A Psalm for Falconer

by Ian Morson

  Suddenly the bell ceased its tolling, and a strange silence fell. Not true silence, because by straining his ears Falconer could discern the lapping noise of water carrying up from the shore. Then something else intermingled with this sound of nature – a rustling and flapping like some wild animal escaping through undergrowth. He rose from his bed and, clasping his arms around him for warmth, scuttled to the window. Looking down, he realized that the guest house lay on the quire monks' route between dormitory and chapel. It was a few hours after midnight and the monks had risen for matins and lauds. In silence they processed along the pathway, their robes swishing on the ground and sandalled feet slapping stone. Their frosted breath spoke wordlessly of the coldness of the hour, and Falconer hurried back to the warmth of his bed. Unfortunately, since he had thrown the blanket off, the straw-filled pallet had already given up his body heat to the night. He sighed, dressed quickly in his robe, and joined the monks in their devotions.

  The monks' entrance to the church was a small door leading into the top of the nave just below the south transept. When Falconer followed the procession in, he had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the low, old-fashioned arch of the doorway. With his head bowed he was unprepared for the beauty of the interior. It was vast – almost too large for the community of monks who lived there – and the arches of the nave soared into the darkness which still prevailed above his head. A faint glimmering of dawn illuminated the multicoloured glass of the east window, still only a shadow of the beauty that full daylight would bring to it. The chancel would during the day be lighted by the row of windows down either side. For now, the only light was afforded by burning torches suspended over the quire that occupied the centre of the church, and even the light cast by these brands was swallowed by the lofty darkness above. What by day must be an inspiring house of God was to Falconer in this pre-dawn moment an oppressive and dismal place. The fifty or so monks assembled for their devotions sat on benches that ran the length of each side of the quire, and Falconer quickly found himself a place where he could observe at least half of this group of monks – those that faced him across the central void. Further away in the darkness that was the body of the great church, the eerie slapping noise was repeated. There, the lay monks were assembling.

  The quire monks were the elite of the community, living a life of contemplation and devotions broken only by a short period of manual labour each day. The bigger community of lay brothers had given up their worldly lives outside the walls, to labour on behalf of their senior brothers. They slept apart and ate apart, but in return for their work gained a more secure life than those outside the priory walls. On the surface this was a placid and well-ordered society, but Falconer guessed it would still reflect the greater society outside the walls. There would be cliques and alliances, resentment and abuses of power. He hoped he could avoid all these and complete his work in peace.

  In the front row of the lay brothers' assembly, the only monks he could identify by name – Peter and Paul – sat side by side with identical smiles on their beatific faces. They seemed oblivious of all those around them. Falconer scanned the quire seats, trying to put faces to the names the loquacious brothers had fed him yesterday. They had spoken in awe of Henry Ussher the prior, and warmly of Brother Ralph, whom Falconer knew already as the keeper of books. Their description of Brother Adam, the holder of the priory's funds, was as unflattering as the look of distaste they had shared with each other. Falconer wondered what was behind that look. Apart from some fearful advice to steer clear of Brother Thady, the only other senior brother they had spoken of was Brother John, the sacrist. His name had occasioned a shared snigger and comparisons with a tame rabbit.

  As Falconer scanned the quire brothers for these exemplars of religiosity, he spotted a minor commotion. Lower down the bench opposite there was a shuffling as a large, imposing brother motioned abruptly for a young novice to move up. The overbearing Brother Adam, wondered Falconer? The monk then plonked himself down beside another older brother, who cast his pale face to the ground at the intrusion. The big monk flicked his fingers in some strange way, then touched his tongue, causing the other's face to turn even whiter. The second brother then fumbled in the folds of his voluminous sleeve. Falconer silently cursed the fact that he had left his eye-lenses in the guest house in his hurry to join the monks. He squinted hard as something seemed to change hands between the two quire brothers. Then both of them stared fixedly in front of them.

