The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  He turned to Brother Nicholas, the infirmarian, whose stooped figure in its black robe looked like a raven. “Yes, Father, I’ll clean the man’s body and bind up his throat, make him decent so his wife can take him home. Gillingsoke is on the road to Castle Rising, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” replied Anselm, “but Hubert’s house and manufactory are in town, in Norwich. He held his property free of any lord. Such times we live in, Nicholas, such times!”

  Clucking his tongue, Nicholas went on, “Here is Hubert’s purse—see the sprinkling of blood? It was lying behind a pillar in the church. The thief must have emptied it out into his own purse.”

  So as not to be discovered holding it, Anselm told himself. The small leather pouch in Nicholas’s hand was flaccid as Hubert’s body.

  The porter, Brother Simon, stood waiting his turn. His nose and the shaved crown of his head were both sunburned—he didn’t hide inside the gatehouse, he was faithful to his task. “Yes, Father, I saw the pilgrims fussing about on the porch of the church. Soon after I heard the woman scream inside. No one had left for some time. I sent Brother Peter to close the meadow gate and then he and I searched the enclave. No pilgrims are inside the pale now, bar the ones waiting in your parlor.”

  “Thank you,” Anselm told them both, and told himself that their observations were probably useful but he was at a loss to say how.

  He supposed he should send to the earl for a sergeant-at-arms—which would be yet another trespass by the outside world. Unless, Anselm thought suddenly, he solved this crime himself. Then all he’d have to do was turn the culprit over to the sergeant, shut the gate upon them both, and set about cleansing the sacred precinct.

  He walked across the forecourt, bent beneath the weight of his task. But as crosses went, this one in no way approximated the poundage of Our Lord’s. Summoning the iron into his soul, Anselm opened the door to his house and stepped into his parlor.

  The room, already small, seemed claustrophobic, warm and still. Pilgrims were ranged along the walls, some standing, some sitting on benches and chests, both his own and Isabella’s. Wilfrid stood guard over the one high-backed chair, trying to redeem himself after his earlier dereliction of duty. Anselm lowered himself down, only too aware of the dust dabbling his feet and the hem of his black robe and of the sweat trickling down his back. But he couldn’t ask Wilfrid to bring him a cool drink, not when all these people had none.

  Every face turned toward him, every eye focussed on him. One of these people, Anselm thought, was a thief and a murderer. He could ask to inspect their purses, but each coin looked like another—how to tell which ones had begun the day in Hubert’s pouch?

  The room was so quiet he could hear the concerted breaths of the pilgrims and the whimper of a baby. And a combination of the two, the quick gulped breath of a woman who’d been sobbing. Yes, there she was, Hubert’s young wife Alianor, small, sleek, her eyes like smoldering coals. She wore a headdress and a cote-hardie of an elegance beyond her station, not to mention her surroundings. The trailing end of one sleeve was stained a brownish crimson. It must have touched her husband’s wound when she and Wilfrid discovered his body.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Madame,” Anselm said.

  She parted her compressed lips. “I’ve lost my husband, my livelihood. I don’t know where to turn.”

  In truth, Anselm told himself, she hadn’t lost her livelihood—since Hubert’s property and business were free held they would come to her. But now, in the throes of her grief, was no time to mention such legalities.

  The king’s mother stood close beside Alianor, one supporting hand on her shoulder. “You may come to me at Castle Rising, you know the way.”

  “My thanks, my lady,” said Alianor, “I shall indeed throw myself on your mercy. But—oh, Father Prior, you must find the evil man who deprived me of my lord and husband!”

  “If God so wills it.” Anselm turned to Isabella. “My lady, you and your retainers were the last to leave the church before the discovery of the murder. Did you see or hear anything?”

  “Not at all, Father Prior.” Isabella’s voice was still inflected by the language of her youth, even though her youth—and her infamies—had occurred many years ago. Supposedly she’d once had a remarkable worldly beauty. Now her face was like fine marble eroded by time and repentance. “The murderer must have passed close behind us,” she said, “but lost as I was in veneration I saw and heard nothing. Sir Raynald?”

