Murder Most Holy Read online

  The sight of the builders’ ropes made Athelstan think of those flagstones in the church and the strange mason’s mark. He had asked his parishioners to keep their eyes open for a similar mark but no one had recognised it. Somehow, Athelstan concluded, the man who had first laid those stones must know about the skeleton found beneath them.

  Cranston stirred. ‘Lord, look at that,’ he said.

  They’d stopped at the corner of the Vintry where the sheriffs’ men were carrying out punishments. A man stood naked up to his chin in a barrel of horse piss. The crude notice pinned to the wood proclaimed him to be a brewer who’d adulterated his drink. The biggest crowd, however, had stopped to watch an aged harridan, her ragged skirts tied up above her head, whilst a bailiff beat her drooping grey-coloured buttocks with a wand as a punishment for ill-treating some children. A crowd had gathered round, shouting cat-calls and throwing offal and other refuse at the hapless blindfolded woman. The commotion stopped as a funeral procession forced its way through, led by a priest carrying a cross and chanting ‘Requiem Dona Eis.’ Most of the mourners were drunk and the coffin bobbed on the shoulders of the pall bearers like a cork on water, so much so that the lid had come loose and the greyish arm of the corpse dangled out, flopping up and down as if the dead person was really waving goodbye to all around him.

  Athelstan and Cranston dismounted and led their horses past the carts crashing across the cobbles to the docks. They turned into Beck Street but were forced under the eaves of a house to make way for a strange procession: a group of men, hooded and masked but naked from the neck down to the waist, were making their way slowly down the street. They chanted the ‘Miserere’ psalm in a sing-song fashion whilst others whipped their backs until the skin turned blue-red and burst.

  ‘Flagellantes!’ Athelstan whispered. ‘They are seen in Paris, Cologne, Madrid, now London. They walk from city to city, chanting their psalms and beating each other in expiation for sin.’

  Cranston just belched loudly.

  ‘How in God’s name,’ he muttered, ‘can that please the good Christ?’

  Athelstan just shook his head.

  The flagellantes turned the corner and the sound of the lashing rods and religious chant faded into the distance.

  Athelstan and Cranston now approached Blackfriars and could glimpse the monastery spires and turrets above the red-tiled houses. They found one side-street barred by soldiers dressed in the city livery, fully armed, who held sponges over their mouths and faces. Athelstan looked down the street and shivered. It was deserted. Every house had its doors barred and bolted and the shutters across its windows firmly locked. The gaudy sign of a tavern clinked eerily as if sighing over its empty taproom.

  ‘The plague!’ Cranston said, mounting his horse. ‘God save us, Brother, if that comes back!’

  Athelstan sketched the sign of the cross at the mouth of the street and followed Cranston into the great open space around Blackfriars. Before them rose the huge gate and high boundary wall which circled the great monastery. A lay brother answered Cranston’s urgent tugging of the bell-rope and took them across the cobbled yard where an ostler, bleary-eyed, toothless, and with the nastiest face ulcer Athelstan had ever seen, muttered some nonsense at them and led their horses away. As the lay brother then took them into the cool open passageways, Athelstan smiled to himself. It felt strange to be back. Here he’d served his novitiate. He looked down one paved stone corridor and stopped as if he could see the ghost of himself as a young man slipping down the corridors at night, through an open window across moonlit gardens and over the wall where his younger brother was waiting to go with him to the King’s wars. Poor Francis, buried on some French battlefield!

  ‘I am sorry,’ Athelstan whispered to the sun motes dancing in the brilliant light pouring through the window. ‘I am so sorry!’

  The lay brother looked at Athelstan curiously.

  ‘Are you well?’ the fellow asked.

  Cranston narrowed his eyes and shook his head as if he could read Athelstan’s mind.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he murmured. ‘My good friend has seen a ghost.’

  The mystified lay brother led them on, across the sun-dappled cloister garden where Prior Anselm was waiting for them in his large, blue-painted chamber.

  ‘You have come earlier than I thought,’ he said. He clicked his fingers at the lay brother and whispered instructions in his ear. ‘Do sit,’ Anselm murmured. He picked up and rang a small bell. ‘You must be thirsty?’

