Paul Doherty - The Mysterium

Corbett sat down and picked up the scrap of parchment with the square of letters.

‘I stand in the centre,’ he whispered. ‘That is the E. I point to the four corners: A, C, G, I.’ He wrote out the four letters, rearranging them several times but could still make no sense of it. ‘I should be back at Leighton,’ he whispered. ‘God knows, Maeve, I miss you so much. I’m tired. I want to sleep.’

He thought of Staunton of Westminster, of himself, Corbett of Leighton, of Boniface of Cripplegate, Blandeford of the Guildhall, the way people defined themselves by the place they called home. He glanced down at the letter E and those in the four corners and his mouth went dry. He rummaged amongst his papers and found what he was looking for. He studied it carefully, then went back to those four letters.

‘The Land of Cockaigne,’ he whispered. ‘The world turned topsy-turvy, the hunted becomes the hunter, the righteous the wicked.’ He snatched up a piece of parchment, took a pen and listed the evidence.

Item: The Mysterium was a chancery clerk.

Item: The Mysterium used the great hoarding at St Paul’s.

Item: The Mysterium gloated about his work.

Item: The Mysterium’s murderous campaign ended with Boniface Ippegrave’s disappearance.

Item: Boniface Ippegrave maintained his innocence until now.

‘No, no,’ he murmured, and crossed out ‘until now’. ‘Go back,’ he told himself. ‘Go back twenty years and stay there. That’s where the truth is.’

Item: The Mysterium — Boniface Ippegrave — was captured red-handed with his accomplice in that tavern in Southwark.

Item: Only after that did Walter Evesham claim he knew how the Mysterium carried out his dreadful crimes.

Item: Boniface Ippegrave was taken into custody but escaped.

Item: Boniface Ippegrave remained in sanctuary for two days at St Botulph’s. No one visited him except the parson, Evesham and Engleat. He received his mother’s ring from his sister and scrawled his proclamation of innocence on a page of the Book of the Gospels.

Item: On the third day, Boniface Ippegrave disappeared, but how?

Corbett glanced up. ‘I think I know,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘Yes, I’m sure I do, but how does it all fit?’

He rose and paced the chamber, lost in thought, trying to track down the assassin who’d prowled the city some twenty years ago. He kept returning to the table, fingering the scraps of parchment, scribbling down notes. He was certain that he had a hypothesis, but how could he link it to present events? He gathered his cloak about him, wheeled the brazier closer to his chair and sat down. Staring into the sparkling coals, sifting the evidence, his eyes grew heavy again. He fell asleep, and when he woke, the light outside was greying. He went to the garderobe, then returned and washed himself at the lavarium, and as he dried his hands and face, he glimpsed the ring of keys to St Botulph’s. He had to go there.

‘St Botulph’s,’ he exclaimed. ‘You are truly a house of secrets! I need to search you to test my hypothesis.’

He sat and wrote a short letter to Ranulf, then another to Sir Ralph Sandewic at the Tower. Dressing quickly and preparing himself, he went out along the gallery and down to the bailey. The early morning was bitterly cold; a river mist still hung heavy. Torches glowed. Muffled sounds echoed through the murky gloom. Corbett loosened his sword in its scabbard. Danger threatened, he sensed it. It was always so. The hunt was on! The assassin, clever and subtle, must have realised Corbett had not given up. The killer would ponder his own survival. What chance did he have? If Corbett closed and trapped him for such heinous crimes, a hideous punishment awaited, being forced up a ladder to slowly strangle to death on a Smithfield scaffold. Corbett murmured a prayer for help.

‘It is your face I seek, O Lord, hide not your face. Do not dismiss your poor servant in anger, for you have been my saving help.’

He felt the church keys weighing heavily in the pocket of his cloak. He would not go there alone. Nightmare memories warned him against that!

‘ Aux aide! Aux aide! ’ he shouted in Norman French, and was immediately answered by the rattle of armour as the serjeant-at-arms and two archers came hurrying through the mist.

‘Sir Hugh, what is the matter?’

‘Nothing.’ Corbett grasped the serjeant’s shoulder. ‘Nothing for now, but listen.’ He handed over the two letters. ‘Send one of your archers to my colleague Ranulf-atte-Newgate; rouse him wherever he is. The other to Sir Ralph Sandewic at the Tower. Both are urgent dispatches. You,’ he pointed at a bearded archer whose hood almost covered his face, ‘are to come with me to St Botulph’s, where we’ll meet the rest.’

A short while later, Corbett and the archer, who introduced himself as Griffyths from South Wales, clambered into a wherry near King’s Steps. The two bargemen pushed away, hugging the bank along the misty, choppy river. Corbett sat in the stern, the archer beside him. Griffyths wanted to talk, but Corbett remained lost in his own thoughts, so the archer turned his attention to the bargemen, engaging them in good-natured banter, loudly asking if Englishmen did have tails and was it true that one Welshman was worth at least a dozen English? Corbett half listened. The river was shrouded in mist, bitterly cold, and very little could be seen except for the lantern lights of ships and torches flaring along the bank. Here and there scaffolds rose, grim spectacles, some decorated with corpses, others empty, awaiting what would be offered later in the day. Corbett recalled Fleschner hanging from that iron bracket, Waldene and Hubert the Monk slaughtered in the tavern chamber. All these squalid deaths were surely linked to what happened twenty years ago, but for the moment, Corbett did not want to speculate further. St Botulph’s would hold the key.

They disembarked at Queenshithe and made their way up through the still empty streets. The mist was like a veil, abruptly parting to reveal hideous sights. Beggars, faces distorted, their bodies displaying horrid wounds, scuttled out on all fours on their makeshift little carts, hands gripping wooden pegs as they clattered across the cobbles whining for alms. Corbett disbursed some pennies and moved on. Whores and their pimps still searched for customers. Night-walkers and dark-dwellers gathered at the mouths of alleyways and watched the two men pass. The icy weather had hardened the track beneath their feet, but the stench was still offensive, and Corbett glanced away at the sight of mangled corpses of cats and dogs struck down by carts. Occasionally a troop of bailiffs crossed their path pursuing a malefactor, their cries of ‘Harrow! Harrow!’ muffled by the mist. Griffyths had now found his tongue again and inveighed stridently against the night-walkers, dismissing them as ‘a dirty, everlastingly gruesome assembly, not a Christian amongst them, with their base dark faces, nothing more than swift, ravening demons’.

Corbett smiled to himself. The Welshman was most eloquent in his dismissal of all they saw.

‘This is,’ Griffyths declared, ‘the most hideous depths of hell, Sir Hugh. I’d give a year’s wage to be back in the loveliness of South Wales.’

Corbett didn’t answer. He remembered the ‘loveliness’ of South Wales! Trees clustered together, the light barely piercing them, the grass underneath slippery. He recalled waiting with men-at-arms and archers for the Welsh bowmen with all their hideous skill to appear and loose their shafts, a rain of death clattering against their armour before disappearing as swiftly. .

‘You’ve served in Wales, Sir Hugh?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you never met the Mouldwarp? He is an ugly-coloured, dismal, lurking character with a hump. He wears a ragged thread-bare cloak and his every limb is blacker than a blacksmith’s.’