The Medieval Murderers - House of Shadows

He sat on the grassy bank to collect his thoughts, damp soaking him from beneath and above. He shivered and wished he was back in Oxford, in his own solar and surrounded by his books and experiments. Roger Bacon had sent him halfway across the country on what had turned out to be a wild-goose chase. He had not even found a cure for his own forgetfulness. True, a Jewish herbalist had provided him with an extract of a nut that was supposed to strengthen memory. He had drunk it. But the only change it had wrought on him was to turn his teeth black. He later discovered that the dark, resinous juice was from the marking nut, so called because scribes used it as an ink.

He rubbed his temples, determined not to consume any more khat leaves. They assuredly relieved his megrims, but they also altered his perceptions of the world. He could not be sure what it was that had attacked him in the cellar. Had it been a golem, a ghost, or something much more real? He pushed himself up off the bank and waded along the leat towards the reredorter building by the pale light of the nascent moon.

Falconer’s emergence up through the long slot that formed the toilet seating in the reredorter had startled two bare-arsed monks who had risen early in anticipation of the prime bell. Their shouts of surprise had roused most of the dormitory, causing Brother Ranulf to scuttle off and find the prior before his charges ended up scattering like hens harried by a fox in their house. If Falconer’s mission had not been so serious, he would have found all this amusing. And when John de Chartres arrived, Falconer was at the foot of the night stairs, at the top of which was a press of curious faces. The prior soon scattered them with a severe look, and Ranulf began to ring the bell announcing prime – an unnecessary act, as everyone was now awake, but one Ranulf thought would settle the monks back into a proper routine. The prior, meanwhile, was persuaded by Falconer to accompany him to the hospital.

‘Why do you want to go there, Master? We should be deciding what to do with the boy Martin Le Convers down in the cellar. By the way, have you got the key to the door? Brother Michael thinks you might have…’ The prior struggled for the appropriate word that might not offend his guest, even though he had the deepest suspicions about the Regent Master.

‘Purloined it?’

John de Chartres blushed.

‘I did, actually. And made good use of it in your absence.’

‘I hope you did not release the boy. He is a murderer, and I need not tell you the consequences for yourself of such an act.’

‘Oh, I did not release Martin, but neither is he any longer in the cellar.’

The prior stopped in his tracks.

‘Please do not speak in riddles, Master Falconer. Either he is in the cellar or you released him. There can be no other answer.’

‘Believe me, Prior John, there is. And as I, too, was attacked down there, behind the same locked door, you will see there has to be another answer. But let us step into the hospital, and I will provide a solution for you.’

They had stopped in the entrance to the infirmary building, and the prior gave Falconer a cautious look but stepped inside. He clearly thought Falconer capable of some kind of evil magic. Making boys disappear, and claiming ghostly attacks on himself. He hoped the darker secret of the cellar that he had been vouchsafed did not enter into any of this current problem. He followed Falconer into the hospital. Inside, the space was much as it had been before. A few cubicles were occupied by elderly monks eking out the last of their days in a less harsh environment than was demanded in the priory as a whole. And at the end, Brother Thomas once again sat next to the prone figure of Brother Peter, whose chains still bound him to the bed.

The prior and Falconer walked down the central aisle with the solemn chanting of the first service of praise of the day washing over them from the priory church. They stopped at the foot of Peter’s bed, and the boy’s eyes opened. He looked blankly around him, as though in a daze. The prior and Brother Thomas turned their gaze on Falconer, both expressing curiosity at what was to come next. What Falconer saw in the cubicle finally convinced him of his already shaping view on the murder of Eudo La Zouche. He just needed one more person to be present and hoped that his guess as to his whereabouts was correct. For the time being he didn’t need Martin to reveal himself, however.

‘Prior, earlier tonight you feared that three of your monks had gone missing, only to find one of them – Brother Peter here – in a state of derangement. Your worry was that something evil had happened in the priory, and you were quick to blame Brother Martin.’

‘And it is clear now that I was correct in my opinion that Martin Le Convers was at the centre of all this evil. This Jew…’

Falconer held up his hand, fancying he could hear a rustling from somewhere else in the infirmary. He needed to stop the prior’s invective before things got out of hand.

‘We will have no more about that, prior. Let us first ask Brother Peter what he and his two friends were doing in the cellar where Eudo La Zouche was found murdered.’

The prior sucked in his breath.

‘The cellar? How could they be doing things in the cellar? It has been locked for years, and Brother Michael has the only key. You saw how difficult it was to open that door. No one has been down there for a long time. I have expressly forbidden its use.’

‘And yet both Martin and Eudo were clearly in the cellar when we found them.’

The prior’s face went pale when he thought of the implications. And Falconer wondered once again what it was that was down there that the prior wanted no one to know about. Something important enough to kill for? He filed that away in his mind and continued his present train of thought.

‘Tell us, Peter, what you and Martin and Eudo were doing in the cellar.’

Falconer could see Peter’s eyes clouding over as he strove to think of a judicious lie that he could tell. In the end he feigned incomprehension.

‘I wasn’t there. Never.’

Falconer smiled coldly.

‘But there is someone else who can tell us the truth, isn’t there, Peter? Martin was there. He knows what you were doing. Digging into ancient mystical philosophy and invoking the name of God to call up life from a heap of clay.’

The two other monks gasped and quickly crossed themselves as protection from such abomination. Peter just lay back, a blank look on his youthful features. His chains clanked as his arms dropped on either side of the bed. Falconer pressed on.

‘Martin can tell us if you were there. Can’t you, Martin?’

He called this out loud, startling those present. The prior was forming a question on his lips, when a woman’s voice called out from the gloom.

‘He is coming, William. And he is ashamed.’

From one of the nearby cubicles emerged Saphira Le Veske, still wrapped in Falconer’s long grey cloak. She was pushing a reluctant Martin in front of her. His monk’s garb was smeared with mud and soaked from the hem almost up to the boy’s waist.

‘Brother Thomas, take the boy and lock him away. Somewhere safe this time.’

The prior’s command was peremptory, but Falconer held back the herbalist before he was able to comply.

‘There is no need for all that, is there, Martin? You will not try to escape, will you?’

Martin Le Convers shook his head and looked shamefacedly down at the ground.

‘How can you believe his promises?’ The prior was inexorable in his denigration of the young monk. ‘He has escaped once from his cell…And you still have not explained that, Master Falconer.’

‘He used the same route all three of them used whenever they wished to meet for their secret gatherings. There is a tunnel that links the cellar with the leat below the reredorter. All they had to do during the night was to sneak to the toilet, drop into the leat and walk along the tunnel to the room. How they found it the first time, perhaps they can tell us.’