Sacrilege (31 page)

The old woman hesitated; her desire to believe me seemed to be battling with her natural wariness towards a stranger and a foreigner. After a moment, her face crumpled and her thin fingers clasped my wrist.

"She didn't kill him," she said, her voice barely escaping the dry lips.

"I know." I pressed my own hand over hers for reassurance. "But to
save her I must find out who did. Sir Edward had secrets ..." I gestured with my head towards the room behind us. Fear darted across Meg's eyes again.

"I have not been through that door, sir. Not once. Only he had the key and it has not been seen since he died."

"Someone took it from his corpse while it was still warm. But I have a copy." I pushed the door an inch farther to show her it had opened. She inhaled sharply. "Well, then," I said. "Let us see what your master wanted to hide."

Meg stepped back, shaking her head as if I had just suggested she walk through the gates of Hell itself. I turned, my hand on the latch.

"Do you know what he kept in here, Meg?"

She continued to shake her head as if her life depended on it, but the candle in her hand trembled and in its light I saw tears well up and spill over her lined cheeks. My heart swelled with pity and I squeezed her hand again. "It's all right. You need not look."

"I never saw anything, sir, I swear it on the holy martyr. But sometimes I heard it. Dreadful sounds. There was nothing I could do, though, you understand? Not a thing."

"What did you hear?"

She only pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to stifle a little sob and shook her head again. My gut tightened with a horrible apprehension.

I pushed open the door and picked up my lantern, holding it up as I stepped forward into thick darkness.

Before me there stretched out a passageway, lined with damp stone, tall enough for a man to walk along, if he stooped. It smelled as if no clean air had circulated there in recent memory, and I took shallow breaths through my mouth to avoid the lingering odour of decay. It was hard to get my bearings underground, but I had the sense that the passage was leading me away from the house, under the cemetery itself, and though I consider myself above superstitions and folktales, nonetheless I had to suppress a shudder at the thought of all those corpses pressing down
overhead and to each side--an impression made stronger by the unmistakable smell of dead things that seemed to grow denser with every step.

The floor beneath my feet was of compacted earth and I stepped forward carefully, keeping the lantern as steady as I could, to stop myself from stumbling, brushing thick cobwebs from my eyes and mouth with every step. After perhaps thirty yards, as I felt the faint stirrings of cold air as if from some vent nearby. I saw that three rough steps had been cut into the floor of the passage and that it ended abruptly in a wooden door. I pushed this gently with the flat of my hand and found that it opened a little way without too much difficulty; as I did so, something brushed swiftly past my foot in the dark and I leapt back, stifling a cry, heart pounding in my throat. Rats, no doubt; a faint scuffling came from whatever lay beyond that door.

Gathering my courage, I pushed the door farther and squeezed through the gap, repeating to myself that I had nothing to fear except dropping the lantern. So I thought, until the full force of the stench hit me and I had to clutch the wall, fighting for breath as my head swam and my stomach rose, so that I was afraid I would faint and retch at the same moment. It is almost impossible to convey the horror of that smell, even now; a brutal mixture of rotting flesh as from a charnel house, with undercurrents of every other filthy human effluent: piss, vomit, ordure, and a faint note of something unfamiliar, almost sweet, herbal. It was as if I had opened the mouth of Hell and all its foul vapours had rushed out to poison the earth.

Battling against the bile that threatened to choke me, I steadied myself and held up the lantern to examine this unspeakable place I had entered. I saw that I was inside an underground tomb, cut out of the earth and walled with stone, its floor covered with ancient flagstones carved with patterns I could not decipher in the candle's thin light. On each of the four walls niches had been built with stone biers inset, two lengthways along the longer walls, the lower ones complete with reclining effigies, their features still remarkably sharp, protected down here from the ravages of wind and weather and by the cool air, which filtered
in through unseen ventilation holes and raised gooseflesh on my skin. I looked up; above me, high enough to stand upright, was a vaulted ceiling, and opposite the passage where I had entered, a flight of stone steps led upwards, but the exit had been bricked up. I must be directly under the mausoleum I had seen in the churchyard earlier. I thought it curious that the tombs had not been desecrated when the priory was dissolved, as I knew many had been in other religious houses, but perhaps a few monks dead for three centuries were not enough to pique the interest of the commissioners who came to raze the buildings.