  Isabella’s steward was a thickset man, freckled of face, red of hair. He smiled shamefacedly. “I confess, my lady and Father Prior, to woolgathering as I knelt, estimating expenditures and the like. I’ll be sure to beg Our Lady’s pardon for my inattention. Walter?”

  “I was praying very passionately that my trespasses be forgiven.” The rawboned man-at-arms smiled tightly and a flush brightened his sallow cheeks, making Anselm wonder how many of his trespasses were hedonistic ones.

  Raynald asked, “James?”

  Isabella’s squire stepped forward, his jaw square, his blue eyes steady, his broad shoulders set beneath his flowing sleeves. “I heard my lady’s voice, Father, and the footsteps of the other pilgrims. Perhaps one set came late, behind the others—it’s hard to say, the space is filled with echoes and drafts and my mind was centered on my prayers.”

  Isabella turned to her ladies-in-waiting. “Maud, Blanche, did you see or hear anything?”

  While dressed less soberly than the queen herself, who wore the habit of a Franciscan nun, still the women’s clothing lacked the frills and furbelows of Alianor’s. They were both of a middling age and ordinary countenance. “I knelt beside you, my lady,” said the one, “and repeated the Psalter of Our Lady as you spoke it. Blanche?”

  The other said, “The church is dark. After several moments staring into the altar candles strange shapes and shadows moved in the corners of my eyes, as though the pillars themselves came forward to kneel.”

  “Yes, said one of the nuns suddenly, “I saw them too, the shapes of angels and ministers of grace, of the Holy Blessed Virgin and her mother, blessed St. Anne.”

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Anselm.

  The older nun’s thin face was almost as colorless as the wimple surrounding it, and yet a subtle glow in her flesh made Anselm think of a fine painted window shining with the light of heaven. It was the younger sister, wider than she was tall, round and rosy of cheek, who answered. “Father Prior, I am Sister Margaret and this is Sister Juliana, from the priory at Little Aldersthorpe. Mother Prioress gave Juliana permission to come to Our Lady’s shrine on this, the feast day of St. Anne, our patron saint.”

  “And you came as Sister Juliana’s companion.”

  “Yes, Father. I am infirmaress, and she has been—infirm.”

  And hadn’t long to live, Anselm concluded. Yet Juliana came here in celebration, not to plead for healing.

  “I’m afraid I saw and heard nothing this afternoon,” Margaret went on. “My attention was to Sister Juliana. Mother Prioress has excused her from fasting, but still. . . .”

  “The incense,” said Juliana with a beatific smile. “The relics, the spirit of a blessed soul lingering in their physical remains, working miracles. Shape and shadow and Our Lord made flesh, out of Mary by the spirit of God.”

  This one was a bit wander-witted, Anselm told himself, and turned to the gangly young man who hovered over a drawn and pinched young woman. She crouched on one of Isabella’s small chests, holding a child of perhaps two years of age. The simplicity of their garments reminded Anselm of the Holy Family, and yet their expressions, worry shading into despair, had nothing holy in them. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I am Thurstan, a plowman of Fakenham,” said the man, politely enough but with little deference. “This is my wife, Hawise, and our son, who we named Edward after your son, my lady.”

  The corner of Isabella’s mouth tucked itself into a rueful half-smile, perhaps remembering that her late husband and his imp
erious father had also been named Edward. She peered at the child’s face. His lips were blue, his skin tinted with lavender. “He is ill?”

  “He was taken ill in the spring,” answered Thurstan, “choking and wheezing, and now wastes away before our eyes.”

  “And we thought ourselves fortunate to be spared the plague this last year.” Hawise rocked the child in her lap and it whimpered again.

  “May the Holy Mother have mercy,” Anselm said. Of all the pilgrims who flocked to Walsingham, he liked the children best. It was sad when one died, yes, and yet it was also a blessing for their souls to be taken up into heaven before they were contaminated. . . . The desolation in Hawise’s face made Anselm realize she was seeing matters from a very different perspective. Somehow he’d never asked himself how the Blessed Virgin felt upon seeing her son’s bloodied corpse lowered from the cross. Strange, to think that everything was not as it seemed. Stranger still, to find that thought less discomforting than stimulating.

