The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 2 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  I had almost forgotten – the Templar’s gold: who stole it?

  Why, the Templars themselves. This was what I learned from the Master months afterwards in the confessional. These deceitful and cowardly “poor brothers” who are wealthier than all the kings of Christendom had made a pact with Henry III. They were to help his chief henchman, Roger Leyburn, seize control of London. However, they were far too fearful of Simon de Montfort to come out in open support of the King so it was arranged that William Leyburn, Roger’s son, would counterfeit the theft of the treasure and smuggle it back to London via the family estates in Kent. There it would be used to buy troops and bribe officials to declare for the royal cause. Simon de Benville was, of course, one of the few men privy to the plot. I believe it weighed on his conscience that money pledged to the Templar cause in Outremer was being thus diverted. That is probably why he spent so long in prayer during that last hour of his life. How unfathomable are the ways of God!

  On Wings of Love

  Carol Anne Davis

  Carol Anne Davis (b. 1961) was born in Dundee, Scotland but moved to the south of England in the hope of being “globally warmed”, which may explain all this freakish weather we’ve had in recent years. Her crime novels include the mortuary-based Shrouded, the sociopath-exploring Safe As Houses and the killing-the-neighbours-from-hell Noise Abatement. She has also published a book about female serial killers, Women Who Kill (2001). Compared to all that, the following story, about a lost falcon, seems remarkably calming.

  The guilty were expected to hang when the King’s best gyrfalcon went missing. His lordship had been hawking with the bird and had freed her to fetch a large duck on the wing. The prized falcon rose highe in the skies and set off as swyfte as she was wont to do, and seemingly as mery. King Edward waited patiently on his mount but the raptor never returned.

  As the days became a week there was much excess in the humour of blood in our warrior king for he missed his gyrfalcon sorely. The huge, rare bird had been as white as the finest rose and, in keeping with its purity, had been fed on the sweetest white doves. I myself – the King’s chief falconer – had raised these doves in a cote in the enclosed garden that my master had built especially for his birds.

  I wasn’t the only man who lived in the chamber there – the other falconers also made much of King Edward’s patronage. And each handsome bird had the most ornate of cages in the garden and an aqueduct that brought them fresh water every day.

  At first we wondered if the Welsh could have magicked away the snow-white prize but in time it was decided that this was beyond their dwindling powers. We knew, though, that the gyrfalcon couldn’t have gone innocently missing for it was written in law that if anyone found a bird of prey they were to hand it over to the sheriff who would seek out the owner with due haste.

  And no one but a king could own a gyrfalcon anyway – so it was clear that this was Edward’s very own creature. Lesser nobles had to restrict themselves to a fawcon gentills (peregrine falcon) whilst a cleric might risk owning a musker (a male sparrowhawk) though canon law forbid the clerics to hunt and hawk. A coward might invest himself of a kite that, rather than soar to pluck fresh flesh from the skies, contents itself with the dead prey of other beasts. And a lady might at best have a merlin on her arm.

  The King tried to interest himself in his many other hawks but I could see that he pined in his noble way for the powerful white bird that had so often accompanied him through the fields of our beloved England. And I begged leave to hunt down the person that was responsible for this untimely loss.

  But where does a man like myself start in so wretched a search? Who brings him succour? Uncertainty gave way to jubilance when my wife heard tell of a woman who had no need of purses but who could turn the wheel of fortune a certain way.

  I went to her at dead of night. We spoke through stones for not everyone approves of such luminaries.

  “Did someone with empty saddlebags thieve away the bird?” I whispered.

  “Someone without a horse,” she agreed, I thought with some reluctance.

  “Can you describe his countenance?”

  “No, the stars can only softly light your way.” She would not be drawn further so I had to hold on to her words about the horse, words that told me the thief was impoverished. And so my first forays were into some of the most wretched hovels in the land. My task was slow for even poor wretches tend to have a jay or a dawe in their quarters. Every tale of feathers shed and squawks emitted had to be investigated and in truth it was a loathsome task.

  “Have you heard tell of the King’s white gyrfalcon?” I asked again and again but the peasants just shrank back in fear, shaking their heads so forcefully that I feared they might lose them. As well they might have done had the enormous golden-beaked beast been found in their fetid abodes.

  Not that a pauper would have wanted the bird simply for its own sake. No, the creature had had the bluest sapphires and the most blood red rubies in the land attached to its jessel, jewels that would keep a common man in land and food and ale for several times his own life.

  I returned from the homes of the poor to find the lord king gazing sadly at the swivelling perch where his falcon had once rested. He had fixed the jewelled ring known as a terret back on the perch as if awaiting the bird’s return. Her hood, resplendent in its heraldic colours, also awaited her presence, being used to calm her into sleep.

  In truth there was no calming her master now. He had grown used to the loss of the creature – but not to the loss of face that its theft had caused him. Someone had kept or killed the purest bird in Christendom, knowing that it was a royal bird. Someone had to pay for so blatant a deed.

