The Medieval Murderers - House of Shadows

Now they were spending an uncomfortable night in a tavern a few miles from Guildford, with the prospect of sleeping on the floor of the taproom, wrapped in their cloaks.

Gwyn grunted and pulled the pointed hood of his leather jerkin over his head to keep out a draught from a broken window shutter. ‘If that woman Margaret had not said that Christina was not as virginal as everyone assumed, the bastard would have got away with it.’

Thomas was not so willing to discount divine intervention. ‘But also, Ferdinand had to be in the right place at the right time to overhear her – it must have been ordained by God that he should not escape disillusionment and retribution!’

Gwyn lowered his quart mug from his lips to guffaw rudely. ‘Don’t tell me that you believe that the Almighty caused that roof to fall on him! It was due to some lousy, incompetent mason, who years ago didn’t know how to build a decent wall.’

De Wolfe cut in to stop them bickering. ‘It doesn’t matter how he died. It’s why he killed her that bothers me. Can we really believe all this mystical stuff about exorcizing evil with virginal spirits? Or was he just trying to have his evil way with her, getting her alone in a dark cellar?’

Thomas was eager to offer his explanation. ‘I spoke to the old archivist again after Prime this morning, before we left. He said it was all bound up with this legend about the vanished monk years ago. He said Brother Ferdinand was always pestering him for more information and spent long hours in the scriptorium searching the old archives.’

‘Proves he was bloody mad!’ was Gwyn’s succinct comment, made to irritate the little clerk. ‘Just like that Ignatius fellow who thought she was a witch.’

‘Maybe, but he must truly have believed that the crypt was unhealthily possessed in some way,’ retorted Thomas.

Even the usually unimaginative John could not disagree with that. ‘There was certainly something very unpleasant about the far end of that cellar,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts and goblins, but the few hours I spent crawling about in there with a sore head, in pitch darkness, was something I don’t want to repeat!’

‘But what was the demented swine trying to achieve?’ demanded Gwyn.

Again, Thomas was keen to share his erudition on matters spiritual and esoteric. ‘It is part of ancient wisdom that things virginal are pure and holy,’ he said earnestly. ‘You only have to think of our young novitiate nuns who devote their lives to God – and above all our Holy Mother, the Virgin Mary.’ He paused to cross himself vigorously.

‘Ferdinand obviously believed that releasing the fresh soul of a virgin directly into that loathsome space would banish the evil and cleanse it with her innocent spirit!’

‘But I don’t see how he got the girl to go down there with him in the middle of the night,’ mused de Wolfe.

Gwyn snorted. ‘These bloody priests have an unhealthy power of persuasion, dinned into people since they were infants – especially over impressionable young women.’

He nudged Thomas suggestively, but for once the clerk refused to rise to the bait, and Gwyn continued to pontificate.

‘However he did it, the bastard had no intention of becoming a martyr. He must have killed her in that last chamber, hitting her with something heavy from that storeroom, then breaking her neck to release her soul in the most effective place. But then he dragged her back to the foot of the stairs to make it look as if she had fallen down.’

‘At least we got that right, though the prior already suspected it,’ grunted the coroner. ‘That ruined Ferdinand’s accident plot, but if he hadn’t discovered she was no virgin he would have got away with it.’

There was a silence as they stared into the glowing fire pit, their only defence against the hard frost outside.

‘What about this falling ceiling?’ asked Thomas. ‘Can you really doubt that it was divine intervention?’

Gwyn was scornful. ‘Divine intervention be damned!’ he said. ‘Cornish intervention, more likely! When that maniac lifted that rock to hurl it at the prior, I charged at him and we went arse over head, crashing into the back wall! It was already shaky, and the shock of both of us hitting it dislodged some of the keystones at the top, where one had already fallen out of its own accord.’

John was inclined to agree with him, but a small voice in his head made him wonder why the roof fall had so efficiently killed the monk but left his officer unharmed.

‘That place is unsafe,’ declared Gwyn. ‘The prior was right for once. They should brick up that staircase and forget the vault ever existed.’

‘Perhaps they will,’ said de Wolfe. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll not be going back to that dismal place. At least we can satisfy Hubert Walter and King Richard that this was no political assassination, just the mad escapade of a crazy monk.’

‘Maybe they’ll ask you to be Coroner of the Verge again?’ suggested Thomas, proud of his master’s reputation.

‘God forbid!’ said John fervently and for once he made the sign of the cross.

30 September 1270

When they found him in the vicinity of the reredorter he was babbling.

‘God is over the three, the three over the seven, the seven over the twelve, and all are joined together. There are thirty-two paths of secret wisdom. The number thirty-two is the sum of ten and twenty-two, being fingers and letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The decade and its elements are figures. One is the spirit of the living God, and two the spirit from this spirit. Three and four are water and fire. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Brother Peter.’

Prior John de Chartres assured him of his full comprehension, though he could clearly see that the monk was raving. Brother Peter looked gaunt, his sandy hair lank and unwashed. The prior suspected him of fasting himself into this agitated state and felt humiliated at not having noticed it sooner. The youth smiled broadly and pressed on, the words cascading from his lips.

‘And five to ten are the six sides of a cube – that perfect form – each designating in its turn height and depth, and the four compass points of the world. Of course, this establishes nothing real but expounds the idea of possibility…’

‘Yes, yes, brother. Nothing is real.’

The prior soothed the young man, squeezing his shoulder in an avuncular fashion. But his words were just balm. Prior John’s heart felt as heavy as a stone. He had been sent from France to shore up the faltering establishment that was Bermondsey Priory. Sundry suits concerning the ownership of adjacent lands had drained the priory’s purse. And there had even been unseemly scuffles between tenant farmers and some monks, resulting in complaints of rough treatment. After four years of hard work, Prior John had thought he had at last got on top of all these problems. Then suddenly, in late September of the fifth year of his office – 1270 – matters had deteriorated. There had been a disappearance, and now it seemed that evil had been visited on the priory. For the only possibility he could imagine was that Brother Peter Swynford had gone stark, staring mad.

William Falconer, Regent Master of the University of Oxford, had been on a wild-goose chase, and he cursed his friend, Roger Bacon, for it. The Franciscan friar had become obsessed with alchemy since discovering certain secret books, books the contents of which he refused even to share with his old friend William. As a result, Bacon had locked himself away for weeks in his little watchtower on Folly Bridge at Oxford. At night the glow of furnaces and the stink of bubbling alembics assailed both the eyes and noses of those in the vicinity. Even those merely passing were occasioned to hurry by, fearing they might be contaminated by the deeds of the devil. He had finally emerged only to beg William to make a small journey on his behalf. Bacon’s monastic order forbade him free movement, preferring to keep their free-thinking brother under close observation. But it seemed that Friar Roger required further confirmation of his theories of ‘species’, or radiating forces that emanate from every substance, physical or spiritual, to affect other things. And for that he needed Master William Falconer, himself an inveterate fiddler in the field of the natural sciences, to go on a journey. Falconer was reluctant to comply at first. But Bacon knew an appeal to Falconer’s curiosity would hit the mark. And it had.