Hugh Corbett 17 - The Mysterium Read online

  THE MYSTERIUM

  PAUL DOHERTY

  headline

  Copyright © 2010 Paul Doherty

  The right of Paul Doherty to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012

  All characters in this publication are fictitious – apart from the obvious historical characters – and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  This Ebook produced by Jouve digitalisation des Informations

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7348 2

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Letter to the Reader

  About the Author

  Also by Paul Doherty

  Praise for Paul Doherty

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Author’s Note

  History has always fascinated me. I see my stories as a time machine. I want to intrigue you with a murderous mystery and a tangled plot, but I also want you to experience what it was like to slip along the shadow-thronged alleyways of medieval London; to enter a soaringly majestic cathedral but then walk out and glimpse the gruesome execution scaffolds rising high on the other side of the square. In my novels you will sit in the oaken stalls of a gothic abbey and hear the glorious psalms of plain chant even as you glimpse white, sinister gargoyle faces peering out at you from deep cowls and hoods. Or there again, you may ride out in a chariot as it thunders across the Redlands of Ancient Egypt or leave the sunlight and golden warmth of the Nile as you enter the marble coldness of a pyramid’s deadly maze. Smells and sounds, sights and spectacles will be conjured up to catch your imagination and so create times and places now long gone. You will march to Jerusalem with the first Crusaders or enter the Colosseum of Rome, where the sand sparkles like gold and the crowds bay for the blood of some gladiator. Of course, if you wish, you can always return to the lush dark greenness of medieval England and take your seat in some tavern along the ancient moon-washed road to Canterbury and listen to some ghostly tale which chills the heart . . . my books will take you there then safely bring you back!

  The periods that have piqued my interest and about which I have written are many and varied. I hope you enjoy the read and would love to hear your thoughts – I always appreciate any feedback from readers. Visit my publisher’s website here: www.headline.co.uk and find out more. You may also visit my website: www.paulcdoherty.com or email me on: [email protected].

  Paul Doherty

  About the Author

  Paul Doherty is one of the most prolific, and lauded, authors of historical mysteries in the world today. His expertise in all areas of history is illustrated in the many series that he writes about, from the Mathilde of Westminster series, set at the court of Edward II, to the Amerotke series, set in Ancient Egypt. Amongst his most memorable creations are Hugh Corbett, Brother Athelstan and Roger Shallot.

  Paul Doherty was born in Middlesbrough. He studied history at Liverpool and Oxford Universities and obtained a doctorate at Oxford for his thesis on Edward II and Queen Isabella. He is now headmaster of a school in north-east London and lives with his wife and family near Epping Forest.

  Also by Paul Doherty

  Mathilde of Westminster

  THE CUP OF GHOSTS

  THE POISON MAIDEN

  THE DARKENING GLASS

  Sir Roger Shallot

  THE WHITE ROSE MURDERS

  THE POISONED CHALICE

  THE GRAIL MURDERS

  A BROOD OF VIPERS

  THE GALLOWS MURDERS

  THE RELIC MURDERS

  Templar

  THE TEMPLAR

  THE TEMPLAR MAGICIAN

  Mahu (The Akhenaten trilogy)

