by Alys Clare
The same year, 1536, the dissolution of the monasteries began.
Martin’s small community lasted longer than some, for they had no treasures, their buildings were dilapidated, and their vow of poverty genuine. But in the end they too were thrown out onto the charity of others, and charity was hard to come by just then.
Martin did not really understand the concept of the change of religion that was being forced upon the population of England. Was God not still God? he asked his superiors. Was his love, and that of his precious son, not still as all-encompassing, as ever-present? Yes, of course, they replied shortly. And can I not still love God just as I have always done? Martin would press them. Yes, they said, patience fast running out in the face of far greater problems looming ahead than the anxieties of one innocent and naive young ex-monk. Problems such as homelessness and starvation, and how to support a community of unworldly men when you yourself were all but on your knees with distress and hunger-induced sickness.
But Martin’s guiding light remained strong and it did not waver. He knew that the sole purpose of his life was to serve God and, if he could no longer do so as a monk in a religious order of the Church of Rome, he would learn how to perform the same service under the new religion. Over the course of many years – for he was shy, scared and diffident about asking for help and advice in this new world he didn’t understand – at last he emerged from long, puzzling and arduous training as an Anglican vicar.
He had told his new masters that he came from Suffolk and would quite like to go back there. Either they didn’t take it in or they decided, for their own good reasons no doubt, not to indulge him. He was dispatched to Devon, to the pretty Norman church of St Luke’s in the tiny village of Tavy St Luke’s.
Martin swallowed his disappointment meekly, as he always did, and set about throwing himself into his new life. God’s love was still holding him up, filling him with joy and driving out his moments of doubt, sorrow and pain, and he felt it was only fair to do his very best in return. And, indeed, it was not hard to become happy in Tavy St Luke’s, for the village was charming. To one used to the wide spaces and the huge skies of East Anglia, the landscape was alien at first: the village lay in a fold of soft green hills, with steep, wooded slopes leading down to rills, streams and rivers, and looming up to the east like a stern, protective barrier there were the moors.
The little Priest’s House seemed like ultimate luxury to one such as Martin, who had never slept in a room on his own before. He knew how to scrub, clean and cook – the monks had trained him thoroughly – and also how to dig over a likely looking patch of earth and plant vegetables and fruit bushes. Everything grew for Martin Oude, and quite soon after his arrival he was exchanging surplus produce for those items he could not provide from his own little garden: milk, butter, cheese, and very occasionally a piece of meat. Fish he sometimes caught for himself in the sea and more often in the many waterways of the area. Eggs he obtained from his own hens, which he kept in a carefully fenced-off patch behind the house and locked up at night in a henhouse on stilts. His neighbours scoffed at first, muttering about hens not needing such elaborate arrangements. They changed their tune, however, when they began to understand just how prolifically Martin’s hens laid for him and how, when there was a fox lurking, only Martin’s little family of fowls survived unscathed.
Martin was kindly, loving, generous, and he never turned anybody away. In a very short time, his parishioners started to wonder how on earth they had managed before he came to them. He was able to give so much because whenever he felt his mental strength waning, he could restore it simply by going into his church. He had loved the little building from first seeing it, and that love grew with each day.
The body of the church was utterly plain, its windows made of pieces of thick, greenish glass set in a maze of lead. The altar was a heavy slab of oak set upon two stone supports, and the cross was as simple as everything else. The true glory of the church was in the five stained-glass panels set high in the wall that divided off the little chapel, dedicated to St Luke the Healer, from the main church.
Martin knew he had seen images of his Lord before, but they had fled his mind and his memory the moment when he first saw the panel depicting Christ holding out the lilies of the field. He had gazed up into the deep, mysterious eyes and something in him – in his soul, perhaps, or maybe his heart – had fluttered up out of him and winged its way to the still figure above him. When finally he managed to tear his eyes away – he had no memory of just how long that had been, although his aching bladder told him it must have been hours, perhaps – he had noticed there were four more panels. They too were exquisitely beautiful, and Martin fell in love with them as well.
As he crept hunched and bent out of the church – he had been on his knees for far too long, and even a young man can grow stiff and cramped under such circumstances – he began to understand why he had been sent to Tavy St Luke’s. Silently, unheard by anyone but God, he vowed to give everything he had, including his life if need be, to look after those panels.
For the year was 1547, the old King was dead, and his son, the boy King Edward VI, sat on a throne all but hidden by the swarm of advisers.
It was the time of the iconoclasts.
The young king was vulnerable, and it seemed that those who pushed to the front and shouted the loudest got their way over matters of policy. The Protestants were determined to make ground, and when they suggested to Edward that it was time to rid the country of the outer trappings of popery, Edward agreed and issued a royal injunction to the Church that his father had founded to destroy the shrines, the pictures, the paintings and everything else that smacked of ‘feigned miracles’, so that there could be no reminder of these in the walls and the windows of churches and private houses.
Martin hoped at first that the King’s Commissioners might be very slow in reaching his little corner of Devon. Optimist that he was, he even wondered if they might pass him by altogether, and he spent many hours on his knees praying that this would be the case.
