The Dragon of Handale (20 page)

To Hildegard, the two sides seemed equally matched. Who the attackers were was a mystery. She waited for an opportunity to escape. The fight raged this way and that, staying close to the tower. One of Fulke’s guards fell against the door. He was so close, she could see the glistening of his eyes as he stared up at the swordsman looming over him, arm raised to strike. The guard kicked him in the balls and scrambled free.

In the moment when his opponent raised his own arm to bring his sword down, a blazon was revealed on his surcoat. She blinked. It was the lion of the Percy family, the Marcher lords, the emblem of the earl of Northumberland.

The two men locked and began grappling at each other’s throats. They rolled on the ground until one of them managed to free himself. It was Fulke’s man. He made off towards the woods with the earl’s henchman in pursuit.

Hildegard took the opportunity to slip out of the tower and throw herself into the safety of the thicket. From there, she watched the fight until Fulke’s guards were chased off in the direction of the priory.

“Leave them to scarper. Let’s get this stuff out and down to the boats.” Wiping blood from his nose, the captain pushed his men hurriedly towards the tower.

By the light of half a dozen cressets, the entire scene was illuminated in brilliant detail: men dragging the bales of feathers into the open, loading them one by one onto stretchers already concealed in the woods, hauling them away.

When she judged it safe to follow, Hildegard was guided by the lighted torches down the path forced through the undergrowth by the convoy. She guessed they were heading towards the landing stage on the beck side. Sure enough, they soon dipped out of sight down the slope and were shortly assembled on the bank below.

From her vantage point at the top of the cliff, she watched them load the bales onto two barges and eventually, torches still shedding a fitful light over the scene, push out onto the water and disappear downstream.

Their lights faded. Silence fell.

The moon appeared. It was ovoid. Not quite yet at the full. Nature silently regained her dominion.

But for the trampled and bloodied grass, there was no sign that a fight between two violent opponents had taken place. No one remained. The wounded had been carried away by their comrades.

Hildegard made her way cautiously onto the path to the priory. As she went, she picked up a stray feather from the grass.

Of course.

Now she knew what it meant: arrows.

She put the feather inside her leather bag, along with the mason’s claw chisel.

C
HAPTER
18

Maybe the nuns are kept in such ignorance that they do not know what is afoot within their own purlieu? Hildegard thought. The atmosphere in the church when she returned, however, was febrile and it was evidence of some repressed knowledge. Even the subprioress, usually so colourless and self-effacing had a flush of colour on her cheeks. The cellaress, hard-faced and authoritarian, swept the congregation of nuns with an excited glitter in her eyes.

Prioress Basilda herself, in something like high spirits, signalled for her servants to carry her out. Their triumphal procession was halfway down the nave when the prioress spotted Hildegard standing against the wall. She ordered her bearers to a halt.

Now what? thought Hildegard, bracing herself.

The prioress eyed her. When she spoke, her words were unexpected. “I beg to ask you to forgive us, Mistress.York As you may realise, the priory has been under some strain from those with ill intentions towards us. We are small and powerless”—her flesh bulged over the edges of her wooden chair, folds of fat shaking on her jowls as she spoke—“and being so weak, it behoves us to guard our interests as best we may. These ways may seem harsh to outsiders. I trust you are not incommoded by our regulations. The woods are now open. The dragon is dead.”

Hildegard gazed at her in silent astonishment.

“Be so kind as to attend me in my chamber before Chapter. I wish to speak to you in private.” A fat hand waved her bearers onwards and she was carried out in a waft of incense.

Hildegard’s gaze followed and she waited a full minute until the prioress and her entourage had left the scene before allowing herself to consider this change of heart.
It had to be something to do with last night’s events at the tower.

The church had emptied by the time Hildegard reached the altar, where the sacristan was snuffing out candles. ‘Sister, you showed me the secrets of your work the other day. Is it possible for you to show me again the things kept under the altar?”

“No problem there, mistress. Here, have a look yourself. Nothing has changed.”

