The Medieval Murderers - Hill of Bones

Then, as if he was awakening from an enchantment, he slowly let the mirror fall upon his bed.

He grasped Godfrey’s arm, his voice now tremulous and his eyes full of fear. ‘Tell me, Godfrey, speak the truth. Is this madness? Is my grandfather’s madness coming upon me at last?’

William broke off a morsel of the bitter salty bread and wiped it around the bottom of the bowl, cleaning up the last juices of the fish stew. Joan’s grandchildren stared bug-eyed at him as if they had never seen a man devour three great bowlfuls before. With a slight twinge of guilt, William wondered if he had just eaten their meal for tomorrow as well as today. But it was only a momentary pang, like the twitch of a wasted limb, for guilt was an emotion William seldom experienced.

He drained his beaker of ale and leaned back in the low narrow bed. The one-roomed cottage stank of fish, wood smoke and what William thought might be dried seaweed, which he suspected was a major ingredient in the strange-tasting bread. The priest had wanted to conduct him to his own house, but one glance at the little man’s patched habit and pinched sallow face had convinced him that Father Jerome ate no better than his parishioners, probably worse. So when Joan had claimed him firmly as her prize and insisted on caring for him, William had graciously agreed, kissing the old woman’s hand with murmurs of gratitude that had made her simper like a virgin maid.

But much to his irritation, Father Jerome had insisted on accompanying him to Joan’s cottage and, having firmly shut the door on the other curious villagers, sat patiently in the only chair watching William eat. Now he cleared his throat with a dry nervous cough and leaned forward.

‘I have known men lash themselves to masts to keep themselves from being washed overboard in a storm and if that mast should break, they have drifted ashore upon it, but… both your hands were tied. A man cannot tie himself like that. For what crime had you been bound up in such a manner by your companions?’

‘What are you saying, Father?’ Joan asked in a scandalised tone. ‘Crime indeed. It was a miracle, Father. A miracle for Holy Easter. God has sent us a saint.’

She glowered at Father Jerome. It had taken a lot of persuasion on his part to convince the old woman that William was not Christ returned, but she was determined not to be done out of a saint.

The priest gnawed anxiously at his lip. ‘I did not mean to accuse… it may be that this man was the victim of pirates who had captured him and bound him as their prisoner. If I am to bury their corpses on the morrow, I must know what manner of men they were and if they should be accorded a Christian burial.’

Father Jerome had presented William with a perfectly reasonable explanation, furthermore one that the priest was bound to accept since he himself had fashioned it. But William had never settled for merely reasonable . When both the priest and the old woman turned to him, the words slid as smoothly as melted butter from his tongue.

‘Father, you are astute indeed. For I was a prisoner of pirates, wicked, godless men, heathens who prey on the innocent.’

Joan’s granddaughter, Margaret, shook her head in disbelief. She had not said a word up to then; now she made up for it with a defiant tilt of her head. ‘But some of them was good Christians, I know, ’cause Anne showed me the crucifixes and rosaries her father had taken from the bodies.’

‘I’ll speak to her family tomorrow,’ Father Jerome said sharply. ‘Such things should have been given over to the Church.’

William noticed the priest did not object to the dead being robbed. But he ignored Father Jerome’s indignation and turned a beatific smile on the annoying little brat.

‘Such pious objects that were found on the men were stolen from the good Christians they robbed and murdered, even…’ and here he shook his head in grief, ‘… even from girls as young as you, and they did worse than steal from those poor girls, far worse.’

Old Joan crossed herself and spat three times on the back of her fingers to ward off such a dreadful fate ever befalling her innocent granddaughter.

‘How then,’ Father Jerome asked, ‘were you spared?’

‘It was as this good woman says, a miracle. I have a gift, a rare gift, of prophecy. I am shown many mysteries, given many warnings of things to come that are denied to other men. It is as if I walk as a seeing man in a world where all others are blind. I saw in a vision how a great storm would rise up and destroy the ship. I warned the pirate captain to put in to port, but he wouldn’t believe me, for there was no hint of cloud in the sky, nor any sign of rough weather approaching. He accused me of trying to spread fear and mutiny amongst his men. When I told them I could plainly see it, he said that if I wanted to see clearly, he would oblige me. He gave orders that I be hauled up to the top of the highest mast and tied up there in the burning sun till I died of thirst. As I hung there they all mocked me, saying to be sure to tell them if I saw a cloud.

‘I saw the storm flying towards me. I saw black hounds with eyes of fire streaming across the sky, howling our deaths, their slavering jaws opened wide to devour us. But I said nothing more, for I give warning but once. Even when they too could see the weather turning the captain refused to lose face and furl the sails, too proud to admit I was right. The first crack of lightning severed the mast and I was cast into the sea, thrown safely away from the rocks upon which the ship foundered, and so upon my holy cross of wood I floated ashore.’

Joan gave a sigh of satisfaction and wonder. Her old eyes gazed upon him with such adoration that William felt a sudden thrill course through him, like the fire that surges through a man’s belly when he stakes all the money he possesses on the single tumble of the dice.

The burial of the sailors’ corpses was a hasty affair, delayed only by the length of time it took for the sexton and his sons to dig a grave large enough to contain all the bodies. They buried them on common ground. Heathen pirates were not to be accorded a good Christian burial. All the same, Father Jerome was uneasy. He only had this stranger’s word for the fact that the men were pirates, but a man who so miraculously survives the waves must be, if not exactly a saint, at least blessed by divine favour, and God would surely not save a liar while He let good Christians perish.

William asked to be shown the bodies that he might forgive the men who had so cruelly wronged him, a gesture of compassion that brought a tear to the eye of many a woman in the village. He walked along the line searching each face carefully. Finally he turned to Martin, the sexton’s youngest son, leaning wearily on his spade.

‘There were more men aboard the ship than this. Where are the other bodies?’

The lad pointed to a mass of gulls circling out over the bay. ‘See those birds flying there where the ship was lost? Those gulls are the souls of the men who drowned and they’ll not leave that spot ’cause they know their bodies are still down there beneath the waves. Not every man who’s lost in these parts washes ashore. Sometimes the current carries them out instead of in, and they pitch up weeks or months later further along the coast. My father reckons if the sea wants them for her own she’ll never give them back.’

William stared at the row of corpses. There was one face he had been desperate to see lying among the dead, but it was not there. He hoped with every fibre of his being that the sexton’s lad was right and that Edgar was lying somewhere at the bottom of the bay. He had to be dead. He must be. No one could have survived that wreck. Yet he himself had survived, hadn’t he?