Of course, it wasn’t.
When he knew for sure that the stern-faced, ruthless men were on their way, he went into his church late one evening for one last look. He whispered aloud, ‘How can they believe it is right to destroy such beauty? Such old, precious things?’ He knew by now that the panels were several hundred years old, and the work of one of the very best of the medieval masters.
He looked for a long time at the panel with the flowers, the one with the three happy-faced nuns, the ones of St Luke grinding his herbs and ministering to the sick man in his bed. Lastly, as always, he turned his eyes to Christ.
Then, with a heavy heart, he fetched his ladder.
It was easier than he had thought to remove the five panels. The delicate, expert craftsmanship of the hands that had made them extended to the fitting of them in their slots in the wall, where each one stood firm against the slightly smaller confines of its space, held in place by a length of dowelling and a series of pegs hammered into neat little holes in the wall. Martin laid the pegs carefully on the sills of each space. He knew deep in his heart that, one day, the panels would be put back.
It was the one small spark of light on a very dark night.
He had prepared a hiding place. After much searching and the rejection of everything else, he had settled on a hidden little dell on the edge of the village, surrounded by a copse and with beech trees growing out of its sloping sides. To the best of Martin’s knowledge, nobody went there. He didn’t think anybody owned the land; certainly, nobody farmed it, for it was useless for agricultural purposes. Generations of foxes had dug into its earthy sides and it was riddled with tunnels and holes. It had been a straightforward matter to dig out a large enough space for the five panels and, that night, all Martin had to do was wrap them carefully in two thick waddings of straw and then tie them into two lengths of sacking.
He carried the two parcels – they were a great deal heavier than he’d
expected – out to the dell. He prayed constantly as he hurried and stumbled along, and his prayers were answered because no one saw him; no one called out a greeting; no one demanded to know what he thought he was doing.
As he slid the second parcel into the hiding place, he put a gentle hand upon it. It was the one that contained the Christ panel.
‘Forgive me, Lord, that I must treat your precious image thus,’ he whispered. ‘It is not for lack of respect, as I hope you know, but to keep safe this great beauty until the time of danger is past. I will not—’
But then, emotion and stress finally too much for him, he found he couldn’t go on. Thrusting the parcel into the bank and backfilling the hole, he could barely see for the tears streaming down his face.
When they came, as inevitably they did, Martin took them inside his church and mutely pointed up at the plain glass in the windows. ‘That,’ he said with total honesty, ‘is the only glass you will find here in St Luke’s and, as you see, our walls are undecorated.’
The men were reluctant to believe him. They had become addicted to the bullying nature of their work, and the rush of blood that came when they prised out and destroyed a beautiful example of the work of ancient hands before the tearful and distraught eyes of some rural clergyman had become almost as good as sex. They didn’t like it when a journey was for nothing. They consoled themselves with kicking the walls and jeering at the tubby little priest and then they left.
Once they had disappeared up the track leading out of the village, Martin went back inside his church and collapsed on the floor in front of the altar. As soon as he could gather his thoughts, he began to pray and he didn’t stop. At first unable to mutter any more than Thank you, thank you, thank you, soon he managed to put his deep gratitude and relief into words.
He had saved the precious panels. He had asked for help, and help had been given.
It was, he concluded, just one more example of God’s love.
The years went by.
Edward didn’t last long, for he had been a sickly child and failed to grow to manhood. After him came his half-sister Mary, and now it was the Protestants who were tied to the stakes and burned alive. Martin watched from afar, distressed and horrified at the violence and the cruelty even while he was wondering if the time was right to unearth his panels and reinstate them in glory in their rightful place. But he seemed to hear a quiet, calm voice inside his head saying, Not yet. He thought the voice was probably God’s.
He was so very glad he had listened. For Mary only lasted roughly the same length of time on the throne of England as her half-brother and then, upon her death, came the advent of Elizabeth. The country turned Protestant again and, although after a brief resurgence iconoclasm faded away, Martin remembered that quiet voice in his head and decided to leave the panels where they were.
And there they stayed.
Over the next thirty years, Martin continued with his serene, happy life. His parishioners loved him, trusted him, looked upon him as a supporter and helper in times of need and of danger, and a good friend all the rest of the time. He never forgot about the panels, but he never put them back.
He wasn’t aware of the growing danger, for he lived his quiet days far from the intrigues of Elizabeth’s court. He had no idea, then, of the fear that had grown up among the Queen’s spymasters; of the paranoia with which they constantly searched throughout the land for secret Catholics; for old Catholic families sheltering Catholic priests; for clergymen who, while posing as good Anglicans, secretly cleaved to the old Catholic ways.
And so it was that in 1590, when the dark eyes of suspicion fell upon Martin Oude, he had absolutely no idea why they had come for him or what they wanted.
Or, luckily for Martin, what was in store.
Jonathan came out of his long reverie, for he could go no further. What came next was terrible, and he had no heart for it tonight.
He rose to his feet, extinguished the light and, knowing his way in the dark, went to bed.
