Paul Doherty - The Mysterium

Corbett handed the piece of manuscript back and stood listening. The sun was now full and strong, and wood pigeons had began their insistent cooing, chorused by the sheer lucid song of a blackbird. He breathed in the fragrance of the morning, the sweet smell of woodsmoke, fresh grass and the faint essence of oils and herbs.

‘So you believe your brother was innocent?’

‘Yes.’ The reply came haltingly. ‘Yes, I do, even though Boniface was so secretive, so furtive.’

‘Mistress, his conduct was highly suspicious.’

‘True. I can hardly blame Evesham for being so hot in his insistence that he was guilty.’

‘And your brother’s disappearance?’

‘Now that is a mystery. I know St Botulph’s, its every corner and cranny. Boniface could not have escaped through a window; they are too narrow, too high. No secret passageways exist; whilst every door was closely guarded.’

‘And his first escape,’ Corbett asked, ‘when he fled to St Botulph’s? If Evesham was so hot against him, how did that happen?’

‘I asked Brother Cuthbert about that. It was logical. Boniface knew the runnels and alleyways of Cripplegate. He acted all stricken and stumbled. Evesham had gone on ahead, pushing aside the crowds, whilst his bailiffs escorted my brother. I understand they had another prisoner. The crowd was milling about. The bailiffs went to pick Boniface up and he suddenly broke free, fleeing through the open door of a shop, or so Brother Cuthbert learnt from parishioners who were there.’

Corbett nodded in understanding. Every day in London criminals were arrested, escaped and fled for sanctuary. It was a common hazard. The narrow streets, the alleyways and runnels, doors and gates flung open, the crowds thronging about, whilst the deep dislike of bailiffs and beadles was commonplace. Yet Boniface had fled. Was that sign of guilt? Was he a killer, a skilled, sly, secretive man who lived two lives?

‘Are you finished, clerk?’

‘You seem eager to be rid of me.’

‘No, Sir Hugh.’ Adelicia laughed. ‘I sense what you are, a good man as well as a royal clerk.’ She paused. ‘If there is such a mixture. Yes, you are good, one who has not yet sold his soul.’

‘And your brother, Boniface, did he sell his?’

‘God knows, Sir Hugh. I can see, or rather sense, your mind spinning like a wheel. Was Boniface the Mysterium? What happened to him? All a great mystery,’ she continued in a whisper. ‘I shall think, reflect and sleep. Perhaps the ghosts of yesteryear will return. If I remember anything, I shall tell you.’

‘And Brother Cuthbert, do you and he ever meet?’

‘Of course we do, especially on a warm summer’s evening when the sun is setting and Goose Meadow is bathed in God’s glory. We sit on the grass, hold hands and remember happier days. Farewell, Sir Hugh.’

The shutters across the window closed abruptly. Corbett shrugged and walked back through the trees to meet Ranulf striding across the frost-glistening grass, clapping his hands to keep them warm and loudly assuring Corbett that Father Abbot confirmed all that Brother Cuthbert had told them. The peace and harmony of the abbey had not been disturbed, not a jot or a tittle, until Abbot Serlo had been roused after his dawn Mass with the news that Evesham would not answer any knocking.

‘Gone to God,’ murmured Corbett, staring up at a crow circling above him. ‘Gone to God’s tribunal now, Ranulf, to join Ignacio Engleat. Lord knows the indictment they’ll have to answer.’ He breathed out, half listening to the faint sounds of the abbey, the drifting words of a cantor, the muffled clatter of cart wheels and the peal of a handbell being rung along the cloisters. ‘Ranulf, who murdered Ignacio Engleat? Who crept in here with subtle wit and cunning mind to execute Lord Evesham? Why the secrecy, why the mystery?’

‘Brother Cuthbert?’ Ranulf stared hard at his master. Corbett was thinking and Ranulf relished what was about to happen. The pursuit would begin with Corbett the lurcher, the staghound. He’d twist and turn like the hunter he was until his prey was trapped, penned and marked for slaughter.

