Michael Jecks - The Outlaws of Ennor

She nodded, but did not turn or acknowledge him. ‘Well?’

‘Luke — is it true about him and her?’

‘It’s true that he told her to get a divorce.’

‘I have seen how he stares at the women about here. Do you think he wants a priest’s mare for himself?’

‘How should I know? It wouldn’t be a surprise, would it? Look at Tedia. She’s attractive enough, isn’t she?’

David hissed, ‘That’s no excuse! Luke is a priest; he shouldn’t be tempting a woman from her husband!’

She threw him a look of annoyance. ‘You know how Isok and she have tried. They have done all in their power to try to consummate their marriage, but he can’t. That’s all there is to it. Tedia can’t wait for ever. She needs a man to fill her loins.’

David nodded abstractedly. His concerns did not lie with Tedia alone. He was worried about his own wife, Brosia. Although he dared not accuse her, because her tongue could be vicious, he was sure she was wagging her arse in the priest’s direction. ‘So she wants to leave him?’

‘Why — are you thinking of taking Tedia?’ Mariota said, and then laughed aloud at his expression. ‘Have no fear! I won’t gossip like some. No, she has her eyes elsewhere, David. Fear not that she’ll find someone.’

‘Like whom?’ he asked, his mind still fixed upon his own wife with a desperate unhappiness.

‘Why, surely that man in her home is as good as any!’ Mariota said, and with another bellow of laughter, she waddled away.

David essayed a weak smile, and then glanced back at the house. Brosia was a soft-looking, calm woman, but when angry, she was a vixen. She would bite his head off if he were to accuse her of trying to persuade Luke into her bed, but David was sure that she was already trying out the priest. Without the proof of his own eyes, she could reject his accusations, and make his life hell in the bargain, and the sad truth was, he daren’t risk such harmony as existed in their home by accusing her without proof. Most men were masters in their own homes; David was ruler of the men of St Nicholas and the ships that were born in St Nicholas, but a slave in his own home.

His eyes were anxious at first, but then they hardened, and when he finally made his way along the roadway towards the priory, his mind was made up. Whether Luke or another man, it mattered not a whit. No man would shame David’s community by taking someone else’s wife. Even if he was a priest.

In the priory, David’s master, Cryspyn of Morwelham, rubbed his eyes with the weariness of a man who had been awake all night.

It was not good enough that the storm should have hit the island so early in the evening, disrupting the sleep of monks who would have to rise in the middle of the night to pray and begin the devotions of the day, but as soon as their prayers were done, all the exhausted brothers had been forced to rush down to their oxen, their sheepfolds, and the poor gardens which contained all that they depended on for food. And then the roof had blown off the storehouse near the brewery, threatening all their barley. If they had not got to it immediately and carried the well-sewn and wrapped sacks away, their supplies would have been terribly diminished, and that could have spelled disaster for the convent. They needed the ale that the barley represented. Without it, they might be forced to leave St Nicholas Island until they could replenish the stores to a sufficient level. The Abbot, Robert Champeaux, would have been displeased with an evacuation, but the place was run on a tightly bound purse as it was, and there were simply not enough men to keep it going. The corollary to that was, that if there were more monks, there would be too many mouths to feed.

Cryspyn sighed. This was his constant worry. The place was perfect for them. Windswept, barren, it had been a wasteland when his brethren had arrived here two hundred years or more ago, during the Abbacy of Osbert. A monk called Turold had been sent here then with some brothers to see to the support of the churches.

In his own time, Cryspyn had seen why it was necessary to have men on the ground here. Raiders had come and stolen what they could, the weather had ruined many of the chapels on St Elidius, Bechiek, St Sampson and, of course, on St Nicholas itself, and all in all, coming here to the islands was not looked upon as a gift or honour, but more as a penance for some form of misdemeanour.

Cryspyn wouldn’t mind, except no one ever bothered to tell him why people were sent here. Obviously he knew why he was here, but he felt he would rather like to know if the priests and brothers were known to be rampant sodomites or womanisers. Either could have spelled at best embarrassment on islands like these. Damn it, if the good Abbot was going to send blasted fornicators here, the least he could do was warn his representative. Cryspyn had a good mind to write him a stiff letter. Except, as he acknowledged with a sigh, the Abbot was more capable than him at dictating terse and cutting letters. Not that he could exactly threaten much to Cryspyn. Once he’d arrived here, he had realised that this was about as bad as things could get. As he deserved.

He stood and went to the window, musing sadly.

It was many years ago now that he had committed that evil murder. He had not intended to kill. He had been waiting for her , but she brought the man into the chamber with her.

Their passion was so intense, it had scarred him for life. He had stepped from his hiding place as they flung away their clothing, and they were all but naked when he put his hand to his sword. Not that they noticed or cared. She was bending before the man, while he was looking down at her, a smile on his face … that smile ! At the time Cryspyn thought it was the smile of a satyr, a foul, demonic thief of his woman’s heart, and it made his blood steam. In a furious passion, he lifted his sword and ran at them, the blade whirling and hissing, and when the man glanced up, his look of passion and adoration changing in an instant to one of terror, he lifted his forearm to protect himself. It served no purpose. As poor Sara shrieked in horror, pushed out of the way by her lover, the sword sank through the arm like an axe through lard, and carried on to sweep off the man’s head and half his shoulder. Then the body walked forward jerkily for three paces, until it collapsed against Cryspyn. He had toppled, appalled, gripping the corpse as the gore and blood fountained over him, filling his nose and mouth and eyes, marking him forever as a man who had killed unnecessarily. He had murdered a woman’s lover through jealousy.

Which was why he was here. In his nostrils he could still smell that foulness, the blood of an innocent victim.

Looking out, he could almost forget his past crime. The weather had improved miraculously over the morning, and the sun sparkled on a clear blue sea that looked as though it was incapable of rising in waves ten foot tall and overwhelming the whole of the northern side of his island. That was a thought which sent a shiver through his delicate frame.

Cryspyn was almost forty-five now and had lived here on this obscure rock in the middle of the sea for more than fifteen years. It had taken its toll on his frame. When he had met Sara, he had been a chunky young man, with a cheery smile for all who met him. That happy-go-lucky, healthy fellow had grown to be an embittered monk with a pronounced stoop, a frowning squint because of his poor eyesight, and hunched shoulders as though he permanently felt the cold.

Someone had once told him that the islands were so fruitful because of the weather. Well, clement it might be in a decent bloody year, but this last had shown the emptiness of the comment. The winds had scoured the place through the last winter, the rains had fallen throughout the summer two years ago, devastating the crops and making all the islanders have to depend on any fish they could catch or starve, and now this storm. It was almost more than he could take. He had a mind to beg of the Abbot that he be taken back to serve as an ordinary brother at Tavistock again. Tavistock! The mere name brought to mind a quiet chuckling river, the steady thump of the water-wheel groaning its way through the latest batch of grain, the odour of fresh bread each morning, the divine scent of ale brewing, the smell of a fresh wine, the flavour of the heady Guyennois exploding on the tongue. He could all but taste it if he closed his eyes.