The Dragon of Handale (24 page)

Apart from this, there was another possibility, and that was that no one had been watching her in the woods. It was simple coincidence that after she’d entered and crossed the garth someone had come out of one of the buildings, the mortuary perhaps, and just happened to walk in the same direction.

But for what purpose? she asked herself. Only the church was situated in that part of the priory, and no one had followed her inside.

The voices from below were louder. The cellaress seemed to be taking her leave. The outer door slammed shut. Waiting long enough for the place to fall silent, Hildegard eventually groped her way back down into the inky well at the bottom of the stairs. The cresset had been doused and she had to feel her way along the wall to the door, and when she found it, she had to locate the door ring by running her hands over the wood panels, then turn the metal ring without letting it make a sound.

When she stepped outside, the cloister yawned black and silent, but beyond it the snow was crisp, glittering in the moonlight.

The footprints of the cellaress were plain to see, large, square-toed, regular, to match the woman’s familiar pace. Another set taking the outside path towards the
dortoir
she took to be those of Mariana. They were smaller but gouged deeply into the snow, as if the person had been running.

Hildegard hesitated, then plunged off, hand on her knife, towards the safety of the guest lodge. She turned quickly. Nothing had followed her. Imagination summoned a hooded figure standing beside one of the pillars. When she squeezed her eyes and looked again, it had gone.

The night was at its coldest in the hour before dawn. The regular congregation, those who had been absolved from their penitential bonds, were forced out prematurely by the cold to gather in the warming room before prime. After tossing and turning for an hour or two on the lumpy bed, Hildegard joined them for a hot drink to start the day.

It was a silent gathering. None of the masons was present. Everybody was yawning and shivering with cold. They soon drifted away towards the church. As soon as the singing started, Hildegard went outside. The jumble of footprints in the now-freezing snow were impossible to read. She gave up and sought the warmth of the scriptorium. It was kept warm by the continually burning log fire in the chamber below.

She had been in there only a minute when she heard someone go in.

“They all heard it,” a voice called. It was the cellaress. It sounded to Hildegard as if she was standing in the doorway, and her words floated clearly up the stairs.

Basilda’s voice replied from inside the parlour. “If you hear any of them prattling about dragons again, clap ’em in solitary for a day or two. That should stop their nonsense. Give the silly ninnies a dose of reality. Nothing like bread, water, and solitude,” she added, “to send fantasies flying.” There were three loud knocks. “This!” The knocks came again. “This is real. Not some faerie nonsense about dragons and elvish lore.”

“What about angels, Basilda?” The cellaress, to Hildegard’s astonishment, was laughing.

“All nonsense. Simply a way of picturing the virtues just as devils image the vices. Human qualities. Why do you ask? Are they still dreaming of handsome youths with golden wings?”

“I fear so. But then, some will preserve their dreams into dotage.”

“Well, we can’t. We’re in charge. That’s what we’re here for. To knock some sense into them. To tell them what’s what.”

“Are we so empowered? You’re edging towards heresy, my dear. Wyclif would be pleased with you.”

Basilda said, “Are you going to stand there all morning, Josiana? Come inside.”

“Can’t. Just wanted to ask about that remedy from sister herberer. Is it working?”

“Like a charm.” The prioress gave a ripe laugh. “I trust it is no charm?”

“If it is and you believe it works, I shall be pleased for you to be out of pain for once.”

“So shall I. And I’ll believe in it right well until the next twinge. What’s in it? Did she tell you?”

“Not she. I’ve told her to write all her recipes down before too long. Her Saxon remedies are all very well, but it’d be a shame if her own knowledge died with her.”

“So, on to other matters. About our guest, how much do you think she—” Their voices dropped, and Hildegard, straining to hear what was said, was thwarted.

It was a surprise to hear them conversing so amiably. Her fear during those hours in the woods paled into nothing. What a fool she was to allow morbid superstition to take such a hold. She was as bad as the nuns Basilda derided. For the first time, she had heard her as she truly was, and she did not sound like the monster she seemed. She was simply an old woman made angry by the pain she was in because of some physical ailment, nothing more.