‘You think so?’ Corbett mused. ‘Possible, Ranulf. Brother Cuthbert and Adelicia could be the murderers, at least of Evesham. They certainly had good cause to hate him, and yet. .’

‘And yet what?’

Corbett’s eye was caught by the twinkle of light from one of the gilded windows of the abbey church.

‘Too simple,’ he murmured. ‘Sin is like a fox, Ranulf, it leaves a stinking trail that even the years cannot wash out or hide. A killer has now taken up that scent. Ancient sins, long-buried evil, a tangle of poisonous roots are now festering. There is a time and season under heaven for everything, or so Scripture would have us believe. The year’s thawing is over, long gone, harvest beckons, vengeance time is here.’

‘And so, master?’

‘Look,’ Corbett shook himself free of his reverie, ‘we’ll return to London. Ranulf, you and Chanson are off to the Comfort of Bathsheba at Queenshithe, to establish what actually did happen to Ignacio Engleat.’

‘And you, master?’

‘I am going back down the tunnel of the years. I’ll return to the chancery, to the pouches of the Secret Seal, and see what seeds of sin I can detect there.’

The Teller of Tales, as the assassin called himself, his hooded face dirty behind its garish mask, stood on the plinth that according to the city worthies was once part of a pagan temple. He was not interested in that; he was carefully watching the great open expanse before the towering iron-clad doors of Newgate. It was a filthy, sombre building, and the stench from behind its grey-stone walls curled and wafted everywhere, an odour of dirt, despondency and despair. At the close-barred windows of the soaring towers either side of the great gate, mad, frenetic faces, hair all tangled, peered greedily out at those now assembling on the cobbled bailey before the prison. The gathering crowd cursed and shouted as they slipped and slithered on the wet offal and blood that poured from the nearby fleshers’ stalls. A motley collection of rogues, cutpurses, counterfeiters, cunning men, coney-catchers, rifflers and ribauds was congregating to greet Giles Waldene and Hubert the Monk. An abrupt proclamation regarding these miscreants had been issued by the catchpoles from the steps of the Guildhall. The two riffler leaders, with no real evidence against them, were to be released immediately. Everyone recognised the truth. Lord Evesham’s murder meant the Crown’s case against them had collapsed, whilst no proof could be lodged that either gang-leader had been party to the recent bloody riots at the prison. In fact both rogues had been lodged deep in Newgate’s pestilential pits and had nothing to do with the malefactors whose tarred and pickled heads now decorated the spikes high on the prison walls. The hour had been set. Waldene and Hubert were to be released after the bells proclaimed terce. Gossips talked of reconciliation between the two factions after the recent riot. Already a chamber had been hired for the consequent festivities in the spacious pink and black-timbered tavern the Angel’s Salutation, which stood on the corner of a crooked alleyway close to the prison concourse.

The Teller of Tales had tried to divert the attention of passersby with a spine-tingling story of the Strigoi, the undead, trooping, according to miraculous report, along the old Roman road to the north of the city. No one had really been interested; indeed neither was the Teller of Tales, for his heart was intent on murder. He’d chosen the time and place most carefully. Newgate was a surge of colour and noise. Silversmiths’ apprentices paraded a gorgeous mazer to entice would-be customers to visit their masters’ shops in Cheapside. Butchers yelled the price of sweet duckling, pigs and fat juicy capons. Whoremongers, taken up by the bailiffs, heads all shaven and carrying their breeches, were being paraded to the strident wailing of bagpipes towards the stocks. A night-walker who had kidnapped a child so as to enhance her begging had been fastened to a punishment post, her filthy skirts raised so that burly baileys could lash her grimy buttocks. The belled pigs of St Anthony’s hospital, the only pigs allowed to wander, snuffled the piles of ordure heaped close to a horse trough. Nearby a jackanapes was being ducked for daring to pass through the Skinners’ quarter saying ‘meow’, a public insult to that worthy guild. Once he was punished, a line of drunks and roisterers also waited to be drenched in the filthy water.