Paul Doherty - The Treason of the Ghosts

‘Burghesh,’ Corbett murmured, ‘I need the keys of the house. I must search Curate Robert’s chamber.’

‘But is that right?’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Corbett agreed. ‘But Ranulf thinks that young priest is responsible for all the murders in Melford. He may well be right. Except. .’

‘Except for what?’

‘Nothing,’ Corbett replied. ‘Not for the moment. I’ll take the keys.’

Burghesh reluctantly handed them over. Corbett gestured at Ranulf to follow. They left the church and went round to the priest’s house. Corbett unlocked the door and went into the sweet-smelling passageway. The walls were half panelled, the wood gleamed and smelt of a rich polish. Corbett, having lit more candles, pushed open doors and looked around. A comfortable place, high-backed quilted chairs, tables, stools and benches. He even espied some books, tied by a chain to a shelf in the small parlour. The stairs to the bedchambers were broad and polished with small pots of herbs in the stairwell. The windows were lead-lined: some were even filled with coloured or painted glass.

Corbett went up. There were three chambers along the gallery; Bellen’s stood at the end. Corbett unlocked the door and went in. The room smelt of sweat, candlewax, rather musty, so he pulled back the shutters and opened the window. He waited whilst Ranulf lit the candles. The small cot bed under the window was unmade. Clothes and robes were scattered about. A wineskin, now empty, lay on the floor, an overturned cup beside it. On a shelf above the desk were calfskin-bound books: a psalter, a ledger containing the Calendar of Saints and the order or ritual for different Masses as well as a Book of Hours, rather tattered and faded.

Corbett sat down at the desk and sifted amongst the different pieces of parchment. He noticed some, like the parchment found on the dead priest, were inscribed with quotations from the Old Testament about sin and forgiveness. Corbett searched on. He moved his foot and kicked a small chest beneath the table and pulled this out. He emptied the contents on to the floor: a small, thick hairshirt, a flagellum or whip with strips of sharpened leather strapped to a bone handle.

‘Poor man,’ Ranulf murmured. ‘He seemed more aware of sin than he was of God’s grace.’

Corbett searched on.

‘Strange,’ he whispered.

‘What is, Master?’

‘Well, Bellen was an educated man but there are no letters or written sermons. After all, Bellen served here for a number of years. I know priests. They have homilies, commentaries, they write letters to friends and colleagues. Bellen, apparently, did none of these.’

He picked up the psalter and shook it. A piece of parchment fell out, yellow, dark with age.

‘Now, here’s one,’ Corbett declared. ‘It’s a draft letter to his bishop.’ He pulled the candle closer and studied it.

Apparently Bellen began the letter but didn’t finish it. There were the usual salutations and then the line, ‘I have something to confess in secreto. .’ but Bellen had not continued.

Corbett heard Ranulf moving around at the other side of the room.

‘He may not have been a letter writer, Master, but Bellen did like to draw.’

Corbett looked round. Ranulf had pulled out a small coffer full of rolls of parchment. He went across and watched as Ranulf sifted through them. Most of them were drawings of the church, rather clumsy and childish: the face of a gargoyle, a pillar, the entrance to the rood screen. Corbett glimpsed one and seized it. Then, hearing footsteps on the stairs, he quickly folded this up and thrust it into his wallet. Burghesh tapped on the door and came in.

‘Have you finished, Sir Hugh?’

In the light of the lantern he carried, Burghesh looked haggard and worried.

‘Yes, yes, I have finished.’

‘And is there anything? I mean,’ Burghesh stammered, ‘anything to tell us why Robert should take his own life?’

‘I don’t know.’ Corbett smiled thinly. ‘But Ranulf and I have to return to the Golden Fleece. The burgesses of Melford will have to do without our company tonight.’

He and Ranulf stepped by Burghesh, went along the gallery and down, out through the half-open front door.

‘Was it suicide?’ Ranulf asked. ‘It must have been, surely? We were all in the Guildhall.’

‘The assassin could be someone else,’ Corbett replied evasively.

‘Such as?’

‘Peterkin; Ralph, the miller’s son.’

Ranulf caught his master’s arm. ‘You don’t believe that, do you? Look around, Sir Hugh.’

He gestured across the dark, misty graveyard, the long wet grass, the slanted crosses, chipped head-stones and the dark mass of the church beyond, its door still open, the steps bathed in a small pool of light.

‘Only the dead can hear you,’ Ranulf murmured. ‘You don’t believe Bellen committed suicide, do you?’

‘No,’ Corbett replied, ‘I don’t. Get into the mind of the man, Ranulf. Bellen may have been this and he may have been that but he was still a priest, a man of God. He had a heightened sense of sin: despair and suicide are the greatest sins. Bellen was anxious but self-composed. I think he knew a lot more than he told us.’

‘But he died,’ Ranulf insisted. ‘Burghesh did find him swinging on the end of that bell rope. If Bellen was a man of God, who would regard suicide as a sin, the same is true of murder. He was strong enough; he wouldn’t have gone to his death like a lamb to the slaughter.’

‘Aye.’

Corbett stared at a hummock of grass which almost shrouded a small headstone. For a brief moment he wondered if it really mattered. All living beings on the face of God’s earth ended their lives in places like this. Elizabeth Wheelwright, Sir Roger Chapeleys, all sleeping that eternal dream.

‘It’s cold,’ Corbett declared.

‘I didn’t find Blidscote. He may have had a hand in this.’

‘I doubt it,’ Corbett replied.

He gathered his cloak around him, putting on his gloves. He listened to the lonely hoot of an owl in the trees at the far end of the graveyard.

‘I wager a tun of wine to a tun of wine, Ranulf, that Blidscote is as dead as any that lie here.’

‘Just because I didn’t find him?’

‘I wonder if we ever will. But come, Ranulf, I need to think, sit and plot.’

They went through the lych-gate. Corbett looked down the lonely lane, ghostly in the pale moonlight. He was tempted to go and see Old Mother Crauford and Peterkin but then he heard voices. People were coming up towards the church as the news spread. He needed to impose some order on what he had learnt.

They returned to the Golden Fleece, to be greeted by scowls and unspoken curses. Corbett ignored them as he stood looking around.

‘Whom do you want?’ Matthew the taverner came up.

‘Master Blidscote — I don’t suppose he’s been in tonight?’

‘No, Sir Hugh, he hasn’t.’ The taverner glanced at him sly-eyed. ‘But the news about Curate Robert is known by all. They are calling you the Death Bringer.’

‘I’m not that!’ Corbett snapped. ‘Master taverner. .’ Then he thought better of what he’d been about to say. ‘I’ll be in my chamber if anyone wishes to see me.’

Ranulf stayed, determined not to be bullied by the dark looks and seething hostility of the taproom. Once he was in his chamber, Corbett lit a candle and prepared his writing desk. He took out the scrap of parchment from the curate’s chamber and studied the outline of the triptych.

‘I wonder. .’ he murmured.

He smoothed this out, took a piece of vellum and began to write down everything he had seen, heard or learnt since arriving in Melford. The first afternoon in the crypt; the conversation there; the daubed markings on the grave; the piece of parchment pinned to the gibbet. He wrote down a list of names and, taking each one, carefully recalled how they had looked, what they had said.