As Hildegard remembered, there was a stone flagon for the Communion wine, a richly engraved ciborium, a tinderbox, tapers and so forth, and, behind them, something she had scarcely glanced at. Despite this, it had stayed in her memory, unexplained.

The sacristan handed everything out.

“No, that last thing, there at the back of the shelf.” Hildegarde pointed to a small phial with a waxed-rag stopper in its slender neck. “What is that?”

The sacristan reached down. “It was his own. He suffered so.”

“What does it contain?”

“His own elixir, specially mixed for him.”

“By whom?”

“By our own sister apothecary. Why do you ask?”

“What was it for?”

The sacristan avoided her glance. “It was just some harmless thing he used, the better to fulfil his duties to us.”

Hildegard took the phial. “May I?”

“Take it. Do. He has no use for it now.”

Assuming it would be an elixir against headaches, Hildegard unstoppered it and sniffed. “I don’t recognise the contents,” she murmured.

“I believe it to be an old Saxon remedy. Best ask sister herberer herself.”

When Prioress Basilda’s servant opened the door into her chamber a few minutes later, it was obvious the prioress had been waiting for Hildegard to appear.

“My dear lady, pray be seated. Here, give her a cushion”—she tapped her servant on the arm—“then pour wine and leave us.”

When they were alone, she gave Hildegard a winsome smile. “You must know by now that there were events in the woods before matins last night? The whole priory is seething with it.”

“I was aware of a certain excitement, but maybe you can tell me more?”

“I will, gladly. It’s connected to our benefactor, merchant Fulke. Unbeknownst to us”—she frowned—“he was secretly storing untaxed imports in a tower in Handale Woods!” She sat back. “What do you think of that?”

Hildegard adopted an appropriate expression.

“Yes, I can see you’re shocked that someone should so impose on our goodwill to make use of us in such a way. Fortunately, the earl of Northumberland, master of the tolls, was informed and took immediate steps to repossess what is rightly his.”

“What sort of goods was he smuggling? Was it Baltic furs?”

“Something like that.” The Prioress was lying—or was she in ignorance of the truth?

Hildegard watched her carefully, but she gave nothing away.

“We will not be bothered by him again, my dear,” she continued. “I need not tell you that the rumour of a dragon which has so frightened everyone was nothing but a fabrication put about by himself to deter anyone catching him in his deceit. Now, my dear”—she resettled herself massively and poured more wine—“you are to stay with us in peace and solitude until you have resolved the problems of widowhood, and I need not tell you that you may avail yourself of everything we have to offer.”

The prioress, belatedly fulfilling her duty, had tipped off the earl’s officials. And the dragon had dissolved into air. Now, ever conscious of her priory’s needs, Basilda was softening up her widowed guest in the hope of a bequest to swell the priory’s coffers.

That’s how it goes, Hildegard decided, philosophically enough. The Benedictines depended on rents and tithes and had to pay the king’s exchequer a goodly whack in taxes on their agricultural land.

The Cistercians, on the other hand, paid no land tax and had rents, too, as well as their massively lucrative Continental wool trade to support them. She would have felt some sympathy for the prioress if only she had not witnessed the cruelty inflicted on her dormitory of penitents.

No doubt, in her defence, Basilda would claim she was only obeying orders from the Pope.

Hildegard’s few belongings lay spread out on the lumpy truckle bed while she considered the problem of meeting Ulf at the ford, as arranged, without being followed.

Why did it matter? She was free to come and go as she pleased. The prioress, for whatever reason, had acted properly in the end.

There were strict regulations on imported goods and on submitting taxes to the king. Only last autumn, Chancellor de la Pole had been impeached by Parliament for alleged breaches of the tax laws. It was a trumped-up charge by the king’s enemies, of course, in that instance. It was their way of undermining the king’s authority, the better to defeat him. Even so, Northumberland held the toll rights in this region, so why keep quiet about the raid on the tower? His seizure of the bales was justified. Hildegard’s feeling of unease persisted.

