Paul Doherty - The Midnight Man

‘So we have been brought to Westminster not only to exorcize a ghost but to question it?’

‘Perhaps,’ Beauchamp murmured, ‘you will also discover that His Grace has persuaded our Lord Abbot here at Westminster that the monks’ cemetery is crammed with mouldering corpses, so it is time to open the graves and remove the bones to their ossuary or charnel house.’

‘A good excuse to search the grounds,’ Anselm countered. ‘You, like the Midnight Man, believe that Puddlicot may have buried his plunder here?’

‘I do, but — ’ Sir Miles paused at a knock on the door.

Two servitors entered carrying food and drink: bowls of beef broth, dishes of diced quail spiced with ginger, pots of mixed vegetables, freshly-baked manchet loaves as well as goblets of wine. Once they had served the food and left, Anselm recited the Benedicite and they ate in silence.

Stephen now and again watched Sir Miles eat with all the delicacy of a born courtier, even as the clerk sat lost in thought. Eventually Anselm coughed and took a sip of water.

Beauchamp lifted his head. ‘Brother?’

‘You don’t believe in any of this, do you? Do you even believe in the good Lord, Sir Miles? I mean, sitting here, if not as friends then at least as comrades, I must know. It matters as to why you brought us here. It certainly influences what happens at Saint Michael’s. If someone is present who doesn’t really believe, that can affect an exorcism.’

‘You are not from the Inquisition?’ Sir Miles joked, a lopsided smile on his face. ‘You will not lodge my name with them?’

‘I regard you as a friend.’

Beauchamp pulled a face and dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘Let me explain,’ he replied, ‘you are wrong about me. I struggle very hard to believe after all I have seen, heard and felt in my life. No, no,’ he shook a hand, ‘I am not talking about the present ills of the church, be it the priest who is lecherous or,’ Beauchamp grinned, ‘the friar who might be even more so. God knows we are all sinners, born weak. No, I remember being in one of the King’s chevauchees in France. I led a posse of mounted archers into a village south of Rouen. Marauding mercenaries had just swept through.’ Beauchamp blinked, clearing his throat. ‘I shall never forget what I saw.’ His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Corpses stripped, bellies ripped from crotch to throat, men, women and children. The village priest had been hung upside down in his own church; he’d been castrated. Children, babes in arms, lay with their skulls shattered like eggs. I found it difficult to accept a loving God would allow that. So,’ he picked up his goblet, ‘if that is life here on earth, is it any different beyond the veil? Isn’t that what you investigate?’ He glanced sharply at Stephen. ‘Of course, you’re the innocent. You believe different, that we really haven’t lost Eden?’

‘You know he does,’ Anselm retorted. ‘You are the Keeper of the King’s Secrets. You must have heard the gossip, the tittle-tattle, and read the reports? You know more about Stephen and myself than we do about you.’

‘You want to be a Carmelite?’ Beauchamp gestured at Stephen. ‘Do you really? Are you one because of your father, or in spite of him?’

Stephen felt a flush of anger. He ignored Anselm’s swift intake of breath and moved his arm from the exorcist’s reassuring grasp. Something about Beauchamp, as with Gascelyn, reminded Stephen of his own father. He felt the furies gather.

‘I became a Carmelite. .’

Beauchamp abruptly stretched across the table and squeezed Stephen’s hand. ‘I am sorry,’ he soothed placatingly. ‘I know you are the son of a famous, well-respected physician of Winchester.’

‘One who was also famous for being free with both his fist and his cane?’

‘You are also a young man who had visions from an early age, or so they say?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Stephen replied hotly, ‘I was an only child.’ He blinked away the tears of anger. ‘My mother,’ his voice faltered, ‘died young. I remember seeing her, as well as other people who had died. When the church bells tolled, voices whispered to me. Faces and shapes appeared in the dead of night. I would also glimpse them in puffs of incense smoke.’ Stephen paused. ‘My father thought I was moon-touched, fey-spirited. He sent me to the White Friars, the Carmelites at Aylesford. He claimed that I would never follow his profession, which dealt with facts. Do you know something, Beauchamp? The more he pressed me the more intense the visions became. I was glad to be free of him, to hide, to shelter at Aylesford.’

‘And I,’ Anselm intervened, ‘took him under my wing.’ The exorcist smiled across at the novice. ‘Cherished him as I would the apple of my eye.’

‘Or as your own son,’ Beauchamp cut in, ‘the one you lost?’

‘Aye,’ Anselm pulled at his sleeves and stared down the table, ‘the one I lost with his little sister and my beautiful Katerina. You know about the great pestilence sweeping in like the Doomsday angel? In a matter of days my entire family was wiped out. Perhaps I went mad; I certainly lost my wits. To me the world, the very air, became dank. Nothing but visions of death, a yawning darkness. Out of this emerged an old woman with wild hair and glaring eyes wielding a broad-bladed scythe, and behind her a horde of hellish skeletons garbed in moth-gnawed shrouds, their bare-boned faces grinning with malice. Vipers curled in their ribs, clawed hands grasped the heads of the dying. Demons clustered like flies. I became insane with grief. Satan, like a huge raven, constantly floated above me. I fled into deep forest. I met shapes, shadows, spectres, wraiths — all the undead. I entered that misty underworld between life and the kingdom of the hereafter. I visited the dungeons of the dead and confronted the furies which scourge, the key-dangling janitors of hell. I had visions of the black lake, the rivers of flame, the fearsome battlements of Hades.’ Anselm breathed out. ‘Others would dismiss it all as nonsense. Nevertheless, I have seen the storm hags ride the winds and heard their calls from the deep, wet greenness of the woods. The dead danced around me. After a time the visions faded but the ghosts remained: those souls who do not wish to pass on.’ Anselm rubbed his face. ‘Eventually I came out of my grief. I bathed, I fasted, and I found my vocation as a Carmelite priest. I also realized,’ he added tartly, ‘that the dead will not leave me alone. Accordingly my superiors, so-called astute men, decided to use my unwanted gift. Yet,’ he added wistfully, ‘I still commit treason against my own vocation. I sometimes wonder what might have been: sitting in an orchard perfumed with apple blossom, hand in hand with my beloved wife, watching our children play. . but, of course, these, too, are ghosts.’ Anselm put his face in his hands. For a brief while he sobbed quietly, then fell silent.

Beauchamp glanced at Stephen, who put a finger to his lips and shook his head.

‘If you want to know what I believe. .’ Anselm dried the tears from his seamed cheeks. ‘If you want to repeat the question that people always ask me about death, we human beings suffer two deaths. The body dies, it corrupts. The soul, the spirit, goes forth. However, once it does, a challenge is mounted by those forces hostile to God and man. Each adult soul is confronted. Some are reluctant to face the challenge. They pause, they wait. They don’t want to give up their lives on Earth. They cower, dragged down by sin, by unresolved acts and hopes. They are reluctant to go into the blinding light which burns all clear so they can make their decision for all eternity. Their world is my world. I try to reassure such souls. I try to release them from the traps. I urge, I pray for them to move on.’ Anselm rose and moved across to the shuttered window. He opened this and stared out. A bell began to clang, a solemn salutation to the gathering dark.