Michael JECKS - The Traitor of St Giles

‘Tired, my love?’ he asked.

She yawned in answer. ‘The journey was not so tiring as I had expected, but it is exhausting to have to meet so many people whom I have never seen before.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Especially when some of them are dead.’

‘It would be nice to be able to accept what the Coroner said,’ Simon said.

‘Very nice,’ Baldwin said scathingly. ‘But how can one trust that fool’s judgement? A man who thinks a Templar could have his knife stolen and be stabbed with it!’

‘Couldn’t he, though?’ Jeanne wondered. Her attention was wandering. Edgar had caught her eye again and now he gestured urgently, his lips pursed with concern. ‘Husband, excuse me a moment. I must see what Edgar wants.’

She left them speculating on the reasons for Sir Gilbert’s death and crossed the yard.

‘My Lady, I am very sorry to have interrupted you, but I thought it better that you should help than that I should call for another.’

‘Why, what is it, Edgar?’

‘Petronilla.’

She followed him out to a little storeroom. Inside she could hear drunken sobbing. Glancing at Edgar, she saw him nod slowly.

‘Something happened to her today,’ he said.

Jeanne muttered a curse and entered. Edgar followed more slowly. He felt unqualified to assist with the girl. He had seen how the Coroner had molested her, and was sure that the last thing the girl needed was another man offering her sympathy.

The two women soon appeared, Petronilla weeping and leaning on her mistress’s arm. Jeanne had to ask. ‘Edgar – are you responsible for this?’

Edgar blinked in shock, but it was Petronilla who threw out a hand in extravagant denial. ‘Of course it wasn’t Edgar, my Lady. He saved me from him. Edgar’s my hero.’

Jeanne sighed at the slurred voice. ‘Well, your hero can help me take you to your room. I can’t get you there alone in this state.’

She was right. Edgar took one arm while Jeanne kept hold of the other, but even then it was hard to half-carry Petronilla back to the women’s rooms where she was supposed to be sleeping. In the end Jeanne stopped, breathless. ‘Edgar, if we get her to the room she’ll wake everyone else. Help me put her in the hayloft. She can sleep there the night. Then you go and tell Baldwin that I’ll stay with her most of the night, and see the child’s nurse. Stephen must stay with her tonight, not Petronilla.’

Soon they were hauling her up the small staircase to the low loft.

‘It’s love that matters,’ Petronilla declared as Edgar shoved her rump upwards.

Jeanne pulled her arms, snarling, ‘There’ll be little love around here if you aren’t silent, my girl.’

‘My little son loves me,’ Petronilla continued, throwing her hand out emphatically and nearly sending the three of them back down the ladder.

Snatching at her wrist Jeanne spoke through gritted teeth. ‘That’s fine because right now your mistress certainly doesn’t!’

‘He loves his mama. Not that Coroner, though, the filthy bastard!’

Edgar pushed but the girl was resisting. Glancing up he saw that Lady Jeanne was near the end of her tether; he made a quick decision. Stepping back, he allowed Petronilla to topple a little. As she gave a short squeak of alarm, he set his shoulder to her waist and caught her about the knees, climbing quickly up the ladder and depositing her giggling in a thick pile of hay. She rolled over and tried to stand. ‘Again! That was fun.’

Jeanne groaned as the girl made as if to throw herself down the ladder. Edgar grabbed her at the last moment and lowered her back onto the hay.

‘Lady, you should go to bed.’

‘She can’t be left a moment, can she?’

Edgar shook his head.

‘This was all the fault of that Coroner?’

Edgar explained how he had found them and Jeanne scowled angrily. ‘Molest my maid, would he?’

‘I think it would be best to leave the matter,’ Edgar said. ‘If you accused him, he could make life difficult. Better to let things lie. I shall see that Petronilla is safe from him.’

‘He’s my hero. Edgar must love me too!’ Petronilla gurgled happily from the straw.

On the morning of St Giles’s feast, it was a sad little group which attended the church for Sir Gilbert’s burial service. Father Abraham stood before them and began speaking in a quiet, low monotone.

‘ Dirige Dominus meus in conspectu tuo viam …’

Baldwin found it was difficult to concentrate. He had decided to attend with Jeanne to represent the Order which he and Sir Gilbert had both served, and yet now he was here he hardly knew why.

He had known Sir Gilbert from the time when the other knight had been at the Temple in Paris. Baldwin had been there as well, and the two men had been on nodding acquaintance. Nothing more than that, but it meant that there was a certain confusion of emotions as he stood watching the priest before the large hearse, the metal frame sitting over the dead bodies with the dark, threadbare cloth of the parish pall hanging over and concealing the corpses beneath.

Standing there at the final ceremony of a man who had once been a comrade in arms, a companion warrior-monk in his Order, Baldwin felt a rush of grief that threatened to overwhelm him for a moment. It was as if the death of this man was symbolic of the end of the Order which they both had served; as if Baldwin himself was the sole survivor of their warrior caste. It made him feel exceptionally lonely.

The service ended before he was ready, his mind still whirling with despair. He wished he could have told Jeanne about his membership of the Templars and about his present desolate mood but it was difficult: although he trusted to her solid commonsense he had never discussed the Templars with her. Many people believed the Church’s malicious propaganda against the Order and Baldwin could not tell how she would respond to hearing that he himself had been one. In any case, one look at her this morning told him that after sitting up much of the night with an inebriated maidservant, his wife was in no mood to listen.

Jeanne and he walked out with the bearers and stood staring down at the hole in the ground. The plot was not far from the church but was not in the yard itself.

Baldwin and his wife waited as the coffinless body wrapped in its cheap winding-sheet was rested in the bottom of the grave. Hick, who today was the gravedigger, wandered over and gazed down speculatively, leaning on his shovel. The priest was still in the churchyard seeing to the similarly shrouded figure of a woman. Baldwin gathered from listening to others witnessing her interment that she had died in childbirth. A woman and many children stood by her hole, staring down into it as the priest tossed soil onto her face. A young girl holding the hand of an older sister burst into shattering sobs.

Meanwhile Father Abraham strode towards Baldwin and Jeanne, the family trailing after him as he walked to a patch of clear ground outside the yard but near the wall. There Baldwin saw a woman standing with a tiny corpse, and he guessed it was this child’s birth which had caused the woman’s death. The priest spoke for a short while, begging God’s forgiveness for the baby’s sins, pleading for the life which had scarcely existed, that God would take his soul up to Heaven.

Baldwin sourly thought to himself that the child could hardly be guilty of many sins.

‘Sad business, that,’ said Hick. He eyed the family weeping at the small graveside. ‘Shame children can’t be buried in the yard with their mothers.’

‘In most parishes the priests allow them to be,’ Jeanne said, and hearing the tightness in her tone, Baldwin smiled and put his hand through her arm.

‘That a fact?’ Hick said, and spat on the ground. ‘Not here. Our Father Abraham, he sticks to the rules, he does.’