House of Shadows (32 page)

He rapped on the solid wood and called out. The black cat joined him and miaowed loudly. One of the brothers or lay workers must have been making a tour of inspection and observed the open door to the crypt. Without bothering to check whether anyone was inside he'd closed it and turned the key. Yet even as this innocent explanation ran through Chaucer's head, a more sinister one was keeping pace with it. This action was deliberate. Anybody coming to lock up would surely have glimpsed the light of the swaying lantern or heard the sound of steps within. But the decisive evidence was the running feet. No one honestly engaged on fastening doors would run away from the scene as if his life depended on it.

He tried the door again but it was well secured. Then he called out more loudly. Not a cry for help but ‘Hey!' and ‘Is anybody there?' He paused and waited for the sound of descending feet and rattling keys and the breathless apology that would follow.

No sounds came.

Geoffrey took a few deep breaths in an attempt to calm himself. He felt his skin crawling. Ever since childhood he'd had a fear of being shut in. He did not relish being imprisoned in this place even for a few minutes. For it would only be a few minutes, surely, before someone heard his cries?

Then he recalled the thickness of the walls, built to last, built as if to muffle sounds. No one knew he was down here either, no one except the individual who'd locked the door on him. Geoffrey's absence would be noticed after a time, certainly. But would anyone come looking for him? And, if they did, would they trouble to explore a deserted, unused crypt? Wouldn't it be assumed that he'd simply decided to quit the priory,
perhaps unsettled by the day's events? After all, he wasn't bound by the rules of the place. He was free to come and go. If he didn't appear at mealtimes, would Richard Dunton conclude that he had got fed up with his Bermondsey sojourn and returned to his wife and family across the river?

A sudden, grim vision flashed through Chaucer's overactive brain. The discovery of a starved, desiccated corpse after some weeks. It was an absurd image, yet not so absurd as to prevent him breaking out in a sweat. He renewed his pummelling on the door and his shouting. He listened. Nothing, apart from the drip of water somewhere in the depths of the chamber and the bell for prayer resounding distantly – very distantly – outside. He might as well save his breath. There would be no one around to listen to him for the next half-hour or so.

He examined the candle in its socket inside the cylindrical lantern. It was reduced to a stub. It was the candle he'd been reading by in bed the previous night, transferred by him from a candleholder to the lantern in preparation for this little expedition. It would have been prudent to have equipped himself with a fresh candle. Too late now. Unpleasant as it was being stuck down here, it would be many times worse being without any illumination at all.

Well, no doubt someone would appear in answer to his calls sooner or later, but in the meantime he must explore his temporary prison. The door was immovable but perhaps there was some other way in and out of the chamber. If he hadn't noticed it on his first inspection, then that would be because he hadn't been searching for it. And if he was going to find it, he needed the few remaining minutes of light from the candle stub. He made a more thorough tour of the vault, running the light over the walls and fetching up once more at the end wall. Again the sense of airless
oppression grew stronger even as the candlelight began to give ominous flickers. Geoffrey was on the point of giving up and returning to the main door – the monks must surely have finished their prayers by now – when he felt a draught at knee height.

Geoffrey dipped down with the lantern and his heart leaped to see what he hadn't observed before, a small aperture at the base of the wall. He got down on hands and knees, observing that the black cat had rejoined him.

‘Is this a way out?' he said to his companion.

Depositing the lantern beside him with care to keep it out of the draught, Geoffrey pushed his head into the opening. It was a little wider than his shoulders. A waft of dank, odorous air met his nose. The hole gave on to a kind of shaft, sloping down at an angle. He held the lantern over the hole to reveal ancient stonework. He could hear nothing but had the sense of water below. Probably the aperture gave access to the priory's drainage system. Somewhere, the descending shaft would connect to a system of channels which would eventually emerge into the open. The prospect of slithering down the shaft and then making his way like a rat through a besmeared and confusing network of underground passages, perhaps for hundreds of yards, did not appeal.

