Fortune Like the Moon (26 page)

For the first time, it dawned on him what a
good
place Hawkenlye Abbey was.

*   *   *

Josse asked Abbess Helewise, ‘How did you know?’

They were back in Helewise’s room. She was sitting straight-backed in her usual place, but he had the impression that the effort of appearing normal was costing her dear.

She turned to look at him. She raised her bandaged right hand, waved it at him, then, with a wince, lowered it into her lap.

He shook his head incredulously. ‘You ran your finger round the edge of the plinth? To see, I imagine, if it had enough of an edge to cut someone’s throat?’

‘I did.’

‘Abbess Helewise, how reckless!’

‘Don’t
you
start,’ she flashed back, ‘I’ve already been reprimanded for my irresponsibility by Sister Euphemia, thank you very much.’

She managed to look both indignant and pathetic at the same time. Knowing her as he was beginning to, he knew the latter was not intentional; it was, he decided, the combination of her pale but resolute face and that damned great wad of wrapping on her hand.

‘Does it hurt?’ he enquired kindly.

‘It does.’

I’ll wager, he thought. It would have hurt badly enough before we staggered up here with a semi-conscious man. The dear Lord knows how
that
little adventure must have affected her.

He remembered his original question. ‘Actually, that wasn’t what I meant.’ It was better to change the subject, he thought, to talk about Olivar and Gunnora, than to risk undermining her courage by his sympathy. Not that it was easy to ignore her state; her face was very pale, and the wide brow beneath the starched white linen headdress was beaded with sweat. ‘I really wanted to know what made you suspect what happened,’ he ploughed on, ‘when I’d been doing my utmost to convince you that Milon was lying through his teeth and had killed Gunnora after all.’

‘I went down to speak to Brother Firmin about the resumption of our services for pilgrims,’ she began. ‘The devotions, and the distribution of the healing waters. Life has to go on, you know, and we’ve had so few visitors since the murders. There will be unnecessary suffering, all the time we do not throw open our doors to those in need. While I was down in the valley, I thought it was about time I made a visit to the shrine. I have been guilty of allowing my worldly preoccupations to interfere with my devotions,’ she said sternly.

Josse was about to say that he was quite sure the Lord would understand, but something about her expression made him change his mind. ‘Quite so,’ he muttered.

She shot him a glance, as if not entirely convinced by his bland reply. ‘I went into the shrine’ – fortunately, it didn’t seem that she was going to pursue it – ‘and I knelt to pray, right in front of the Blessed Mother’s statue. I noticed that the plinth seemed to be very shiny, as if someone had recently been polishing it.’ She bowed her head. ‘I know that I should have been concentrating on my prayers to Our Lady,’ she said, ‘but, as I said, I am easily distracted at present.’

‘Understandable,’ he remarked. ‘Wouldn’t any abbess be, with two suspicious deaths among her nuns?’

‘The very time an abbess needs to pray hardest for help!’

Oh, dear. She wasn’t in the mood for understanding. Didn’t, apparently, want to be released from her self-accusation. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You were thinking how shiny the plinth was.’

‘Yes. I got up and had a closer look, and I could see a stain of some sort running underneath it, right at the point where it adjoins the rock wall into which it’s set. I touched the place, and the stain felt dry, sort of crusty. So I moistened the tip of my finger in the holy water and rubbed again. What came off was, I was almost sure, blood. I repeated the action, this time getting a good sample. Then there was no doubt.’

‘And you began to see what might have happened?’

‘I did. I thought of the steep, slippery steps, and, in my mind’s eye, I pictured that terrible wound in Gunnora’s neck. I saw that perfectly symmetrical cut. I’d always puzzled over that, hadn’t you?’

‘Aye.’

‘I mean, if you’re slitting someone’s throat, even with an accomplice holding them, surely you haven’t the time to make such a perfect cut?’

‘And nobody did,’ he said. ‘It was done by her falling against a circular edge. It
is
sharp enough?’

‘It is,’ she said with feeling. ‘I ran my forefinger gently around it, and almost sliced off the top joint. We
must
have it seen to – I must go and tell Brother Saul to close the shrine until we’ve done so, and he ought to send word to the silversmith immediately.’ She half-rose, as if she were going to go racing down to the vale there and then.