  “We saw nothing in the church,” Thurstan said.

  Anselm forced himself back to the issue at hand. “You went outside with all of the others?”

  “Our lady the king’s mother knelt before the high altar,” Hawise said, then glanced at the man standing to one side, half obscured by the ray of sun just creeping into the narrow window. “But this man, here, he came behind us.”

  “Well then,” said Anselm.

  The man was tall, dressed in a simple wool tunic and mantle. Rough dark hair streaked with gray framed a patrician face, high-browed, hawk-nosed. “I am Geoffrey de Charny, knight,” he said in the accents of France.

  The others glanced at him in surprise and even resentment. Several inched away. Isabella did not. Her eyes lit up. “Ah, un chevalier francais.”

  “Je vous en prie, Madame.” Geoffrey bowed, his shadow on the opposite wall bending and straightening as well.

  Well, well, thought Anselm. A Frenchman. An enemy. “You were the last to go outside?”

  “No,” replied Geoffrey. “The merchant, Hubert, he stayed behind.”

  “Of course he did, we know that. But you were the last of the group that did go outside?”

  “Save my lady the king’s mother, yes.”

  “You, then, were the last person to see Hubert alive.”

  “So it seems.”

  Anselm leaned forward like a hound on the scent. “Why are you here? Were you a captive?”

  “I was captured at Calais. My king has paid ransom. I stop here on my way to take ship at King’s Lynn.”

  Raynald’s sandy brows rose. “If King Jehan has paid your ransom then you must be a great knight indeed. An honorable man,” he added to Anselm.

  “The truly wise man gives thanks to God and to the Virgin Mary for any successes he may achieve,” Geoffrey said.

  Amen to that. Anselm deflated a bit, suddenly uncertain. France and England might be at war, but a warrior turned pilgrim, a man of honor trusted by his captor, always had safe conduct. And was hardly likely to go about murdering merchants.

  “A Frenchman who can’t afford to pay his own ransom,” Alianor said scornfully, “might think a bit of thievery wouldn’t come amiss. He has killed many Englishmen, no great mischief to kill one more who stood between him and a holy reliquary.”

  “Is the relic missing, Father?” asked Geoffrey.

  “No,” Anselm replied.

  “Perhaps,” suggested James, Isabella’s squire, “he dropped it on the floor as he fled.”

  “Why do I steal a finger bone of the blessed Madeleine when her body already lies in my country?” Geoffrey returned.

  “More than one body,” muttered Walter. “Those French monks either create relics or steal each other blind.”

  Geoffrey quirked a brow but said nothing.

  “If the holy thief succeeds in his purpose, then the blessed saint herself wants to move,” Juliana pointed out. “And some relics have the power of self-replication, like the holy Eucharist itself.”

  Anselm had heard Hubert expressing similar rationalizations, although from a very different viewpoint. Not that it mattered—Walsingham’s reliquary of St. Mary Magdalene was safe in its chapel. “Only Hubert’s money was stolen,” he said. “And his life.”

  “Hubert had no money,” said the lady-in-waiting named Blanche. “I overheard at the door of the Lady Chapel, he reached into his purse, found it empty, then muttered a curse at his wife for keeping their coins herself.”

  Alianor shrugged. “He’d forgotten he gave me the coins to carry. He was always short-tempered.”

  Behind Anselm’s back Wilfrid nodded agreement. He’d already mentioned the quick exchange between man and wife before the collection box.

  “Even though the thief didn’t know Hubert’s purse was empty,” said Anselm, grasping at a quickly-receding straw, “the motive remains the same.”

  “And perhaps this man here,” Alianor went on, “the plowman with the ailing child, needs money badly enough to kill for it.”

  Hawise frowned, but Thurstan drew himself up and shook the mop of flaxen curls from his brow. “I’m not a wealthy man, far from it. But I’ve no need to steal. After the black plague killed so many in our village I have more work for my hands than ever before, and higher wages and a bit of respect as well.”

  What is the world coming to? Anselm asked himself. Although he saw where he himself was going. He wouldn’t be giving thanks for achieving any successful criminal investigations, not at this rate. He sank back even further in his chair, sent a prayer for assistance heavenwards, and tried to concentrate his mind.

