Dark Night Hidden

by Alys Clare

  ‘But—’

  ‘Josse!’

  Not for nothing was she Abbess of one of the largest communities in the south of England; the habit of command was strong in her, and meekly he did as she ordered.

  Outside, the icy air hit him as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over him. As his fast breathing slowed and grew quiet, he strained to hear what was being said within. But, except for the low, soothing tones of the Abbess and the occasional deeper rumble of the priest’s interjections, he could hear nothing.

  After some time she came out, carefully fastening the door behind her. Immediately she came to stand beside him and said, ‘Sir Josse, forgive me for ordering you from the room. I have no more right to command you than you to command me. But I did genuinely fear for him, in pain as he is, and in addition I thought that perhaps he would speak more openly to me.’

  He acknowledged her apology with a grunt. ‘And did he?’

  ‘Not really.’ She kicked at a stone frozen into the path. ‘One thing, though, that may be of use to us – he said that Father Micah had been gravely preoccupied of late with the problem of how to bring some souls back to the faith. He—’

  ‘Brother Firmin!’ Josse exclaimed. ‘He said that Father Micah mentioned two missions he had to pursue: one concerned a lord who had forgotten God’s ways, which, we can be fairly sure, meant the Lord Saxonbury. The other involved some lost souls who were destined for burning in the flames.’

  ‘Lost souls,’ she repeated dreamily. Then, eyes wide, ‘Sir Josse, what a frightful, haunting description! Oh, whatever it took, was not Father Micah right to try to bring the lost back into the love of God?’

  ‘My lady, think of that poor woman in the infirmary! Was that right, what he did to her?’

  ‘We cannot know that it was he!’

  He smacked his hand against his forehead in exasperation. ‘You are thinking with your heart, not your head!’ he exclaimed. ‘First you suggest that Father Micah was right to flog a woman twenty-five times, then you say, oh, but it might not have been him! Do you approve or not, my lady?’

  She kicked the stone again, more forcefully this time so that it was dislodged and rolled away. Following it, she kicked it again. Then she said quietly, ‘No.’

  He knew better than to react in any way that might smack of triumph. Instead he said, ‘It’s time we were heading back. I’ll fetch the horses.’

  He saw her back to her room and there bade her goodnight; it would soon be time for Vespers and he did not expect to see her again that day. As he turned to go, she said, ‘Sir Josse?’

  ‘My lady?’

  ‘I think that I should send for Gervase de Gifford. It seems very likely that Father Micah was responsible for the flogging of the woman in the infirmary, even if he did not himself wield the whip. If that is so, and it is also correct that she had companions, then one of them had a reason to harm the Father. We should, I believe, share this information with de Gifford.’

  ‘Aye, I agree.’ He paused; he was reluctant to say what was on his mind.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I was just thinking that what you just said equally applies to our large friend Benedetto. I wonder if we should at least question him?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I see. And perhaps find some way of confining him until de Gifford arrives? If Benedetto is innocent it will do no harm, and if guilty, we shall have restrained him so that he may face justice.’

  Thinking that she seemed to be placing a great deal of trust in this de Gifford’s ability to know guilt from innocence, Josse said, ‘May I speak to him first before there is any question of confinement? It is merely that I do not like to think that we might send a man to trial who was guilty of nothing more than devotion to his mistress.’

  ‘And you have no proof of de Gifford’s efficiency as an official of the law,’ she added. ‘Yes, Sir Josse. Please, go and speak to Benedetto now. I will be guided by you as to whether or not we should then turn him over to de Gifford.’

  ‘Thank you, my lady. Shall I report to you after the office?’

  ‘Yes. Please do.’

  But he was back before she had even set out for the Abbey church.

  He went to the infirmary, expecting to find Benedetto sitting in vigil with the woman, Aurelia. He was not there; Sister Caliste, preoccupied with tending her patient, trying to dress the wound on her forehead while the semi-conscious Aurelia writhed and moaned in pain, said that she thought he might have gone off to pray for her. But Benedetto was not in the church, nor, when Josse ran down to check, in the shrine in the Vale. He was not in the pilgrims’ shelter, nor anywhere else in the Vale.