  There were other men keen to track down the culprit, but none knew the bird’s ways as well as I. I knew that she had been enamoured of a particular tercel so now brought him from his vast cage and took him out into the kingdom. We rode for many a day, his bells jingling as he clung to my leather clad arm and my trusty mount galloped over hill and dale.

  This time I stopped every destitute poacher I espied, assuring the bedraggled men that I didn’t want to take away the deer that they’d just slain or sue them in a common law court on an action of trespass. “The very elements stay agitated whilst the King’s bird is hidden away,” I lamented. But they were men more used to trapping fowl than to hawking with raptors so I accepted their trembling denials about knowing the bird and let them be on their way.

  Again I returned to the women who knew many things. Again we spoke hushedly and rapidly.

  “You said the culprit was poor.”

  “I said they had no horse.”

  “But surely . . . ?”

  At that very instance her infant cried as if the Devil himself had entered its body and she had to scurry away. I pressed my lips to the stone and spoke some more but she dared not answer. Dread of ecclesiastical censure fastens many a tongue.

  A culprit without a horse . . . You are doubtless thinking that I visited the clerics next, but you would be wrong. Edward himself had the ear of his best friend, the episcopal officer Robert Burnell, and very little of the religious life escaped that fine chancellor’s notice. And Edward himself had at this time given generously to his monastery at Vale Royal.

  No, it would not be a monk who had taken the gyrfalcon for they had all the ale and eggs and bread – with many days of pork and mutton – that a man of prayer could ask for. And though it’s true that some monks were fishers not of men but of money, word soon reached our ears, like iron attracted by a magnet, as to what these particular monastic men were about.

  Someone who wasn’t poor, who didn’t poach, who wasn’t a monk. Someone who didn’t have a horse . . . Noble men usually owned fine mounts of course, but some of these nobles had been ruinously injured whilst hunting or were so melancholic that they could not ride a strong steed. They, then, were next for my inspectorate for truth to tell they cheated and lied and stole and lacked the capabilities and piety that my
king, the beloved Edward Longshanks, had.

  And so many weeks of entering sculpted doors and majestic arches became my way of life, for the nobility loves its vast ornate houses. And often I entered a palatial residence, only for a knowing squawk to give my tumult pause. But it was always a popinjay brought from foreign shores at great cost to please a lady, yet so beautiful that its ownership was beyond price.

  Some of these men even offered me their popinjays to gift the King, usually at their wives’ protestations. But I explained that Edward only wanted his own white raptor back – or the punishment of he who had stolen it away.

  My task unfulfilled, again I returned to the mystic, my heart wounded to bitterness. “Is anyone in the wrong?”

  “Sire, only in a way.”

  “Someone who doesn’t have a horse yet is not a poor man or a poacher or an injured nobleman?”

  “Someone who is poor yet rich in many ways.”

  “You seem to hint at the spiritual life but no one has heard tell of a monk or cleric behaving this unseemly.”

  “It is not a monk you seek, sire,” the woman said through stones.

  My search, so nobly and royally begun, seemed at an end as I made my way back to the raptors’ garden.

  “If you cannot tempt the bird back,” I said to the gyrfalcon’s favourite tercel, “then perhaps no one can.” He came gladly to my gloved hand and his bells tinkled beautifully with his every movement. The sound made me think of the sacred music of the nuns. Most of these nuns came from families of wealth and breeding, homes of the finest silks and rarest diamonds. Would that ongoing longing for luxury make one grab the jessel of a gyrfalcon as she feasted on her ground-brought prey?

  This time I had to make my inquiries especially discreet for no one wants to anger an abbess or her sisters. I spoke to those who understood the religious life of the women, who knew their ways.

  It transpired that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself had at one stage ordered a Benedictine abbess to stop keeping dogs in her monastic chamber. Truth, it turned out that the nuns went to church with squirrels on their shoulders and little hounds and monkeys playing in the folds of their skirts. As they had vowed to live in houses of strict order, these pet creatures were frivolous and not in keeping with the religious life.

  More tellingly, it wasn’t in keeping with the need to keep the food bills frugal as so much went on the diets of these monkeys and hounds that the women themselves ran out of food.

  And so there was a ban and though some rebellious girl might keep a rabbit in her cell, no one had heard tell of a white gyrfalcon. And how would a nun tempt such a bird to stay in her modest chamber when the raptor was used to the finest royal cage and whitest dovemeat in the land?

  “Is the gyrfalcon in a nun’s monastery?” I asked my source.

  “No, sire.”

  “Where, then?” It may be wrong to tax the Muse but I was worn out with talking after dark in whispered riddles.

  “Within our good country yet further away than many men have ever been.”

  Further than many men have ever been. I understood she must be talking of the nation’s hermits for truth to tell they were foot-wearyingly hard to find. But no man can hide completely from another so I stopped weary travellers on my journey and they pointed out various hermit’s abodes. Some lived in caves, closer than I’d ever dare live to the restless dark waters. Others had taken to tall trees so I called through the branches, knowing that if the gyrfalcon was there she would answer me or credit the tercel attached to my arm. And many lesser birds did reply to me but none had her special distinctive call.