  AN EVIL SPIRIT OUT OF THE WEST

  THE SEASON OF THE HYAENA

  THE YEAR OF THE COBRA

  Canterbury Tales by Night

  AN ANCIENT EVIL

  A TAPESTRY OF MURDERS

  A TOURNAMENT OF MURDERS

  GHOSTLY MURDERS

  THE HANGMAN’S HYMN

  A HAUNT OF MURDER

  Egyptian Mysteries

  THE MASK OF RA

  THE HORUS KILLINGS

  THE ANUBIS SLAYINGS

  THE SLAYERS OF SETH

  THE ASSASSINS OF ISIS

  THE POISONER OF PTAH

  THE SPIES OF SOBECK

  Constantine the Great

  DOMINA

  MURDER IMPERIAL

  THE SONG OF THE GLADIATOR

  THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

  MURDER’S IMMORTAL MASK

  Hugh Corbett

  SATAN IN ST MARY’S

  THE CROWN IN DARKNESS

  SPY IN CHANCERY

  THE ANGEL OF DEATH

  THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS

  MURDER WEARS A COWL

  THE ASSASSIN IN THE GREENWOOD

  THE SONG OF A DARK ANGEL

  SATAN’S FIRE

  THE DEVIL’S HUNT

  THE DEMON ARCHER

  THE TREASON OF THE GHOSTS

  CORPSE CANDLE

  THE MAGICIAN’S DEATH

  THE WAXMAN MURDERS

  NIGHTSHADE

  THE MYSTERIUM

  Standalone Titles

  THE ROSE DEMON

  THE HAUNTING

  THE SOUL SLAYER

  THE PLAGUE LORD

  THE DEATH OF A KING

  PRINCE DRAKULYA

  THE LORD COUNT DRAKULYA

  THE FATE OF PRINCES

  DOVE AMONGST THE HAWKS

  THE MASKED MAN

  As Vanessa Alexander

  THE LOVE KNOT

  OF LOVE AND WAR

  THE LOVING CUP

  Kathryn Swinbrooke (as C L Grace)

  SHRINE OF MURDERS

  EYE OF GOD

  MERCHANT OF DEATH

  BOOK OF SHADOWS

  SAINTLY MURDERS

  MAZE OF MURDERS

  FEAST OF POISONS

  Nicholas Segalla (as Ann Dukthas)

  A TIME FOR THE DEATH OF A KING

  THE PRINCE LOST TO TIME

  THE TIME OF MURDER AT MAYERLING

  IN THE TIME OF THE POISONED QUEEN

  Mysteries of Alexander the Great (as Anna Apostolou)

  A MURDER IN MACEDON

  A MURDER IN THEBES

  Alexander the Great

  THE HOUSE OF DEATH

  THE GODLESS MAN

  THE GATES OF HELL

  Matthew Jankyn (as P C Doherty)

  THE WHYTE HARTE

  THE SERPENT AMONGST THE LILIES

  Non-fiction

  THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH O
F TUTANKHAMUN

  ISABELLA AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF EDWARD II

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT: THE DEATH OF A GOD

  THE GREAT CROWN JEWELS ROBBERY OF 1303

  THE SECRET LIFE OF ELIZABETH I

  THE DEATH OF THE RED KING

  Praise for Paul Doherty

  ‘Teems with colour, energy and spills’ Time Out

  ‘Paul Doherty has a lively sense of history . . . evocative and lyrical descriptions’ New Statesman

  ‘Extensive and penetrating research coupled with a strong plot and bold characterisation. Loads of adventure and a dazzling evocation of the past’ Herald Sun, Melbourne

  ‘An opulent banquet to satisfy the most murderous appetite’ Northern Echo

  ‘As well as penning an exciting plot with vivid characters, Doherty excels at bringing the medieval period to life, with his detailed descriptions giving the reader a strong sense of place and time’ South Wales Argus

  To Ida Margaret Barbero Terracino, no mother more loved and lovely. A true Christian lady and the best of teachers. From the rising of the sun to its setting, we shall never forget you. (The Terracino family)

  Prologue

  Soul-scot: the last payment of the dead . . .

  A cold wind swept the Thames. The river, a broad ribbon of inky blackness lit here and there by the glow of lamp or candlelight, surged powerfully between its banks. The late winter rains had lashed the King’s great city of London, drenching the thatched roofs of the poor and cascading down the dark red tiles of the stately Cheapside mansions. The year was turning. Spring was easing its way into the ice-bound countryside beyond the Tower. Soon the harsh rigour of Lent would be imposed, fasting, sackcloth and penance. The shriving pews of London churches would become busy. Those seeking absolution would creep to the cross hoisted high on the rood screen to confess their sins: pride, avarice, greed, lust and, above all, murder.

