Pip Vaughan-Hughes - The Vault of bones

It was a smell that brought me to my senses. Nay, not a smell: a stench, a miasma. I opened my eyes, or at least fancied that I had, for it was pitch dark. For an awful moment I was struck by the horrifying, juddering fear that I was smelling my own long-dead and rotten flesh. I could not move, not a sinew, and that dreadful reek was all about me, smothering me like cuckoo-spit on a leaf. I could not even move the tiniest breath of air through my throat, could not utter a sound. As slow as judgement I sank, choking, into the darkness once more. When I awoke again I was lying stretched out upon something hard. In a flash I fancied that it was the bottom of my coffin that I felt, but then I opened my eyes and saw, not the solid black of a grave, but whitewashed plaster arches, dimly flickering with lamplight. I shut my eyes again, disbelieving what they told me. But when I opened them again, I saw a tonsured head above me, and a face that, save for a pair of kindly eyes, was all nose and fleshy lips. I gave a small cry, for this was worse: surely now I was beginning my atonement for all my vile past, for why else would a monk be here with me? He was still there when I dared look again, though, and this time he spoke, not with the voice of a demon or a judge, but in the rough, reassuring tones of a Roman. 'Are you awake, my son? What is your name?' 'Is this hell?' I asked.

The monk chuckled. 'Only when the Abbot is in his cups,' he whispered. 'But I did not say that. No, you are in the Hospice of Saint Bartholomew.' 'In London?' I croaked, sitting up with a jerk.

'No, no!' said the monk, eyebrows signalling amusement on one side and concern on the other. 'On the Tiber Island. Is there one in London?'

I nodded, not wishing to explain how I knew. 'A fisherman found you and we brought you here, for you were lying no more than a few yards from our bridge,' he continued.

I lay back, trying to remember any of that, and failing. Then I remembered something after all. 'I was stabbed in the heart! How…'

'Stabbed, you say? Well, well. No, you were not stabbed, my son.'

'No, I saw…' I looked down, and realised that I was naked under a rough flaxen sheet, and that I stank, although not of the corpse-fetor I was expecting, but of vinegar. Despite a stiff neck I searched for the wound I was sure I would find in my chest, but instead saw only a great bruise, two or three small grazes and a long scratch, fine as a hair, under my arm. 'But truly, I saw the knife! I felt him stab me,' I protested. 'Him?'

'The… the footpad,' I stammered. 'There were two of them.'

Yes, they did rob you,' said the monk, frowning. We found no purse with you. We had to wash your clothes in vinegar, and swab you, too, for you were lying in a great dead fish, all slime and maggots.' He mimed being assailed by a ghastly stink.

I must go,' I said. 'Please bring my clothes, Brother. I am unhurt, it seems, and I must…'

'No, no’ said the monk, grasping my shoulders. You took a blow to the head, for one thing’

But I protested, vehemently if politely, and at last the poor, confused soul shuffled off to fetch my clothes, much scrubbed and free of the horror of dead fish, but practically glowing with the fumes of vinegar. They were still wet, and the vinegar made my various scrapes and bruises sting. I guessed that the doughty fishermen had taken my purse, and I considered the money well spent. I knew who had my knife. But it was not until I was limping out of the building, the monk fussing at my side and I making haste, for I did not want the Watch to be called, or to have questions put to me, that he sighed and said, 'A sorry night for guests in our city. You at least are leaving us on foot’ 'What do you mean?' I said, half listening.

Well, we pulled a Frank out of the river at sundown’ he said. 'A Frenchman. You were lucky, my son. That one was dead’

I stopped in my tracks. 'Dead?' I asked. A Frenchman? How do you know?'

'He carried a promissory note from the Margrave of Namur. Namur is in France, I think?'

You are right. Was he short, with grey hair and no front teeth?' The monk shook his head, humouring me. 'Then was he tall – taller than you, anyway, with a broken nose and an old scar on his face?' I drew my finger from my left temple down to the corner of my mouth.

'He was. He was! Lord in Heaven, did you know him?' The good brother was aghast. I shook my head hastily.

'No’ I lied. 'But a companion of mine, another Frenchman, was looking for his friend, a knight of Namur, who seemed to have disappeared this morning. Shall I send him down here to see if it is the right fellow?' I added guilelessly.

'Oh, please do so’ said the monk, crossing himself. What an ill fortune follows you, my son! Why not stay awhile, and I will hear your confession? Or you may pray in the church…'

But I was already gone, walking as fast as I could across the bridge to Trastevere, where I ducked into the narrow streets and left the hospice, and the kindly, confused monk behind me. And behind me also, the corpse of Fulk de Grez, late companion to the Emperor of Constantinople. Like a spirit summoned up from the mist on the river, I remembered something my father had told me many years ago on a wet Dartmoor afternoon. We were watching his dogs herd a flock of bedraggled sheep into a pen of hurdles, and I had exclaimed, worried that the dogs were going to harm the sheep, for they snapped at their heels with great fury. But no, said my father. Think of your hands and fingers, all the things you can do with them: tie knots, pick your nose. A dog has no hands, and perforce he must do everything with his mouth. A dogs teeth are his fingers, and he knows exactly what to do with them. He will not bite the sheep. When a dog snaps at your hand and misses, we think he tried to bite and failed, but no, it was a warning. If a dog wishes to bite you, bite he will. And now I thought: as dogs with their teeth, so Venetians with their knives. If a Venetian bravo wished to cut out your sweetbreads with a flick of his wrist, he would do it. These folk did not miss. I had been spared – spared, and warned. It was easy enough to get back to the Borgo, though it took what remained of the night. I found a path that ran between the high ground of the Janiculum hill and the river, where the folk of Trastevere have their gardens, and crept past sprouting cabbages and new beans, dozing chickens and rabbits shut up in their hutches. I saw nothing and nobody-save a fox, which did not bother to run from me but glared from beside an artichoke bed, and a polecat, surprised atop a henhouse, that fled silently. The gate into the Borgo was not guarded – or at least there was a guard, but he was at muffled rut behind a tree and I slipped past as the woman begged the guard to stab her with his great big sword.

I made my way home, squinting through a raging headache at the skinny cats who, by night, filled the doorways of the quarter. On my own doorstep, a fat, red-faced priest gaped at me with alarm and I stepped back, for he seemed to have four feet, two sandalled ones planted on the stone step, two bare ones reversed and facing me, soles out. Shaking my fuddled head, I realised that the bare feet belonged to a tart kneeling before him, his cassock providing a sort of confessional that covered her from the knees up, and indeed there were muffled sounds coming from under the cloth.

'She's making a full confession, I see’ I said. The man's eyes were bulging out of his face, and still he made an effort to avoid mine. 'And I believe that's worth a three-year penance’ I added, slipping past him and closing the door on his quivering back. This city was starting to bother me: I thanked the stars I was leaving in the morning.

I was sure that my lodgings would be watched, but they were not, or at least I saw nothing to make me suspicious. And I had been certain that they would at least have searched my rooms, but again all was safe and in its place. So I hastily pulled on my clean clothes, neatly folded on the bed, and stuffed the vinegary ones into a saddlebag. The gold was where I had left it, up in an old mortise-hole in one of the ceiling beams. The excitement I always felt before beginning a journey was offset by a sharp foreboding that, on top of my sleepless night and the blow to my head, began to make my limbs twitch as though Saint Vitus's dance were creeping over me.