Paul Doherty - The Mysterium

‘And the second reason?’

‘Ah.’ Again the King pointed to the door. ‘In the grounds stands an anchorite cell built near the curtain wall. Adelicia lives there, as she has for the last twenty years.’

‘Adelicia?’ Ranulf asked.

‘Adelicia Ippegrave, beloved sister of Boniface, former chancery clerk. She lived with her brother in Cripplegate and was a parishioner of St Botulph’s, a close friend I understand of Parson Tunstall. When her brother disappeared and Tunstall retired a broken man, Adelicia sold all her possessions and both bishop and abbot gave her permission to retire here as an ancilla Domini — handmaid of the Lord — to live the life of an anchoress.’

‘How close were Cuthbert and Adelicia?’ Ranulf asked. ‘I mean,’ he shrugged, ‘some priests have their lemans, their mistresses?’

‘I don’t know.’ The King seemed distracted. ‘Adelicia publicly condemned what had happened. She constantly protested her brother’s innocence and declared she would spend her life in prayer and fasting so that God would eventually make true judgement, and so it was, until yesterday.’ Edward pushed himself away from the table, rose and stretched, then walked to the windows, pulled back the shutters and stared into the night. ‘Yesterday was harvest time, as if the past was not buried deep enough. In Newgate, Hubert the Monk’s followers believed that those of Giles Waldene would turn King’s Approvers in return for a general pardon. A riot ensued. Later on that day, Ignacio Engleat, Evesham’s clerk, was drinking and whoring at the Comfort of Bathsheba near Queenshithe — you’ve seen what happened to him. On that very evening, the same killer perhaps, crept down the steps to the cellar beneath the corpse chapel here at Syon. Somehow he eluded both Brother Cuthbert and his guard dog, Ogadon, persuaded Evesham to lift the bar on his door, entered and cut our former justice’s throat. On leaving, the assassin just as mysteriously managed to lower the inside bar behind him. A true mystery, which is why,’ the king turned and pointed at Corbett, ‘I have summoned you here: to resolve this, to discover the truth. .’

‘If God had not been our protector, when the enemy rose against us, then they would have swallowed us alive. .’

Corbett, standing in the shadowy choir stalls of Syon Abbey, joined lustily in the melodious plainchant of the good brothers of St Benedict as they sang the morning office of lauds. Ranulf, standing beside him, suppressed a smile. Corbett liked nothing better than to sing. Ranulf, bleary-eyed, quietly thanked the Lord that his master had slept through the office of matins. He glanced up. It was still early, and the light streaming through the brilliantly painted glass window above the choir remained a dull grey. The abbey church was cold, despite the fiery braziers wheeled in under the lofty rood screen. Ranulf stared around at the pinched white faces peering out of cowls. From the tops of pillars, carved woodmen, gargoyles, babewyns, angels, saints and demons smiled and glowered. Between the pillars flashes of colour shimmered from the wall frescoes, most of them scenes from the Gospels or the life of St Benedict at Subiaco and Monte Cassino.

‘Don’t hold the sins of our fathers against us.’ The powerful chant of scores of male voices thundered like surf into the great open space created by pillars and arches, a resounding plea for God’s help.

Ranulf blinked and found the place in the psalter as the choir swept to its glorious doxology: ‘Glory be to the Father and to the Son. .’

Corbett lowered the stall and sat down as the reader approached the lectern and, in a clear voice, proclaimed the reading from the Book of Daniel. A phrase caught his attention — ‘Do not treat us because of the treasons we have committed against you’ — and he reflected on the tangle of treasons facing him. After the meeting the night before, the King had taken him aside, finger jabbing, insisting that Corbett resolve matters and remember three important issues. First, Staunton and Blandeford had been friends of Boniface. Second, both had been approached to investigate any wrongdoing by Evesham. Third, now that the Chief Justice was dead, the case against Waldene and Hubert the Monk had collapsed, as the Crown’s principal witness could never be called.

‘But the riot at Newgate?’ Corbett was sure the King was trying to ignore this.

Edward grimaced. ‘According to what I’ve learnt, Waldene and Hubert were held fast in their respective pits. Like Pilate they have washed their hands of any wrongdoing. I’ve given orders for their immediate release.’

Then the King was gone, shouting for his escort. Blandeford and Staunton also made their farewells before following the royal household down to the quayside and the waiting barge. Corbett had immediately sought out Chanson, the Clerk of the Stables, who was responsible for their horses and pack ponies. Corbett had ensured the groom had good lodgings in the abbey guesthouse before adjourning to his own sparse chamber. He had slept well, waking long before dawn. He’d washed at the lavarium and dressed in a fresh shirt, hose and leather jerkin, a welcome relief from the heavy sweaty jerkin and chainmail of the previous day.

‘Master?’

Corbett glanced up. The monks were filing out. He rose, going through the rood screen into the nave, where Chanson squatted at the base of a pillar, his bobbed hair cut, as Ranulf laughingly described, as if a pudding bowl had been overturned on his head. The groom, threading his Ave beads, glanced up, the cast in his left eye giving him a constantly humorous look. Corbett clasped his shoulder, assuring him all was well and thanking him for his work the previous day. In truth Chanson loved and lived for horses and nothing else. Weapons were more dangerous to him than any opponent, whilst his singing voice, so Ranulf asserted, would make the good brothers think that the choirs of hell were mocking their plainchant.

‘We’ll wait for the dawn Mass,’ Corbett told him. ‘Stay only if you want to.’

Chanson said he would, and Corbett left him bantering with Ranulf as he turned to the grandeur of the nave, admiring its soaring pillars, darkened transepts, and the intricacies of the carved screens outside the various chantry chapels. Humming the tune of a hymn, Corbett carefully examined the paintings. One made him smile. Apollinaria, the patron saint of tooth drawers, holding the pincers and tongs of her martyrdom. Now in heaven, she was depicted dispatching help to poor unfortunates as they sat on a row of stools, each with a tooth drawer inflicting more pain than relief. An artist who suffered toothache, Corbett reflected. He walked back up into the Lady Chapel, his mind drifting back to St Botulph’s. He had ringed that church and secured the doors: the main one, the sacristy door, the north door and the corpse door. The windows were narrow and high. The tower, with its plastered walls winding steps and small enclaves, held no secrets. At the top, the crenellated platform provided only a dizzying drop to the steep slate roof below. So, how had Boniface Ippegrave escaped? How had he managed to disappear from such a close, fast place? Corbett paused to light tapers for his wife, for their two children, Edward and Eleanor, for himself and his two companions. By the time he had finished his Ave, the Jesus bell was ringing for the dawn Mass.

Afterwards Corbett and his two companions, laughing about Chanson’s singing, broke their fast over bowls of oatmeal at the ale table in the buttery before leaving the abbey precincts. The morning was dull. Clouds blocked the sun and a sharp breeze whipped their faces as they made their way out through the Galilee porch into Goose Meadow, which stretched down to the corpse chapel of St Lazarus. Already the brothers were filing out to the outlying fields and granges. Corbett heard their chanting, so strong on the morning breeze not even the cawing of a host of rooks could drown it. The grass was still frosty and wet, the feeding ground for a nearby warren of rabbits, who disappeared in darting flashes of brown and white. Ogadon, on guard outside the entrance of the chapel, close to the ledge beneath the bell, lumbered to his feet growling.