  The chroniclers, sitting in the scriptoria of their monasteries and abbeys, cowls pushed over shaven sculls, mittened, ink-stained fingers fluttering over plates of fiery coal, were strident in their judgement. Murder had made London its haunt. The Beast of the Apocalypse, begotten by Cain, prowled the sordid, spindle-thin alleys of the city. Murder lurked in the runnels of Cheapside and flittered like some darting shadow along the corridors of palaces, across the galleries of stately mansions and even through the paved cloister walks of their own houses. With the horned features of a babewyn or a gargoyle, it seemed to strike, strike and strike again. It battened fat, waxed strong on other sins, some fresh and bloody like hunks of meat sliced by a hunter: power, lust, greed, revenge, hatred or passions freed by too much ale or wine. It also nourished itself on ancient sins supposedly long forgotten, the roots of which had dug deep like weeds in a graveyard, stretching down to break through the coffin wood or the linen shroud to draw a morbid strength and vigour from the ill-named dead. The chroniclers listed such horrid deeds, as did the coroners’ rolls at the Guildhall with their litany of ‘death other than their natural death’. Murder erupted from the dark on Fleet Street, on the highway through Holborn, outside the gates of the Temple, in the shadow of Aldgate and Cripplegate, within bowshot of the Tower and on the approaches to London Bridge.

  On 6 March, the year of Our Lord 1304, the thirty-second year of King Edward I, the eve of the Feast of St Perpetua and Felicitas, who died as martyrs in the Roman arena, murder unfolded its standard on the banks of the Thames at Queenshithe close to the small Chapel of the Oak. Its victim, Ignacio Engleat, lying bound and gagged against the slime-covered wall of an alleyway, faced the soul-cutting terror of his own swift-approaching violent death. He stared in terror at the dark shape busy about him, all hooded and visored, humming a Goliard song about a scholar walking a flower-fringed lane to meet his love-sweet. Ignacio wanted to live, but if he was to die, he must be shriven, confess his many sins, his cloying lusts, his deep thirst for the glee cup of the richest Bordeaux. He had sinned that very evening, visiting the whorehouse the Comfort of Bathsheba, doing business with the strumpet-mongers and lying with a maid soft and tender, her skin smooth as silk and white as milk, hair as red as the sun, lips sweeter than the honeycomb. Afterwards he’d gone downstairs to the tavern next door, the Halls of Purgatory, where he’d demanded and drunk a goblet of the best claret. He had fallen asleep and woken here in this freezing, filthy antechamber of hell. He could not remember how. He must have been drugged with some malignant potion mingled with his wine.

  Ignacio watched in horror: that shifting shape, breathing heavily, was dragging a corpse towards him, the decaying cadaver of a river pirate hanged and left on the banks of the Thames for three turns of the tide. A corpse washed by the river but still slimed with corruption. In those few heartbeats after he had woken, the moon had bathed the horrid sight in its ghostly light – the scaffold arm, the dangling corpse, the flitting shape of his attacker humming that damnable song as he’d crept across and cut the corpse down – and he had realised immediately what was about to happen. After all, he was a clericus peritus lege – a clerk skilled in the law. Hadn’t he sat in Westminster Hall as scribe to the Court of King’s Bench? Hadn’t he been out on assize in the shires? Hadn’t he been sworn as a commissioner of oyer and terminer, ‘to hear and decide’? Wasn’t he an experienced jurist, close friend and servant of Chief Justice Walter Evesham, appointed directly by the King? So why was he here? Why was he going to be punished in such a heinous way? He strained against the gag and bonds that held him tight. He should have known. He should have read the signs when Justice Evesham fell like Lucifer, never to rise again. All this for what? Justice Evesham now sheltered in the Abbey of Syon on Thames, a recluse, a sanctuary seeker from the law he had once exercised so imperiously. And he, Ignacio Engleat, Evesham’s clerk, was bound and gagged like a malefactor in this fetid runnel.