  Cranston beamed. Athelstan, who always felt uneasy in this chamber where he had been confronted with his sins, nodded absentmindedly.

  A servitor appeared carrying a large jug of mead and three cups. He’d hardly filled Anselm’s and Athelstan’s before Cranston had drained his and was nudging him for more.

  ‘Don’t be shy,’ the knight whispered, smacking his lips. ‘Marvellous! Absolutely marvellous! Fill it to the brim and leave it on the floor beside me.’

  The hapless servitor obeyed and backed, round-eyed, out of the room.

  ‘You like our mead, Sir John? Our hives are most fruitful and produce the softest and sweetest honey. I must give you a jar of that and a small tun of mead for Lady Maude.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Cranston murmured. He stared, bleary-eyed: at Athelstan and swayed dangerously on his stool. ‘A fine place,’ he mumbled. ‘I can’t see why you left it!’

  Athelstan glared back. Any minute now Sir John would nod off for his afternoon nap. He just hoped he would not fall straight off the stool for Cranston in a drunken stupor was prodigiously heavy.

  ‘Father Prior,’ he said quickly, ‘this matter of Henry of Winchester, why is there so much debate?’

  Prior Anselm, fascinated by Cranston, found it difficult to drag his eyes away from the jovial coroner who sat on the stool like a huge, burping baby.

  ‘Henry has produced a tract,’ he replied slowly, ‘in which he argues that God became man, not to save us from sin but to make us beautiful again.’

  Athelstan raised his eyebrows. ‘Father Prior, where’s the heresy in that?’

  ‘At first I thought the same, but if we accept Brother Henry’s thesis that Christ came to return us to our former state of blessedness, then where is the importance of sin? Where is the idea of divine justice and retribution?’

  Cranston belched. ‘Too much bloody sin!’ he murmured. ‘That’s all you priests talk about. How can the good God send a man to hell because he drinks too much?’

  Cranston smacked his lips and was about to launch into his own original dissertation when there was a knock at the door and the lay brother entered.

  ‘Father Prior, the rest of the Inner Chapter are waiting.’

  Athelstan, who’d been staring in disbelief at Cranston the theologian, rose to his feet. ‘Father Prior,’ he said hastily, ‘we should meet them now.’

  Anselm winked at Athelstan and led them down a maze of corridors, Cranston lumbering behind them like a fat-bellied ship in a storm. The members of the Inner Chapter, together with a bemused Brother Roger, were already seated round the table. They half-rose to their feet but Anselm gestured at them to sit down. The introductions were quickly made and Athelstan was pleased Cranston was with him. He knew he was considered a black sheep in the Order; some of these men might dislike, even object to, his presence here. Now everyone just sat fascinated by Cranston, who slumped in Prior Anselm’s chair without a by-your-leave and beamed down the table like a jovial Bacchus. Athelstan saw the sniggers and heard the whispered comments. The words ‘toper’ and ‘drunkard’, and condescending looks were passed his way.

  Whilst the prior made an embarrassed speech, Athelstan studied his brothers in Christ: William de Conches and the cheery-faced Eugenius he knew by reputation. Dangerous men with their sharp eyes and rat-trap souls, who believed the good Lord really did like to see people burnt in barrels of oil for his sake. The jovial Brother Peter and the Irishman Niall were strangers. They both seemed pleasant enough an
d Athelstan could see Peter was on the point of bursting into peals of laughter at the way Cranston now leaned, bleary-eyed, against the table. Brother Henry of Winchester sat like a statue, his dark face a mask of serenity. He smiled shyly at Athelstan and nodded. Athelstan did likewise. He had heard of this brilliant young theologian, a powerful preacher with a razor-like intellect. Poor Brother Roger beside him was a complete contrast with his foolish face and strange tufts of hair sticking up on his head. Athelstan looked at the man’s crazed eyes, the saliva drooling from his lips, and wondered if he was insane enough to commit murder.

  Anselm finished the introductions, turned and looked a Cranston but he was now half-asleep, a serene smile on his face. Athelstan coughed to divert attention, placed his ink horn parchment and quill on the table and touched them nervously He stared down at them, picked up his quill and gazed round the group.