‘I’ll see to all that,’ Josse said hurriedly. ‘You have my word, Abbess.’

She looked doubtful.

‘My word,’ he repeated.

She bowed her head in acknowledgement, sinking back into her chair. ‘It’s sharper than any blade, you know, the edge of that plinth,’ she said. ‘For some reason, the silversmith cut off the skin of silver so that it overlapped the wooden platform. Only by a little. But it was enough to slice through flesh and sinew.’

‘She would have built up a great deal of momentum in her fall,’ Josse said. ‘Those steps are quite high, and she’d fallen from the top. Right on to that perilously sharp circle of metal.’ He shuddered.

Helewise must have noticed. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? And just imagine that poor man, Olivar, trying to clean up. Believing it was his fault, that the woman he loved so devotedly was dead because of him.’

‘The only small amount of logic there may be behind that is that it was he who requested the meeting,’ Josse pointed out.

‘But I don’t think it was. When we were talking, he and I, down in the shrine, he said that it wasn’t what he wanted, that secret tryst.
Furtive,
he called it. I had the impression it was something they’d agreed on before she even came to Hawkenlye, that, one day, they’d meet up and she would leave again. Only he, I think, was envisaging arriving at the main gates for her, having me ceremoniously put her hand in his. Going to the shrine was, I’m almost certain, her suggestion.’

‘Why did she change her mind?’ Josse asked, although not in any real expectation of an answer. ‘Olivar’s a fine-looking man, a man of substance, what’s more, and she surely had no doubt of his love?’

Helewise was looking at him, one eyebrow raised in faint irony. ‘Don’t you recall what I said to you, in the course of our very first meeting?’

Most of it, would have been the honest reply; she had, he recalled, said quite a lot. But then he thought he knew what she meant. ‘I do. Gunnora, you said, was not apparently bothered by the vow of chastity.’

‘Indeed.’ She leaned forward, as if eager for his understanding. ‘I have noted it before in young women – not only young ones – who enter the convent. While in the world, they do not question the ways of the world; they know what their duty as women – as wives – is, and has to be. Whether they like it or not is irrelevant. But then, when they take the veil, suddenly all that changes. The realisation that, from the very day they join us, they will for ever more sleep alone, comes to some women, I assure you, as nothing but a vast relief. Gunnora, I strongly suspect, experienced that realisation. She did not want to be any man’s wife. Certainly not Brice’s, whom she never loved, and, she discovered, not Olivar’s either.’

‘Whom she did love?’ Josse asked. He was reeling slightly from what the Abbess had just told him. He wondered if she would have spoken so freely were she not suffering from shock.

‘Did she?’ Helewise leaned back in her chair. ‘I’m not so sure. I asked the same question of that poor young man, and he said that, in return for all his protestations, she once – once! – said she
thought
she loved him.’

More fool him, was Josse’s instant thought, for pursuing her so singlemindedly.

But he didn’t say it aloud.

‘Her death was an accident, pure and simple,’ he said decisively after a moment. ‘I can’t think that there is any necessity for him to be arrested and put on trial, since, as I see it, there’s no question of his being responsible for her death. And, with the remains of the bloodstains under the plinth, what really happened can be proved. Do you agree, Abbess?’

‘Yes, Josse, indeed I do.’ It was, he noticed abstractedly, the first time she had called him simply by his given name. It was a timely moment for a move to more intimate terms between the two of them. ‘We shall have to make our reports on the two deaths to both the Church and the secular authorities, I suppose,’ she went on, ‘but, like you, I feel that there is no guilt attached to Olivar. He is innocent of blame over Gunnora’s death.’ She paused, frowning. ‘But I do not think we shall ever convince
him
of that.’

‘We must!’ he said, horrified. ‘The poor man’s life won’t be worth living, unless we do!’

The cool grey eyes looked on him with mild pity. ‘Do you think he’ll ever find it worth living anyway, without her?’

‘Of course! He’s young, and she’s not worth grieving for! She—’

‘Every one of us is worth grieving for,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes, I know what you think of her, you who hadn’t even met her.’ He heard no reproof in her words. ‘I feel the same. She was cold, she was calculating, she used people and she was not worthy of Olivar’s love and devotion. But
he
thinks she was. He has waited several years to claim her, and his love seems to have grown despite the absence of any encouragement from her. Why, he hadn’t even seen her, until the night of her death, for the year or more that she had been with us here!’

