.
Brother Morrison had dismissed the men with the finality of a headmaster before beckoning to Colin and me to follow him so he could escort us down the dimly lit hallway to our cells for the night. And that was precisely how it felt to me as we plodded along behind him. Favoring his right side as always, I found myself hoping he would need to stop a moment to regain his breath or relieve the discomfort of his left leg, but he did neither thing. Instead, we drew inextricably closer to the miniscule cubby where I was going to have to spend the night. The place where a man was brutally murdered five days before. To sleep upon the very bed where the victim had breathed his last breath.
Each step made my stomach twist and my heart thunder, my own body taunting me with the knowledge that I was not at all ready for this moment. When Brother Morrison stopped in front of the abbot’s cell, my cell now, I secretly begged for him to say that my sacrifice was no longer necessary, but he only reached out and unlatched the padlock from the door, holding it in his stout palm like an unpleasant thing. Perhaps to him it was, given that there were no other locked doors within the monastery. I cannot say I had even a trace of sympathy for him.
He pushed the door open and just as before, the tiny room was cloaked in absolute darkness. Only the lantern Brother Morrison was carrying in his other hand was able to allow the barest hint of light to creep into the cell. It was as though we were staring into an infinite chasm whose dimensions could only be guessed at. Just sitting there—quietly, calmly—waiting to swallow me whole as soon as the door swung shut again.
Brother Morrison shuffled in ahead of m
e and struck a match that he seemed to produce from out of nowhere, and in another moment had two candles lit, one on the table and the other atop the stand where the bowl had been on our last visit here. Colin snatched up our valises from the hallway just outside the tiny room and set them on the bed. Brother Morrison explained that he’d had Brother Hollings leave them there before he’d taken our trunk to the room where Colin would be staying as it was, apparently, marginally larger. That news set my mood even further on edge.
Solemn good nights were quickly dispensed, driven by the indifference of the elderly monk, and though I wanted to catch Colin’s eye to make sure he realized how miserable I was, I somehow failed to do so. In the next instant the two of them were back in the hallway, Brother Morrison pulling the door shut behind him, not even bothering to toss me a final glance. And then I heard the sound of the latch clicking firmly into place, and in that moment I thought I might actually begin to weep.
I stood there, frozen, just inside the door. The cot upon which the abbot’s body had fallen on my right, the tall square stand holding a white tapered candle that persisted in flickering despite the lack of any semblance of a draft on my left. Not ten feet in front of me stood the tiny round table with its single chair and the room’s only other candle doing what it could to dispel the night’s shadows, which was precious little.
I could not tell you if I stayed like that for one minute or twenty. All I know is that before I moved a faint sound had begun to reach my ears. I knew at once what it was—chanting. But this was different from anything I had heard here before as it was both discordant and disjointed. I listened for a while, wincing at the inharmonious sounds as they drifted past in differing tones, timbres, beats, and volume, before finally understanding why. The monks were in their own cells, each hymn a singular expression of that man’s devotion. They probably did not pay one another the slightest heed, so concentrated were they on their own efforts.
Gradually, without even being aware of it, I found that I had begun to calm down. My breathing had deepened and my heart had resumed its normal cadence, and I decided it was the result of those murmuring chants in spite of their jaggedness. They had lulled me with the depth of their soulfulness. So finally, at last, I was able to steal across the miniscule space and settle into the straight-backed chair tucked up under the table. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice on my part as not a handful of minutes later the songs began to blink out, one after the other, some fading away while others abruptly ceased, until there was only one lone voice, sweet and pure, that continued to float through the tiny cell just a few minutes longer before it too was finally gone.
And that was when the silence descended upon me for the second time like some fanged beast that had been hiding just beyond my view in the blackness of a forest. It immobilized me again and I found myself straining to hear anything . . . anything at all: the shuffling of a boot on the wooden hallway floor, a faraway throat being cleared of nighttime irritants, or even the stifled yawn of someone settling into bed. But there was nothing. It was as though I had become the last man alive in the blink of an instant. There was only me and the tortured spirit of the abbot who had been slaughtered not four feet from where I was now sitting.
I dug out my watch and turned it toward the candlelight until I could see that it was just past nine o’clock. Had I been of a mind to retire to that cot, which I most surely was not, it would have been the earliest I had gone to bed without being ill since childhood. Yet it mattered not in the least as I had no intention of lying down at all this night. If I got drowsy enough I had already determined to do no more than rest my head on the table and snatch whatever sort of fleeting nap I could get that way. It was all I could bear to allow myself. Colin simply had to solve this murder without delay or I was bound to end up very much the worse for it.
The candle on the table in front of me burned steadily, casting its glow across my folded hands where they rested atop the table. I could picture myself sitting like that, rigid and utterly on edge, before forcing myself to rearrange my position as I quite suddenly had the eeriest vision of the abbot having done much the same thing on many a night. He would have had either his Bible or a sheaf of writing papers laid out before him, but I otherwise felt unnervingly akin to him in that moment.