Apart from the effigies on their stone biers, the tomb was empty. I moved forward with cautious steps, shining the light into the corners, keeping my sleeve pressed over my mouth, but could see no obvious reason why this place should have been so significant that Langworth needed to steal the key from Sir Edward Kingsley's corpse. If anything had once been hidden here, Langworth must have returned to clear it out before anyone could find it. I cursed and was on the point of turning back when something drew my eye: a flash from the floor close against one of the end walls. I crossed quickly and knelt to see what object had caught the light, and almost cut my knee on a shard of glass. There were several lying in the same place, and when I picked up one of the largest I saw that it was curved on one side. I gathered some of the other fragments and realised that I was holding the broken pieces of a small glass alembic. Bringing one piece nearer to the light, I saw that there was a residue staining the interior, of what looked like a dark-greenish hue, though it was hard to tell as the candle flame flattened all colours. I put my hand down to my side to lever myself up and felt something rough beneath my fingertips; lifting the light again I saw that it was a short length of rope, frayed at one end where it looked to have been cut with a knife. A couple of feet away, tucked into the shadows, was a pile of sacking. Gingerly, I lifted one corner, pinching as little of the material as possible between my thumb and forefinger. As I did so, something stirred within and a large brown rat shot out of the filthy nest past my feet. I swore aloud in Italian and from behind me I heard a muffled cry. I whipped around to
see Meg standing in the half-open doorway still holding a candle in one hand, her shawl clutched across her mouth. We stared at each other for a moment, our ragged breathing amplified unnaturally in the vault, until I burst out laughing. I could hear the hysterical note in it as Meg joined in, prompted by relief.

"Dear God--damned creature nearly gave me a seizure," I whispered, and heard my voice shaking. She nodded, but the laughter had died on her lips as her gaze travelled over the old tombs that lined the walls. I was still holding the soiled sack; it was crusted stiff with some foul substance. With great reluctance I brought it closer to my face to sniff it and dropped it almost instantly as I caught the faint iron tang of dried blood. Meg coughed violently behind me and gagged as she did so.

That unbelievable smell: as I stood up it caught again in my throat and I had to press a hand over my mouth, swallowing hard to stop my gorge rising. I sniffed the air, trying to trace the worst of it to its source, which seemed to be one tomb set into the wall beside the bricked-in staircase. I knelt and read the inscription: "Hugh de Wenchepe, Prior, 1263-1278." I glanced up at Meg, who had come to stand at my shoulder; her face seemed even whiter in the shadows, her eyes fixed on the tomb of the long-dead prior with an expression of dread. I guessed that the old housekeeper thought she knew what had been hidden here, and I was gripped by the same awful sense of anticipation. I should have realised it the moment I opened the door. I had been in old tombs and burial vaults before; the ancient dead smelled of dust and mould. Yet Prior Hugh's coffin gave off a ripe stink like an abattoir, as if he had been rotting there for only a few months. A chill ran through me and as I held the lantern over his blank-eyed marble face I noticed the marks: the tracks of human fingers in the dust at the edges of the tomb's lid, where it had been recently opened.

"Meg--hold this for me, will you?"

I handed her my lantern; though I sensed her reluctance, she took it and held it above the bier as I leaned in with both hands to try and move the stone cover. This was no easy task; Prior Hugh's tomb was
neatly carved to fit its alcove in the wall and the only way to open it was to slide the heavy stone towards me, with the fear that, even supposing I managed to budge it alone, it might at any moment topple forwards, crushing my leg or, at the very least, shattering so that it could not be replaced. In vain I struggled, straining with all the strength I possessed, only to see the slab shift no more than a couple of inches. Whoever had moved it before must have had help; two men might lift it between them, but I was not willing to admit defeat, having come so far. I muttered a prayer in Italian as I grabbed the left elbow of the effigy where the prior's hands were bent in prayer, to give myself better purchase. Bracing one foot against the wall of the tomb, I pulled on the statue's arm; with a great grinding of stone, I felt the slab lurch forward a couple of feet as the smell of putrefaction gusted upwards from the gaping blackness beneath. "Santa Maria!" I cried, spinning away from the tomb into a corner where, leaning with one arm against the wall, I vomited up my supper and a quantity of sweet red wine.