  Ignacio blinked away the rain and sweat running down his balding brow. The shadowy assassin hovered over him. Ignacio tried to plead, but it was to no avail. He was seized and stretched out along the ground, the stinking corpse of the river pirate placed on top of him. He turned his head from the putrid stench, that horrid face, eyes all pecked by the gulls, the scabby skin hanging in shreds, the flesh nothing but the seeping softness of corruption. He tried to beg, but the assassin, still humming, tightened the cords around him. Ignacio, terror-stricken, tried to move, but both he and the dead pirate, lashed to him, his rottenness now clinging to him like a cloak, were dragged across the rutted trackway, its sharp cobbles cutting his flesh.

  The assassin paused. Ignacio blinked and screamed silently as his assailant dug the tip of the knife into his forehead, etching a symbol. Now, at the moment of death, Ignacio abruptly recalled the morbid memories of his own past. The Angel of Death had singled him out. Justice had recalled ancient sins. The Mysterium! Hadn’t he marked his victims in such a way? Hadn’t he, Ignacio Engleat, Evesham’s personal clerk and scribe, listed the macabre details of such ghastly killings? But the Mysterium was gone, surely? Boniface Ippegrave had been exposed and disgraced by no less a person than Walter Evesham. Of course, like all Evesham had done, that was a lie. Now the ghost of Boniface Ippegrave had returned to carry out vengeance. Ignacio whimpered. He tried to recall the opening verse of Psalm 50, but all he could remember as, lashed to that corpse, he was pulled like a sledge across the cobbles were the words of scripture: ‘Israel prepare to meet your God.’ That was Ignacio Engleat’s last conscious thought as he and his dead companion were tipped over the edge of the quayside into the freezing black river.

  A few hours later, Abbot Serlo of Syon on Thames finished his dawn Mass in honour of St Perpetua and Felicitas in the chantry chapel of St Patrick. He thanked the lay brother who’d acted as server, then took off the red robes of the liturgy for that feast. As he did so, his keen blue eyes made out St Patrick’s prayer inscribed in gold on a black panel against the chantry wall to the right of the altar. ‘I bind unto myself this day, the strong name of the Trinity by invocation of
the same, Three in One and One in Three. From the snares of demons, from the sedition of vice and any man who plots against me near and far . . .’

  Abbot Serlo scratched his tonsure and wondered if that was a warning. As if in answer, Brother Cuthbert, brown robe fluttering, hobbled into the chapel as fast as his aching limbs would let him, hard sandals rapping the paved floor.

  ‘Father Abbot, Father Abbot.’ Cuthbert leaned against the entrance to the chantry chapel, gasping for breath. ‘Father Abbot,’ he repeated, ‘you’d best come. Walter Evesham, he cannot be roused. I cannot wake him; there’s no—’

  Abbot Serlo whispered to his altar server, who hurried off, whilst the abbot followed Cuthbert out of the abbey church. It was a crisp, icy morning, the sky greying, the last stars disappearing, in the east a red glow. Serlo closed his eyes.

  ‘Deo Gratias,’ he whispered. The earth would dry and the brothers could break the soil, but first this . . .

  The abbey buildings rose black against the sky. Already members of the community were busy. Brother Odo the sacristan, with his great bunch of keys, was leading a line of novices, each with a shuttered lantern, around the abbey. Candles, lamps and tapers were to be lit, chains unlocked, gates opened and treasures checked. As Father Abbot passed, the brothers, heads bowed, whispered, ‘Pax tecum’ – peace be with you. Abbot Serlo replied, his eyes still on the hobbling figure of Cuthbert, busy leading him through the cloisters where the gargoyles grinned evilly in the murky light. They went out across the herb and flower plots into the Paradise of Benedict, the main garden of the abbey, its hoed banks greening with the first show of spring. As they reached Goose Meadow, stretching down to the curtain wall of the abbey and the Chapel of St Lazarus, which now served as the abbey’s corpse house or coffin chamber, the wet grass chilled Abbot Serlo’s feet, the water seeping over the thick leather soles of his sandals in between the sturdy thongs. Serlo hid his irritation. Cuthbert would not have come unless this was serious. Not for the first time he quietly wished that the disgraced Chief Justice Walter Evesham had chosen another abbey or monastery in which to seek sanctuary and withdraw from the world.