The Lost Prophecies (17 page)

‘Would you care for some food as well?’

‘The body, prior,’ Bishop Walter said gently. ‘Where is it?’

Prior Stephen gazed down at his table. ‘It’s down in the crypt.’

‘We shall need to see it,’ Baldwin said.

The prior was clearly distressed by the death of this man. Violence was rare and naturally disturbing to a man like Prior Stephen. Few would expect murder in a great abbey – except violence was natural in any large foundation. It was not so many years ago that the Dean of Exeter had conspired in the death of a political enemy in the Chapter, hiring the vicars of Heavitree and Ottery St Mary to murder the cathedral’s precentor. Where there was money, privilege and power, there were motives for murder.

Still . . . ‘You are sure that this was murder?’ he asked.

To his shock, Stephen began to laugh shrilly, like a man sent suddenly lunatic.

‘Faugh!’ Simon exclaimed. ‘What’s that?’

They were being taken down into the crypt along a dank, dingy corridor under the abbey’s Chapter House when the smell caught at his throat. It was there, over the odour of burning pitch from the torch in the hand of the old lay brother who was taking them along the narrow stone passageways.

Bishop Walter had remained with the prior, and Simon could see why. Prior Stephen was in a dreadful state. He would say nothing about the dead fellow, only that he was most certainly murdered. More than that he would not say, but instead his eyes filmed over, and he started to shake uncontrollably, wine spilling from his goblet and showering his table and lap.

‘Did the bishop say anything to you about the body?’ Simon asked in a muted voice.

‘No more than he told you. He was silent all the way here,’ Baldwin said. ‘It is most peculiar. I have never known him to be so close before.’

Simon wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘Can you smell that?’

Baldwin shot him a disdainful look. ‘My sense of smell is fine, Simon. I can detect excrement – but that is no surprise. I dare say we are close to the sewers.’

‘Not here,’ the lay brother said.

‘Then why that odour?’ Baldwin asked.

‘I was told not to say.’

‘Who told you not to say?’ Baldwin asked.

‘The prior. You’ll see soon enough anyway.’

‘See what?’ Simon said.

And then they turned a corner, and he saw a flickering light ahead of them. It glinted from the moisture on the stone walls, from puddles on the ground – and from something else.

‘Sweet Jesus!’ Simon blurted.

‘Yes. The poor boy died badly,’ the lay brother said tonelessly.

‘I could not tell you. I didn’t want the messenger to hear of it.’

‘In Christ’s own name!’ the bishop swore.

‘It was concealed. I swear by the Gospels, my lord, I did all I could to keep it hidden. No one knew it was there, so far as I can tell.’

‘Someone clearly did,’ Bishop Walter said. ‘What was the lad doing there if he didn’t know about it?’

‘I asked him to fetch it to me.’

‘Why?’

‘The Franciscans. They are deeply spiritual men, I am sure, but one of them tried to engage me in conversation about books. He asked to see the abbey’s works, and when I had shown him he enquired about others. Books that might be more . . . contentious. It made me anxious, so I sent young Alexander to fetch it. Someone found him there and killed him for it.’

‘But he was not merely killed, was he?’

‘I would that he
had
been!’

Scarcely a man, Baldwin thought. The youth’s face was unlined, the flesh pale and smooth.

Simon called: ‘Baldwin, I can’t . . .’

‘I understand, Simon,’ Baldwin said with some asperity. In the last few years Simon had grown more accustomed to the reality of sudden, violent death, but with a murder like this even Baldwin felt more than a shade of queasiness.

‘Did no one hear him?’ he asked the torchbearer.

‘Of course they did. Loads of us heard the screaming.’

Killing him in this manner must have taken an age, Baldwin told himself. ‘Nobody sought him?’

‘The man who did this knew his way about, I’d think. He knew how to get here, knew enough to close doors and all. And all the noise we heard, well, we heard it through the windows. All of us came piling out to help the poor soul, but we were in the yard outside. No one could hear anything through these walls.’

Baldwin looked about him briefly. It was easily believable. The walls down here were enormously thick. The crypt itself was beneath the main Chapter House, and so some distance from the sleeping accommodation. The monks would all have been sleeping in their dormitory some distance away, and although they could have heard a man’s screams through their own open windows it was unlikely that the sound could have been heard through the walls. Here, they must have been three feet thick or more.