  ‘Father Prior,’ he began slowly, ‘has asked me to come here to elucidate certain mysteries which concern the Inner Chapter This assembled on Monday the thirty-first of May. Within a week of its starting Brother Bruno slipped on the steps leading down to the crypt. On the following Saturday, last Saturday to be precise, Brother Alcuin the sacristan went into the monastery church, locking the door behind him, to pray in silence for the repose of the soul of his dead brother who lay coffined before the high altar. Is that correct, Father Prior?’

  Anselm nodded. ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Alcuin went into that church. The door remained locked, yet when Brother Roger went in, Alcuin had disappeared.’ Anselm paused and Athelstan saw the half-wit grin vacuously. ‘On Monday evening,’ Anselm continued, ‘Brother Callixtus, contrary to the rules of this house, went into the library to do private study. There, he apparently slipped from a ladder and was killed instantly.’

  ‘Coincidences!’ William de Conches snapped, crossing his arms and leaning against the table. ‘Bruno was an old man, the stairs are steep.’ He gave a shrug. ‘Alcuin went into the church and, perhaps overcome by emotion, decided to flee the monastery. He leaves, locks the church behind him and steals away like a thief in the night.’ The inquisitor glared brazenly at Athelstan. ‘He wouldn’t be the first friar to have done so and he certainly won’t be the last!’

  Athelstan gazed coolly back, trying to hide the surge of rage. I hope you are the murderer, he thought, because there is murder here. He blinked, trying to clear such malicious thoughts from his mind.

  ‘And Brother Callixtus?’ Athelstan asked. ‘He, too, fell from the ladder?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Eugenius snapped, half-turning his head, refusing to look at Athelstan.

  The friar leaned his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers, vowing not to look to his right where Cranston sat snoring like a baby. ‘Brother Henry, Brother Niall, Brother Peter?’ He smiled at the theologians. ‘You have all studied logic?’

  All three men nodded.

  ‘And the theory of probability and the possibility of coincidence?’

  Again there were nods of assent.

  ‘Then tell me, Father Prior,’ Athelstan continued, ‘how many violent deaths have there been at this monastery in the last three years? Not deaths due to natural causes but violent and unexpected deaths?’

  ‘There have been none.’

  ‘So,’ Athelstan concluded, ‘in three years before the Inner Chapter met, perhaps even in six, there are no violent deaths But this Inner Chapter meets, and within two weeks two brothers die and another disappears in mysterious circumstances. Now tell me, all of you, is that probable? Is that logical?’

  Brother Henry of Winchester smiled and shook his head.

  ‘Brother Niall, Brother Peter?’

  Their agreement with Brother Henry showed in their faces

  ‘Moreover, we have other evidence,’ Athelstan continued ‘Something Father Prior hasn’t told me.’

  Anselm gazed back in surprise.

  ‘There is something else, isn’t there, Father Prior?’

  Anselm licked his thin dry lips. Had he done the right thing, he wondered fleetingly, in bringing this young Dominican back? Athelstan was too quick, too sharp. Would the cure he proposed be worse than the disease? Was William of Conches right? Would it be best to leave these things be? Athelstan’s sea-grey eyes held his.

  ‘Yes, yes, there is,’ Father Prior replied. ‘Alcuin would never have fled the monastery. His cell was as he left it; he took no scrip, no wallet, no food, no money, no boots, nor a horse from the stables. And, if he fled, surely someone would have seen him? Secondly, Alcuin felt excluded from the Chapter. He and his close friend Brother Callixtus,’ Anselm smiled weakly ‘always did consider themselves theologians. The other brethren overheard their chatter. They dismissed the Inner Chapter as a farce. Alcuin said his friend Callixtus could prove that you, Master Inquisitor, were wasting your time.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’ William of Conches barked

  ‘He meant, monk —’ Cranston smacked his lips and opened his eyes.

  The Dominicans jumped as the coroner brought himself fully alert, stretching and looking sharply round the room for anyone laughing at him.

