The Brothers of Glastonbury (27 page)

My hope that she had forgotten this unguarded remark was dashed. But there was no good reason why she should be kept in ignorance concerning Mark’s nocturnal activities, so I felt obliged to tell her what I had discovered.

She was, of course, as mystified as I was. ‘But if he didn’t go whoring, what
did
he do?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know much, do you?’ she snapped.

We were growing extremely edgy with one another; the discovery of the dead cat had shaken us all more than we cared to admit.

‘No!’ I snapped back. ‘And I don’t know what significance this has, either.’ I opened my pouch and drew out the coil of brown homespun thread which Edgar Shapwick’s stable-boy had given me.

Cicely took it from me gingerly. ‘Where did it come from?’ she asked.

‘It was snarled up in Dorabella’s mane when she was found wandering yesterday morning. She also had bits of straw in her coat, as well as flecks of something sticky.’

Cicely had unwound the coarse woollen thread and was pulling it through her fingers in an effort to straighten it further. She frowned. ‘There’s something sticky on this as well.’ She examined the strip more closely. ‘Yes, look!’ she said. ‘There! In the middle. You can probably feel it better than you can see it.’

She was right. When she handed the thread back to me I was just able to make out, halfway along its length, a speck of some black foreign matter which undoubtedly felt glutinous to the touch. I raised it to my nose and sniffed, but it was too small an amount to have retained any smell.

‘Well?’ Cicely asked impatiently. ‘What do you think it is?’

When I shook my head, she jumped up from her seat, holding out an imperious hand for me to accompany her. ‘We’ll ask the others,’ she said, ‘and see if they have any ideas.’

I followed her meekly, first to the kitchen, where Lydia was boiling some bones in a pot over the fire, the preliminary step to making a nourishing broth for her mistress’s supper.

But she could offer no solution. ‘Take that nasty bit of stuff away,’ she ordered crossly, ‘before you drop it in the water.’

We then repaired to the workshop, where the two apprentices were scraping skins in a desultory manner, more to keep themselves occupied than from a belief that the work was of any importance. They were glad of a diversion, and both scrutinized the thread curiously as they listened to my story.

‘Found in Dorabella’s mane, eh?’ said Rob thoughtfully. ‘I’d say it’s a piece of homespun, unravelled from somebody’s clothing.’

‘Well, of course it is!’ Cicely raised her eyes to the ceiling in a mute appeal for patience. ‘But what’s that sticky blob in the middle of it?’

Rob shrugged his shoulders. ‘How should I know? I can barely see it.’

‘Wait a minute.’ John Longbones took the thread from his friend, carrying it over to the window and holding it up to the light. This was poor, the heaviness of the day still not having lifted, even though the hour was approaching noon. Then he rubbed the yarn between fingers and thumb, testing the consistency of that little black speck. After a moment or two, he said, ‘I think it’s tar.’

‘Tar?’ Cicely repeated vaguely, while Rob and I looked equally mystified. We were many miles from the sea and the nearest port.

John nodded. ‘Stockholm tar.’

‘But that’s used in the building and repairing of ships.’ I had lived in Bristol long enough by now to have some knowledge of seafaring matters.

‘It’s also used on sheep,’ John Longbones insisted. ‘One of my mother’s brothers keeps a flock near Wedmore. He always carries a little box of it around with him to treat fly-blow and maggots and cuts and grazes.’

‘I thought they used broom water for that sort of thing,’ I argued, childhood memories of watching local shepherds beginning to stir.

John gave me a look which showed plainly that he regarded me, however mistakenly, as a townsman who knew nothing of country ways. ‘Only the poorest herdsmen use broom water nowadays,’ he informed me pityingly. ‘It’s not nearly so effective. Haven’t you heard the saying, “It’s a pity to lose a good sheep for a ha’p’orth of Stockholm tar”?’

I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I was far too excited to worry about John Longbones’s poor opinion of me. Peter Gildersleeve had been on Pennard land when he disappeared, and the Pennards owned sheep. Now it seemed that Mark too might recently have been on Pennard land, and he had also vanished. Yet why would he have chosen to visit Anthony and his sons when he knew that I had done the selfsame thing that very morning? Why did he not return home from Beckery to hear first what I had to say? But if he had indeed gone, what could have befallen him? For what possible reason would the Pennards wish to harm either him or his brother?

