The Law of Angels (31 page)

When he felt her watching him his head jerked up. “It’s a powerful thing when it happens. When it happens twice in as many days it can break a man.” He touched the region of his heart.

“Betrayal is difficult to live with. But don’t lose faith just yet. Gilbert may have no thought of violence,” she told him. “This is only the master chandler’s guesswork.”

“What do we do? Wait and see? Let more folk be burned to death?” He gave her a swift glance. “You don’t know, do you?”

“What?”

“That market trader they dragged free. He died yesterday. Still raving about crocodiles, they say.”

Hildegard felt a pang of grief. She had almost forgotten him in the sequence of events that had taken place since she had last seen him at St. Leonard’s. “I think I know why he was talking about crocodiles. It was because he knew the fire was started in the puppet booth. You know there’s a crocodile in one of those little plays?”

Danby nodded. “That’s it, is it? He was trying to warn us. Meanwhile, I worry. Where is Gilbert now? Is he setting another fire somewhere where he’ll kill and maim many more? Does he imagine he’s going to persuade folks to his views that way?”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“He sits in the minster, he tells me. Looking at glass. Learning from the ancestors, he calls it.”

“I saw him there the other day.”

“Aye, the other day. But who does he meet there? Some fellow conspirator? And what’s more to the point, where is he now?”

“I’ll go along to the minster and have a look. Even if he sees me he’ll have no reason to suspect I’m looking for him.”

Danby’s eyes brightened for a moment. “It would set my mind at rest, sister. If I go chasing along there he’ll know there’s a reason and maybe it’ll put him on his guard.”

Hildegard called her hounds. Duchess stood up and shook herself. Bermonda stretched her forepaws along the ground. Then they followed her obediently out of the yard. From now on she would go nowhere without their protection.

Chapter Twenty-three

The great metal studded doors stood open. It was as busy here as in every other part of town. Strangers stood goggle-eyed in the nave. The soaring pillars drew exclamations of astonishment from those who had never been here before. They stood gazing up, lost in its grandeur, easy prey for pickpockets.

A few craftsmen from other districts discussed the manner in which the columns must have been built and the possibility of them toppling to the ground should God so decree. A child hid itself underneath its mother’s mantle and peeped upwards with bedazzled eyes.

Hildegard was used to the place. Even so, when she glanced up, she felt her spirits soar just as the columns soared. It was magnificent work. It made Gilbert’s visits here understandable. The glass within the slender windows dazzled with brilliant hues, shedding patterns of glowing ruby, sapphire and emerald over the flagstones and scattering the upturned, awestruck faces of the visitors with jewelled light.

A hurried glance, however, showed no sign of Gilbert sitting in front of the windows, nor anywhere else within the building.

Heart sinking a little, she walked slowly between the pillars with her hounds at her heels. She reached the end near the high altar then turned back. No one with that striking shade of hair was standing in front of the grisaille glass in the north transept. No one was sitting under the bell window nor anywhere else. She let herself out through the south door.

The streets were full of angels.

All shapes and sizes, young and old, they paraded in giggling bevies of a dozen or more, white robes trailing or hitched under glittering belts, wings folded or flaunted with pride and great inconvenience to everyday mortals making their way round the town. Hildegard circumvented these gorgeous obstructions until she reached the yard leading into Danby’s workshop.

There she hesitated.

More bad news might set off his drinking again. She saw the tablet of glass in his hand. Its cutting edge. Its dagger-like point. Its stain as dark as blood.

She decided to hold off for a while. Give him a chance to strengthen again. It was still possible that Gilbert was on some innocent errand, that she had missed him in the packed crowds.

She poked her head into the yard, caught a glimpse of Danby working alone in the workshop, confirmed that Gilbert hadn’t returned by a different route then, without being seen, went back into the street.

She would set about finding him and if she couldn’t find him she would do what she had intended to do earlier. She would take her hounds for a bathe in the river before they expired in the heat.

