Toby Clements - Kingmaker - Winter Pilgrims

‘I must be gone,’ the canon mumbles. ‘Must go.’

She looks at him one last time. He is a big man, a half-head taller than she, with broad shoulders, the reddish hair cropped short, a disc of skin shaved bald. Apart from the horsemen beyond, he is the first man she can ever recall having seen. She almost reaches out to touch his face.

He turns and hurries across the courtyard to the wall that divides the priory and scrambles up on to the roof of the wood store. His clogs send the snow sliding, but he catches the top of the wall and hauls himself up and over. He pauses, looks back, and then is gone, back into his own world. Only then does she wish she’d thanked him.

‘We must tell the Prioress,’ Alice wails, still on the ground. ‘We must warn all the sisters.’

‘No!’ Katherine says, helping her up. ‘No. We cannot. We cannot. We must tell no one. No good can come of this.’

She is looking around them at the windows and the apertures. Has the canon been seen? She thinks not. There is no one about.

‘But what of those threats?’ Alice counters. ‘Those things said?’

‘They can do nothing,’ Katherine says, ‘so long as we remain within the priory walls. Let us thank God for that canon, whoever he was, and let us pray that he was not seen here in our quarters.

‘We will do our own penance, Sister,’ she adds. ‘A thousand Aves and two thousand Credos before the Shrine of the Virgin, and we will forgo bread until the feast of St Gilbert.’

Alice nods uncertainly. Only Katherine knows that the feast of St Gilbert is but a few days away.

‘I am sure that will please the Lord,’ Alice says at length, and seems to be about to say something else, but just then the bell begins ringing for prime. They look at one another before they brush the snow from their cassocks, adjust their veils, fold their hands into their sleeves and walk towards the cloister and the safety of church.

Neither hears the soft tap of a shutter being pulled closed above their heads.

‘Alarm!’ he shouts. ‘Alarm!’

It is just after first light and the canons are gathering for prime in the western arm of the cloister. They react as a herd of cows might to a barking dog. Only the Dean steps forward.

‘What is this, Brother Thomas?’ He stands with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face.

‘There are horsemen without.’ Thomas points. He can hardly breathe for running. ‘They are armed. They are coming for us.’

The Dean snaps into movement, as if this is something for which he had planned.

‘Brother John!’ he barks. ‘Brother Geoffrey! Secure the main gate. Brother Barnaby, sound the bell to summon the lay brethren! Let it ring sharply now. Brother Athelstan, have the Prioress secure the postern gate in the sisters’ cloister and shutter every window. She must gather the sisters in the chapel. Brother Anselm, bring reed and ink and some paper to the Prior in the secretarium. Brother Wilfred, have the ostler saddle a horse. And tell Brother Robert to come.’

Three canons are sent to take the books from the library to the secretarium, and two more to take axes to the buttery, ready to open the barrel and let the wine run to waste if the priory walls are breached. The bell in the belfry begins an urgent peal.

‘How many, Brother?’ the Dean asks.

‘Four, I believe, although one has been sorely treated.’

‘You harmed him?’

Thomas hesitates. He does not wish to mention the two sisters.

‘I did, Brother, may God forgive me.’

‘Good man,’ the old soldier says. ‘I am sure He will find it in His heart to do so.’

The Prior stands before the iron-bound door of the secretarium, frowning at the sound of the bell. He is dressed only in an alb, and the white circle of hair around his head is in disarray, and he blinks.

‘Why is the bell ringing so, Brother Stephen?’

‘We are under attack, Father. Brother Thomas here was waylaid while without by four armed men.’

The Prior’s gaze switches to Thomas.

‘What was their purpose?’

‘Their captain threatened to invest the priory and to have me killed.’

The Prior turns to the Dean.

‘You have alerted our sister the Prioress? Good. And secured every gate and window?’

‘All is done, Holy Father, although I have not yet sent for aid from Cornford.’

The Prior looks thoughtful.

‘It is difficult to know what to do in that regard,’ he says, more to himself than the Dean or Thomas. ‘I am not yet sure of where Sir Giles stands in respect to his obligations to our house.’

Brother Anselm arrives with the reed and ink and this decides the Prior.

‘Nevertheless,’ he says, taking the nib and paper. ‘Let us do so, and see what results.’

‘Brother Robert can deliver it.’

The Prior nods and the Dean turns to Thomas.

‘Climb the belfry, Tom, and see if your men are still there.’

Thomas hurries through the secretarium into the nave, where Brother Barnaby is tugging the bell rope in sharp jerks. Thomas has never been up the ladder. His clogs are clumsy on the rungs and he clings to the risers so tightly that sections of bark come loose and spin down on Barnaby below.

‘ Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus . .’

After almost a hundred rungs the ladder emerges through a trap door on to a bird-shit-splattered, roughly adzed wooden floor. The bell swings close above him, deafening. He crawls across to the snow-capped sill of the window set in the northern wall and looks out.

Nothing.

Beyond the priory walls a milk-white dawn mist has risen above the fens, a membrane that floats over everything so he can hardly tell where the earth below meets the sky above. Only the stark branches of the hawthorn trees are prominent, though here and there the mist eddies and thins under the tutelage of the freshening wind, so that vague shapes appear for a moment, then are gone.

He watches from the other windows of the tower, each facing a different point on the compass, and through each the view is similar. There is no sign of the horsemen. Down below he can see the beggars’ gate open and quickly close again to admit numerous lay brethren, summoned from their granges by the din of the bell.

At length it stops ringing, though his ears continue long after.

‘Brother Thomas!’

The Dean is standing in the middle of the garth, framed by the cloister.

‘Anything?’

‘Nothing, Brother!’

From below comes the clop of iron shoes as a horse is brought across the cobbled yard. Perched atop is the reluctant Brother Robert.

The Dean calls up again.

‘Is the road clear?’

Thomas waits before replying. A clearing in the mist is drifting across the land, a window through which he can see the snowfields below. He waits until it reaches the road, bulking out and flattening against the dyke before rising and passing over, revealing only the weals left by the tracks of long-gone travellers.

‘No one,’ he calls down.

The Dean signals for the gate to be opened and Brother Robert urges his horse through the gate. The Dean blesses his back with the sign of the cross, but already the gate is slammed shut and the locking bar dropped in place. Thomas watches as Robert trots away up the road, head down, shoulders hunched, vanishing into the mist.

Thomas has never been up here in the belfry before, never seen the priory from above. He sees how the whole is halved by the dividing wall, so that the canons’ cloister is kept apart from the sisters’ cloister, only touching in the window house, the octagonal brick building set in the wall that houses the turning window through which the two halves of the priory communicate. The charge of this is given to the oldest canon of the community, and it is through this screen, designed so that neither brother nor sister ever see one another, that food and laundry passes from the sisters to the canons, while in the wall bisecting the nave of the chapel is a smaller version through which the consecrated host is passed during Mass. In this way the two communities might be said to feed one another.