Meg waited patiently by the tomb, still holding the light, snatching breaths through the fabric of her sleeve. When I had wiped my mouth I turned back. Her face was unbearably bleak.

"We should leave, sir," she whispered, her voice shaking. "Leave the dead to their rest. Else we shall both take ill of the contagion."

"Not now," I said, recovering myself a little, though my voice was barely a croak. "Whatever is in here holds the answer, I am sure of it. I need you to take the light again, Meg, if you can bear it for a while longer." She hung back, understandably, though she did not take her eyes from the lid of the tomb and the hole under it.

Expelling the drink from my body seemed to have done me good; my head felt clearer as I rolled up my shirtsleeves higher and asked Meg to hold the lantern directly over the opening beneath the stone slab, which was about two feet at its widest end. I took a deep breath and leaned in, as the candle flame threw my own shadow like a giant on the wall behind me.

I made out the shape of a corpse wrapped in a thin linen shroud that appeared grey and horribly stained. I directed Meg to bend closer with the light and lifted one corner of the cloth, then jumped back as a hand fell from the wrappings onto the body's chest. The flesh was blotched and partly blackened, but still intact, the fingernails long and curled over like claws. It was quite clear that this body did not belong to a prior dead for three centuries but had been put in Prior Hugh's tomb recently. But how recently? Despite the smell, the body did not seem to be in an advanced state of decay, almost as if it had been artificially preserved. Besides, the hand was too small to be a man's.

A thought struck me then; I clenched my teeth tightly and peeled back the shroud over the face. I flinched as the linen came free, taking pieces of discoloured skin with it. Beside me, Meg turned away with a soft gasp. To gaze on the frailty of our human frame is always appalling and this face seemed more so than any corpse I had seen. Tufts of fair hair still stuck to the blackened scalp. Its features were frozen in a terrible grimace, the lips pulled back to expose the teeth, the eyes staring, the cheeks sunken in, and although the body had begun to putrefy it looked as if an effort had been made by whoever buried it to slow the effects of decay by some amateur process of embalming. It might have lain there a month or several. Worst of all, it was clear that the body was that of a boy, not yet full-grown. I turned to Meg and saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.

"Did you know?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"I swear, sir, no. But I had wondered ... Is it the beggar child?"

"Beggar?"

"I saw him only once, sir. Last autumn, before the lady Kate came to us. It was supposed to be my day off, but I came in because the timber merchant had to change his delivery day, and there was Master in the kitchen feeding this lad bread and milk. Terrible skinny thing he was, half starved. He never came back and Master gave me to understand it
was not to be mentioned again. But sometimes I noticed food was missing ..." Her voice trailed off into silence.

"You think he kept the boy down here?" I glanced behind me to the frayed rope. "Sweet Jesus. Why? What did he do to him?"

Meg only closed her eyes very slowly, as if this might erase the horror before us. There was one obvious reason why a man might keep a young boy prisoner, but nothing I had heard about Sir Edward suggested this was his vice. Had he procured the boy for others, I wondered--his influential friends, perhaps? Poor, poor child, I thought, sickened to the guts by the thought of the boy tied up in this place of death, no doubt terrified out of his wits. I was seized by an urge to run, out of the putrid air, away from the horror of the place. I leaned over and took a last look at that dreadful face, and that was when I noticed a glint of metal in the depths of the tomb.

"Bring the light closer," I whispered urgently, as I reached in, steeling myself against the touch of that flesh under my fingers.

The corpse wore a silver chain around its neck; shreds of skin caught in the links as I pulled it to the front. Hanging from the chain was a round medallion, engraved with an image that I could not make out. I took the light from Meg and brought it so close to the face that were it not for the lantern glass I would have singed the creature's hair. The medallion showed the figure of a man carrying a bishop's staff in one hand and his own severed head under the crook of the other arm. The head was smiling and wore a mitre. "
Dio mio
," I whispered, handing the lantern back to Meg.