  Falconer was suddenly uncomfortably aware of being observed himself. Straight across from him sat a tall, cadaverous individual whose eyes were buried deep in his skull. From their dark pits, those eyes bored into Falconer's very soul, as though seeing through to all his past sins. He returned the stare, and for an eternity their eyes were locked together across the width of the quire. Then the spell was broken as the pale-faced monk (Brother John, the tame rabbit?) scuttled forward to meet an imposing figure, obviously the prior of Conishead, entering the quire.

  Falconer had been advised that Henry Ussher was an ambitious man, whose desire for power extended beyond the backwater of this small priory at the outermost edge of the kingdom. His features matched his reputation, for his head was large and powerful, split by a great sweep of a nose that gave him the look of an unstoppable force. His hair, though tonsured, fell in silver waves about his face. With his pale-visaged sacrist at his feet like a loyal dog, he began to intone the psalms.

  After the service, the lay brothers disappeared out of the west door of the church to begin their daily tasks. The quire monks, however, filed into the chapter house for the period of quiet contemplation until dawn. Falconer observed that for some monks the contemplation turned into something more soporific. As for himself, the regent master was aware that his stomach was audibly protesting at the lack of attention it had been paid. He felt a tug at his sleeve, and turned to his left to confront a rotund little man with a wide grin on his face. The monk indicated that Falconer should bring his ear down to the level of the other's mouth. He did so, and the brother provided some whispered solace.

  ‘We eat after prime.’

  Falconer wondered if he could last that long before his stomach involuntarily broke the monks' vow of silence again. In the meantime, he perused the room in which he sat. The glimmering of dawn lighted the chapter house through the six circular windows deliberately set in the eastern wall. This was a place intended for morning meetings. The ornate stucco on the walls was shaped in panels that enclosed geometrical figures, deftly decorated with gold. Some earlier prior had had ideas of outdoing the great abbey of Furness, no doubt. The effect unfortunately was of a provincial knight inappropriately overdressed in cloth of gold on a visit to London. Pleased with having dreamed up such an appropriate image, Falconer felt he had summed up the room and soon became bored. He let his mind wander on to the books he was seeking at the priory.

  When Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln and one-time chancellor of the university of Oxford, had died, he had bequeathed his library to the Oxford Franciscans. Unfortunately, the friars had proceeded to scatter the books throughout England. In the dispersed collection there had been many rare and valuable texts. It was said Grosseteste had had a fair copy of Aristotle's fabled advice to Alexander – the Secretum Secretorum, which encompassed physic, astrology and the philosopher's stone. He had also possessed some books on magic like the rare Sapientiae nigromanciae. Both these were amongst the texts that Falconer was seeking for his friend, the exiled Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon. Roger claimed to have glimpsed them when the collection had been donated to his Order, and wanted to see them again. At the command of Pope Clement IV, Bacon was compiling a great treatise on the sciences from his exile in France. He had not been released from close confinement by his Order, but had at last been allowed to communicate with the outside world, hence the recent letter to Falconer.

  But what Falconer sought most avidly for himself was a late version of Grosseteste's De finitate motus et temporis,
in which Bacon insisted the bishop resolved basic matters about the eternity of the world. Before Falconer's eyes danced images of the celestial spheres lit by the light of God, streaming from the beginning of time to the present day, and shortly beyond it to the Final Judgement that so many thought imminent. Falconer imagined he could feel on either side of him the pressure of all the souls that had ever existed crushing against him, as they were raised from the dead.

  With a start he woke from the doze that had overcome him in the quiet of the chapter house, to realize that the monks were getting up to return to their devotions. He was glad that it was the motion of the living, and not the resurrected dead, he had felt pressing against him. He was not yet prepared for Judgement.

  When the monks processed into the chapel again for prime, Falconer detoured into his room and retrieved his eye-lenses. He would not be caught without them again. Catching up with the portly little monk who had spoken to him, he began to ask him about the other members of priory. But the monk silenced him with a finger to his lips, and no more words were forthcoming. Falconer did avoid disrupting the rendition of the psalms with another embarrassing rumble, but only by coughing loudly to cover the noise of his empty gut. Finally the monks moved to the frater, where a frugal meal was made available.