The rough penance she exacted from her nuns, miscreants, as most of them were, was no harsher than usual in such an establishment. If the woman seemed to have forgotten the injunction to demonstrate compassion, it was nothing new. It was a tough regimen at Handale. But there was an explanation.

C
HAPTER
21

By the time the cellaress—Josiana!—left, Hildegard had already begun to sort through the priory rolls and put them into date order. Master Schockwynde’s name appeared many times over the previous twelve months. His clerks had filed meticulous accounts. The prioress was equally meticulous in the tardiness of her payments.

Fulke’s name also appeared often, his donations generous and regular. She wondered what it was that had made him fall out with the prioress. Or, rather, the other way round, as it seemed he was the one to be sent packing.

Basilda must have known about his activities at the tower. Maybe now, with the earl breathing down his neck, she wanted to dissociate herself from him.

Another possibility was that he had kept her in ignorance of what was going on in the remote woodland, keeping her sweet with his donations, and now that she had discovered the truth, she didn’t like it.

It would have been easy enough to keep his trade secret, as no one from the priory had set foot in the woods since the rumour of a dragon had started to spread. Fulke was probably at the back of that, too. It had turned out to be a sure way of keeping a lid on things.

The other view, that Basilda willingly connived at his secret trade, was a possibility not to be discounted. There would be a rich dividend in it for her. If that were the case, then why had she cut off this source of income?

As she worked steadily between prime and tierce, the snow fell softly without a pause. Now and then, she glanced out of the window. She saw the cow bier gradually being buried under a drift of snow. The little cowherd was nowhere to be seen.

It was so gloomy in the scriptorium that she kept the candle alight. Curse the expense. She would make an extra donation before she left. She was looking forward to meeting dear old Ulf later in the day. He might already have news about Alys and her guardian. He would also, surely, have got his horse back. And the identity of the coxcomb and the nature of his purchases would have been discovered.

All that remained to trouble her was her unease over the two recent deaths that had occurred. Giles and the priest.

The animal attack on Giles was not much of a mystery, as it was likely to have been a wolf or wild dog that had attacked him. The death of the priest was a different matter.

Either he had taken the poison accidentally, groping under the altar for the holy vessels used in the mass, his mind on other things, and had somehow contaminated the chalice before putting it to his lips—an unlikely explanation, Hildegard decided—or he had taken it deliberately, some deep sorrow or frustration driving him to self-hatred. It was a dramatic way to commit the sin of suicide, however, and it did not fit with the impression she had of a rather shy, retiring, and pious young man.

The third possibility—and the most likely in her opinion—was that he had been murdered. It was what the nuns thought, too, albeit they believed it was death by witchcraft.

Remembering what the priest had told her about the inmates here, she gave an involuntary shudder. Someone, within the enclosure, was walking around under a cloud of guilt.

The puzzle was, how had he managed to fall foul of a murderess?

There seemed little more she could do to solve the mystery. Both the herberer and the sacristan seemed to have their suspicions, the latter made nervous by what might be uncovered. The coroner had been called, however—she had made sure of that—and when the weather cleared, both matters would be investigated by the appropriate authorities. The bodies would be buried. Mass said. The end.

Again she was haunted by a memory of the spy Rivera. His words came back to her and seemed now to be a portent of his own violent murder:
The purpose of life is death.
He had walked unflinchingly towards his own death at the hands of the London mob.

For a long while, she gazed out of the window at the empty sky.

Snow was still seeping from between the clouds.

With an effort, she forced herself to the task in hand.

Working steadily for some time, she eventually had everything completed to her satisfaction. She replaced the neatly sorted rolls on the shelf in the aumbry where she had found them, then stood on tiptoe to fetch down a few others from the highest shelf. Obviously older than the ones below, they were covered in dust. Blowing it off, she took them over to the desk by the window and settled down again to put them in order.