I turned to see Cicely’s eyes blazing with an excitement equal to my own, which she was unsuccessfully trying to conceal in front of Rob and John. Fortunately, neither apprentice was very perceptive and, with a casual remark about us still being none the wiser regarding her cousins’ fate, she was able to drag me outside once more without arousing their suspicions.

‘Well?’ she breathed as soon as we were out of earshot. ‘What do you think? Has this mystery something to do with the Pennards?’

We sat down again on the bench surrounding the medlar tree while, for the hundredth time, I tried to put my thoughts in order. ‘Anthony Pennard and his sons certainly wear brown homespun,’ I conceded. ‘And a man might well wipe his hands clean on his tunic or hose after rubbing tar on a sheep. A thread pulled loose from a rent in the cloth or from an unravelling hem could carry with it a speck of that tar. But we mustn’t forget that there are other shepherds and other flocks in this region from whom your cousins may have bought fleeces.’

My companion was rightly scornful of this argument. ‘Peter was visiting the Pennards when last seen. And if Mark wanted to find out more about his disappearance, he wouldn’t have gone riding off to see anyone else, now would he?’

‘No,’ I agreed, suitably chastened.

‘Then it’s obvious that the Pennards’ land is where we must begin the search for them both.’

‘Not “we”,’ I corrected sternly. ‘I must certainly confront the family again in the light of what we now know – or think we know – but you will stay here with Dame Joan. It’s where you’re most needed, and you would only be a handicap to me if there should prove to be danger. I don’t know why the Pennards should wish any harm to your cousins, and can think of no good reason, but I can’t, and won’t, take the risk of letting you go with me. You understand that?’

‘Yes,’ she answered submissively, which surprised me a little, until I realized that she had not previously considered the possibility of danger.

‘Good,’ I said, and then went on, ‘At least now I think I know why Peter was there, what he was looking for, and how he evaded Abel Fairchild’s curiosity. But I still have no idea where he went after Abel returned to the house to raise the alarm. Why was he in that particular spot? It’s so bare and desolate.’

Cicely nodded, and then repeated something she had said to me once before. ‘I suppose that’s why it’s called the Sticks.’

Chapter Nineteen

I turned my head and stared at her unblinkingly for several seconds.

‘What is it?’ Cicely asked nervously. ‘What have I said? You look so strange.’

I quoted once again: ‘“Amongst the hills, in the hollow places of the earth, on the altar by Charon’s stream.” Perhaps,’ I added, ‘that stretch of ground is not called the Sticks, but the Styx.’

It was my companion’s turn to stare. ‘Whatever are you talking about?’ she demanded peevishly. ‘You’re not making sense.’

‘How did that particular parcel of land get its name?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘My father called it that,’ she said at last. ‘Whenever we visited my aunt and uncle in the past, we always travelled the last stage of our journey along the old Roman road, which as you know cuts across the Pennards’ holding. The Pennards don’t like it but the land belongs to the Church, and all the Bishops of Bath and Wells, including Bishop Stillington, have insisted that the route remains open to pilgrims and other wayfarers. Not many people use it, though, because it’s so lonely; they prefer the busier highway which leads through the city, even though it takes them longer if they’re going further afield.’ She paused, frowning, confused by this digression. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes! My father! He’d say the same thing every time we reached the lower slopes of Mendip: “Now we’re crossing the Sticks.”’

‘You never thought to ask him how it got its name?’

Cicely grimaced. ‘No, why should I? It’s always been called so as long as anyone can remember. In any case, I don’t think he knows or he’d have told me.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he does,’ I sighed.

Probably no one knew. It was just a name which had been passed on from generation to generation down the centuries, until its original meaning had been lost. But had it once, in the dim and distant past, been called the Styx, after that river of ancient mythology? The Greeks had believed that their souls must traverse the Styx before they could reach the Underworld, and they would be rowed across by the boatman, Charon.

‘What does it all mean?’ Cicely wanted to know. ‘And why are you asking me all these questions?’

