Wine of Violence (18 page)

"It's only right I tell your mistress first," Ralf said, and, with an impish grin, watched the colors of frustration and anger rise and fall in the receiver's face. "And I must confess I find your prioress a rare sort of woman. What think you of her?"

"A woman is a woman. Whatever her titular position here, she can never be more than what God has made her, a ward in need of man's firm direction."

The crowner winked at him, but Thomas decided silence was the wiser response.

"She has a man's stomach for all her delicate look and short stature," Ralf said. "I would trust her to lead me into battle, I think."

"Then you are the greater fool." Simeon's laugh lacked even the hint of humor.

"No, but perhaps you are. Have you heard nothing of what she found by herself yesterday?"

Simeon glanced quickly at Thomas, who shrugged.

"Ah, I see that neither of you has heard of your brave lady's
efforts to protect you all at Tyndal. It seems she was disturbed by this recent attack on one of her charges." Ralf nodded at Thomas.
"And decided to go off on her own to investigate."

"What feminine foolishness!" Simeon barked. "And what woman did she imperil by taking her along on this childish game? Since I have heard nothing of this, I know none of my monks went with her."

"She endangered only herself. Seems she went out to the clearing where our good brother was struck and wandered down by the stream he had heard in the distance."

"The woman needs a keeper!" Simeon's face turned red again.

"And there she found a cave."

"What cave?"

"A place cut out by the stream in flood, methinks. Someone had built a bed there, of all things, yet there was no evidence of any fire. And then a strange man appeared.

Simeon gasped. "Surely one of Satan's imps." Then he leered.
"Or else she has odd fantasies like women are wont to have. Did
the man perchance have cloven hooves, hairy legs like a goat, and
a proud member as well?" Simeon jerked his hips suggestively and winked.

"Nay, monk. He held no lance ready for a lusty joust, but he did hold a knife in his hand."

Simeon hesitated and stared at the crowner in brief silence.
"A knife? My jest was unseemly. Did he injure our lady by either
word or deed?"

"She had already turned her ankle, but the man harmed her not. He ran away as soon as he saw her."

"And did she describe him? Perhaps I have seen this man. He may be one of our villagers."

"She did not get a good look at him. I thought perhaps he was a holy man just come to the area and was using the cave for his hermitage. All she noted was that grime darkened the creases in his face, that his beard and hair were unkempt, that his clothes were torn and stained, and that he held the knife in his left hand."

"Not a bad observation for a frightened woman," Thomas muttered.

"Indeed," Simeon said with a frown. "We have heard of no hermits in our area. Nor do I recognize the man's description. It could fit many from the village."

"Aye. Her find did lead me to search the cave and the environs, however, and I have brought something to make our liege lady happy. You too, I think."

"A breakthrough in the foul murder of our brother?" Simeon asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Ah, I might as well tell you, good monk, since I have yet to know a monastery without holey walls when it comes to gossip.
Here is the broken hilt of a dagger, stained with blood, I believe."
He patted the leather pouch at his side. "One of my men found it buried under the rocks just outside the cave your prioress found.
And also buried nearby, we found a bloody robe with a knife tear
near where Brother Rupert's heart would have been."

As soon as Ralf went off to speak with the prioress, Simeon left Thomas and hurried back to tell Theobald of the latest developments. Thomas continued on to the church.

Thomas had never pretended that his faith was other than a thing of habit, unconsidered and at no point in his life profound. Even now he went through the motions of priesthood as a necessary daily ritual and suspected that the majority of others did the same. However, he was not such a fool as to deny the truth of what he practiced. Wiser men than he had said that Hell fire waited for unbelievers, and who was he to question them? He was no scholar and felt no unique connection with God that he might argue he had been granted special enlightenment. He was happy to leave the clarifications on the details of faith to the likes of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas' faith might be mundane. His love of music was not. He had never shown skill on any instrument and his voice was toneless, but when choirs lifted their voices heavenward in the praise of God, it was the only time Thomas felt his soul had gotten a glimpse of Heaven. Thus, when he entered the sacristy and heard singing, he decided to slip out to see who was practicing the chants with such sweet sound.

It was the novices of Tyndal.