  Racing now, feeling his heart pumping hard, Josse explored the entire Abbey. With the exception of the small leper house – which was a separate, isolated unit within the foundation and which nobody entered if they expected to leave again – he looked everywhere. He even searched the curtained cubicles of the nuns’ long dormitory. Apart from the simple beds and some small personal effects, nothing.

  Unless Benedetto had made himself so small that he could creep into a tiny, hidden corner, which hardly seemed likely, then there was only one conclusion: he had gone.

  Feeling as if he were the bringer of very bad news, Josse went to find the Abbess.

  10

  In the middle of the morning of the next day, Helewise sat at her table and studied Josse and Gervase de Gifford as they took one another’s measure. They were, she thought irreverently, like two large dogs in the market place, each suspecting the other of invasion of personal territory.

  Despite the wariness, however, she sensed a similarity between the two men. Not a physical one; Josse was brown-eyed and dark, tall, broad-framed and, despite his rough-featured face, he habitually wore an expression that suggested he expected to like people rather than condemn them. Gervase de Gifford on the other hand was slim and elegant, and his green eyes had a look of detachment and slight amusement. No. The likeness between him and Josse was merely that they shared a sort of power, an indefinable something that sat on them like a garment. It was as if both had been put to the test, survived and consequently believed in themselves and their own ability to cope with whatever life might subsequently throw at them.

  She became aware that de Gifford was speaking to her.

  ‘ . . . thank you for summoning me here, my lady.’

  ‘It is my duty,’ she said piously. ‘Besides, I promised that you should be informed of any intelligence that Sir Josse managed to glean concerning the late Father Micah.’

  ‘Indeed you did,’ de Gifford said blandly. ‘As Sir Josse has just been explaining, it is nothing definite, but every small pointer can be of use. Is it not so, Sir Josse?’

  ‘Aye.’ Josse, she noticed, was not yet ready to waste more than the basic civilities on this newcomer.

  ‘To recapitulate,’ de Gifford said, turning to Helewise to include her in his summation, ‘you suspect that the woman Aurelia, brought here to your care gravely injured, may have been the victim of Father Micah’s religious zeal. You think this because her wounds are similar to those with which the Father threatened another woman, the wife of this Lord of the High Weald. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Helewise said, adding, ‘It is, as you just implied, rather vague and we really should be trying harder to discover the truth but—’

  ‘My lady,’ de Gifford interrupted with an apologetic smile, ‘I believe you may be accusing yourselves falsely. You have here someone who may have been flogged by Father Micah and, through Sir Josse’s good offices, you have come to hear of someone who would have been a possible future candidate for the same treatment. It may interest you to hear that I know of others.’

  ‘Really?’ Helewise sat up straighter in her chair. Josse, she noticed, was scowling at de Gifford in concentration.

  ‘Really,’ de Gifford echoed. ‘I am not certain where the boundaries of the Father’s influence were set; he was a replacement for your Fa
ther Gilbert, I am aware, and Father Gilbert made but rare visits down to us in the Medway valley. He had his own concerns up here and, besides, our souls are adequately catered for by our own Father Henry. But, whether or not Father Micah should have been carrying out his mission of salvation in our vicinity, the fact remains that he was.’ He studied Helewise for a moment, as if deciding whether he should proceed with what he was about to say. Apparently deciding that he would, he added, ‘Father Henry understands our – er, our ways. Father Micah did not. We did not welcome him and Father Henry, I believe, resented him. Neither reaction had the least effect in keeping Father Micah away.’

  Helewise was not sure what he was trying to imply. ‘Your ways?’ she said. ‘Surely there is only one way for a godly man, Sir Gervase? Does not your Father Henry appreciate this?’

  De Gifford gave her a charming smile. ‘Naturally so, my lady Abbess, and reminds us all of our duty at every possible opportunity. I merely meant to make the point that priests may vary in the methods that they employ to keep their flock within the fold.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She was not convinced. She had observed an occasional exchange of glances between de Gifford and Josse – or rather, she corrected herself, glances from de Gifford directed at Josse – as if the Sheriff were trying to recruit Josse as an ally. Two laymen together facing a woman of the Church.