She listened patiently, and with a brow furrowed in concentration, while I explained things to her. ‘But there’s no river there,’ she objected when I had finished. ‘It’s nothing but pasture.’

‘But there might have been water there once,’ I insisted. ‘A thousand years and more ago, there could have been a river known for some reason as the Styx.’

Charon’s stream! But where had it come from? And where was its source? I thought suddenly of the great gorge away to the north-west, near Cheddar. I had never seen it, as I had told Anthony Pennard, but I had heard it described by many pilgrims who visited the abbey in the days when I was a novice. And I recalled one old man, more learned than many of his fellows, and more patient with the questions of a green youth hungry for any scraps of knowledge which came his way, who had told me that this ravine between the towering heights on either side had probably, long, long ago, been the bed of a river which, century after century, had carved a course for itself through the Mendip Hills.

Hard upon the heels of this thought came a recollection of the lie of the land close to the shepherd’s hut, the narrow valley which sloped gently downhill from the sheer cliff-face. I remembered too that there was a well-worn track which curled around the bluff, and which ended in a fall of matted foliage, trailing ivies and ferns that grew in a fissure of the rock higher up. Had that little valley also been a river-bed a thousand years ago? But if so, where had the stream come from? Had it trickled down from the slopes above? Unlikely, because in that case it would surely have worn away the rocks in its path, just as the constant flow of water had done in the great gorge. And yet the only other place it could have come from was out of the cliff-face itself, trickling down through the porous limestone from the sink-holes on top of the Mendip Hills.

A cave! Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner? I recalled one of the brothers at the abbey once telling me that caves are nothing more than the beds of dried-up underground rivers, after the water has been diverted into another channel.

Underground river … Charon’s stream …

I turned again to Cicely, who was regarding me anxiously, unable to follow my racing thoughts. ‘Let’s go and see Rob and John again,’ I said, getting to my feet.

The two apprentices had given up all pretence of working by now and were crouched on the floor of the workshop playing at fivestones.

‘Have you ever heard of there being caves,’ I asked them, ‘on that part of the Pennards’ land known as the Sticks?’

‘Or the Styx,’ Cicely smirked, thereby thoroughly confusing her listeners and distracting their attention from the question.

At last, however, I was able to learn from Rob Undershaft that there were indeed any number of caves in the Mendip Hills, far more perhaps than anyone knew about; and he cited the terrifying experience of one of his cousins who had crawled into what appeared to be nothing more than a hole in the ground, only to find himself in an underground cavern, from which he had eventually been rescued with the greatest effort and difficulty.

‘But I’ve never heard of any on the Pennards’ land,’ he went on, ‘though that isn’t to say there isn’t one. The best person to ask, surely, is Anthony Pennard himself. Why do you want to know?’

‘No particular reason,’ I lied, daring Cicely with a look to contradict me.

I reflected with rising excitement that the Sticks was the area of hills within easiest reach of Glastonbury, close to its sister town of Wells, and which would probably have been most familiar to the monks of Ynys Witrin. Brother Begninus might well have known of a cave through which ran an underground river, a river which found its outlet through an enlarged fissure in the rock and flowed on down the hillside into the great marshy plain below. Perhaps there had been a dry area within the cave, and a rock formation which resembled an altar … Perhaps Begninus had hidden the church’s holy relic there once before when danger had threatened, and used the place again during that year when news of a fresh Saxon advance had reached him and the other brothers, when he had once more been charged with its concealment.

‘Amongst the hills, in the hollow places of the earth, on the altar by Charon’s stream.’ The words kept spinning round and round in my head. Had Peter Gildersleeve followed this same line of reasoning? There was no way of knowing, but somehow I felt it more than possible that he had. And had he also concluded that the entrance to the cave must lie at the head of that little valley?

Once more, I could not know the answer. But just supposing I was right – why had he not come back? Whether he had found what he was looking for or no – whether he was about to become one of the most honoured men in Christendom, feted by kings and cardinals alike, or was a very deeply disappointed man – he should have returned. Where, too, was Mark? And why had Dorabella been found with traces of tar and bits of straw in her coat? The riddle was not yet solved, nor would it be until I put my theory to the test and went to see for myself if it were sound or no.