  The quire frater, where all the contemplative brothers' meals were taken, was a lofty hall whose roof was supported by a line of pillars along the centre of the room. The monks ate at two tables running either side of the pillars down the length of the room. The simple fast-breaking bread and beer felt like a banquet to Falconer, and he consumed every crumb. As he ate in silence, he kept seeing the brothers wave their hands or wiggle their fingers at each other. Suddenly he realized that they were communicating with hand signals. By a process of inference he was soon able to recognize the pulling of one's little finger as the sign for passing the flagon of milk. Symbolic of pulling on a cow's udder, no doubt. He thought how useful this might be in other circumstances – silently and secretly communicating at Mass, for instance.

  As he rose to leave the communal table, his arm was taken by the little monk who had reassured him after matins. He guided Falconer to one side as the rest of the monks made their way back to the chapter house for a reading of the Rule, and to hear any business that the prior wished to pass on to the community for that day. Apart from their chanted devotions and this monk's handful of words earlier, no one had spoken since he had risen. Falconer did not realize at first that the monk at his side had asked him a question: already, he had become unused to hearing human intercourse.

  ‘I'm sorry, what did you say?’

  The little monk smiled. ‘It is a little perturbing at first, isn't it? Our regime of silence.’

  He spoke in a whisper still, but to Falconer's ears it seemed as if the monk's voice boomed out like a mummer in a marketplace.

  ‘I was saying my name is Brother Ralph – Ralph Westerdale. I am the precentor and keeper of the books. I've been expecting you, and have been given permission to break silence to speak to you.’

  ‘I am glad to have met you at last, Brother Ralph,’ Falconer replied. ‘I am very anxious to look through your collection, in particular for certain texts that belonged to Bishop Grosseteste.’

  A frown creased Ralph's face, and he looked away for a moment. ‘Yes. I want to talk to you about the library. But first we must attend the reading and find out what the prior has to say today.’

  He took the impatient Falconer by the arm and led him back to the chapter house, where the assembled monks sat reverently with heads bowed as one of their number read from the heavy tome that contained the Rule of St Augustine. Words tumbled eagerly out of the mouth of the lector.

  ‘The Rule calls for strict claustration. The ideal monk should be without father, mother or kinfolk.’

  Falconer surreptitiously pulled out his eye-lenses and concentrated his gaze on this zealot. He was the tall, cadaverous monk who had looked into Falconer's soul in church. Now, his eyes sparkled like stars from the deep pits of their sockets. A stream of spittle flew from his lips as he advocated the necessity and moral value of manual labour. At this, some of the more soft-skinned and well-proportioned monks, who clearly did not observe this rule to the letter, sank lower in their seats. But the lector continued on his inexorable route.

  ‘Above all you should obey the three great rules of the Counsels of Perfection. And these are Obedience, Poverty and Celibacy.’

  He endowed each of the three with a capital letter, around which he conjured up an image of the most ornate of illumination in red, blue and gold. He especially dwelt on the last, as though he attributed a greater significance to celibacy in the context of this particular establishment.

  He let his words hang in the air for a long moment, then slammed the tome shut. In the ensuing silence, the prior rose from the ornate chair he occupied at the head of the congregation. Standing as he was on a raised dais that ran across the end of the chapter house, he towered over the congregation. He wore a solemn mask on his lordly features.

  ‘I regret I have some bad news for you all.’

  He paused, and swept the assembled throng with his gaze.

  ‘A body has been recovered from the bay. I have agreed that it should be brought here for burial, and Brother Martin is coming over from Furness Abbey to examine it.’

