Michael Jecks - The Chapel of Bones

‘I had helped Jan to lock and bar the gate, and was on my way to bed. It took me past the chapel here, and I saw that the door was ajar. I … I didn’t want to enter, sir.’

‘That is understandable,’ Stephen said drily. Not many would want to pass through the graveyard itself after dark and alone. No matter how often a man taught logic and common sense, local men would continue to believe the old superstitions; ghosts must wander about the world. The worst place was this charnel house with its concentration of mouldering bones. No doubt the older members of the Choir had been enthusiastically dinning terrible stories into all the others until they’d only go out at night in gangs of two or three. ‘Yet you did. Why?’

‘I thought that if someone had been in to steal the cross or plate, I should make sure that the Dean was told as soon as possible, sir.’

‘Most commendable,’ Stephen said. The fellow might be telling the truth at that. Or he might have gone in there to steal a gulp of Communion wine. It wasn’t unknown.

‘When I entered, I tripped over him, sir. It was dark and I just fell over him,’ Paul said, his eyes moving once more to the body which lay only a few feet from the doorway.

‘Quite — ah, yes,’ the Dean said at last. ‘Hmm. And that is how you got his blood on you?’

The Annuellar looked like he was going to be sick. ‘Yes.’

‘So how could this have happened?’ the Dean murmured to himself. ‘We shall have to investigate.’

‘The Coroner has been summoned, but I understand he is off at another death,’ Stephen said. ‘He may be away for a day or two.’

‘A sad loss,’ the Dean said.

There was no flicker of amusement on his face, but Stephen knew why his tone had such a depth of irony. The Dean and the new Coroner had never seen eye to eye. The Cathedral had its own rights and liberties, but the Coroner, who had been given his position to replace poor Sir Roger de Gidleigh, who had been killed during a rising early in the year, was ever trying to impose the King’s rules on the place. Issuing commands was no way to persuade the Dean that cooperation was to their mutual advantage.

‘Perhaps, then, we should be entitled to ask for assistance from another quarter,’ the Dean mused, and Stephen was struck, not for the first time, that when the Dean wished it, he could speak quite normally without his damned annoying hmms and hahs.

He eyed the Dean shrewdly. ‘What are you plotting, Dean?’

‘I plot nothing. I just — ah — wonder whether we ought to aid the good Coroner by asking for help from people who have already proved their use to the Church.’

‘You mean the Keeper.’

‘He did — um — help before,’ the Dean agreed.

When the call came, Sir Baldwin Furnshill was already in a foul mood, and the messenger who found him grooming his rounsey at the stableyard behind his little manor house was somewhat shocked by his reception. Baldwin was not by nature captious, but when the messenger arrived he was not his usual self.

That morning his wife Jeanne had in jest accused him of watching one of their servants over-closely, and he had denied it angrily — and guiltily. The young servant-girl had reminded him so much of the woman he had met while returning from pilgrimage in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, and the shame of his adultery still poisoned his soul.

It wasn’t his wife’s fault — he knew that. In God’s name, his crime was entirely his own responsibility. No one else could be blamed — certainly not poor Jeanne. Baldwin had been close to death, and when he recovered, he had seduced the woman. She was married, as was he, but they had both been lonely and desperate — she because her man was incapable of giving her children, he because of his brush with mortality. Both had taken comfort in the way that men and women will.

That was Baldwin’s view, after rationalising his behaviour over the weeks, and he was not of a mood to reinvestigate his motives just now, so when Jeanne joked at his apparent interest in the new maid, he had responded with anger sparked by his own shame.

‘What?’ he had shouted. ‘You accuse me of trying to get the wench to lie with me? I’ve been gone all these months, and now I’m home you seek to watch over my every gesture like a gaoler?’

He should have gone to her and comforted her, hugged her and reassured her of his love for her. That was what he would have done before, but today, even as her eyes reflected her shock and hurt, he could not do so. That would be hypocrisy, for he had been comparing the new girl with his lover, and the thoughts of her, with her long dark hair like a raven’s wing enveloping him as she gently moved above him were still too sweet. He couldn’t embrace Jeanne while thinking of another woman.

So she had turned and left the room with pain in her eyes that he should have sought to wipe away, and he, foolish and clumsy in his shame, went out to take comfort in the only way he knew, riding his horse until both had built up a powerful sweat and he had exorcised his guilt for a while. Now he was grooming the mount, swearing to himself under his breath while he wondered how to ease his wife’s feelings of hurt.

The relationship of a man with his mount was much more easy than that of a man with his wife. A woman could be demanding, petulant, irrational. Horses needed food and drink, but beyond that were biddable and easy to understand. How could a man understand a wife? Even Jeanne, the most quickwitted, intelligent and loving woman he had ever met, was still prone to ridiculous comments.

No, that wasn’t fair. Baldwin knew he was just trying to excuse his own behaviour. It was he who was at fault, not Jeanne. And suddenly he had a flare of insight as he brushed at the rounsey’s flank, and his brush was stilled in his hand.

‘Great, merciful heaven,’ he breathed.

When he had first met Jeanne, she was a widow, but she had often remarked that she never missed her first husband, because he was a bully and had lost his affection for Jeanne. He berated her, insulted her before his friends, and had taken to striking her — all because their marriage wasn’t blessed with offspring. Suddenly Baldwin understood that her pain this morning was because she thought that he might grow like her first husband, and with that thought he was about to go to her and apologise, beg forgiveness and plead with her to understand that he adored her still, when the clatter of hooves announced a visitor.

‘Yes, I am Sir Baldwin,’ he repeated testily when the rider held his message a moment longer than necessary.

‘I am sorry, sir. I had expected to find you in your hall at this time,’ the fellow said, eyeing Baldwin’s scruffy old tunic doubtfully.

Baldwin grunted and snatched the letter from him. Just then, a stableboy who had heard the noise, ran out to see who had arrived but slipped in a damp pile of leaves and fell on his rump on the cobbles.

‘Let that be a lesson not to take too much interest in matters which don’t affect you,’ Baldwin said as he slowly read the page. ‘In the meantime, fetch a broom and clear the leaves before a horse falls and breaks a leg.’ He read on. ‘Why does the good Dean ask me to attend on him in Exeter?’

‘It is a murder, Sir Baldwin. A man has been killed.’

‘I see,’ Baldwin said, and he had to make an effort not to show his relief at the offered escape. ‘Well, I shall have to loan you a fresh horse.’

‘This one will be fine to take me back to Exeter in a little while, sir.’

‘Yes, but you’ll need a fresh mount to get to Tavistock, lad.’

Simon Puttock, a tall man of seven and thirty with the dark hair and grey eyes of a Dartmoor man, slammed the door behind him and strode out into the chill air, pausing a moment to stare out over the harbour.