The Medieval Murderers - House of Shadows

Her snivels began again. ‘That was the last time I ever saw her alive!’

De Wolfe made his throat-clearing noises – he never could abide weeping women; they made him feel helpless.

‘There was no disturbance in the night?’ he asked, for something to say. ‘She never called for you or left her room?’

‘No, not that I knew of. I slept soundly until dawn. She had said she wished to go to the prior’s chapel to take the Sacrament, so I went to awaken her, but she was not there!’

Her sobbing began anew and John looked helplessly at the other two women.

‘If you have finished, sir, we will take her back to Sir Roger and his wife,’ offered Margaret Courtenay. ‘We should all seek our beds, for tomorrow will be a sad and stressful day.’

‘We are little the wiser for all that talking,’ growled de Wolfe later. He, Gwyn and Thomas were sitting in the warming room, the only habitable place unless one wore three layers of extra clothing. There were half a dozen monks in the chamber, some dozing, others in murmured conversations, giving the coroner’s party covert and often suspicious glances. However, the place was large enough for them to talk in low voices without the others hearing. John had given Gwyn the gist of the interviews, and his officer agreed that it took them no further forward in discovering the culprit.

‘This Roger Beaumont is the obvious suspect,’ he grunted. ‘But he’s hardly likely to admit it, even if he’s the guilty one.’

‘I wonder if he already has something to hide?’ mused de Wolfe. ‘What if he was embezzling some of the portion of the estate profits that were supposed to be going to the Exchequer? If he suddenly lost control after Christina’s marriage, might not Jordan’s new stewards and bailiffs discover the fraud and report it to the king? Beaumont could literally lose his head over that!’

Gwyn looked dubious, not because he could not believe that a lord was capable of such greed, but because they had no means of proving it.

Thomas ticked off the candidates on his spindly fingers.

‘His wife has no obvious motive, other than what she gains by her husband becoming richer. The daughter Eleanor no doubt felt that she might have a chance with Jordan de Neville if Christina was out of the way, but would she kill for it?’

Gwyn reached across and grabbed Thomas’s third finger. ‘This one’s for Jordan, for he wanted to marry the Courtenay woman, not Christina.’

‘So that leaves only Margaret Courtenay, who also wanted an unmarried Jordan for herself,’ finished John. ‘But the dead girl was a good friend, for God’s sake!’

They sat around the fire in silence, digesting the unpromising situation.

‘Does it have to be one of the family guests?’ ruminated the coroner. ‘What about the people in this place? They’re a queer bunch, right enough.’

‘There’s that chaplain, Ignatius, who thought Christina was a witch,’ agreed Thomas.

‘I suppose the prior himself had no motive,’ said Gwyn in a hoarse whisper. ‘Maybe he was tired of the court using his priory as a lodging-house!’

Thomas sneered at his big colleague, his reverence for priests making the very idea sacrilegious, but the idea set John’s mind working. It seemed unlikely that Robert Northam could be implicated, but he was an important man and knew many of the barons and bishops who wielded power in England. God knows what plots and schemes were going on in the higher echelons of government – could he be involved in any of them?

However, there seemed no way forward to accuse anyone of the killing, let alone the prior himself, and their discussion faded into silence until an old monk approached them and sat down uninvited. He was a wizened man, with no hair left to demarcate his tonsure, his head being covered in wrinkled pink skin. His lined face was relieved by a pair of sharp brown eyes that suggested an active mind inside that shrivelled exterior.

Thomas smiled a welcome at him and shifted along his bench to let the old man get nearest to the fire. ‘This is Brother Martin, whom I spoke to earlier,’ he explained. ‘He supervises the scriptorium next to the chapter house and keeps the archives of the priory.’

In a quavering voice that spoke of his advanced years, the monk enquired after their health and their lodgings and bemoaned the cold weather, which ‘plagued his old bones’, as he put it. The conversation, prompted by the eager Thomas, got around to the history of the priory, by which time Gwyn was nodding off with boredom.

‘It was much smaller than this in the early days, some ninety years ago,’ explained the archivist. ‘But it grew fast with patronage. I hardly recognize it from what it was when I was a novice here, about fifty years ago. Old buildings knocked down and new ones springing up.’

‘The priory received many gifts, then?’ asked John politely, though he was not much interested.

‘A lot of money and land from wealthy donors, sir. At one time it became fashionable to give to Bermondsey…lands, rents, advowsons, even whole manors sometimes. Rich folk would pay a lot for Masses to be said for their souls to spend as little time as possible in purgatory!’

His face took on a faraway look as he peered back in time. ‘Only a few months ago I was required to check on an old covenant dating back to the early years of the century, as there was some dispute about our right to the manor of Kingweston in Somerset. It was strange, for there had been parts of the entry scratched out, which made my task difficult.’

‘This is the matter you told me of when we spoke in the cloister?’ said Thomas. ‘There was some reference to another chronicle, you said?’

‘Long ago, I found another old parchment from those days, which listed the witnesses to Count Eustace’s grant of the manor and advowson of Kingweston, one of which was a Brother Francis of this priory. His name had been erased from the deed itself and there is no other record of him ever existing. I told the prior of the irregularity and tampering, but he became quite annoyed and told me to forget all about it, as it was of no consequence. He took the old document from me and I’ve not seen it since.’

John wondered what this had to do with anything and soon the old monk had warmed himself sufficiently and wandered off.

‘What was all that about?’ he demanded of his clerk, prodding Gwyn to silence his loud snores.

Thomas smiled slyly; he was always keen to probe into old stories and gossip. ‘From talking to several older monks, it seems that there was some scandal here many years ago. It was hushed up but refuses to be extinguished. The odd thing is that it also involved a royal ward – of the first Henry. She vanished along with a monk, and it is thought they eloped, though some claim she was murdered and is the cause of all these rumours of ghosts and evil spirits. Much of Brother Ignatius’s obsession with devils and imps seems to be fostered by this legend.’

De Wolfe grunted. ‘Then maybe poor Christina’s ghost will join the spirit band that haunts this place. But it doesn’t help us discover who killed her.’

An hour later Roger Beaumont and Jordan de Neville came to the warming room and sought out the coroner for a private word. The lord of Wirksworth was still offended by de Wolfe’s insinuations about his having most to gain by Christina’s death, but he concealed it under a stiff manner as he made his request.

‘I realize it is late, Sir John, but some of the family – as we consider ourselves to be – wish to see the spot where our poor Christina came to her death.’

De Wolfe looked surprised at this unexpected supplication. ‘Why ask me? The prior is the ultimate authority in this house.’