Her words trailed miserably away. ‘Your sister?’ I said. ‘Mistress Yates?’
‘A good woman, though I fear she made some poor confessions to me,’ remarked Cogge. I glanced at him, surprised all over again at the contrast between his crude features and physique, and the well-bred calm of his voice.
‘Yes, Bella is a good woman,’ said Philippa. ‘But ignorant. She is my natural sister. My father acknowledged her but he did not take her from her mother, which is why she grew up on a farm, living the life of a farmer’s daughter, and unlettered. She never learned to read and write until she came here and I taught her. But from her mother, she did get some religious teaching, and her mother held by the old faith. Her beliefs were rigid, and shot through with superstition, too. My sister still holds by those beliefs. Her mother taught her to fear heresy, taught her to think new ideas were wicked and that laughter of any kind was suspect. Bella thinks all laughter is irreverent. I have tried to widen her mind but she has never broken free of her childhood training.’
‘You think differently?’ Sybil said.
‘I have told you, have I not? My father was interested in modern thought. I was educated at home, by a most enlightened tutor,’ said Philippa. ‘I am still Catholic but like my father, I understand that some old beliefs may have been just that, just beliefs, and that new discoveries can’t be ignored. Bella does not agree. She refuses even to listen to me. She was scandalized when Eleanor Overton brought John of Evesham’s Observations here!’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She told us herself that she disapproved of the book and didn’t think anyone ought to be interested in it.’
‘Quite. She looked at it, and she was able to read quite a lot of it, although the lettering is so old-fashioned, because I have myself taught her to understand such lettering. Bella does not care greatly for books but I have tried to interest her in the many old and beautiful works we have in our library. To show her the Observations, though, was a mistake. It shocked her. To her, the Observations is full of lore from infidel countries, which in itself makes it unfit to be studied by Christians; and it also recommends the theory that the earth goes round the sun, which in the eyes of the Catholic Church is most definitely heresy. And there is an irreverent picture, too. She wanted me to destroy the book and was angry when I proposed to sell it, because she said – her own words – that that would be to spread its poison beyond these walls. She would have destroyed it herself, except that as I told you only this morning, there is a curse on anyone who does so. Those of my ladies who share her prejudices are afraid of the curse too.’
She came to a halt. I said: ‘Please go on.’
‘I have lost the thread,’ said Philippa blankly.
‘Your sister Bella was angered by the idea of selling the book,’ said Sybil helpfully.
‘Yes. Oh, yes. Well, the man Hardwicke came to buy it and he paid for it and rode off with it, but Bella was violently upset. She had come to me and begged me not to let him take it. But I did … and then Bella, as she sometimes does, took a horse and went out. I thought she was just going to ride in the open air, to calm her mind, but she didn’t. She came back, bringing the book with her. She said she had gone after Master Hardwicke. She caught him up near the river ford a few miles north of here, and stopped him and bought it back from him, paying him as much as he had paid me. Or so she told me.’
‘Where did she get the money?’ asked Cogge suddenly.
‘She has money,’ Philippa explained. ‘When her mother died, which was not long after my husband also died, her stepfather didn’t want her on the farm any more. He’d married her mother after Bella was born; and had children by her; he wanted them to have his farm and his goods after him, not Bella, who was only a stepchild. It wasn’t a happy state of affairs for Bella. I was back with our father by then, but he’d married again and I could not get on with his new wife.’
For a moment, bitter memories seemed to distract her from the matter in hand. ‘She swept into the house and started to behave as though she was the lady of a manor and I was one of the servants! Do this, do that, go here, go there, fetch my embroidery frame, would you, Philippa? Oh, and I don’t think we need so many kitchen staff, Philippa, so I’ve dismissed two of them. It will save money and that will please your father. You can help out in the kitchen when necessary.
‘As a result,’ said Mistress Gould trenchantly, ‘my father had the idea of buying a house where I could live with women friends. So he bought this house, Stonemoor, and fetched Bella from the farm to join me. He gave us both some money. But maintaining this community is costly and we are now short – though we would be better off if Bella hadn’t held on so tightly to her portion. She has never contributed more than she can help to our expenses. She keeps her money here, and yes, she had enough to buy the Observations back. And then,’ said Philippa, ‘Master Spelton arrived.’