But considerations of how the noise travelled were less compelling than the sight of the dead man.

He was slumped with his back to the pillar in the middle of the room. The enormous stones were there to support the weight of the massive ceiling above, and it was not wide enough for the man’s arms to span the masonry, but someone had done their best to make him, binding his hands with a thong so tightly that the leather had cut into both wrists.

As the bearer said, he had died badly.

A strip of leather on the ground showed how he had been gagged. The cloth holding the gag in his mouth had been wrenched aside at some point. Perhaps in the poor man’s agonized struggles, trying to escape even as the skin was flayed from his living body and rolled aside like an opened shirt.

The bishop left the prior and marched to the abbey church. There, at least, he hoped, he would be able to gain a little solitude for contemplation.

Entering, he saw that there were already other men up near the altar, both kneeling in prayer, and he recognized them as Franciscans. So these were the men who the prior had said were strangers to the convent. Bishop Walter strode to the front of the church and bent to kneel, feeling his old joints complain as he did so. Always the same: as he grew older, his ancient frame had started to fail him. First it was the piles when he spent too many hours in the saddle, then his eyes had begun to weaken, so he must use spectacles to read even in good light, and now his legs were complaining at the regular kneeling on cold stone. Even the callouses on both knees did not help any more.

The other men had fallen silent as he walked in, and now, as he remained kneeling quietly, he was sure that at least one of them was eyeing him. But he would not be distracted from his communion with God. To his relief, soon after he had closed his eyes he heard the rustle as they both stood, then the firm slap of their bare feet as they made their way from the church.

That was when Bishop Walter began to pray in earnest for the return of the book, the cursed Black Book of Brân.

Simon was relieved when Baldwin had apparently completed his investigation of the body and they could leave the noisome passageway leading to that foul chamber.

‘Who knew the lad best of all?’ Baldwin asked the torchbearer.

‘Don’t know. I’m a lay brother, and they don’t always tell us much. You know, we’re just menials and servants. We don’t matter,’ the man said in a surly tone.

‘You have served the abbey long?’

‘No. I served the king, but now I am retired here. A corrodian.’

‘A pensioner? And yet they do not treat you well?’

‘The abbot has a book about all the things he wants and expects, and God save the man who gets it wrong. It’s all listed in his book. And so are all the people who don’t measure up to his standard.’

‘Did that boy?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Come, now. I am seeking his murderer. A man who could do that either must have hated the boy a great deal or must have had some reason to want to punish him. What can you tell me?’

‘The lad was a pleasant enough fellow. Friendly, but no slacker. Hard worker, from all I’ve heard. And he had a good brain on his shoulders. Could read Latin, Greek, French and other languages. He was a good student. No wonder the prior was proud of him.’

‘Not the abbot?’

‘The abbot has his own ideas about what is right and wrong.’

‘What is your name?’

With a display of reluctance the man grudgingly admitted, ‘Peter.’

‘Thank you, Peter. You disagree with him?’

‘No. Why should I? He is trying to bring back honour to the abbey.’

Simon was still wiping at his mouth. Now he looked up, his face still sour after the sight in that chamber. ‘Why mention that? Has there been a loss of honour here?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ Peter demanded. ‘About the thefts? The insult to the king? No man would insult our King Edward, God save his soul! But they did his father.’

‘Who would have insulted the king?’ Simon scoffed. ‘No man would dare offend a king.’

They had climbed a winding stair and now were approaching the door to the Chapter House. In answer to Simon’s comment, Peter turned to it and pointed. ‘See that?’

‘It is a parchment, isn’t it? Not good quality,’ Simon said, studying the skins nailed over the door. There were three sheets he could see, stretched over the door’s frame. He prodded them. ‘It’s pretty rough, though. No wonder it wasn’t used for writing.’ He leaned closer to sniff at it, but then withdrew sharply when Peter shrugged and responded.

‘It’s not very good, no. But I doubt many tanners wanted to cure the hide of Master Puddlicott once he was skinned.’

