Paul Doherty: The Mysterium

‘Father Abbot, Father Abbot.’ Cuthbert leaned against the entrance to the chantry chapel, gasping for breath. ‘Father Abbot,’ he repeated, ‘you’d best come. Walter Evesham, he cannot be roused. I cannot wake him; there’s no-’

Abbot Serlo whispered to his altar server, who hurried off, whilst the abbot followed Cuthbert out of the abbey church. It was a crisp, icy morning, the sky greying, the last stars disappearing, in the east a red glow. Serlo closed his eyes.

‘ Deo Gratias ,’ he whispered. The earth would dry and the brothers could break the soil, but first this. .

The abbey buildings rose black against the sky. Already members of the community were busy. Brother Odo the sacristan, with his great bunch of keys, was leading a line of novices, each with a shuttered lantern, around the abbey. Candles, lamps and tapers were to be lit, chains unlocked, gates opened and treasures checked. As Father Abbot passed, the brothers, heads bowed, whispered, ‘ Pax tecum ’ — peace be with you. Abbot Serlo replied, his eyes still on the hobbling figure of Cuthbert, busy leading him through the cloisters where the gargoyles grinned evilly in the murky light. They went out across the herb and flower plots into the Paradise of Benedict, the main garden of the abbey, its hoed banks greening with the first show of spring. As they reached Goose Meadow, stretching down to the curtain wall of the abbey and the Chapel of St Lazarus, which now served as the abbey’s corpse house or coffin chamber, the wet grass chilled Abbot Serlo’s feet, the water seeping over the thick leather soles of his sandals in between the sturdy thongs. Serlo hid his irritation. Cuthbert would not have come unless this was serious. Not for the first time he quietly wished that the disgraced Chief Justice Walter Evesham had chosen another abbey or monastery in which to seek sanctuary and withdraw from the world.

They passed a copse of trees and stepped on to the path leading down to St Lazarus’ chapel, which had stood here long before the abbey was ever built. According to Brother Cornelius the chronicler, it had been built by the Saxons. A previous abbot had tiled the roof with costly red slate and replaced the main door, yet it still remained an ancient place, its nave of coarse grey ragstone, windows mere arrow-loops, protected by shutters. Serlo paused to catch his breath and take in the view. He had always wanted to do something about this forbidding, sombre place built close to the curtain wall overlooking the river. Cornelius claimed the ancient chapel had once been called ‘the Church of the Drowned’, a place where corpses dragged from the nearby Thames could be brought. Stories and legends swirled of how the chapel was still haunted by the earthbound souls of those who’d drowned, either by suicide or the victims of accident or murder.

‘Father Abbot?’

Serlo broke from his reverie. Cuthbert was looking strangely at him.

‘Father Abbot?’ he repeated.

‘Of course.’ Serlo smiled. He followed Cuthbert, the custos mortuorum — the keeper of the dead — off the grass and along the narrow, pebble-dashed path. Near the main door lounged Ogadon, Cuthbert’s guard dog. As the two robed figures approached, the great mastiff lumbered to his feet and walked as far as his clinking chain would permit. Serlo patted the the dog’s black head and followed Cuthbert into the church.

It was a grim place, Serlo reflected, with its squat drum-like pillars and narrow windows through which slivers of morning light pierced. Torches flickered at the far end. Above the stark altar on its dais rose a huge bronze crucifix flanked by thick purple candles, their flames dancing in the breeze. Charcoal casks spluttered, their smoke perfumed with sprinkled incense. Pots and jars of crushed herbs were ranged along the walls in a futile attempt to hide the cloying smell of decay. Down the nave of the little chapel stood nine great tables in rows of three. On two lay corpses draped in black and gold cloths with a red cross sewn in the centre. Serlo recalled that one of these was old Brother Edmund who used to work in the infirmary; the second was a beggar found near the great gatehouse. He took the proffered pomander, and Cuthbert led him across the gloomy nave and down steep steps to the cellar beneath, where a paved passageway, lit by torches, stretched past three cells into the darkness. Two had their doors open; the third, at the far end, was heavily barred by a wooden beam held firmly in the iron clasps fixed to the oaken lintel on either side. Cuthbert led him to this.