  Josse said, ‘Who else did the Father order to be flogged?’

  ‘He did not merely order,’ de Gifford corrected. ‘He made it a rule to carry out himself any sentence that he imposed. A variant, I suppose, on the good commander’s maxim: never order your troops to do something you are not also prepared to do. In answer to your question, Sir Josse, Father Micah flogged another woman, somewhat younger than Aurelia. She had been convicted of a crime by a Church court and she was to be handed over to the secular arm for punishment. However, Father Micah overruled that and said he would do it himself, which he duly did. Then he allowed her to be hauled away by a couple of guards and thrown into some filthy prison cell.’

  ‘What became of her?’ Helewise, to her distress, heard her own voice emerge as little more than a whisper. But she did not think there was anything that she could have done about it; de Gifford told his affecting tale simply but with quiet force, so that, for an instant, it had almost seemed that the poor beaten woman, dragged away to prison, was there in the room with them.

  De Gifford was gazing at her, cool eyes briefly filled with pity. ‘She died, my lady. Her gaoler decided to compound her various agonies by raping her. In doing so, it appears she hit her head on the stone floor of her cell, and it was a hard enough blow to kill her.’

  ‘And what of the gaoler?’ Now her voice was shaking.

  De Gifford shrugged. ‘What of him? Still a gaoler.’

  ‘But he assaulted his prisoner!’

  ‘She was to die in any case, my lady,’ de Gifford said gently. ‘They did not believe that her repentance was sincere, for they said she intended to revert to her wickedness as soon as she was able.’

  Helewise was about to ask what form the woman’s wickedness had taken – another adulteress? Surely not! – when Josse interrupted.

  ‘I investigated the case of two men who escaped from a gaol,’ he said. ‘My own involvement began but three days ago, although I believe that the men fled some days earlier. A pilgrim family who came here for the Holy Water cure told us how someone had attacked the guard. He only appeared to have been hit once, or perhaps twice, in the face, yet he died. When one of the Abbey’s brothers and I went to look at the body, we discovered marks on his throat that suggested he had been throttled.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about him,’ de Gifford said.

  ‘And what about the men who escaped? Do you know anything of them?’ Josse, Helewise noticed, looked eager, straining towards de Gifford as if he expected answers to all his questions suddenly to materialise.

  De Gifford studied him for a moment. Then he said, ‘No.’

  I am almost certain, Helewise told herself, that his last statement was a lie. Josse met her eyes briefly, and she saw that he had had the same thought.

  ‘I asked around in the village where the gaol was,’ Josse said casually, as if it were a mere aside. ‘Nobody there knew anything of the men, either. Or they said not, anyway.’ He eyed de Gifford. ‘Which I thought strange, since I was almost certain that they did. They were afraid, you see, de Gifford. To a man – and to a woman – they scarcely waited to hear me ask my question before they began shaking their heads and denying all knowledge. One old woman started to tremble, repeating over and over again that she didn’t want any trouble and that she hadn’t seen anything, didn’t know anything, may God strike her down if she told a lie. I thought her statement was quite foolhardy, since she had undoubtedly just done exactly that. And a little child who was with her – he was a boy, no more than about five, too young to know how to keep a secret – said that he was frightened that the black man would come back and get him while he lay in his bed at night.’

  De Gifford looked as if he were about to speak. Then, seeming to change his mind, shook his head slightly.

  ‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ Josse went on. ‘The prison guards reckoned that the men who escaped were foreign. One of their number had complained that he didn’t understand a word the prisoners said. Now it’s possible that the prisoners were well-educated men whose speech was not comprehended by the ruffians we employ in our gaols, or that the guard was singularly hard of hearing or dull of wit. But I believe it’s much more likely that the guard didn’t understand because the men cried out to him in another tongue. What d’you think, de Gifford? Do I reason rightly?’

