Murder at Meaux

by Cassandra Clark

  ‘I’ve done nothing but bring ruin on everyone,’ Hildegard said as she went to the garden door. ‘Preserve this house, Agnetha, should he come to a decision to close it down.’ Whom she meant by ‘he’ was at once understood.

  After that she said no more but walked deeper into the garden where it tilted in a short slope to the edge of the canal. It was downstream from the mill and the water ran rapidly between the high banks that Hubert’s predecessor had built up in order to ease the passage of the barges bringing in produce to the abbey and taking away their own wool overseas to Flanders.

  When she looked into the depths she felt a wild longing to plunge in to a different realm. Only the desire to fight to an honest resolution kept her feet fixed firmly on dry land.

  12

  ‘So you see, there is a difference here that cannot be bridged. I can imagine no way to a compromise between us. He can force my submission and I can do no other than resist.’

  Agnetha had brought a bowl of thick broth to the table in the belief that most problems could be solved by a square meal and a good night’s sleep. The sleep was taken for granted and by now it was after terce and there was already a bubbling pot of on the fire for later.

  Brother Gregory lingered. His concern was evident. ‘Hildegard,’ he said after she had told them both what had transpired, ‘as I see it, Hubert is right. He can have you excommunicated. He can put your activities before the consistory court of the Chapter and if we agree he can appeal to the Archbishop’s Chancery Court at York presided over by his auditor and ask him to make a judgement. That is within Hubert’s right.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The question is whether you are guilty in the way he suggests.’

  ‘I am.’ She glanced down. She would not deny the facts to anyone, least of all to dear Gregory.

  ‘In fact, yes, you will see it like that. I understand that. But I suggest that it may be looked at in a different light.’

  She remembered the loss of blood, the emptiness.

  Lifting her head she said, ‘The fact that I lay with Ulf cannot be disputed. I will not dispute it. I will not add lies to any other transgression.’

  ‘You will not need to do so. I said it is a question of how it is seen.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘As I understand it from what you have just told us, Hubert sees this business as a flagrant disregard of your vow of chastity. A lightness with regard to the solemnity and binding nature of the Rule. However, it might be argued that you acted as you did for some other reason.’

  ‘I tried. He would not listen. He is the authority on the teaching and I live in sinful ignorance, he believes.’

  Agnetha broke in. ‘It’s always the same. Get two men fighting over a woman and all reason flies out of the window.’ She turned to Hildegard. ‘I regret to say this, domina, but the abbot is no better than he should be.’ Touching Gregory’s sleeve, she said, ‘Forgive me, brother, not all men are the same but he’s not the first and he won’t be the last to be ruled by something other than his native wit.’ To Hildegard she said, ‘Remember what you told me about Avignon? The goings-on there in the very palace of the French pope! Cardinals flaunting their mistresses and their children! Where was the celibacy there I’d like to know?’

  ‘The law for the rest of us can be harsh,’ Gregory replied. ‘I know to my cost.’ He said no more about that although Hildegard had long suspected that he had loved a woman in Outremer and his heart had been broken when he had to leave her.

  ‘It’s comforting to hear you both talk like this but it can’t help me. I feel weakened by the knowledge that Hubert is right. The facts are as they are. The law is as it is said to be. I am undermined by that idea.’

  ‘The Church has self-interest at heart in the ruling against marriage,’ Gregory remarked. ‘If churchmen could marry, their children would inherit their father’s wealth and the Church would soon be impoverished. On the other hand we monastics are allowed no wealth of our own so one might ask why not allow us the wealth of conjugal bliss? Would it reduce the wealth of our Order? Would it even weaken our allegiance to the Rule? I think not. We would be supported by our help-mates in our daily teaching.’

  ‘But that is not the world in which we live, Gregory. We were aware of that when we joined the Order. We should not have joined if we could not wholeheartedly support its rules.’

  ‘Some may dispute that. They may believe it is time to reform outdated obligations and that it is only those within who can bring about change.’

  ‘If you’re going to talk like this I’ll leave you to it.’ Agnetha rose to her feet. ‘Go and lie down, domina. You’re as white as snow.’

  The four sisters who lived in the house taught the children from the nearby villages the basics of reading and writing. They also cared for the sick and, as a way of bringing some income to Meaux, they ran a busy silk- spinning workshop. Agnetha went out saying something about needing to see how her sisters were progressing with an order from the Archbishop’s palace for a length of silk for a new cope.

  Gregory gave Hildegard a searching look. ‘I’m serious when I say your transgression may be seen in a different light. If you won’t deny the facts then this would be your only hope.’

  ‘Hope?’ She uttered the word as if it were new.

  ‘This will come before the Chapter,’ he told her. ‘I will argue your case. If Hubert decides not to listen he will have to bring in the Archbishop to arbitrate. It will take time. Before he gets to that stage he will have a long period in which to reflect on his actions.’

  ‘Gregory, you have my gratitude for your support. I beg you not to harm your own standing here.’

  ‘I see a look of defeat in your eyes, as if you are half-convinced that Hubert deserves to be the victor in this.’