‘Did you tell him what your sister had done?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I did. And I showed him the money I had taken for it. I said I didn’t want any further payment. That wouldn’t have been honest. We agreed on that, and he took the book, in its box, and put it in his luggage. Next day, when he was leaving, Bella went to help him prepare for his journey and she carried his saddlebags downstairs, ahead of him. She seized a moment to exchange the book in his luggage for another, which was in an identical box. I told you, I think, that I had had boxes made for the more precious books in our collection. They all look alike. She used one of the same size. Afterwards, she told me what she had done. I was furious! For the second time, the book had come back, bounced, like a flat pebble on water! And this time, the messenger had gone off with the wrong volume.’
‘But it would be found out,’ I said. ‘When Doctor Dee received it, he would look at it and know!’
‘Bella,’ said her sister bitterly, ‘is not unduly intelligent. She thought that perhaps he wouldn’t realize, that he might simply think that the description he had had of the book was wrong. The one she put in was another copy of the one you’ve seen. It has star charts and some text that includes figures. I was sure it would not deceive Doctor Dee. Oh, sometimes, Bella maddens me!’
‘And now she has hidden the book,’ I said. ‘And won’t say where it is. But this is beside the point. The fact remains that Bernard Hardwicke somehow met his death shortly after leaving here, and that Christopher Spelton has also vanished.’
‘I can’t explain that. Truly, I can’t,’ said Philippa wanly.
‘Did your sister take a horse and go for a ride on the moors shortly after Master Spelton rode away from here, as she did when Master Hardwicke left?’ asked Brockley sharply.
‘No! I mean … I don’t remember. Perhaps she did. She often does, if something has upset her. Are you accusing her of something? But of what? I am sure that Bella wouldn’t … couldn’t …’
Brockley said: ‘You or she could have given orders to Walter Cogge here.’
‘I received no such orders,’ said Cogge. ‘And if I had, I would not have obeyed them. I obeyed an order to conceal the fact that Master Hardwicke and Master Spelton had been here, because Mistress Gould did not wish her sister’s foolish behaviour to be known. But that was all. Do you really think I would have accepted an order to commit … well, is it murder we are discussing?’
‘None of us knows what to think,’ said Sybil.
I said: ‘We had better talk to Bella. By the sound of it, she was the last person to see Bernard Hardwicke and possibly the same applies to Master Spelton. Would you be good enough to send for her, Mistress Gould?’
In a mechanical way, as though she were a puppet, worked by strings in someone else’s hands, Philippa picked up the bell on her desk, and rang it. ‘When I am in my study, someone is always near enough to hear my bell,’ she said, and sure enough, another moment brought a tap on the door and when Philippa called ‘Come in’, Mary Haxby appeared.
‘Please find my sister Mistress Yates, and ask her to come to my study,’
said Philippa. Her voice had no expression.
We waited in an uncomfortable silence. I sat down on a stool and nodded to Dale to do the same. Sybil also took a stool. Brockley stood where he was, his right hand resting lightly on his sword hilt. Walter Cogge had from the start been standing politely two steps behind the rest of us and he stayed there. Joseph just stared at the window, though there was nothing to see out there except the dark moorland.
Another tap on the door heralded Bella’s arrival. Philippa said: ‘Come …’ but Bella was in before the invitation was finished. She said: ‘Benedicite, my sister,’ and waited, though her currant-like eyes glanced rapidly at us, taking us all in.
‘When you went after Bernard Hardwicke to buy back the Observations of John of Evesham, how did you leave him? Did he just ride away?’ asked Philippa.
‘No one called Hardwicke has been here!’
‘Nonsense, Bella. I know we have pretended to the guests who are in this room now that Hardwicke never came here, but of course he did. They now know that he did.’ Philippa pointed to the boot and its protruding bone, which were still lying on the desk. ‘That was found in the river. It is all that is left of Master Hardwicke. The receipt he gave me when he paid for the book was found inside that boot. He seems to have been killed close to the river, where you say you last saw him.’
