Will Davenport - The Perfect Sinner

‘And if we didn’t? If your soul had to stand up for itself without a lot of people, most of whom don’t know it very well, all singing flat on its behalf?’

I stared at him. I was deeply disturbed by his tone. This was dangerous ground. ‘You know the story? The story of de Mowbray?’ I sometimes felt it was all I had thought about for years now.

‘I might. Tell me anyway.’

‘He begged his chaplain to sing a mass for his soul the moment he died. Do you know what happened?’

Batokewaye sometimes looked as if he had been hewn from the huge trunk of an old elm tree and that look came upon him now, dense, unchangeable, so I went on. The chaplain ran straight from the deathbed. He was racing to the chapel but something stopped him. De Mowbray’s spectre, twisted and tortured. “You’ve broken your promise,” said the spectre. “No, I came straight here,” said the chaplain, “you died only a moment ago.” “In that time, twenty years have passed in Purgatory,” the ghost replied, “I have suffered twenty years of torment for your neglect. It is worse than Hell.”’

He just went on looking at me. I thought perhaps he hadn’t been listening.

‘Worse than Hell, William’ I said again. ‘If a few moments here is twenty years there, imagine how it will be. Your soul stays there, paying the price of your sins, until Judgement Day itself.’ It turned my guts around to think of it, to think I had that coming, hurtling at me.

He sighed. ‘Wherever I’ve been in the country, I’ve heard that story,’ he said. I’ve heard it said about Montague, Mauny, Beauchamp, Scrope, every single knight who has given up the ghost.’

‘Are you saying you don’t believe it?’

I’m saying that Purgatory is a very good idea from the clergy’s point of view. I’m delighted at the chance to live in luxury off a terrified Lord.’

‘Should we not be terrified of Purgatory? If we die in mortal sin aren’t we bound to suffer there? Isn’t that what the Bible says?’

The priest stared back at me, unblinking. ‘I know you, Guy. I’ve known you since long before you were a knight. I’ve heard everything you have to confess and I must say it’s been mild stuff. If you came to me to confess a real mortal sin, I’d know you were lying. All right, lying might be a sin but you’d have to try a lot harder to get committed to the eternal flames than by a grammatical paradox.’

He thought he knew me. He didn’t. I had told him nothing of the last and greatest of my three sins.

‘There’s Heaven and there’s Hell,’ he went on, ‘and each of us is bound for one or the other. You have to earn your way into both of them and all we can do is pray to Saint Peter that he’ll be kind if we’re somewhere in between, which is where most of us are. And by the way, no it’s not what the Bible says at all. The Bible is fairly silent on the precise question of Purgatory. It’s a modern invention.’ The priest stood up, turned to face me, looming over me.

‘Look at you. Sir Guy de Bryan, noble Knight of the very choice Order of the Garter,’ he growled, ‘King’s companion, steward, holder of the Great Seal, ambassador, royal envoy. Thought of throughout the length and breadth of the land for years past as the finest knight there ever was, so clearly honest that you cast no shadow in the sunlight. It passes straight through you. So fair, you’ve been called in twenty times a year since you were old enough to wear a sword to sort out every brawling squabble the greedy nobility gets itself into. Trusted equally by the King and the Commons and that’s rare enough. Not a spot on your soul and yet you’re so afraid you’ve hired a phalanx of priests. You’re getting much too pious. You need to ease up on the piety. Do you understand anything about our Lord?’ He wheeled round and thrust his hand, finger outstretched to the top of the tower.

‘What’s that up there?’ he demanded.

I looked up, squinting against the sun. The crucifix?’

‘That’s it. Don’t we take it for granted? Wasn’t it lucky Christ died on a cross?’

Unsure where this could be leading, I frowned at him. ‘It was surely more than lucky, it was blessed,’

‘That wasn’t what I meant. Supposing Pilate had given him the option,’ rasped the priest, bending down to put his enormous face right in front of mine. ‘Supposing he’d said, all right Jesus, it’s up to you. Your choice. You can either be crucified or you can be stung to death by bees.’

More heresy was in the wind. I stared at him.

‘Well, imagine,’ said the priest impatiently. ‘If he’d chosen the bees, what an inconvenient sign we’d have to make then.’ The priest waggled his hand around his face, fingers jabbing back and forth and let out a hoot of laughter.

I crossed myself quickly as the rooks took off from the trees around the tower adding their shrieks to the echoes of the laugh. Remembering the figure up on the hill, I looked up there to see if there had been a witness to this blasphemy. There was nobody there now.

‘Oh come on, man,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose you think that’s another hundred years of Purgatory added to your sentence. If God hasn’t got a sense of humour, what hope is there for the world? Indeed, what hope is there for any of us if someone like you has to spend half your fortune on a place like this?’

‘Have you lost your faith?’ I asked. ‘It’s a few years since I’ve seen you, old friend. You don’t sound like a believer any more.’

‘Oh, don’t you dare doubt my belief,’ retorted the priest. ‘I may be old-fashioned, but I believe all right.’

‘Do you believe in good and evil?’

‘In their place,’ said the priest, ‘I am not sure I have ever met a truly evil man. Have you?’

‘Oh yes. One. Just one.’

The priest looked at me. ‘Molyns?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘All right, I’ll grant you that,’ the priest went on. ‘One. But good and evil notwithstanding, what I don’t believe in is all this modern blackmail.’

‘You know what I did.’

‘I know what you think you did. Seems to me other people had a big hand in it.’

He didn’t know about my third sin. That was the problem and somehow I wasn’t yet ready to tell him. I had tucked it so far out of sight that I no longer quite knew its shape.

The wicket gate creaked open and a face looked round. It was the man from up on the hill. I didn’t want to be interrupted and certainly not by a stranger.

‘Not now,’ I called, perhaps a little impatiently, and the face disappeared abruptly.

‘Ah,’ said the priest, ‘sorry, he’s with me. I was just about to mention him.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s a squire in the King’s household. Well connected. Trusted. In with the people who matter. They send him to sort out things, very like you were at that age, I’d say. Oh and he’s married to the beautiful Philippa Roet, so that puts him in with Lancaster.’

‘Really? Why’s he here?’

‘You’re off travelling again. He’s going with you.’

‘Who says he is? Come to that, who says I’m going anywhere?’

William looked at me with a smug expression. ‘I am trusted with certain information, you know. He came down with me. I was asked to bring him to you. Up at court they thought he’d never find Slap ton by himself. I know where you’re going.’

He’d tried that sort of trick a few times before. ‘I don’t think you do,’ I said.

‘You’re journeying overland, avoiding France and all its friends. Your final destination is Genoa by way of the Rhine valley and the Alpine passes. Your purpose there is to negotiate an agreement whereby the Genoese will trade freely with us, using one port specially nominated for that purpose and hopefully granting free use of Genoa by English ships in return. Am I right?’