  She felt tears crowding behind her lids. ‘I have wronged him. I know that. I have wounded him more profoundly than I could ever have believed. I deserve punishment.’

  Gregory got to his feet and reached for her hand. ‘As I said, there is another way of looking at the facts. There always is.’

  13

  A little later, too weak to do more than lie on her bed watching the sun slant across the floor of the chamber, she forced herself to ponder earlier events that morning in order to take her mind off her own anguish at the wound she had inflicted on Hubert.

  Pierrekyn had shown her where Brother Anselm had died, murdered, as the minstrel feared, and her thoughts drifted over the puzzle of the Roman numerals made visible as indentations on the wooden surface of the scribe’s work desk.

  Maybe they meant nothing. The fact that they seemed fresh was all that made her pause.

  And then there was Ulf. Her thoughts ran panic-stricken over his likely fate. How long would Hubert say he was obliged to keep him in prison before his case could be heard? It might be months, years, it might be forever if the law-men got to work on it.

  Or it might be no time at all should Hubert decide to hand Ulf into the keeping of the Sheriff in York. Fear clutched at her like the squeeze of an iron hand.

  14

  Exhausted, she slept.

  When she awoke in a distress of tangled bed covers it was mid-afternoon. The bell for nones drifted sonorously across the canal from the distant tower.

  As she opened her eyes it came to her what she had to do. With one ear cocked for the sound of anyone in the passage outside her door she rapidly got out of bed and found her cloak. She would write a letter to her prioress detailing everything that had happened. If anyone could help her in her dispute with Hubert it would be the Prioress of Swyne and she would no doubt have an opinion on the fate of Brother Anselm too. Her recent gift of fruit and herbs was also owed a response.

  The small chamber given over to reading and more rarely to writing was on the upper floor of the nuns’ house. As expected it was empty. A chill hung in the air as ever. From the chamber below came a remark or two from her sisters now as they worked at
their silk-making. Their lives seemed enviably simple and straightforward.

  Refusing to be daunted she quickly wrote a few lines to the prioress and after sealing it with her own ring took it down-stairs. She would ask Agnetha to send someone over to Swyne as soon as possible.

  15

  ‘Strange you should have written a message, there’s one here for you too.’ Agnetha handed her a fold of vellum and slipped Hildegard’s note into her sleeve to be dealt with later.

  Taking the one that had been delivered to her, she opened it and saw a row of numbers. It made no sense.

  ‘Who brought it?’

  ‘Young Pierrekyn. I did not wish to wake you. I must say,’ Agnetha continued, ‘that sleep has done you good.’

  ‘I feel better. I have some strength to draw on after all.’

  She glanced at the numbers again. ‘Did Pierrekyn say anything when he gave you this?’

  ‘Only that he would like to talk to you about it when he can.’

  ‘Does he know that our lord abbot has forbidden me to leave this house?’

  ‘I may have mentioned such. He said he’s got to come over here later to run through something or other with our singers.’

  Hildegard smiled at that. Staunch Pierrekyn! ‘And what time does he intend to do that?’

  ‘He suggested some time before Vespers. I told him I thought you would be awake by then.’

  16

  She held the piece of vellum in her right hand. The wound in her left shoulder where the bolt had pierced was throbbing and Agnetha had strapped up her left arm ‘to prevent any unnecessary use’ before offering her a draught of Brother Egbert’s cure.

  ‘I can make neither head nor tail of this, Pierrkyn,’ she said holding out the page of numerals with her right hand as soon as he turned up.

  ‘This is a long-shot,’ he told her in the language of a bowman, ‘but sometimes even a long shot strikes the target. And we have to discover who murdered Brother Anselm. I’m as convinced as the abbot that he did not take his own life. It would not have been in his character. We must clear his name and find his murderer.’

  ‘So what is this long-shot?’

  ‘It’s this. Those scratchings, uprights and straight lines made by someone in a hurry, look like Roman numerals as we agree. I’ve put them into our own numbers with their curves, difficult to carve for a man weakened to the point of death and also not natural for a monk more used to Latin.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You know how numbers may stand for letters in some coded messages?’

  ‘So you think these numbers are a code?’

  ’Why not?’ He took the vellum from her. ’Didn’t the marks on the desk look like Roman numerals? Weren’t they like the marks of a dying man to you? I’m convinced Anselm scratched them out for us to find. Did you notice the knife he used to sharpen his quill lying next to them as if pointing at them?’

  ‘I suppose it might have looked like that – assuming no-one had moved the pen-knife by accident when Anselm’s body was found.’

  She remembered Gregory’s opinion of facts, that they could be seen differently, according to the light.

  Whatever the numbers meant they were a sequence of some sort visible only when the sun brought them into relief. Even if they were only a reminder of a melodic line the monk had been writing out they might have meant something at the time.

  ‘Given the nature of Brother Anselm’s work,’ Pierrekyn continued, ‘why could these numbers not refer to notes on the stave?’

  ‘So what do they mean?’

  ‘That’s the problem at present. But I shall solve it, given a little time.’