Bella stared at her sister. Her mouth worked. She moved to look more closely at the boot and then recoiled from the sight of the bone that was sticking out of it. Philippa pushed the receipt towards her so that she could read it for herself. ‘There is no doubt,’ said Philippa, ‘that that boot belonged to Master Hardwicke.’
‘How did you leave Master Hardwicke? In good health?’ Brockley enquired. ‘And did you also ride after Master Spelton when he in turn took his leave of Stonemoor? Carrying the wrong book, which you must have known would be recognized as such when its purchaser looked at it? Did you also catch him up by the river?’
Brockley sounded as though he was using his voice and his words as hammers. I would not have liked to be questioned in such a way. Bella’s eyes were darting from us to her sister and back again. They were bright, with malice, I thought, but also with fear.
‘Master Hardwicke rode off over the ford and I didn’t see him again!’ Bella’s voice was high and angry. ‘I never went after Master Spelton. Who says I did?’
‘I do.’ Walter Cogge stepped forward. ‘Just after Master Spelton left, you took a horse out.’
We had not expected an intervention from Cogge, least of all in support of us. We all turned to him in surprise. Bella was glaring at him. ‘You weren’t in the stables that day! You were out on the farm!’ she snapped.
‘I came back for the midday meal and I was there when you came in, and I’d already seen that Roan Thorby was missing,’ said Cogge imperturbably. ‘You brought him in with sweat on his hide. You’d ridden him hard. You didn’t see me; I was in my room in the loft above the stalls. I let you rub Roan Thorby down yourself. Serve you right, after getting him in that state.’
Bella had begun to shake. The currant eyes were bright now with something more than fear or fury; they were full of tears. Philippa saw them. ‘What is it, Bella? What are you crying for? Why are you trembling like that? What do you know that you shouldn’t? Bella?’
‘Oh, dear Mother of God!’ Bella’s tears began to stream. Her mouth worked. No one spoke or offered a kind word. The air quivered with blame, with accusation. It broke her. Suddenly, she ran round the desk and threw herself on her knees beside Philippa. ‘Mea culpa! Mea culpa!’
‘You’ve clearly learnt some Latin,’ remarked Philippa. ‘Though teaching you has been hard going.’ Bella pawed at her sister’s skirts and Philippa, half-rising, pushed her chair back, to get away from the clutching hands. ‘What are you guilty of, Bella? What have you done?’
‘It started with an accident! It were just an accident! Oh, God have mercy on me; sweet saints preserve me; I never meant … never meant …!’
‘Never meant what? Get up, Bella, get up!’
‘I can’t get up … sister, doan’t you push me off, doan’t you abandon me, I’m your sister, blood of your blood …!’
‘Bella!’
‘That Master Hardwicke, he didn’t want to sell me back the book; he said no to me, he said no! We’d got off our hosses and hobbled them and we’d sat down by the river; when I caught him up, he was nearly at the ford and I said I wanted to talk to him, so he said, let’s get down and sit on that rock there and to tell him all about it, whatever it was. Only when I told him and showed him my money, he got angry. He said no and got up and went to his horse and he leant down to undo the hobbles and I was angry too, so very very angry …’
She actually sounded angry now, as though the memory had awakened the fury that must have possessed her at the time. She stopped, I think because her rage had actually choked her. Philippa said: ‘Go on!’
‘That book mustna go out into the world, no it mustna! It’s a wicked book, all heathen learning, not fit for Christian eyes, and saying things the Church says aren’t true … and making fun of the Pope – let that go out into the world and it’ll spread like a disease; it’ll make folk sicken in their minds …’
‘Get on with it!’
‘I’d tried to say all that to him but he took no heed, he laughed at me. He went to his horse and turned his back on me. He wouldn’t listen, and he’d laughed, yes, laughed!’ Bella was gabbling, almost incoherent with fury. ‘I had my little belt knife with me like always. I thought: I’ll show him, I’ll show him. My faith’s not to be laughed at, no, it’s not, and I ran after him and hit him in the back with the knife. I wasn’t thinking to kill him, just wound him, make him turn round, make him attend to me! I didn’t think that little blade could kill a grown man! It had to go through his cloak and all as well! But it’s a good sharp blade; it went in like it was hot and he and what he had on were just butter. He didn’t die at once, any road. He stood up and turned round and stared at me and I stared at him and I started to say summat … to tell him he’d got to listen, got to … and then there was blood coming from his mouth and he fell over and made funny noises and then he was dead!’