‘I just knocked,’ the old lay brother whispered. ‘Father Abbot, I just knocked, but no sound. I looked through the grille, but the light is poor.’

Helped by Cuthbert, Serlo climbed on to a wooden tub and peered through the iron grille fixed into the top of the door. Inside the cell it was dark; there were no windows, only a small slit high in the wall, wafer thin, no broader than a man’s finger, allowing a crack of light through the limestone brick at the base of the chapel wall. No lamp or candle burned, the murky darkness betrayed nothing except a shape sitting at a table.

‘Lord Walter,’ Serlo called. ‘Lord Walter!’ He banged on the door.

‘My lord abbot, perhaps he’s suffered a seizure?’ Cuthbert whispered. ‘His humours were much disturbed.’

‘He’s no prisoner, brother, despite what the King says.’ Serlo breathed heavily, stepping down from the tub. He kicked this away just as other lay brothers, summoned by the altar server, hurried down the steps shouting greetings to Brother Ogadon to quieten his grumbling bark. They crowded into the narrow passageway even as their abbot removed the outside bar and tried the door.

‘It is also secured from within,’ whispered Cuthbert. ‘My lord Walter always insisted on that. A bar is fastened to the inside lintel; it can be swung down. I don’t know why. .’

‘Break it down!’ Serlo ordered.

Cuthbert stood away.

‘Fetch what you have to.’ Serlo gestured at the door. ‘Just break it down.’

The lay brothers organised themselves. Stout logs were brought. Abbot Serlo went up and knelt before the bleak altar in the corpse chapel. He recited the requiem for those who lay there and tried to suppress a deep chill of apprehension. Something was wrong. The King would not be pleased. Lord Walter Evesham had been a high and mighty justice, the terror of outlaws and wolfsheads, be it in the cavernous darkness of Westminster Hall or out on commissions of eyre, delivering jails and decorating scaffolds and gibbets the length and breath of the kingdom. Then he had fallen like a shooting star. The King had returned from Scotland to investigate matters in the city. Lord Walter had been weighed in the balance and found very much wanting. Serlo lowered his head, listening to the battering against the door below. Walter Evesham had fled here seeking sanctuary. He’d proclaimed that he was tired of the world, exchanging his silk and samite robes for the coarse hair shirt and rough sacking of a Benedictine recluse and demanding shelter and protection. Edward of England had openly jeered at this so-called conversion, but allowed his former justice to stay on one condition: that he never left the grounds or precincts of the Abbey of Syon. That had been two weeks ago. .

The crashing below and the sounds of ripping wood brought Serlo to his feet. Brother Cuthbert clattered up the steps.

‘Father Abbot, Father Abbot, you’d best come.’

Serlo hurried to join him. Down in the eerie vaulted passageway, the lay brothers clustered together like frightened children. The door to the former justice’s cell had been ripped off its leather hinges and lay to one side, the wood around it much damaged where the inside bar had been torn away. The abbot stood on the threshold. A former soldier, a knight who’d served in Wales and along the Scottish march, he recognised, as he would an old enemy, the reek of violent death and spilt blood. He took the lantern horn from Cuthbert’s rheumatic hands, and walked through the shattered doorway and across to the table. The pool of dancing lanternlight picked out all the gory horror.Walter Evesham, former Chief Justice in the Court of King’s Bench and Lord of the Manor of Ingachin, lay slumped, head slightly to one side, his throat cut so deep it seemed like a second mouth. Blood caked Evesham’s dead face and drenched the top of his jerkin, forming a dark crust over the table and the pieces of jewellery littered there.