I considered going outside to use the toilet, though I did not have the need, and then decided to save that expedition until I could not stand being here an instant longer. That time would inevitably come somewhere in the smallest hours of this night. I knew that as certainly as I trusted the ceaseless movement of my watch’s sweep hand. As though to prove the point to myself, I quickly rewound my watch before dropping it back into my vest pocket. I would not look at it again, I vowed, until I was desperate. By then, I tried to convince myself with much great optimism, the night was bound to be nearly over.
The sound of my own steady breathing was my only companionship. Not even the faint rhythm of a single monk’s slumbered breathing wafted through the walls of the cell and I could not fathom how that was possible. Surely one or two of the more elderly monks had to be snorting in their sleep by now. It felt entirely unnatural that there could be a silence this complete; but no matter how hard I tried to cajole myself, it nettled at the back of my mind like a portent.
I remained sitting in that chair contemplating nothing and everything, when the slightest shiver of sound whispered past my ears. It was nothing, I told myself, beyond the seeds sown by an overactive and highly charged imagination. And then I heard it again. It was soft and furtive, like the tick-tick of a teeny mouse as it steals into the kitchen to check for unattended crumbs and, indeed, for an instant I was convinced that my cell had been invaded by just such a fiend. But when I seized the candle and hastily swept it across the space, I found no remnants of any such vermin. So when I heard the sound for the third time I knew with great certainty that it had to have come from the hall.
My outstretched arm froze in midair, the candle wavering ever so gently as it tried to cast its paltry glow as far as the door. Nothing would please me more than to state that I stood up and prepared to confront whomever . . . whatever . . . was coming to my cell, but I did not. Rather I sat there like that, arm at attention, candle fluttering listlessly, and attempted to dispel visions of the floating spectre of the abbot himself, his hair askew, his body oozing blood from its dozens of stab wounds and his mouth gaping open in agony to reveal the gory void where his tongue should have been. The very thought of the apparition clutched at my throat before I could scoff at it, so that by the time the doorknob began to twist with ghostly stealth, I was sure I would have collapsed to the floor if I had been standing.
“Ethan . . .” Colin whispered with the delicacy of a gentle breeze. Who else had I expected it to be? Hadn’t I always known at the back of my mind that it would be him? How could I still be so ridiculously foolish at this stage of my life? “What are you doing?” he asked in a voice as quiet as a shadow as he slowly, carefully eased the door shut behind him.
I could only imagine how I looked to him. “Nothing,” I murmured casually as I finally lowered my arm.
“How is your work coming on the table?” he asked as though I were a carpenter who’d been sent to sand and refinish the sad little overused piece of furniture I was sitting in front of.
“What?” My mind was still attempting to right itself.
He stared at me, tilting his head to one side like an endearing puppy who is trying to ascertain what its master is saying. “Have you taken a rubbing of the tabletop yet?” he asked with the obviousness it deserved before wrinkling his brow and stepping toward me. “Are you all right?”
I heard myself release a stifled sort of chortle that I, nevertheless, managed to accomplish without making much noise. “I am staying in a room the size of a thumbnail where less than a week ago a very pious man was murdered and mutilated. So, no, I do not think I am very all right at all.”
Colin may have cracked the thinnest smile,
it was too bloody dim to tell for sure, but when he spoke in his hushed whisper, his voice remained even and smooth. “Come here.”
I did not particularly feel like doing his bidding, but I got up and moved to him anyway. I cannot say for certain what I thought he was going to do or say, but I must profess to being surprised when he pulled me to him. “Everything is going to be just fine, you know,” he whispered into my ear.
“Easy enough to say when you’re not the one staying in this room,” I responded just a touch more petulantly than I had intended.
For some reason he seemed to find that amusing. “Where would I be without you?”
“Staying in this cursed old cell yourself,” I groused back.
That apparently amused him even more as he squeezed me to him and in spite of my mood and the events of this morning, I let him. “Don’t lose faith in me. I know I will be able to make an end to these killings quickly. I can feel the momentum starting to take shape . . . the answers to these riddles are drawing ever closer.” He looked at me with an eager smile. “Before you know it we will be on our way back home where we belong.”
I stepped back from him and crossed my arms over my chest as I watched the flickering candlelight play across his broad, handsome face. “Good,” I grumbled. “Because this place has just about got me missing Mrs. Behmoth.”
We both chuckled as he moved toward the door again, sending my mood back down as if over a precipice. “Wish me luck,” he said, his face alight with a devilish grin. “While you’re tracing the top of that table I shall be off to the library to see if Brother Bursnell is trying to deceive us.”
“Be careful,” I warned, though I doubted he would earn much more than a furrowed brow if he were caught snooping around. Which was about as likely, I had to admit to myself with a measure of chagrin, as the ghostly specter of Abbot Tufton coming back to his cell to terrorize me.
The Dalwich Desecration Page 21