  ‘What is the problem, exactly?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I think it’s a question of the mode he was using,’ he explained. ‘The first note of each of the modes are different. If, for instance, this was in the Dorian mode it would start on the note of D.’

  ‘That would mean that the numeral two here would be the note of E?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘So your task is to change the numbers to letters and read the message?’

  ‘It’s just an idea. And why I haven’t done it yet is because I only thought of it as I was drilling the novices in the words of the Dies Irae in preparation for tomorrow’s mass.’ He gave his familiar boyish grin, ‘I could hardly breathe with excitement when the idea stuck me – it was like a thunderbolt and so obvious I couldn’t imagine why we hadn’t thought of it at once! I wanted to let you know as soon as possible. In the meantime, as you were asleep when I came over, I’ve worked out one or two versions –’ he gave a brief frown, ‘and so far I have to admit it suggests nothing much, although one combination does spell the word dead. Look,’ he pointed to the numerals again. ‘One, two, five, eight, giving us D-E-A-D.’

  Hildegard thought for a moment. ‘Could he have meant he knew he was dying?’

  ‘If he was then he must have realised we would soon know about it. It seems rather pointless.’

  ‘May I have a list of the modes myself? Maybe it’s worth having two people working on them.’

  He duly explained how the modes worked. ‘You won’t need to write them down. They’re easy to remember. All you have to do is fix the first note in your head and count off its eight notes.’

  ‘How do you differentiate them?’

  ‘With names like this: we call it the Ionian mode when it begins on C. Dorian, as I’ve just mentioned, starts on D, and it continues in order, E is Lydian, F is Mixolydian, A is Aeolian and finally Locrian starting on B. Obviously the only difference between the eight notes of each mode is that the first note is doubled. That’s why it’s only the Dorian mode that can spell the word dead.’

  ‘So we need to find out which mode he was likely to have chosen. Would it be too easy if it was the one most in use?’

  ‘I don’t know. I need to get back inside the scriptorium and look more closely at what he was copying. There may be a clue there. Meanwhile,’ he made for the door, ‘I’m going to work through the notes of every mode to see what four letters can be combined to make a word that points to the murderer.’

  ‘Other than dead.’ She gave him a rueful smile. ‘Let me scrutinise some of them to make our task a little quicker.’

  They agreed that she would look at the modes beginning with the last three letters of the octave.

  17

  The Abbot may have forbidden Hildegard to leave the nunnery and, truth to tell, she did not regret the imposition at first as she had little strength to go traipsing about in her present condition. Hubert could not, however, forbid her from looking out of the windows.

  When the sound of a horseman riding at speed over the bridge from the direction of Beverley was heard, she, along with one or two of her sisters, peered out from between the shutters to see what was afoot. They were in time to catch sight of a well set-up, middle-aged fellow in a blue cape and hood followed by a scurrying page on a pony. The two riders disappeared under the gatehouse.

  ‘Who’s that fellow?’ she asked.

  No-one knew.

  Later, the same rider and page were seen riding back the way they had come but at a more considered pace.

  Nothing much happened for a day or two. Ulf remained in his lock-up. Pierrekyn got nowhere with his code-breaking and, for that matter, neither did Hildegard, and Abbot de Courcy maintained his prohibition on Hildegard leaving her house of nuns.

  Visitors came and went over the bridge as usual. A few pilgrims sought lodgings in the guest house and apparently knelt before the Talking Crucifix, the abbey’s only relic, before going on to Beverley to worship at St John’s shrine in the Minster.

  The usual tradesmen brought in their necessary wares.

  A mason and his apprentice went back and forth on work to the door of the scriptorium.

  Wine barrels were delivered by barge and dragged along to the cellarium by a team of lay-broth
ers and their brother-conversi from the outer granges drove up in wagons groaning with produce, abundant at this time of year after a good summer and promising much work for the kitcheners with their bottling and salting and preserving to support the community through the winter months.

  Although forbidden to visit, Brothers Gregory and Egbert found plenty of irrefutable reasons to cross the bridge to keep an eye on their invalid. At the same time they brought in regular news for the edification of the silk-spinners and eventually the man in the blue cloak was identified as a fellow from Beverley.

  The precise purpose of his visit was still a mystery as he had been whisked straight in to secret confab with the abbot and whisked straight out again before the kitcheners had managed to prise anything useful from his page who had merely stared with large eyes over the rim of his mug of warm milk.

  Brother Egbert brought fresh cures from the herberer and expressed pleasure at the progress Hildegard was making.

  ‘It only throbs when your cure wears off, Egbert, although I still feel tired,’ she told him. ‘My life force has vanished. I can scarcely summon the power to lift a hand. Really, if there was an earthquake like the one down in London when Wyclif was summoned before Gaunt, I would scarcely raise my head to watch.’

  Both monks assured her that such lassitude would pass.

  They tried to allay her worries about Ulf as well.

  In reply she said,’Will you be kind enough to ask him something for me?’ When they assented she said, ‘I want to know whether he heard the dogs bark around midnight on the night his wife died.’