  These reclusive men had their spiritual strengths, but had no sweet white doves or gilded cage to offer. Who could take so magnificent a raptor and make her disappear from God’s sweet earth?

  It was as I rode across the furthest reaches of England’s earth that I found my answer. For the tercel started to strain sideways in a particularly urgent manner so I bade my horse to plunge through the foliage to create a path. And in time we went through forests that hadn’t seen a hoofprint for many a season and we crossed rivers that were undrunk by human lips.

  Finally we came to a lawn sweet with ox-eye daisies, primroses, iris and marigold. And the scent embraced me and my mount so sweetly that I wanted to stay there in that clearing for the rest of time. But there was a small stone accommodation before me demanding my attention so I dismounted and walked towards the entrance that had no door.

  And then I heard a sound that was a thousand times sweeter than the flowers that assailed my senses, a sound that made my spirits lift towards the very skies. It was a sound of such purity, of such joy, that I could scarcely believe it was a human voice.

  I stayed transfixed as a hare before the stoat for an eternity before peering into the shadows to see the source of this perfection. The song came from a slender young woman sitting on the earthen floor. Her eyes were closed and it seemed that her mind was far away as she sang her sweet psalms – but the white gyrfalcon’s eyes were open and it was staring straight at me.

  Its jessel had been removed and it wasn’t tethered in any other way to the rock that it sat on. I already had the tercel on one arm so offered the other to the huge white bird that had so often been my companion. But after glancing at me it returned its strong gaze to the songstress, ignoring I who had raised it, who had tended its early sicknesses and later wounds.

  All too soon the young woman’s song came to an end and she opened her eyes – eyes that were as large and brown and trusting as a newborn fawn’s. She bid me welcome and I accepted a pitcher of water from her as any passing traveller would. We spoke of the tallness of the trees and the richness of the monasteries but the time came when I had to broach the reason why I was there.

  “That’s a beautiful gyrfalcon,” I said.

  As if knowing that it was under scrutiny, the raptor rose from its stone and flew carefully over and perched on her slender arm. I could see that she had wrapped miniver skins around the limb to protect herself from its talons.

  “Yes, I love her dearly,” the girl said.

  “And she appears to love you too.”

  In some ways I had just been forming pleasant words but even as I said them I knew they were true. There was something about the way that the huge creature looked at her that made me profoundly envious. None of us falconers, for all our offerings of doves and fresh water, had ever inspired such devotion in our hawks.

  “Have you had her long?”

  “Long enough to grow to love her.”

  “Who did you buy her from?”

  “I have no money – I have chosen to live simply in retreat.”

  By dint of slow questioning I found out all I needed to know about her life. She had been born noble but had chosen the religious path, at first entering a nunnery. Then, in time, she had realized the goodness to be had in the simplest and most solitary of livings, in a diet of seeds and fruits rather than manmade bread. She saw how the bodily humours could regulate a person’s temperature without need of fire. She heard for herself how the singing of a single voice in the darkness spoke more loudly than fifty nuns following a psalm.

  “I gave up all I knew,” she explained, “And walked here relying on the kindness of strangers. I brought with me a handful of seeds to start the garden of contemplation you see before you. Still I lacked . . . something and often asked the heavens to grant me this missing element if it was right for me. And one day this wondrous creature came down from the heavens as I was singing and she has stayed close by my side ever since.”

  The tercel moved restlessly on my arm as the woman told her tale and its bells tinkled compellingly and the gyrfalcon put its head to one side and closed its eyes in a fair imitation of human rapture. And I realized then that the white bird hadn’t been enamoured of the tercel but of the bells that played on his feet whenever he moved. The falcon clearly loved music in a way that few higher beings love music – and she had flown for as long as a
bird can fly to seek out the most breathtaking voice in Christendom.

  I asked the nun if there was anything that she needed but she had sweet nuts to eat, spring water to drink and primrose leaves to ease her hurt from long hours working in her garden. And she had the gyrfalcon for company and it had the freedom of the skies to find its food.

  I left then, holding her song close to my heart. I spoke not another word about the King’s lost avian creature. Truly, you cannot own a bird like a raptor – it had chosen her and it was not my place to interfere with that.

  I went home to tell untruths to my beloved Edward but he had by now forgotten about his favourite bird and had tournaments to regulate and taxes to raise and monasteries to run out of funds for. And he had many fortified castles to build in Wales.

  I’ve never forgotten the young nun, the magnificent songstress. I think of her every time I hear a nightingale or a swallow plight its troth. She sang as sweetly as a skylark and her heart was as pure as the heart of a newborn child. Who stole the bird? It stole away itself to live a life of goodness and simplicity – and had I not the many burdens of a married man I would follow its example and do the exact same thing.

  A Lion Rampant

  Jean Davidson

  In my anthology Royal Whodunnits, Jean Davidson introduced the character of Father Gregory, a spy during the reign of Edward I. The following is a sequel to that story, set a few years later when his past catches up with him.