He was surprised to see Brother John leading the boys so skillfully. Thomas stood near a pillar just outside the nave and watched the monk rehearse them in their chants. Their youthful voices filled the air with a song so beautiful it was almost too painful to hear. Indeed, the sound was as powerful as that of a full choir of monks, although the mix of just broken and unbroken voices added a purity, indeed a uniquely innocent quality to it. In spite of himself, he lifted his eyes heavenward. At least the attitude of prayer was sincere enough even if no words came with it.

Brother John waved his hand, and the chanting stopped. The monk then gestured and hummed with enthusiastic grace, demonstrating how he wanted them to sing a particular passage. The boys watched him, their expressions solemn and worried, their
eyes unblinking. If Thomas hadn't had less comfortable meetings
with this troubling monk earlier, he would have warmed easily to him now. The novices certainly had or they would not have cared so much about following his instruction.

This Brother John was a very different person from the one Thomas had first seen. That monk had frightened him with eyes as cold as frosted stones and mouth as stern as if he were sending a heretic to the stake. Perhaps that was what bothered him most
about the monk, his icy aloofness. Then he had seen him with the
young man in the church. That monk was not aloof.

He quickly scanned the faces of the choirboys. None were of the right height or shape to match the young man he'd seen in the chapel that night. These were younger boys, just on the edge of manhood. The one Brother John had embraced with such tenderness in the pale moonlight of the chapel had crossed the line between childhood and a man's world. When Brother John smiled at these boys, however, the love Thomas saw in the monk's look came not from the loins but the heart.

Nor could Thomas ignore the gentleness with which the monk had treated him when he found Thomas lying in the clearing. Nor could he deny the attentiveness with which this man had helped him walk to the hospital. Brother John had found him a comparatively quiet bed there and kept him company until Sister Anne came. He was even companionable, touching Thomas' shoulder with tenderness and sympathy from time to time, asking meaningless and non-intrusive questions to distract him from his pain.

Thomas folded his hands into his sleeves, trying to think back to the events in the clearing before he was hit from behind. Once again he asked himself if it could have been Brother John who struck him. He was the most likely person, but Thomas was almost certain he had heard more than one voice speaking across the clearing before he was struck down. If there were two ahead of him, wouldn't they have been Brother John and the youth? He had seen no third person.

Then who might it have been if it wasn't the monk? Newcomer though he was to the area, he surely would have heard if the priory had been plagued of late with lawless men attacking those who came to the hospital. There were no prior tales of errant monks or wild hermits. Had there been a spate of troublesome strangers about, the crowner would have been a regular visitor to the priory, and the word was that Ralf had not ever come to the priory before the murder of Brother Rupert. Had the old man been the first victim of such a band?

Thomas shook his head. Unlikely. Despite Prioress Eleanor's snide comments, the old priest could not have been the first
monk to wander beyond Tyndal's perimeters, but, with the exception of Prior Theobald and his large gold cross, monks rarely had
anything worth stealing to tempt the lawless. He smiled. Thomas rather doubted that the trembling prior was one likely to seek unholy solace to ease the holy life.

Nor are men seeking coin or jewels prone to violating their victims, Thomas remembered with a wince.

No, Thomas was convinced that Brother Rupert was not the victim of lawless men; however, he might have been the victim of someone who wanted his death to look like the suicide of a monk overwhelmed with guilt over lust.

He shifted his weight against the pillar and watched the novice master demonstrating to one boy how a short passage should sound. The man had a pleasing voice, he thought.

"So why carry him into the nuns' cloister?" he muttered under his breath. Why not just leave the man where he had been killed?
And how could the murderer fail to notice that the genitals were in the wrong hand but still have the composure to change the dead monk's clothes? And what was the intent of the murderer? There were just too many questions.

Thomas scratched the bristling hair in his tonsure. It would need shaving again soon. "The man must have known that his attempts to disguise the murder as a suicide were rudimentary at best. How stupid did he think we all are here?" He looked up nervously, hoping his words had not been overheard, then fell back to silent thought.

He..
.well, it must have been a man surely. A woman could never castrate a man, even after death. Surely, women were too delicate. The young ones, anyway. Thomas gave a mirthless snort. The lasses he had known in his old life might have been too delicate. He wasn't so sure about these nuns.