  Again, de Gifford appeared to go through the same process of deciding whether or not to confide his thoughts. But this time he made a different decision. With a gesture of squaring his shoulders, he said, ‘My lady Abbess, Sir Josse, there is a limit to what I may tell you. But you are right – I do know something about these prisoners and of the woman who died in gaol. And, indeed, of the one now lying in your infirmary. Or so I believe.’

  ‘You can’t have her!’ Helewise cried. ‘She is under our protection and if you try to arrest her I will have her taken into the Abbey church where she may claim sanctuary!’

  De Gifford turned his clear eyes on to her. ‘My lady, you misunderstand, and I cannot blame you for that when I have perforce been so very reticent.’ He frowned. ‘On my honour, I am glad that Aurelia is here. What was done to her was vilely cruel and I would have brought her to Hawkenlye myself had I known where to find her. As it is, I shall ensure that nobody who wishes her ill shall learn from me where she is. Keep her here, help her to heal. When she is ready to go, then – but no. It is not yet time to speak of that.’

  Feeling weak as the high emotion drained from her, Helewise leaned against the back of her chair.

  Josse said, ‘You were saying, de Gifford, that you know the identities of the two escaped prisoners.’

  ‘I cannot be sure, for the tally of people we refer to here is but four – the woman who died in gaol, Aurelia and the two men who fled – whereas the group of which I heard tell numbered seven.’

  Not four but five, Helewise thought. The two men, Aurelia, the poor woman who died, and Benedetto. But if de Gifford did not know about Benedetto, then she was not yet ready to tell him. Nor, from the glance he sent her, was Josse. De Gifford, it seemed, had assumed that Aurelia had been brought to Hawkenlye by some Good Samaritan who came across her on the road.

  ‘Four people?’ Josse now said. ‘Foreigners?’

  ‘Er – yes. Some from the Low Countries, some from the far south. So I believe.’

  ‘And why are they in England?’ Josse demanded. ‘Were they making for Hawkenlye?’

  ‘No, not as far as I know.’ De Gifford twisted his face in mock anguish. ‘Sir Josse, please do not push me so hard. I am telling you all that I may, and even this much is more than I should. I can reveal nothing else about the trave
llers and I shall not do so, no matter how much you scowl at me. What I will say is that I am aware that Father Micah was on their trail. As I have told you, he was responsible for beating and imprisoning Frieda.’

  ‘Frieda,’ Helewise repeated softly. ‘The woman who was raped and killed.’

  ‘Yes, my lady.’ De Gifford looked at her. ‘It is better, is it not, to have a name for her? So that we may remember her as a real woman and not merely a faceless, unidentifiable prisoner?’

  ‘It is,’ Helewise agreed. ‘We shall say a mass for her soul.’

  ‘I do not think—’ de Gifford began. Then, abruptly breaking off, he bowed briefly and murmured, ‘A charitable thought.’

  ‘Go on, now,’ Josse urged. ‘Father Micah brought about this Frieda’s downfall. What else?’

  ‘He was also responsible for the imprisonment of the two men, and he was beside himself in his rage when he learned that they had escaped. He went through that village with the force of an attack of the pestilence, cursing them for their evil ways, telling them that they were Satan’s own and in league with the Evil One, that they should have kept their accursed eyes open and prevented two of the devil’s minions from escaping.’

  ‘If the villagers were Satan’s own and the prisoners were his minions, then they were on the same side and it’s no wonder the men were allowed to escape,’ Josse observed.

  ‘Quite so,’ de Gifford agreed. ‘But then Father Micah was never strong on logical thought, especially when he was in a thundering rage and about God’s work.’

  ‘You speak of a priest,’ Helewise said coldly. ‘Whatever his faults, Father Micah did his duty to God as he saw it. His methods should not be open to the criticism of ordinary people.’

  ‘No?’ De Gifford’s tone was soft. ‘Well, my lady, if you will excuse me, I must disagree. The Father’s methods included burning down the houses of those he suspected of contravening the Church’s edicts, and he did not care whether the inhabitants were inside or not. He also confiscated the meagre food of the poor in order to ensure that they fasted when he ordered them to, and he had been known to beat a man so badly that the poor fellow never worked again. That man had five children.’