Fulke himself was probably in chains by now. On the other hand, he had disappeared quickly enough when Northumberland’s men appeared, so maybe he had got away. Indeed, he might escape completely if no one came forward to accuse him. The prioress might be wary of doing such a thing. The nuns were vulnerable out here, despite the high walls, and it was not unknown for witnesses to be kidnapped, or worse, to save a criminal from the weight of the law.

The question remaining was whether Fulke would be able to return this night as planned. The promise of gold might be enough to make him take the risk.

What surprised her was that Northumberland’s men had not ransacked the entire building.

The old herb woman was mixing something over the brazier when Hildegard arrived at the door of her thatched hut.

She jerked round when she heard Hildegard’s step. “Another question, mistress?”

“Yes. This.” Hildegard held up the phial belonging to the priest.

“Ah, I see. Come inside.” Wiping her hands on her apron, she took the phial from Hildegard and unstopped it. “Who gave you this?”

“I asked the sacristan what it was. She said you would know and that I might take it away with me.”

Without a word, the herberer took down a book from a shelf and began to leaf through it until she came to what she wanted. She held out the book to Hildegard. “Read?”

“Yes, I can.” She took it in both hands. It was a Saxon leech book.

The page it was opened at was headed “A Remedy to Ease Manly Temptations.” Underneath was a long list of ingredients, including wormwood, betony, lupin, vervain, henbane, dittander, viper’s bugloss, and cropleek. She scanned them to the end, noticed the lethal effects of several of them without careful dosage, and, farther down the page, read the instructions on what to do with the resulting salve.

It involved mixing it in with sheep fat and holy salt, straining it through a cloth, then placing it under an altar and having nine masses sung over it.

In conclusion, the text claimed that when evil temptations came over a man, he should anoint his face and wherever his body most troubled him, then sign him with the cross, cense him, and his condition would soon improve.

She looked up. “Did it work?”

“Well, let’s put it this way, mistress, he’s not troubled now, is he?” She cackled with stony-hearted mirth.

Hildegard handed the book back to her. “Did you mix this for him?”

“Surely. It did him no harm. He seemed content with it. The prioress should have been prepared for it, cooping him up here with a lot of women in the back of beyond. A cock among hens. What else did she expect?”

“How can you be sure it did him no harm? He died, after all, and it was most certainly poison.”

“This was a salve. He wouldn’t be soft-witted enough to eat it.”

“But if he did swallow some—?”

The pale eyes blinked twice. “It would have killed him. Instantly.”

It was when the entire convent were consorting in the cloisters during their recreation period, some to read, others to pray or gossip, that Hildegard sauntered unobtrusively towards the gate leading out of the enclosure and let herself through. Hurrying past the closed door of the lodge, she soon found her way down to the beck and began the difficult scramble over the rocks towards the trysting place with Ulf.

As far as she could tell, no one followed her.

She arrived without a sound to a point overlooking the ford.

The water ran deeper than usual. It flooded the road and swirled on between the banks towards the coast less than half a mile away. There was no one in sight. She peered into the half-light under the trees. A clink of metal alerted her, and at the same moment Ulf appeared astride his horse, accompanied by a couple of men and his little servant lad.

She went down to meet him.

He looked anxious. “Hildegard! Have you heard the news?”

“About Northumberland?”

“No, about the king?”

“Tell me.” She could see it was serious by his tone of voice.

“It’s his uncle, Thomas Woodstock, earl of Buckingham, so-called, and his brother Warwick, with their ally the earl of Arundel.”

“What’s happened?”

“They refused to meet the king at Westminster when he summoned them, and now they’re mustering their armies against him. Warwick is already standing by at Waltham Cross.”

“Yes. I know. Roser told me. Do they seriously intend to march against the king?”

“There’s no other interpretation.”

“But that means civil war!”

“They’re putting out a rumour that King Richard was plotting to murder all three. They’re saying Richard’s pilgrimage to Canterbury the other week was to have a secret meeting with the French king’s ambassadors. He wanted to offer Calais and Guînes to the French. In return, King Charles would invade England in order to rout Richard’s enemies, the dukes.”