House of Shadows (11 page)

‘Take the horse around the rear of the church. A lay brother there will stable the beast for you. The guest quarters are in the hall beyond the infirmary. But beware, there is someone…'

There was a momentary hesitation in the man's instructions, as though he had suddenly thought of another impediment to his new guest's sojourn. However, Falconer, who was short of sight anyway, did not see the worried frown on the prior's visage at such a distance and through the sheet of falling rain. Merely that the prior cast a look over his shoulder before again waving his arms to the right to emphasize where Falconer should go.

‘Well, you will see for yourself. Go that way before you drown. You will find the hall easily enough.'

He then disappeared inside the church again to deal with the problem of the mad monk.

Falconer shrugged his shoulders at the mysterious utterance of the prior and, bowing his head against the driving rain, led the rounsey around the north side of the church. Avoiding a brook that already ran in flood across the marshy ground beyond, he followed the prior's instructions. He turned to the right around the grey and looming structures south of the church. Most abbeys and priories were similarly laid out, and Falconer guessed that the first outbuilding he came to was the infirmary where Brother Peter would soon be confined. It looked a grim and depressing place, and by the evidence of his nose the main cesspit for the priory abutted it close by. The final building in the range should be the guest quarters. And indeed, hugging close to the walls to shelter from the worst of the rain, Falconer soon discerned a bedraggled figure lurking in an archway that led to another inner courtyard. This would be the lay brother who would stable his horse.

The man beckoned him over and took the reins of the lame rounsey with nothing more than a grunt to welcome the prior's unexpected guest. It was only as the man turned his back that Falconer's eye was taken by a light in one of the upper windows of the guesthouse. He thought he saw the pale features of a person in the light of a flickering candle. Delving in his pouch, he produced his eye-lenses and fixed them on. But by then the vision was gone, the window dark, and, besides, the rain was smearing his view through the lenses.

When first he had commissioned the device to rectify his poor eyesight, it had been nothing more than two pieces of glass fixed at either end of a V-shaped bar of metal. He had had to hold it to his face to see clearly.

Dissatisfied, he had eventually crafted folding side-arms that wedged above his ears. For the first time ever, he had been grateful for the jutting nature of those appendages. Still and all, the eye-lenses were heavy and cumbersome, and he didn't wear them regularly. He was thought eccentric enough already in the town of Oxford, and to wear eye-glasses all the time would invite ridicule. Taking the glasses off, and folding them, he called over to the lay brother.

‘Who was that at the…?' He paused, unsure what he was asking. The man glanced up to where Falconer was pointing. Seeing nothing, he frowned and shrugged his apparently already burdened shoulders. Falconer sighed and decided he had seen nothing more than a false image in the flicker of lightning in the sky. That or a ghost, and he didn't believe in ghosts.

‘Brother, where do I go?'

The man, who might have belonged to a silent order for all the conversation he had at his disposal, pointed a stubby finger at the doorway at the other end of the range from where the ghostly image had appeared. Falconer trudged under the arch and out of the rain.

 

The prior sat at the long oak table in his private chamber twisting the seal ring that adorned the little finger of his left hand. Before him lay a precious piece of fresh parchment on which he was contemplating writing a letter. This sheet was no palimpsest, used and rubbed clean for reuse, but bore a pristine surface. It was to carry a significant message to the parent house of St Mary's, La Charité-sur-Loire. John de Chartres had thought long and hard about the contents of the letter, and even if it should be sent at all. But he was a cautious and meticulous man and did not want to be held to individual blame for the scandal he feared could soon be exposed. He cursed the day he had been
given the commission of setting the priory back on its feet. Then, he had scorned the old tales of horror that went back to soon after the founding of the priory.

Shortly after his own landing on the shores of England, he had been told by a seafarer, who happened to reside near Rotherhithe, that the place he was going to bore a poor reputation. He had brushed off the remarks as the malicious rumours of tenants who resented paying the priory its dues. But almost as soon as he arrived at Bermondsey, one of the older brothers, Ranulf, had taken him aside.