*   *   *

Gilbert had vanished, just like Jankin and Dorelia. And yet, like them, his presence seemed everywhere. She looked in several churches where she knew there was good glass, but there was no sign of him. Praying that Danby and Stapylton were wrong in their suspicions she eventually headed towards the river with the feeling that she had done as much as she could.

It was as crowded on the bank of the Ouse near Lendal as elsewhere in town. The heat had sent droves of people into the water. She strolled along, looking for a quiet spot where she could release the hounds, passing St. Leonard’s, going out farther to where the meadows began with their hundreds of small encampments. Evidently people were still pouring in for the festival, and even in the stifling heat cooking fires were being stoked. Billows of woodsmoke drifted at the foot of the walls.

Managing to find a shelving slope on the river bank that was less crowded she released the hounds from their chains. Duchess plunged into the water at once and began to swim strongly into midstream. Bermonda ran in and out at the water’s edge, daring herself to go little by little into ever deeper water until finally she launched herself in with delighted little yips.

A crowd of children were playing nearby and she watched them enviously, dogs and children, wishing she could go for a swim herself. One of the boys was wading out to his waist, reaching for something floating on the water. It was a flotilla of white feathers and it made Hildegard imagine the miller upstream wringing the neck of one of his geese for his Corpus Christi dinner table.

The boy splashed back to his companions with a shout of triumph, holding one of the feathers aloft. The others circled and tried to snatch it away but he ran, laughing, up the bank to store it in a little cache of treasures in the grass.

Duchess swam back to shore and gave Hildegard the shower she desired. Laughing, she shook the water from her kirtle. Bermonda came up and did the same. She sat on the bank and spread the skirt of her habit to dry.

It was a rare moment of peace after the horrors of recent events and, tired out after the hard ride over the moors, she allowed her eyelids to close. Little by little the tension of fear began to drain from her limbs. From far off came the shouts of children at play, and deeper and closer than that was the lulling murmur of conversation from around the campfires.

Gradually the sound of distant singing detached itself from the rest. High and clear, it became louder as the singers approached. Stirring from her slumbers Hildegard imagined it must be a company of pageant players coming up from the meadows where rehearsals were sometimes held. After a moment or two she recognised it as the little dirge the children had been singing when she had arrived in York with Maud and Petronilla, an age ago.

She opened her eyes and saw the same little group approaching along the river bank. This time the boy-bishop was leading a girl of about eight by the hand.

They walked with great ceremony through the grass and drew to a halt not far off. The boy-bishop was intoning some gobbledygook as before and waving a hand in an approximation of a blessing, but suddenly the girl threw herself to the ground and started screaming and writhing in what was a passable imitation of someone in religious ecstasy. It reminded Hildegard of a particular novice during her own training.

The child continued to writhe and sob. After a while it became alarming. The others were standing around, eyeing her with some curiosity, forgetting their parts in the charade.

When the girl didn’t get up, Hildegard went over.

“She’s gone crazy in the head,” one of the boys said when he saw her. “Ever since she saw the Virgin in a bush.”

“She says she saw the Virgin, does she?”

A small girl slipped her hand into Hildegard’s. “I’m frightened of her. She does this all the time, sister.”

“Let her be,” said the boy-bishop. “She’s got to let the devils out.”

“Who told you there were devils in her?” asked Hildegard.

“She did. She says Our Lady came to her in angel meadows and told her to set the devils free or she would go to hell and burn forever.”

“I doubt whether Our Lady would say a thing like that to a child,” observed Hildegard.

Suddenly the girl stood up and pointed across the meadow and in a terrified voice cried, “See! The angel of the Lord! See his firey sword! He comes to bring punishment to those who don’t repent! Praise the Virgin and all her angels! Repent! Repent!” Then she fell forward again, clawing at the ground, burying her face in the hot grass and sobbing as if in genuine terror.

Hildegard went over. She knelt down. “Dear child, get up. You are forgiven.”