He had a choice. He could make his way back towards the main door and resume his attempt to get noticed, or he could launch himself down the stone shaft. At that moment the candle in the lantern gave a final flicker and went out, and a blanket of dark fell on the chamber. Geoffrey was still on hands and knees, debating. He felt the whisk of the cat's tail against his sweating face.

At the same instant, and to Chaucer's overwhelming relief, he heard a banging on the door and a voice
calling: ‘Is anyone there?' He shouted in reply and there was a jingle of keys and the sound of the door swinging inwards. A figure stood at the entrance. It was one of the brothers.

Geoffrey levered himself to his feet.

‘Who's there?' said the monk.

‘Geoffrey Chaucer, a visitor to your priory.'

‘What are you doing down here?'

By now Chaucer had reached the door. He recognized the monk. It was the revestiarius, the young man who was assistant to old Peter and whose name was…what was it now?…ah yes, Ralph. The brother also recognized Chaucer as he drew closer to daylight, which reached the bottom of the steps.

‘Why, sir! I did not know it was you.'

‘A foolish error. I was exploring the place and stupidly got myself trapped in here somehow.'

The cat appeared and shot past the two men. Brother Ralph smiled and said fondly: ‘Magnus, you foolish thing.'

Chaucer reflected on the appropriateness of the Latin name. It was a black barrel of an animal, well fed on kitchen scraps. He'd been on the point of describing how he'd been deliberately locked inside but something checked him. Better to treat it as an accident.

The young monk stood fingering the bunch of keys. He said: ‘Someone reported shouting from down here. I dismissed his words, then thought I'd better make certain after all.'

‘I'm glad you did.'

Brother Ralph glanced at the lantern which Chaucer was holding. ‘You were searching for something?' he said.

‘No, I was only curious to see this place. I have heard stories of it.'

‘Stories?'

‘Of spirits and hauntings and suchlike,' said Geoffrey.
He was truthful enough in claiming he had not been searching for anything in particular, but he grew a little uneasy to find himself blathering away about spirits. Brother Ralph said nothing but stood aside to allow Geoffrey to pass him and then secured the door to the underground chamber. They climbed the steps to the outside. It was early afternoon. The sun shone full into the inner court, giving Geoffrey a better glimpse of Brother Ralph. He was a short young man whose pale complexion was emphasized by his black habit. He had a bland, amiable look. Chaucer noticed the sacrist and librarian, Brother Peter, passing in the background. The sun caught Peter's spectacles, making them glint under his cowl. It was hard to tell but he seemed to be looking with curiosity at Geoffrey and Brother Ralph.

‘Is that place down there your province?' asked Geoffrey, indicating the steps they'd just climbed. ‘I thought the revestiarius dealt only in linen and hangings.'

‘You are right, Master Chaucer,' said Brother Ralph. ‘This whole area is the cellarer's and the sub-cellarer's, but I could not find them so I took the keys from their office. I must return them now.'

‘My thanks, Brother Ralph. You saved me from an unpleasant stretch in the dark. I am well rebuked for my curiosity.'

What next?

 

For the second time that day Geoffrey passed through the outer court of the priory. The hulking gatekeeper was back in position. That is, he was leaning against the wall and picking at his teeth with a twig. Geoffrey wondered if it was the same fragment of wood as before. He halted opposite the man as though a thought had just occurred to him.

‘Did you find it, Osbert?'

‘Find what?'

‘Whatever it was that you had mislaid in Brother Michael's chamber.'

As on the previous occasion, when he'd warned Osbert of the murderous fugitive, Chaucer was speaking more to discomfit the gatekeeper than anything else. Something about the man set his teeth on edge. But Osbert was ready to give as good as he got. Removing the twig from his mouth, he said: ‘Where are you off to, sir?'

‘To visit a grieving house.'

‘Prior Dunton gave orders that no one was to leave this place.'

‘That was when there was a murderer on the loose. Now he has done away with himself there is no more danger.'

‘Done away with himself! Believe that and you'll believe anything.'

This chimed with Chaucer's own opinion. He approached Osbert. The deputy gatekeeper was almost a head taller. Yet Geoffrey was accustomed to dealing with people like this, people with a little authority who turned into jacks-in-office.

‘What do you know, Osbert?'