  ‘He meant,’ the coroner repeated, ‘that there were two monks —’ he smiled ‘— sorry, friars, who believed the Inner Chapter was a waste of time. One’s now dead, the other’s disappeared. Am I right, Father Prior?’

  Anselm nodded quickly. Cranston held up a stubby finger.

  ‘I have not studied logic but always remember the old proverb, “Just because a dog has its eyes closed, that does not mean it’s asleep”. I am Sir John Cranston, King’s Coroner in the City. Even asleep I am alert.’

  Athelstan groaned to himself. He wished Cranston would not play his trick of pretending to be a drunken toper.

  ‘Father Prior,’ Athelstan asked quickly, ‘what do you think Alcuin and Callixtus meant by saying the Master Inquisitor was wasting his time here?’

  ‘I don’t really know. The two of them were for ever in comers whispering and Callixtus was searching the library for some manuscript.’

  ‘The other one,’ Cranston rudely interrupted, glaring at Athelstan. ‘You know, the old one, the first to die – Bruno. Was he connected with the Inner Chapter?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ Eugenius answered. ‘But Alcuin, for some strange reason, always claimed he was going to the crypt at the very time Bruno stumbled and fell.’ Eugenius pulled a face. ‘I leave you to draw your own conclusions, Athelstan, as to what he meant by that.’

  Athelstan made a few notes of what had been recorded then, putting down his pen, rose and stood over Brother Roger who crouched like a frightened rabbit, his eyes fixed on the Master Inquisitor. Athelstan took the half-wit’s hand in his.

  ‘Brother Roger,’ he murmured, ‘what is it you want to tell Father Prior?’

  Roger blinked furiously and licked his lips in a way which made his tongue look too big for his mouth, making the saliva run down his unshaven chin. The sub-sacristan rubbed his head with dirty fingers.

  ‘I saw something in the church,’ he said. ‘But I can’t remember, except that there should have been twelve, or was it thirteen?’ He smiled vacuously at Athelstan. ‘I don’t know. Brother Roger forgets so quickly.’

  Athelstan shook his head and rose.

  ‘Father Prior, is there anything else we need to know? Does anyone here have further information on these mysterious occurrences?’

  A wall of silence greeted his words.

  ‘In which case, Father Prior, Sir John and I would like to withdraw. We have a chamber here?’

  ‘Yes, the servitor will show you up. Sir John and you will stay in our guest house.’

  Athelstan bit his lip. He knew Sir John wanted to stay at Blackfriars well away from Lady Maude’s sharp tongue but the idea of sharing a chamber did not appeal to Athelstan. He had travelled with Cranston on a few occasions and knew the coroner became very loquacious, especially after a good meal and a few cups of sack.

  ‘We have your leave
to go round the monastery and see what we wish?’

  ‘Of course!’

  The meeting broke up. Brother Roger half-ran from the room. Brothers Niall and Peter nodded smilingly at Athelstan. Brother Henry murmured how glad he was to see him here, but the Inquisitors totally ignored him. Prior Anselm handed Athelstan and Cranston over to the lay brother who took them out of the main monastery building, round by the church to a small guest house which overlooked the orchard. It had its own kitchen and buttery on the ground floor and a large spacious chamber above, containing two truckle beds, a chest, a prie-dieu, a table under the glazed windows, one chair, a few stools and pegs driven into the wall on which to hang up their clothes. It was clean and well swept. Fresh rushes lay on the kitchen floor sprinkled with a mixture of herbs whilst the bed chamber boasted woollen cloths on the wall and a pure wool rug stitched to a coarse backing on the floor.

  ‘Father Prior said you can join us in the refectory for a meal if you wish,’ the young servitor announced. ‘Or you may cook your own food or have something sent across from the kitchen.’

  ‘Who will bring the food?’ Athelstan asked.

  ‘I would,’ the young fellow replied. ‘My name’s Norbert. I am in the novitiate preparing for my final vows.’

  Athelstan studied Norbert’s smooth face and clear brown eyes. He looked like a man to be trusted.

  ‘You have nothing to do with the Inner Chapter?’ Athelstan asked.

  ‘Oh, no, Brother Athelstan. Too grand for me.’