  Ann Segrim stood in the reception hall at Godstow Nunnery, and wondered again why she had been persuaded into this escapade by Peter Bullock. Until recently, the separation of the nuns from the outside world was but laxly observed. Sisters from wealthier families were known to entertain relatives and friends, including men, within the convent walls. But a few years ago Ottobon, the Papal Legate to England, had tightened up on the Benedictine rules. Now no nun could converse with a man except there be another sister present; the lesser nuns were not allowed to leave the cloister at all; and on no account was a nun to speak with an Oxford scholar for fear of exciting ‘unclean thoughts'. All this Ann had learned from the gatekeeper, who stood at the only entrance through the four-foot-thick walls that enclosed the nunnery. The gatekeeper, Hal Coke by name, was a sullen old man, who had grumbled about the new rules, and the new abbess who enforced them. His main complaint concerned his loss of earnings from conveying gifts, letters and tokens from convent inmates to scholars and back again. The abbess had put a stop to all frivolous communication. All that was left for him to do was to conduct visitors to the abbess's hall, and there to leave them to the tender mercies of Sister Gwladys. This he had done for Ann, suggesting all the while that she was a fool to contemplate entering the nunnery, and that he might be able to provide her with ‘better entertainment'. He was such an objectionable fellow that Ann would have been glad to be delivered to Hell's ferryman in order to escape his foul tongue.

  After she met Sister Gwladys, she was sure that it would be easier crossing the Styx into Hell than gaining access to the nunnery. The abbess had been apprised of the constable's plan, and Ann Segrim's part in it. But she was still far from convinced. They began a stiff and formal conversation under the watchful eye of an old crone by the name of Sister Hildegard. Ottobon's rules had also demanded that any exchange between nun and outsider should be observed by an ‘ancient and discreet nun', and even the abbess was not exempt from this injunction. On this occasion, Sister Hildegard carried out that function, and her wrinkled, puggish face put Ann in mind of Hell's guardian, Cerberus. It was Sister Gwladys who first broached the subject of Ann's real purpose.

  ‘I do not like the idea of you prying into the activities of my nunnery, but this … death … leaves me with no option.’ The word ‘murder' was clearly one that the abbess had not yet come to terms with. Ann was surprised at her openness in Hildegard's presence, and leaned forward to whisper her response.

  ‘I thought we planned to keep my role a secret. That I was to be seen as a corrodian – merely a temporary boarder.’

  A puzzled look crossed Sister Gwladys's patrician
features. She was a handsome woman, whose face was lined with the cares that her severity of purpose impressed on her. The hair that poked out from under her headdress was silver even though she could only have been in her middle years. The edges of her mouth were turned down in a perpetual grimace of disapproval, whether at others' or her own failings Ann could not surmise. Probably at both. She suddenly realized what Ann meant, and something that Ann guessed was intended to be a smile contorted her features. She achieved it by merely turning down the corners of her mouth even further.

  ‘Don't worry about Sister Hildegard. I chose her because she is deaf, but will not admit it. She will pretend she can hear us, but you may speak openly all the same.’

  As if in confirmation, the ancient nun nodded her wrinkled face in agreement with what she imagined her abbess might be saying. Gwladys continued.

  ‘As a corrodian, you will be free to speak to all the sisters. There are only twenty of us at present. On each of three sides of the cloister you will see a house; in each lives six or seven nuns. St Thomas's Chapel is next to the gatehouse – though you may prefer to use the smaller domestic chapel – and the frater where we eat is beyond that.’

  ‘Which household did the nun who … died … live in?’

  ‘Sister Eleanor lived in the middle of the three – to the north of the cloister. I have arranged for you to stay there.’

  Ann hoped that didn't mean in the murdered nun's very room. ‘And can you show me where she died?’

  The abbess's face froze, but eventually she rose and flicked a finger at Ann. ‘Follow me.’

  She led Ann from the hall and into the inner courtyard of the nunnery. The cloister was a pleasant sanctuary with religious scenes painted on the white plaster of the inner walls. Across the middle of the cloister ran an open stone conduit conveying water to the three households ranged around its perimeter. The abbess's voice was as cold as the stone flags on which Ann stood.