Sister Anne, for one, was as tall as many men. She had shown
no timidity about examining the dead monk, nor had she shown any hesitancy about looking at his horrible wounds. No man, himself included, could have looked upon that brutal mutilation with the calm detachment she had shown. A strange woman indeed, Thomas thought, as strange in her way as Brother John was in his. Had she been plump with age and gray-haired like
several of the female servants he had known in his father's house,
he would have had no difficulty imagining her indifference over
a man's body, but Sister Anne was neither beyond the child-bear
ing age nor had she gray hair. Her reaction was not womanly, not natural. Could she have killed the monk?

Nay, he thought with a smile. Despite her odd manner, he liked Sister Anne. He felt no evil or anger in her, only compassion and a sorrow with which he felt a certain kinship.

Then there was Prioress Eleanor. He could probably eliminate her as a suspect because she was as new to Tyndal as he was. Besides, she was far too little to stab a man in the heart, unless she was standing on a stool to do it. The image of the small religious leaping upon a bench and flailing away with a knife too big for her two tiny hands even to grasp made him grin in spite of himself.

No, he couldn't see the prioress killing a man, whatever his frailty or age. She might be capable of poisoning, he thought grimly, but she didn't have the heft to wield a man's weapon. Nor did he think she would castrate a man. Despite her religious profession, there was an earthly side to the prioress. He suspected she might not only enjoy the company of a man but might also prefer his manhood to be quite functional. In fact, he
wondered how well she kept her vow of chastity. Thomas laughed
quietly. If she was looking to lose her virginity at Tyndal, she was in the wrong place. The monks he had met here were too old, too disinclined, or too frightened by women to satisfy any such lusty inclinations. Brother Simeon might be the exception, but that one was far too ambitious to damage his chances for advancement by having an affair with the prioress of a minor house like this.

As a female suspect, Thomas rather fancied Sister Ruth. He disliked the gruff woman. She was exactly the type he preferred to find locked safely away behind the stone walls of a convent, but he doubted even she would have killed Brother Rupert. Perhaps the aged monk had been a threat to the chastity of young nuns when he too had been a youth, but the good priest was far too old to be of interest or danger to any woman at the time of his murder.

Could Sister Christina have done it? No, that one was bound for sainthood if he was any judge.

Brother John was finished running each of the novices, separately
and in groups, through the segments of the chant that needed polishing. They were ready to start again. Thomas looked at the
novices and back at the monk, then shook his head. The poignant
vision of Brother John with the young man in the chapel would not leave him. If I were a wagering man, Thomas thought, I'd say this monk was a bit too fond of boys.

When the chant began, the beauty of the voices excelled anything Thomas had ever heard before and drove the more earthy thoughts from his head. With a soft cry of mixed pain and joy, he slipped slowly down on his knees to the chapel floor as tears flowed inexplicably down his cheeks. If he had just heard the voice of God, he could not have felt more awe.

And had tears not blinded Thomas, he might have looked up to see Brother John turn and gaze at him with a slight smile and widening green eyes.

Chapter Twenty

Gytha had just finished tossing out the old rush mats and was sweeping the floor in preparation for laying fresh ones when there was a knock at the door of the private chambers. She stopped in mid-sweep, rested against the broom, and looked over at her mistress.

"Enter!" the prioress called out from her chair, her foot still propped and wrapped.

"My lord Prior begs an audience, my lady." Sister Ruth entered, and, as she glanced down at her prioress, her face curdled into puckers of disapproval.

Eleanor looked up in surprise. The purpose of the prior's visit momentarily escaped her. She knew she had planned to spend this day in comparative quiet. The sprain was a bad one, and Sister Anne had ordered her to avoid the long, narrow steps into the cloister until the ankle was stronger. Gytha had even spent the night in her mistress's chambers, rather than returning to the village as she usually did, in case Eleanor needed assistance.

That quiet day had included some plans the sub-infirmarian would have forbidden, had the prioress mentioned them. Eleanor hoped to talk to Sister Matilda about her mushroom hunting forays during her kitchen days, and she thought she might also walk to the chapel for daily prayers with the assistance of Gytha. Other than that, however, she had decided to listen to Sister Anne. If nothing else, obeying the sub-infirmarian in part would allow her an hour to indulge in reading from the copy of Wace's
Geste de Bretons
which her aunt had loaned her from Amesbury.
That book might have been the cause of Sister Ruth's scowl this time. Or not. Eleanor shrugged. The nun never seemed to view anything Eleanor did with any approval.

"Of course," she said, closing the book carefully so it lay flat on the lectern shelf in front of her. "Why is he here?"