Priscilla Royal - Justice for the Damned

The monk denounced himself for his burst of temper that had allowed the merchant's easy victory in this battle of wills.

When the couple reached the entry door to the small chapel, however, Herbert suddenly stopped. Looking back at the monk with a thoughtful expression, he said in a tone that was almost conciliatory: "You might ask if the ghost killed him, Brother, and if her spirit had some quarrel with him."

The words were like cold water in Thomas' face, quenching all his fury in a trice. As he watched the pair leave, he stared with growing uneasiness at the sunshine streaming through the open door. If he hoped the brightness would present him with a real killer instead of murderous ghosts, he was disappointed. The light revealed only dust motes that drifted about with unruly grace.

Leaning back into her chair, Eleanor stared at Adam and Eve in the tapestry above the chamber door and pondered the news of Wulfstan's murder.

Her first reaction had been outrage. Not only was her beloved priory troubled with this vile and unlawful act, but had she not come here to escape death? For the last two years, she had been forced to deal with murders and had nearly died of a fever herself. Could God not grant her some respite?

Quickly, her indignation had turned to shame. A man had been slain like a criminal and his wife and children left to grieve. He was a laborer. Would they have food and shelter now that he was dead? How could she put her own selfish concerns first?

For this sin, she spent an hour in prayer, time she yearned to increase, but she had grown too weak to concentrate longer on God.

Despite her mortal frailty, He had been merciful, sending both understanding and the calm of forgiveness. With the peace she felt descending on her, Eleanor became convinced that God had no quarrel with her longing to escape worldly violence, nor had He deemed Amesbury Priory worthy of this foul assault. Even her wish to turn her back on Death's grinning arrogance was innocent enough.

Her failure lay in not directing her anger against the Prince of Darkness. Death had been a pawn of Satan in this murder.

Was it not her duty to deny the dark angel his pleasure in wronging the innocent? She should find a way to bring justice to the bereaved family. In so doing, she could restore order to priory life as well. Surely God would grant her the tranquility she herself prayed for later.

As she had gripped the prie-dieu and painfully pulled herself from her knees, however, she doubted her ability to do anything to resolve this issue. What a pitifully weak creature she had become! Once seated, she shook her head in despair. Nay, she did not have the strength to fight the Devil in this situation. Someone else must do it.

Suddenly her foot grazed something next to her chair and she glanced down. The object was a woven basket, fitted with a smooth cushion that was coated with brindle-colored hair. It belonged to the greyhound Prioress Ida kept as companion, a dog she had taken with her on her journey.

Eleanor studied the basket.

Her own creature, a great orange cat left at Tyndal to protect the kitchens from pillaging rodents, would never tolerate such a soft thing, she thought. Ignoring snow or wild storms, he went out each day to hunt vermin. Had he been born a man, he would have been the perfect knight, embracing any hardship in the performance of whatever his liege lord might require.

"Dare I be less dutiful than my cat?" she asked herself in a voice tinged with both humor and self-mockery. "Here I sit, in the warm comfort of these rooms, like a pampered pet. I should be ashamed!"

She rose from her chair and walked with determination to the chamber window. Leaning to her left, she could see just a bit of the River Avon now flowing with enthusiasm, free from winter's icy grasp. The Saxon cross was invisible from here, as were those strange hillocks across the river that she remembered from her youth.

Were the barrows sacred or profane? Opinions amongst adults were varied, but a younger Eleanor and her childhood friends had loved frightening each other in the dark with tales of pale spirits that danced on the mounds and longed to capture a young Amesbury novice.

Did they really believe in such phantoms, Eleanor now wondered, or was it mostly pretense? "Maybe it was both," she said aloud, "for there seems to be a place in all mortal souls that longs for ghosts even as we fear them or logic dismisses them."

Now she must seek the truth about wandering souls. Her aunt may have discounted the current ghost as both playful and quite mortal earlier, but the murder of Wulfstan had changed that. The spirit had been accused. It had ceased to be an innocent thing.

Had an angry soul escaped from Hell and killed Wulfstan? Or was the specter the diabolical creation of a mortal who wished to hide behind engendered fear to slay with greater ease? If she succeeded in discovering the truth, would she be faced with a nightmarish sight so horrible that no human could survive it, or with a craven killer deserving of the hangman's rope?

Her grip on the window weakened. She turned away and went back to sit in the chair placed near the fire. Leaning her head against the carved wood, she almost slipped into sleep, then forced her eyes open. How could she engage in battle against such foes when she could not even stay awake?

When would she regain her strength? she asked God. Was she not a grown woman? It had been many years since she had been a babe that needed a wet nurse to watch, feed, and bathe her. She had suffered from too much frailty over the last many months, not just as a result of her illness but from her sinful soul as well.

"And I am tired of it," she declared. "Weary of it all!"

Without doubt, her aunt was quite able to deal with the nature of the ghost without her help. If anyone could get that sheriff to do his job and investigate whatever lay behind the malicious acts, Sister Beatrice was the one. But Eleanor knew full well why her aunt had fashioned the original plan with Sister Anne to involve her in the investigation.

Even as a girl, Eleanor had loved solving problems, and her aunt would have known that this phantom was the very thing to strengthen her niece's hold on life. "We may all yearn for heaven," the novice mistress had once said to her, "but our hearts desire with equal passion to keep loved ones on earth." By setting her this task, her aunt had hoped to bind Eleanor firmly to the world she had almost abandoned.

Now that the specter had turned deadly, however, her aunt might change her mind about her niece's involvement, but that did not daunt Eleanor in the slightest. Her resolve hardened, and she sat upright. She had a duty to honor.

Willing herself to her feet, the prioress rose and looked toward the chamber door. Rather than just sit and muse on ashes in the hearth, she would take her sub-infirmarian's advice and start walking to improve the balance in her humors.

"It might be harder to regain health than lose it, as Anne so often says" she said, stiffening her back, "but I am a Wynethorpe, a breed as strong-willed as any of Angevin descent."

She would walk.

As the May sun warmed her face, Eleanor lost all doubt. The dead did not come back to trouble the living. Raised on the works of Saint Augustine, Eleanor had never quarreled with his logic. Even after she had attained enough education to allow some disputation, she had found him persuasive in this matter. Because of this, she was reasonably convinced that the spirit had a man's body.

Or a woman's? Before the murder, she would have concluded that this sort of jape was more likely a boy's game. Now she must ask what kind of a woman was capable of killing a strong man like Wulfstan and beheading him. Had not the shape been described as a queen or a local wife? "How very odd," she muttered. It was difficult to imagine many women able to commit this particular crime-and even harder to see how a man, one easily mistaken for a weak woman, could do so either.