‘I know what I know.'

‘I expect you do,' said Geoffrey, turning away. He hadn't gone more than a few feet before the other said: ‘Don't you want to know what I know?'

‘If you wish to tell me, man, then do so. Do not waste my time with riddling utterances.'

‘You are going to visit a grieving house, you say. It is the Morton house you mean, isn't it? But the grief will not be that of a living brother for a dead one. Simon will not be so sorry at the death of John. The only sorrow there will be Mistress Susanna Morton's. Her you've seen?'

Again Osbert made the cupping gesture with his hands at chest height. Geoffrey nodded. The deputy gatekeeper licked his lips.

‘I've seen 'em too, all unbuttoned and loose.'

‘If I want dirty talk, Osbert, I can find better sources than you, more inventive ones.'

‘Wait, sir. Listen. I've seen Mistress Morton down by the river. I came across her and him one morning lately, going at it hammer and tongs behind some bushes. That woman and her husband's brother, the one that's dead and gone. She saw I saw too. He didn't, he was too busy. But she saw me with her great goggle eyes over his heaving shoulder.'

‘Did her husband know?'

The gatekeeper shrugged. ‘He could smell it on her, I expect. She's loose in the hilts, that one. For all that she gives herself airs. That's on account of her parentage.'

Parentage? Chaucer recalled that Mistress Morton was supposed to be the daughter of a priest. But he wasn't going to indulge Osbert by joining in the slurs on the woman, especially over something for which she bore no responsibility. Instead he said: ‘You've tried it on, too, haven't you, Osbert? You've chanced your arm with Mistress Morton.'

And not succeeded, he thought. Otherwise you would not be talking about the woman in quite these terms.

‘So what if I have?' said the other.

‘What has this to do with anything, though?' said Geoffrey. Then an idea occurred to him. ‘Are you saying that Simon Morton wanted to harm his brother because of his wife's infidelity?'

‘He wouldn't have the guts to do anything himself,' said Osbert. ‘Little shrimp of a man who could only sire a half-wit. Could've been her, couldn't it?'

‘Why would Mistress Morton want to get rid of her brother-in-law?'

‘Perhaps she got tired of his great hands wandering all over her—'

At that moment a monk came out of the gatehouse door. It was Brother Philip, who had official charge of the outer gatehouse. He dipped his cowled head on seeing Chaucer. Osbert had the grace to look uncomfortable. He said to Geoffrey: ‘And a good day to you, too, sir.'

Chaucer went through the shadow of the gate and turned right towards the artisans' dwellings. He pondered over what he'd heard from the gossipy, lascivious porter. He wondered whether Osbert was telling the truth about what he'd witnessed behind a bush on the river bank. Chaucer recalled something revealing that Mistress Morton had said when he had brought the news of John Morton's death. She'd referred to ‘my John'. So was this whole business to be explained by domestic jealousy? Was that what Osbert was hinting at? Had Simon Morton discovered that his wife was carrying on with his brother (‘He could smell it on her') and, lacking the nerve to take action himself, did he persuade…suborn…bribe someone else to do the job for him? Adam of the crooked hand? How would a poor mason have paid for such a desperate task? With a valuable ring, perhaps? Or was it Mistress Morton, trying to get rid of an importunate lover? She'd find it easier to pay Adam, and not with a gold ring either.

Geoffrey tried to get the sequence of events clear in his mind and almost straightaway dismissed the hypothesis. Because Adam had not been taken on at the priory until after Simon fell sick.

But wait: hadn't Michael the cellarer said that Adam had earlier approached him in the quest for work and
been turned away? Was it possible that at some point before he fell ill Simon had gone to Adam and urged him to assail his brother, perhaps even to kill him? Andrew the mason had claimed that Adam seemed to be looking for an opportunity to go for John Morton. But if Simon – or even his wife – had hired Adam, then the murder had been carried out in a strangely public manner. Perhaps Adam had intended to provoke an attack, to pass the whole thing off as a brawl with unintended, if fatal, consequences.

This string of hypotheses seemed too vague. And anyway, they would never know the truth of it now that Adam was dead.