THIRTEEN
When Theophilus Davey arrived back at Wrenbeare that morning after his brief visit home to change his clothes, eat a bite of breakfast, collect what he needed from his office and summon Jarman Hodge, he had already planned how he would conduct the day. He had instructed Jarman to melt away and seek out the nearest of the neighbouring properties in order to speak to the servants there, and so he approached the Fairlight house alone.
Greeted at the door – if greet was the right word for the resentment, loathing and suppressed anger he saw in the servant’s face – Theo said immediately, ‘Theophilus Davey, coroner.’ He was quite sure the servant would recognize him from his earlier visit and knew full well who he was, but it didn’t hurt to issue a reminder. ‘I require a private room. Find me somewhere, if you please.’
The servant was short and stocky, red-faced, with broken veins in his cheeks and a big bloom of a nose. He smelled of alcohol. He was balding, and what hair he had was dark and worn long to his shoulders with a few strands arranged over the dome of his head.
Why such antipathy? Theo asked himself. He made a mental note to add it to his list of things to consider.
The servant shot him a look that might have made a lesser man back down. But Theo was large and imposing and he carried the authority of his ancient office. Not many people resisted him for long. The manservant made a hawking sound in his throat, then without a word took Theo along a short passage that led off the hall and into a decent-sized room with two windows looking south-east, wood-panelled, furnished with bookshelves, two chests and a large table with an imposing chair standing behind it. Glancing at the shelves, Theo saw thick bundles of papers, yellowing with age, and large leather-bound volumes whose bindings were cracking with neglect.
The room was, he surmised, the study of the late Sir Thomas Fairlight, justice of the peace, and, in all likelihood, nobody had touched his private papers since he died.
Theo nodded. ‘This will do well.’ He ran a finger across the surface of the big oak table. ‘Get someone to dust this, then see that I’m left alone unless I summon one of the household.’
The man grunted something. Theo turned until they were face to face. ‘What’s your name and what do you do here?’ he demanded curtly.
The man seemed to think about refusing to answer. Then, with a shrug, he said, ‘Leagh. Once I was the butler. Nobody calls me that now …’ He shrugged again, dismissively. ‘I’m in charge of the indoor servants.’
As he spoke, Theo smelt another blast of alcohol fumes. Leagh muttered something which Theo chose not to hear, then strode away. The very sound of his footfalls on the wooden floor spoke of his anger.
Theo stood quite still for a moment, staring thoughtfully after Leagh’s retreating figure. Then he put his leather bag down on the floor beside the chair. He had packed paper, quills and inkhorn, and the little penknife that had been his father’s was in its usual pocket in the inside of his robe. There was no point in spreading out the impedimenta of his profession until the table had been dusted, so he followed in Leagh’s footsteps and went to find the agents he’d detailed to search the house and grounds.
None of them had anything to report.
Dispirited, Theo wandered around the grounds, familiarizing himself with the layout. The front facade of the house was imposing and it was clear that, in its prime, it would have been even more appealing. Now a tangled creeper grew rampant up one wall, its roots making cracks and crevices in the brickwork, there were broken panes in some of the windows and a big patch of mould covered the wall under the overhanging roof.
Theo walked round to the rear of the house, to the yard, the outbuildings, the stables; the servants’ domain. He caught sight of Christopher Hammer in the distance, in a paddock inspecting the rear offside hoof of a skinny bay mare. Cory sat on a fence nearby, chewing on a blade of grass.
Crossing the yard, Theo caught the stench of human waste. The privy was concealed behind an ugly brick wall, and he rem
embered the little scullery maid, Tatty, saying she’d seen a wolf lurking behind the wall when she went out to use the privy one night. Theo studied the scene, imagining himself hurrying out of the stinking privy, about to dash back to the safety of the house and suddenly aware of a big, crouching shape in the shadows … Just for an instant, he had a flash of empathy with the terrified maid.
‘What did you see, little Tatty?’ Theo said softly.
He would be asking her for real soon.
Back in Sir Thomas’s study, the table now dusted and polished to a shine, Theo spread out his belongings and, with a clean sheet of paper before him and a nib charged with ink, he began to list the people to whom he wished to speak. He had got as far as Avery Lond, Agnes Lond when there was a knock on the door.
‘Come in.’
Leagh opened the door and eased his way inside, tiptoeing across the room with exaggerated care as if keen to demonstrate that he well remembered Theo’s command to be left alone and was doing his very best to honour it.
Theo sighed.
‘What is it?’ he asked, deliberately keeping his expression neutral.
‘A message for you, Master Davey sir,’ Leagh said, approaching the desk and bent almost double.
‘Let me have it.’ Theo held out his hand.
Leagh bowed even deeper and put a piece of paper into the outstretched hand. Theo waved him away, and he backed out of the room and very gently closed the door.
Theo was torn between irritation and amusement. In the end, amusement won, and he suppressed a chuckle. Unfolding the scrap of paper, the laughter died.
He read the main paragraph of Gabriel Taverner’s short message twice, then swore under his breath. Damn the doctor, he’d been so sure! This man died from natural causes, he’d said, from starvation or some sickness. Then there’d been all that anxiety over whether it had been leprosy, only the doctor said no.