  Had this crime gained nothing for the murderer, then, and accomplished no end whatsoever? No money stolen, no relics stolen—had Hubert died for a mistaken perception, because everything wasn’t what it seemed?

  Anselm envisioned Hubert in the chapel, between the group with Alianor, Juliana, and the others on the one hand and Isabella and her retainers on the other. He must have died after the former left the church but before . . .

  Impatiently Alianor looked right and left and then stepped forward, shaking her becrimsoned sleeve at Anselm. “My husband’s blood cries out for justice, Father Prior! If you can’t find his killer here, then send these people about their business and look amongst your own brethren. Who’s to say which of them entered the church, privily, through the sacristy door?”

  “That door creaks,” Anselm explained, trying to keep the indignation from his voice. “My lady Queen Isabella would certainly have heard it, even if the guilty party had waited to cross the chancel until she’d turned away . . . What is it, Sister?”

  Margaret was looking closely at Alianor’s forearm, exposed as the sleeve of her cote-hardie slid back. “You’ve been injured, Madame. Five bruises, four on one side, one on the other, like the violent grasp of a man’s hand.”

  “It’s no matter, please don’t concern yourself.” Alianor quickly dropped her arm and the folds of cloth covered it.

  Anselm sat up, suddenly seeing the murder from a different viewpoint, and answered his own question. What had been accomplished by Hubert’s murder was Hubert’s death.

  Alianor might have tired of her husband knocking her about—that much Anselm could understand. But she hadn’t broken her vow of obedience, not to mention the sixth commandment, and murdered him. When she’d left the church with Juliana and the others, her husband was still alive.

  Juliana, Anselm saw, was staring at the shadow play on the wall, Alianor’s sleeves billowing like smoke in the brilliant sunlight, Geoffrey’s figure like an upright effigy. Was it Sister Juliana who’d said something about shadows? No, it was Isabella’s lady-in-waiting, Maud, who said she’d seen moving shapes while she knelt at the altar. And someone else, one of the men, had also said something very interesting. . . .

  The room was so silent Anselm could hear the child’s labored breath and the shuffle of feet as several people shifted impatiently. Shoes, he thought. He and his brethren wore sandals, but
everyone else here wore soft leather shoes. Isabella and her retainers heard no footsteps because there had been none to hear. They themselves had been the only people in the church save Hubert himself.

  Everyone spoke of the king’s mother as though she and her retainers moved together like soldiers in formation. But if Maud saw a shadow moving before her, what she was seeing was a shadow cast by the light of the candles in the chapel behind her, the shadow of one of her own colleagues as he stepped cat-footed through the door, did the evil deed, and returned. All he had had to do was station himself in the rear of the group and wait until Isabella, in a voice that had once commanded armies, began speaking the Psalter.

  Abruptly Anselm stood up. The man had done two evil deeds—he’d murdered Hubert and he’d wiped his blade on the altar cloth, knocking the reliquary to the floor. Yes, he saw the way now, as clearly illuminated in his mind as the mottled plaster wall of his parlor was illuminated by God’s holy and revealing light. “Wilfrid, gather every knife in this room and bring them to me.”

  Wilfrid stepped out from behind the chair, puzzled but knowing better than to ask questions. He collected blades from Geoffrey, Thurstan, Raynald, James, and Walter. When Margaret proffered a tiny knife Anselm shook his head. “Thank you, Sister, but so small a blade as that could not have cut a man’s throat in one stroke—nor could you, I think, have reached over his shoulder to make that stroke.”

  Turning away from them all and yet aware of every eye upon him, Anselm walked into the hot glow of the sunbeam which shone through the window bright as the Holy Mother’s crystal reliquary. He beckoned Wilfrid, his arms bristling with knives, to his side. Picking up the first knife, he drew it from its sheath and held it to the blazing ray of sun.

  Geoffrey’s dagger was long and plain, but the hilt was cunningly wrought. The blade was pristine, polished to a silvery gleam. Thurstan’s knife was well-worn and stank of onions, but it, too, was clean. Not that Anselm suspected either man, not any more. It was simply appropriate for him to inspect all the knives.