‘Prior, I have to warn you that all is not well here.'

John smiled to himself wryly. He knew that. After all, had he not been sent to sort out the financial mess the priory had slipped into?

‘I am aware of irregularities with the accounts, Brother Ranulf.'

He was quite shocked at the look of scorn the old monk had then given him. He was not used to such disrespect and began to remonstrate. But Ranulf gave him no time to get into his stride, sneering at the new prior.

‘No, no. That is nothing – a little laxity. No, I am talking about past deeds that still dog our heels.'

John stood in silence as the story flooded from Ranulf's hoary and bewhiskered lips. It was a tale of the priory's earliest time, almost two hundred years ago. Of chaplains who disappeared without trace, and ladies who were wards of the king, and who rewarded the ministrations of the monks by running off into the wide blue yonder. It had all apparently brought bad luck on the house. When the monk finished his diatribe, it was John de Chartres' turn to cast a scornful look on his informant. He was a prudent and worldly man despite his deep faith, and yarns about errant lords and ladies and bad luck did not impress him.
Besides, he had been vouchsafed a darker and more accurate account of the priory's early history by his superiors. An account with which he wasn't going to enlighten Ranulf.

He had smiled and patted the old monk on the shoulder in much the same way as he had done this very morning when Brother Peter had uttered his gibberish. He had at the time taken Ranulf's tale to be similarly outlandish. They had not bothered him then, those old stories. Now, he was beginning to wonder. He pulled the candlestick closer to his parchment, the better to write of the events he wished to detail by the yellowish flame. Beyond the window of his comfortable upper chamber, dusk had fallen. And the edge of the pallid moon was beginning to be eaten away.

 

Falconer crossed the cramped room that was the small upper solar of his guest quarters, the old floorboards creaking under his weight. He sank down on the rude bed, which also protested at his size. He was a large man, but even now, after years spent in study at the university, his frame carried little excess fat. He had been a fighting man in his youth and kept up an active regime to avoid the degeneration of the body that he saw in his fellow Masters. But now it was not his body but his mind that troubled him. After fifteen years as Regent Master at Oxford University, Falconer was afraid he was losing his mind. Not in the sudden way that the young monk called Peter was deemed to have lost his by the prior of Bermondsey, but in a slow and insidious manner.

It had all started when he was lecturing a bunch of new students on Aristotle's
Prior Analytics
. The subject was as familiar to him as his own palm, and he had intoned the tenets a thousand times. But suddenly he could not recall a simple set of premises.

‘First then take a universal negative with the terms A and B. If no B is A, neither can any A be B. For if some A – we will call them C – were B, it would not be true that…not true that…'

Suddenly the sequence that he had rattled off to hundreds of students refused to emerge from his brain. And a sudden shaft of a headache arrowed through his left eye. He had covered the moment by brusquely harassing one of the more recalcitrant of his students. ‘Finish the premise, Thomas Youlden.'

At least he had remembered the boy's name, if not the principle he had been instilling into unwilling brains for years. The boy had trembled but had fumbled his way through that which had completely escaped his dominie. Later, his old friend and constable of the town of Oxford, Peter Bullock, had guffawed when Falconer had privately confessed his embarrassing failure. Though he still didn't mention even to Bullock the accompanying megrims that troubled him periodically.

‘Why, William, I do believe old age is creeping up on you too.'

The thought had mortified Falconer, who was only just into his forty-fifth year and several years younger than Bullock. That was the moment when he decided he needed to seek a herbalist. The Doctors of Medicine at Oxford were less than useless to him. Their so-called medical knowledge was based on philosophical thought, not empirical action. Be that as it might, the problem was that he didn't want anyone else in Oxford to know of his plight anyway. So that was why he had so easily complied with Roger Bacon's request for him to travel to Canterbury to enquire of a certain Jew there about alchemical matters. Falconer had seen straight away that he could combine the trip with a medical consultation.