Bishop Walter left the church feeling a little calmed by his prayers. As he entered the passageway that gave out to the cloister, he glanced up into the Chapter House and saw the other men standing at the door.

‘Had you heard this tale?’ Baldwin asked as the bishop walked towards them.

‘The skin? Oh, yes. I remember the matter very clearly. Twenty years ago, was it not?’

Peter nodded. ‘Aye.’

‘Were you in the old king’s service then?’ Bishop Walter asked.

‘Me? No, I was in his son’s household. Our present king. I was a man-at-arms. A sergeant,’ he added proudly. But then he shook his head and sighed. ‘I was hurt fighting the traitors at Boroughbridge, and that is why he bought my place here – to let me rest before my death.’

‘Really?’ Baldwin said, eyeing him doubtfully.

‘I have been injured, and I grow lame sitting in a saddle or marching,’ Peter said.

‘Why was this flesh left here?’ Simon demanded, his lip curled as he stared at the leathery hide.

‘He had robbed the king,’ the bishop said. ‘What else would you have had him do? Puddlicott and others took the king’s most prized possessions. King Edward used to leave them here in Westminster’s crypt for safety. When the thieves were caught, he was determined to make an example. Puddlicott claimed to have benefit of clergy. He was held in the Tower for two years before he confessed that he lied. His skin, and the skin of the other robbers, was nailed here as a deterrent to stop other monks aiding felons.’

Simon winced. ‘That was the old king, then?’

‘Yes. King Edward I, our king’s father.’

‘You say the monks abetted the thieves?’ Baldwin prompted.

‘That was the suggestion. The king’s treasury down in the crypt was secure, with locks on all doors, but the felons clambered in through a window. It took them days, I heard tell – they had to work at the bars first, breaking the sill to remove them, and then climbed inside, where they broke open the strongboxes and took all of value. The guards apparently heard nothing, the brothers said they heard nothing – and yet a mason worked two nights to break open the window! And some of the felons were harboured within the abbey.’

Baldwin was studying the door with a speculative eye. ‘And last night another man was flayed alive. That is a curious coincidence, is it not?’

Simon coughed to cover his urge to throw up again. ‘You call it “curious”, Baldwin? I just call it
sick
. Whoever did that was mad!’

Abbot John of Malvern swore to himself as he marched from his lodgings along the pathway to the abbey, his arms wrapped about him against the morning’s chill.

The fool! He had no damned doubts what Alexander had been doing, and for the abbot’s money he deserved all he had got. No. No, that was too harsh. But the lad had taken the keys to the crypt, he’d gone in there at dead of night and according to that priggish twit, Prior Stephen, he
had
been looking for the book.

Damn the book! It should have been destroyed an age ago. The bishop himself shouldn’t have brought it here. That was stupid in the extreme. As was sticking the thing down there under the Chapter House. There had been a number of attempts on that chamber in the past. Only a few years ago the crown jewels had been stolen from there. The blasted place wasn’t secure. Who could have been stupid enough to leave that book there? Only the son of a hog – Prior Stephen. He was too dim to see the dangers, the idiot!

‘Abbot.’

Bloody rudeness! ‘Bishop.’

Bishop Walter peered at him short-sightedly. ‘I am sorry to hear of the death of the fellow during the night.’

‘It was a shame. Yes. Poor Alexander.’

The bearded knight at the bishop’s right shoulder leaned forward. ‘Have you found the murderer?’

‘Me? Why, no.’

‘Whom have you set to finding the killer?’

‘That is hardly my responsibility. I have asked the prior to look into it. It is more his province than mine.’

The knight had the impudence to eye him askance at that. ‘Not yours? Is this not your abbey?’

‘It
is
my abbey. And as such I have a duty of care over all—’ he held up a hand to cut off the knight ‘—over all the living within my community. As prior, he is responsible for the men within the abbey, the lay and the ecclesiastical, and maintaining order. I find your interest in the matter impertinent, master.’

‘You do realize that the young fellow down there in the crypt has been
murdered
by having the flesh torn from his body?’

‘Enough, Baldwin,’ Bishop Walter said, holding up his hand. ‘My lord abbot, I have spoken to the prior already. I would be very keen to ask my two friends here to help you to investigate the death. They would be most happy to do so.’