The Medieval Murderers - The False Virgin

He transferred his gaze to another man, a sallow, black-browed fellow with a shock of dark hair and a turn in his eye.

‘Mostyn Gam, what have your scouts reported about our route towards Worcester? What prospects are there for feeding our men and beasts on the way?’

Mostyn looked pessimistic. ‘Not very good ones, arglwydd. There are few great houses and estates, most of the farms are small and half of them only grow bloody apples!’

‘What castles will we have to contend with? They are usually well stocked with food and fodder.’

Mostyn Gam pulled out a small roll of parchment from his pouch and flattened it on the table. Entering England was a new experience for the Welsh army and their knowledge of its geography was sparse. Though the coastline was well known, the inland areas were familiar only to those who lived there, as there were no reliable maps and only the main roads between towns were recorded, their distances often being speculative.

‘Our priest from Talgarth went disguised with one of the scouts. He drew this chart when he came back, marking the places where he felt meat, grain, hay and even money might be taken.’

They pored over the crude map for a time, noting where castles, manors and villages were sited near the route they proposed for reaching Worcester.

‘What’s this one, marked with a cross near this line of hills?’ asked Evan ap Collwyn, jabbing a large finger onto the parchment.

Mostyn squinted at it with his lazy eye. ‘He said it was a small priory, dedicated to some English saint or other. It’s isolated and, with a bit of persuasion, may well yield up something useful. They’re bound to have livestock for us to slaughter, as well as a mill stocked with flour and grain.’

‘And some gold and silver cups on their altar, as well as a fat money chest in their chancel,’ suggested another man, a cousin of Owain’s from Builth.

The prince held up a cautionary hand. ‘We are fighting the King of England, remember, not the Holy Catholic Church! I respect those religious houses in Wales who support our cause and if English priests and monks do not oppose us as we pass by, then we have no call to harm them or their houses.’

Evan ap Collwyn grinned. ‘Indeed, but no doubt some of these fat clerics can be persuaded to “voluntarily” offer us sustenance. Is it not their Christian duty to aid any travellers who knock on their doors to ask for food and lodging?’

There was a guffaw from around the table and even Owain raised a smile as he replied. ‘I doubt if any man of God would relish six thousand travellers knocking on his door… so we will proceed with moderation.’

The leader was in a subdued mood, keenly feeling not only the loss of his brother and son, but the absence of his strange astrologer and prophet, Crach Ffinant. A superstitious man, Glyndwr took predictions and prophesies very seriously and missed the advice of Crach, with his reading of the stars and the clouds, and the behaviour of the birds and natural elements.

With a deep sigh, he sat wishing for some sign from heaven that he was doing the right thing by marching deeper into the heart of England than anyone else since the Norman Conquest.

After vespers, the last service of the day, Prior Paul called his secretary into his parlour, bidding him to close the door firmly.

‘Mark, you are my confidant and my friend. We must talk seriously about the tragedy that has befallen this house. Between us, we must try to come to some conclusion.’

It was true that the prior was extremely fond of the younger monk and an almost father-son relationship had grown between them. Mark was a nephew of the Bishop of Lichfield, who had been ordained from the same seminary as Paul, a fact that was likely to advance the younger man’s career prospects, starting with this secretarial post in St Oswald’s.

Mark sat on the stool opposite the table and looked expectantly at his mentor.

‘How do we begin, Prior?’ he asked.

‘By posing a series of questions, I think. The first is whether we have to accept that it must be a member of our brotherhood that is the culprit.’

The secretary pondered this before he answered.

‘I suppose we have to accept that John’s death was murder, not some bizarre accident. Our infirmarian was adamant about that and I cannot see any hope of denying it.’

Paul nodded, his famous smile having deserted him. ‘A lack of drowning and two blows to the head would seem to make his conclusion incontrovertible. Now what about anyone other than a brother being the perpetrator?’

Mark shook his head sadly. ‘Little chance of that, I’m afraid. The death occurred within the inner precinct and there was a guard on the only gate all that night. I cannot see anyone from outside scaling a ten-foot wall, especially when a stranger would surely have no motive to silence poor John’s fantasies.’

Paul looked at his assistant. ‘You feel sure that that must have been the motive?’

‘I see no alternative. Why else would anyone wish to dispose of an obscure old monk who, apart from this recent aberration, never uttered a controversial word in his life?’

The prior rose from his seat and went to a window to stare out, though for once he was not searching the horizon for the approaching Welsh horde. He turned back to face Mark. ‘So we are left with seventeen brothers as the only suspects?’

Mark turned up his palms in an almost French gesture, perhaps learned from Pierre or Louis.

‘There was one lay brother in the precinct, of course: the night porter, Alfred, who rings the service bell. But he is almost as old and feeble as John, and has spent almost all his life here. Surely we can discard him as a suspect?’

The prior nodded his agreement. ‘And there are two others we can discard as well.’ The secretary raised his eyebrows in query as Paul continued, ‘Ourselves, I trust! I certainly know that I am innocent and I am sure that you feel the same.’

Mark flushed a little at the implied compliment. ‘Thank you for your confidence in me, Prior. But, of course, an episcopal or even papal enquiry, to say nothing of the secular authorities, could not eliminate us from suspicion any more than the rest of our brothers.’

Paul shook his head. ‘There will be no enquiry outside the ecclesiastical fraternity. In these fraught times, with an enemy advancing on Hereford and Worcester, no coroner or sheriff will concern himself with an internal matter in a religious house. I doubt any bishop will be interested, either, for like us they will be too concerned with defending their brethren and their treasures.’

He sat down again and rested his chin on his clasped hands. ‘So we now have fifteen suspects to consider.’

‘I think we have one more to eliminate,’ Mark said, ‘and that is our brother Louis. He was the one who detected the murderous nature of the death and rejected any notion of an accidental – or miraculous – collapse of Beorwyn’s statue upon old John.’

The prior saw the logic of this at once. ‘Ah, you mean that if he was the killer, he would have gone along with the obvious conclusion that John had drowned under the statue? He certainly would not have demonstrated the two blows to the skull to us.’

There was a silence as each man digested this.

‘That still leaves us with a considerable number of names to consider,’ said Paul ruminatively. ‘And no clear idea of how to proceed. I can hardly take each brother aside and demand to know if he killed old John!’

Mark pulled the top of his black robe away from his neck, as it was very hot in the chamber, even with the two glazed casements open.

‘Can you not give them a stern warning at chapter about the peril to their souls and the prospect of hellfire if they do not confess – or even fail to offer you any information they have about this evil tragedy?’