Now, as he lay back on the bed, pondering on the results of his trip, an errant sliver of pain began to niggle at his left eye again. He dipped into his pouch and extracted another dried leaf. It would have been better to infuse it in hot water, but the persistent rain and the thought of seeking help from the intransigent lay brother put him off. He stuffed the leaf in his mouth and sucked on it, waiting for the light euphoria it would bring. Through the arched window of the solar, he could see that one edge of the speckled surface of the moon was being eaten away by darkness. He closed his eyes and tried to relax, but sleep did not come.

In the growing stillness, however, he was aware of a dim but persistent noise. He lay in the darkness trying to decipher the sound. The closest he could come to it was that it reminded him of the sound of a ship tossing on a worried sea. He rose and stepped across to the window, wondering if one of those cloud-ships he had heard tell of as a child had indeed sailed into view above the priory. He recalled his father swearing to the truth of coming out of Mass one morning to find a cloud-ship bobbing in the sky, its anchor caught on a tombstone in the churchyard. His father had looked up to see a strange-looking sailor cutting the rope to leave the anchor behind and so allowing the ship to sail away into the sky. However, his father had been unable to show the boy any evidence. No anchor lay in the churchyard. Falconer gazed up, but all he saw was a growing darkness as the moon was increasingly obscured. Then he heard the sound again and knew it for what it was. Someone was unceasingly pacing the floorboards of the adjoining room to his. The room at whose window he had thought he had seen a ghostly figure.

 

As the moon was slowly eaten away and the night darkened, John de Chartres picked up his quill and began
his narration of the events of the past few days. He set down on the pristine parchment in lines of black ink the disconcerting disappearance of two brother monks and the madness of a third. It had all begun two nights ago at compline, when Brothers Martin and Eudo had failed to put in an appearance. A cursory search of the priory and grounds had established that they were nowhere to be found. Eudo La Zouche was a quiet, stable youth, whose absence surprised the prior, even though he had found him easily led.

Brother Martin was another matter altogether, and his past history made it all the more difficult for de Chartres to confess to his disappearance. But confess it he must, it seemed. Especially now that Brother Peter's precipitate descent into madness had occurred. He was afraid there were darker deeds to confess. All three young men had come to Bermondsey Priory by different routes and from different backgrounds – particularly Martin – but had somehow struck up a mutual friendship. The prior had been glad at the time that they had studied and prayed together, clearly finding mutual strength in their comradeship. He now wondered if he had been misled into thinking their alliance was one of innocence. And he began to examine his recollection of their friendship to see if there had been one who had exerted a stronger influence over the others. It was his greatest fear that Martin had led the others astray in some way.

‘I now lay down my confession of sin…'

The prior stared at these opening words scratched on to the page for an eternity, before becoming bold enough to write down the final calamity.

‘And now we have his mother to contend with.'

 

Knowing that the effects of the chewed leaf would not allow him to sleep, William Falconer decided to slake
his curiosity. He crept across his room, barely making a noise, and descended the stairs. The two guest-rooms, while being next to each other, were not connected in any way. They were approached by two separate staircases from the inner courtyard. So if Falconer was going to discover who his restless companion was, he would have to descend his own stairs to access those of the other guest. It did not occur to him until he stood in the archway at the bottom of his own stairs staring at the continuing downpour that he had no reason to be intruding on the other man.

‘Damn it all, William. You are an infernally nosy character – you must be able to think of some cause to disturb his rest.'

He sidled along the wall of the guesthouse trying his best to keep out of the rain that still poured down. Despite his best efforts, several large drops of water fell from the roof overhang and subtly found their way down his neck and inside his robe. He shivered as the freezing water trickled down his back, soaking into his underclothes. Reaching the arch of the other staircase, he pushed against the door to escape the deluge. It resisted his thrust, and after rattling the latch several times he finally realized the door was locked.