There was a frightful silence, until Philippa broke it with: ‘And then?’
‘I were that scared!’ Bella was trembling violently. Tears poured down her face. ‘I couldn’t get the knife out. Any road, I took the saddle and bridle off his horse and threw them in the river, and his saddlebags too and then I got hold of him and dragged him – oh, God’s teeth! He were such a weight! But I pushed him in the river too, the knife still in his back, and chased the horse away. But I got the book out of his saddlebag first, and I came home with it and said I’d bought it back!’
‘And Master Spelton?’ I said.
A shocking expression crossed Bella’s face, made all the worse by the fact that she was still on her knees and that above the desk top, only her head was visible. It was as though she had been beheaded and it was her dead mouth that was talking. Despite her tears, her face, her little dark eyes, had become sly.
‘I couldna just let him go. I’d given him a different book, but this Doctor Dee that wants to buy it – a wicked magician, he must be, tries to raise demons, so folk say, and reads the stars for that heretic queen we’re all supposed to half worship … Doctor Dee would realize. I didn’t think that at first, but after Master Spelton had gone, I thought about it again and then I realized. I’m not the silly fool you think I am!’ Her look at Philippa was horribly triumphant. ‘I take time to think things through but I get there. I get there. Happen it takes time but get there, I do. I’m nobbut a bit slower than you. I’m not stupid.’
Philippa made a disgusted sound. Bella’s gaze came back to the rest of us, more sly than ever, hideously self-satisfied, ‘It were easier t’second time,’ she said. ‘I knew what to do. I took Roan Thorby and I rode fast and caught Master Spelton up. I come up alongside him, leant over and drove t’ knife
in. I’d lost my belt knife but I’d got another from our stores and no one noticed, only I didn’t use that one for Master Spelton. Wanted to be sure, so I got a second knife as well, a bigger one, from the kitchen. Just to be certain. He turned round and gawped at me and said, What in hell’s name do you think you’re doing, woman? And then he looked horror-struck, like, and his eyes rolled upwards and he fell off the horse.’
‘I can’t believe this,’ said Philippa faintly. ‘I can’t believe it!’
Bella didn’t seem to hear her. She was lost in her terrifying story. ‘I grabbed the horse’s reins,’ she said, ‘and got down and hitched it to a bush and went back and dragged the knife out. I got it out that time. Only he weren’t dead; he tried to get hold of me, but I fought and somehow he rolled over and I hit him on the head with a lump of stone. There was plenty about. Then I … well, it was the same story. Everything in the river, t’book as well. I were sorry for that for it weren’t the wicked Evesham book but what else to do? I thought it best, get rid of everything and know nothing.’
‘So that’s it,’ said Philippa, in a voice of despair. ‘That’s the whole story. Oh, how horrible.’ She stared at her sister and we watched the horror take hold of her, as she absorbed its meaning. She thrust her chair still further back and away from her sister, visibly shrinking from her. ‘How horrible!’
‘Yes,’ said Bella. And then reality seemed to crowd in on her and the furtive, aren’t I clever expression in her eyes changed to terror. ‘But you’ll not throw me to the law, sister; doan’t do that to me; we’re the same blood; and this is an abbey now; it’s under Church law; I can’t be taken by the sheriff’s men; I can’t be arrested for defending honest Christians from heresy, from wicked creeds; I can’t … I can’t …’
Her fit of rage had passed and now our stony faces, Philippa’s recoil, were frightening her, more every moment. Behind my still countenance, I was actually in turmoil. Christopher Spelton was dead. I had feared it but now I knew for certain and grief was sweeping through me. I had never realized until now, as I heard his death confirmed, just how much I had valued his friendship … even his love, the love I had rejected. I wanted to get away, to be by myself, to cry my sorrow out. But I remained seated where I was, silent, stiff-faced. Walter Cogge, his voice genuinely appalled, said: ‘I told you I thought her confessions had been poor. They are a great deal worse than I could have dreamed. These are monstrous things that she has done.’
The Heretic’s Creed Page 17