What she unrolled onto the desk in the first one was a list of penitents, those who had been admitted to the priory since its foundation. They were names from many generations ago.

She scanned the Latin hurriedly, realising that this was not part of the work the prioress had asked her to do. She could not help being interested in the old names, however They had an antique sameness, showing the Saxon origins of the early convent and the nuns who had chosen to settle in this remote place: Elfleda, Frea, Winifred, Agnetha, Gerda, the names of their vills an added means of identification. She could not help wondering about them.

She rapidly read through these rolls, and by the time she reached more recent rolls, she was already beginning to rewind them almost as soon as unrolled, because they were clearly not relevant to her task.

And then a name in one of the more recent ones caught her attention: Mariana of Stillingfleet.

So the nun was from a place near York. Not far from her own part of the world, as it happened. Her thoughts switched to the woman’s hostility and apparent suspicion. Could she have recognised Hildegard as a nun of Swyne? No, she decided, it could not be that. And anyway, she would have said something by now. Given her evident anger, she would have gloried in revealing Hildegard’s true identity if she had known it.

She read further. The reason for being sent here was added after the name and date of arrival, along with the date when her penance ended. It was as Mariana had told her. Her sin: venery. It did not say with whom. Nor was there anything about the fate of the child she had borne. Her punishment and two year’s solitary confinement had ended a year ago. It would make her child about three years old if it had lived. So recent. No wonder she still raged.

Feeling that she was spying into what did not concern her, she was about to wind the roll up, when she caught sight of the name Desiderata. So she had arrived as a penitent as well, shortly after Mariana. Then a word leaped out that sent a shock through her, but before she could reread it, a surreptitious tread on the stairs disturbed her.

With an irrational desire not to be caught reading the document, she hastily rolled it up and swept the whole lot back onto the top shelf. She was just in time. The door opened.

It was the cellaress, Josiana.

Her glance flew round the room before it came to rest on Hildegard. “Mistress York. I wondered who was in here.” She glanced at the still-burning candle on the desk near the window. “At work so early?”

“I felt desperately cold last night, and this was the warmest place I could think of.”

“Disarmingly honest of you.”

Hildegard gestured towards the completed files. “I also wanted to finish this little chore before I left. I’m now happy to say I have done so.” She made up her mind in that instant. “If an escort through the woods can be arranged, I would like to leave today. I trust my work and the donation I intend to make will be adequate to show my gratitude for your hospitality?”

Josiana did not answer straight away. A strange look of triumph entered her eyes.

“My gratitude for your work, mistress. However, I’m afraid an escort will be impossible. You will not be able to leave the priory.”

“Will not? What do you mean?”

“I mean that we are snowed in. We are cut off entirely from the outside world. You are our prisoner. You must resign yourself to our hospitality until the thaw.”

With a narrow-lipped smile of derision, Josiana went out.

Bone white. Desolate. The enclosure walls streaked and pitted with the stuff. The skeleton trees pressing close and overtopping the perimeter. All the odd angles of the roots laden.

The thatch of the priest’s house, separate in the outer garth, hidden under a mound of snow. Not a breath of wind. Icicles hanging from the gutters.

Hens in the yard not moving from their perches but merely fluffing out their feathers and complaining. Pigeons absent, hidden in their cote. The pigs did not appear. The cows in the barn moaned at milking time but stayed within the byre.

The cloister garth was a desert, its silence broken only by the tolling of the bell and, minutes before the daily offices, by the stamping of boots in the doorway of the church. The barefoot novice was allowed a pair of scuffed pattens, which made a clicking sound on the tiles. But even the penitents were silent in their cells.

Wrapped tightly in two cloaks and a double pair of leggings, Hildegard paced the perimeter, making a complete circuit of the wall and finally reaching the priest’s house again. No one had entered or left since the snows fell. Here, in the farm garth, the snow came up to her knees, and she imagined how much worse it would be on the unprotected moors road. Careless of her trail of footprints, she went up to the door of the house and pushed it open.