The girl lifted her head and seeing that Hildegard was a nun flung herself into her arms, sobbing. “I saw her, sister. She came to me in the meadow and asked me to help her. And she was covered in the blood of the devil. And she screamed in agony. I saw her. But I refused her. I was in fear for myself. She is our Holy Mother, the Virgin, Queen of Heaven. The Mother of God. I have to speak though they rip out my tongue! Save me!” Then she cried out, her terror so convincing it sent shivers up Hildegard’s spine. Suddenly the girl sprang away and ran a few steps with one arm flung out. “See! There she comes again in her robes of glory! Save me, Blessed Mother!” She fell to her knees.

All the children turned but the only thing that met their gaze was the softly blowing meadow grass, rippling in a gentle breeze that ran far along the river bank towards the woods. The children, nonetheless, started to run screaming in all directions. The more the girl intoned and pointed, the more they allowed themselves the luxury of panic.

Hildegard stepped forward. “I think that’s enough, all of you. There is nothing there. This child needs to be taken home now.” Her matter-of-fact tones brought some order to their hysteria and she asked, “Can any of you tell me where she lives?”

“She doesn’t have a home,” one of the girls said in an important voice, breaking off her hysterical cries in mid flow. “She’s staying with an aunty.”

“Then let’s take her there.”

One by one the little troop came to accept the idea of a grown-up taking charge and they followed randomly through the meadow towards a row of cottages on the edge of the open land in the shelter of the city walls.

When the child appeared accompanied by a nun, a harassed-looking woman came rushing out of one of the houses. “Has she been causing trouble again, sister? I am sorry. I can’t say how much I regret it, putting you to all this inconvenience, having to bring her back. I don’t know what to do with her.”

“She seems troubled by something she’s seen.”

“All nonsense. What can she have seen that others haven’t? She’s causing a disturbance because she’s having to stay with me. She will not settle.”

“Has something happened to her mother?” asked Hildegard.

“Died this year past, so she’s been sent to me. Poor little morsel, pushed from pillar to post. Who wouldn’t invent a vision or two, eh?”

The woman picked the child up in her arms and held her tight. “Come in now, Lucy, do. It’s all over. We love you fondly. And we’ll always keep you safe.”

Several of the group peeled off into the house and Hildegard realised that the woman already had a large brood of her own. She felt sorry for her but there was little she could do to sort out another family’s domestic arrangements.

As the woman followed the children she turned briefly at the door. “It’s the old story. Her dad’s been beguiled by the witchcraft of another woman.”

The boy-bishop stood by. “We’ll go back into angel meadows, sister, and see if we can catch sight of the Virgin ourselves. Maybe we can offer a prayer and she’ll take the devils out and make Lucy happy again.”

He gathered the remnants of his little troop. They struck up their dirge-like hymn once more as they wound solemnly through the camps.

*   *   *

And then she saw him. Gilbert. She had scarcely left the row of houses when she glimpsed his bright hair.

He was sitting on the bank of the river with his back against a tree, a pad of some sort on his knees and a drawing instrument in his hand As she approached she saw he was making a sketch of the people sitting close by. She went up to him as it seemed the natural thing to do. Her hounds followed.

“Taking advantage of a break in work?” she called. He didn’t show any surprise at seeing her. His expression could only be described as innocent.

“May I have a look?”

He held up a page of drawings. Somehow he had managed to catch the exact look of the family sitting nearby under the tree. Mother, father, a toddler and a babe in arms. Without distortion he revealed them in all their pride and poverty. She looked at it with admiration. “You draw like an angel, Gilbert. Are you going to give this to them?”

He shook his head. “It’s for my pattern book. They’ll maybe see themselves in a church window one of these days. The Holy Family. Flight into Egypt.”

“So you’re working, even in this hot weather?”

“I always work.” He showed her the book. Its pages were protected by two boards of wood, the whole thing held together by leather straps. He turned over the page he was working on and on the other side, the wool side of the vellum, was a drawing of herself with Duchess and Bermonda beside her. So that’s how he saw her. She gave him a quick glance.

“When did you draw this?”

“Earlier on. I saw you walk past and go to sit near the river.”