The Medieval Murderers - House of Shadows

Falconer leaned forward and touched her lightly on the bare arm. She did not recoil, and he felt a spark of common feeling pass between them.

‘I can say that I am not exactly ignorant of the philosophies of life. Nor are you yourself, I think.’

As he drew his arm back, she grasped it firmly, preventing him from moving away. Her hand was warm and her look encouraging.

‘I trust you, which is more than I can say for the prior. He gives me the creeps. But do take care. There is an old story that warns of the risks of meddling in dangerous knowledge.’

‘Tell me. It may help us avoid disaster.’

Saphira took a deep breath and began. ‘Four sages enter an orchard – which stands for dangerous knowledge – and have a mystical experience. The first gazed on it and died, the second gazed on it and was stricken mad, the third gazed on it and destroyed their creation, turning heretic.’

‘Eudo and Peter are the first two. Martin perhaps the third. And the fourth?’

Saphira turned her startling green eyes on Falconer, a questioning look in them.

‘You said there were four sages. What happened to the fourth?’

‘He escaped with his mind intact, because he was wise and anchored to the here and now.’

‘Then let me hope the last is I.’ Falconer uttered the words confidently enough, but he felt a twinge of fear due to his errant memory. Was wisdom draining from his mind? If he pursued this quest, would he fail also, through not being wise enough? But it was only a momentary lapse, and a flush of euphoria abruptly filled his mind with confidence. He laughed.

‘Is there something troubling you?’ Saphira asked.

He looked at the Jewess sitting beside him on the bed. She had a look of concern in her beautiful eyes.

‘Nothing. What makes you think there is?’

‘You looked so…distant for a while. As though you were no longer present.’

A tendril of worry crept up Falconer’s spine. Was he lapsing into blank reverie as well as being forgetful? He laughed again, trying to make light of his fears, but this time it sounded forced. ‘It’s nothing, really. I have just been a little…ah…forgetful lately.’

Saphira looked hard at him but decided to make no more of the moment. They had more urgent matters to attend to now. Falconer pulled off his old greyish cloak and draped it over Saphira’s shoulders. She began to protest – after all, he would get as wet as her in the teeming rain – but he insisted.

‘It’s more sensible this way. If I pull the hood up-’ he did so as he spoke, enveloping her head of luxuriant red hair and obscuring her finely chiselled features ‘-then no one will tell who you are. Look. You could pass for a monk in that garb. A small, very shapely monk, but…’

She giggled, despite the situation, and pulled the cloak close around her. It was true – dressed like this she and the Regent Master could search the priory for her son without arousing too much suspicion. He gently took her arm.

‘But we will have to hurry or the priory will be rising for prime, and then it will be impossible to move freely around.’

Falconer picked up a stub of candle and cradled it in his hand. They would be in the dark outside where a strong wind was blowing, but maybe he would be able to relight it inside the priory buildings. As they left the hospital, he glanced back at the tableau of a recumbent Brother Peter, chained to his bed and lit by the glow of two candles on either side of him. He resembled some saintly icon glowing in the surrounding darkness. The woman pulled at his sleeve, and they went out into the stormy blackness of the priory grounds. The sky was invisible, the moon completely obscured. It gave Falconer the feeling of an oppressive weight bearing down on him, and he hurried along the eastern wall of the dorter and towards one of the doors.

‘Wait! Look!’

Saphira Le Veske’s call was shrill and peremptory, her clutching at Falconer’s sleeve urgent and demanding. He turned around and saw the woman staring into the Stygian gloom.

‘What is it?’

‘There. By the stream that runs below the building. There’s someone there.’

‘The latrine block? Hold on…’

There were times when Falconer regretted his poor eyesight, and this was one of those moments. He fumbled in his pouch and withdrew his eye-glasses. Fitting them to his head, he peered in the direction Saphira was pointing in.

‘There. Can you see him? It’s Menahem, I’m sure it is.’

Falconer, cursing the rain, tried to make out what she was indicating. Then he saw a movement, but it was no more than a grey shape in a blacker world, until the figure turned to look towards them, alarmed perhaps by the woman’s cry. Falconer discerned pale features beneath a monastic cowl, and he was about to ask how Saphira knew it was her son on such little evidence when she broke away from him. The cloak he had lent her flapped in the strong wind as she chased after the disappearing shape. Falconer pulled off his eye-glasses and sprinted after her. When they got to where the figure had been, there was nothing. There was no door he could have entered, no window he could even have clambered through. His escape was blocked to the south by the churning, muddy stream that ran in spate below the latrine block of the reredorter. And he could not have passed them to the north, as there were blank walls to either side. He had simply vanished.

‘Are you sure it was your son?’

‘A mother knows her son, Master Falconer. It was Menahem, or Martin as they call him here. But where could he have gone?’

She looked distraught at having been so close to the goal of her hunt and yet having missed him. Falconer wondered if her overriding desire to find her son had seduced her into superimposing his image on the fleeting apparition. He grasped her shoulder and turned her back the way they had come.

‘Come. Let us stick to our task of scouring the priory. If it was him-’ she looked hard at him, angry at his lack of confidence in her opinion on the ghostly figure. ‘-then we will find him. We at least now know he is here somewhere.’

The trouble was that their search was as fruitless as the earlier one. They combed all the buildings they could gain access to but found no crumb of evidence that either Martin or his companion Eudo were anywhere on the premises. Nor was there any sign of a body. Finally, bodily soaked, with their spirits drowned too, they took shelter under the porch that led into the cellarer’s building. The long, low, rib-vaulted chamber was illuminated by a couple of sputtering candles and punctuated by gloomy corners where lurked dusty barrels and anonymous heaps. Used for storage, it was a convenient and dry means of reaching the covered way of the cloister. Neither Falconer nor Saphira wished to remain in the rain any longer. As they crossed the cellarium, Saphira grabbed Falconer’s arm and hissed a warning.

‘There’s someone down at the far end.’

Falconer screwed up his eyes, making out a tall, angular figure that did not resemble the boy that Saphira had claimed to have seen earlier. He was rummaging around in a pile of crates, one of which toppled over on to his sandalled foot. A brief curse was followed by an expostulation to God for forgiveness. The monk turned towards them, and Falconer could tell it was Brother Thomas. Saphira slipped discreetly behind one of the columns as Falconer approached the monk.

‘Have you found something, Thomas?’

The monk looked startled. ‘What? Oh, it’s you, Master Faulkner.’

Falconer silently excused the monk his mangling of his name and enquired if he had discovered something of significance.

‘No, I doubt it. I was just wondering about the old cellar below here. It’s somewhere in this corner behind all these boxes. No one’s used it for years, but Brother Eustace was saying a few days ago that he had heard noises in the night coming from this region.’