‘I don’t understand,’ Josse admitted. He stared at her. ‘Do you?’

‘No.’ She dropped her head into the palm of her unbandaged hand, kneading at her temple with her knuckles. ‘Not really. Not that it makes any difference.’

‘Does your head ache?’ he asked sympathetically.

‘A little.’

He stood up, moving round to her side of the table. ‘Why not lie down?’ he suggested. ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood, you’ve solved a murder that wasn’t, you’re in pain from both your hurt finger and your head. Don’t you think it’s time, my dear Abbess Helewise, to admit you’re only human, and need a good, long sleep?’

Her head flew up at his words, and he thought she was going to tick him off for his presumption. But then, to his great surprise, she began to laugh. ‘I don’t see what’s funny,’ he said, quite offended. ‘I was only trying to help.’

‘Oh, Josse, I know!’ She had recovered her solemnity. ‘Between you and that old hen Euphemia, I don’t think I stand a chance of staying here at my post for the rest of the day. So I think I might just give in. I must admit, the thought of lying down somewhere quiet, with a pleasant breeze to cool me, and one of Sister Euphemia’s cold lavender compresses on my forehead, is increasingly appealing…’ She stood up, too quickly, and he caught her as she toppled.

‘Told you so,’ he murmured close to her wimpled and veiled ear.

‘I shall pretend I didn’t hear that,’ she remarked. Then, with her not inconsiderable weight leaning against him – she was, he’d noticed, broad-shouldered as well as tall – he helped her out of the room and across to the infirmary.

Chapter Nineteen

The coronation of Richard Plantagenet, second surviving son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, took place in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189.

The new King, Richard I of England, was five days short of his thirty-second birthday. He had been in the country for a fortnight, and, even as the day of extravagant and lengthy ceremony continued, the greater part of his able brain was thinking ahead to when he could leave again.

Two years earlier, the Muslim leader, Saladin, had captured both Jerusalem and Acre from the Franks. Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, set about besieging his stolen territory, but it had become clear that the recapture of the Holy Sepulchre was not a task that he could do alone. Richard Plantagenet had been ready – more than ready – to go to his aid, and had taken the cross in preparation. However, the timetable of events in Outremer had not been drawn up to suit the Plantagenets; the everlasting intrigues and in-fighting between Richard, his father and his brothers continued to make it impossible for Richard to embark for the crusade in the east.

Now that he was King, however, all that was over. Even before the crown was on his head, he had demanded a muster of ships. And, across the Channel, his companion-in-arms, friend and ally, Philip Augustus of France, was waiting …

Henry II’s thirty-five years on the throne had left England sound. Unlike his son and heir, he had involved himself in all aspects of good government, and had managed to achieve that remarkable feat of integration simply because he had intelligent, informed help. His small group of administrators had shared with him the aim of making the country strong. And solvent: when Henry died, he left a substantial sum, rumoured to be in the region of 100,000 marks, in the Treasury.

Richard’s magnificent coronation nibbled away at quite a lot of that. But, nevertheless, the remainder would have been a more than adequate inheritance for most kings.

Kings, that is, who were not champing at the bit with impatience to go off to war.

The raising of revenue was Richard’s sole, driving purpose. His new kingdom, which he hardly knew, was no more to him than a vast bank, where, happily, his credit appeared to be good. Whether or not his demands were acceptable to his new people, whether, even, the majority of his subjects shared his fanatical determination that the Holy Land must be wrested out of infidel hands, were matters of supreme indifference to him. The important thing was to raise as much money as he could, as quickly as he could; he once joked that he would sell London if he could find a buyer.

Quite a lot of people didn’t realise it was a joke.

In those hectic days of the new reign, it seemed that everything was for sale. Not even the highest in the land were exempt from demands; Henry’s able and loyal advisors were made to pay heavily for the dubious privilege of the new King’s goodwill. And, lower down in the establishment hierarchy, officials were thrown out of office to make room for incumbents who paid for their new appointments. Anyone whose money was a burden to him, went the ironic saying, was relieved of it; it was possible, at this extraordinary, country-wide market, to buy privileges, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, even towns; human nature being what it is, there were plenty of people more than ready to advance themselves the quick way, via their wealth, instead of the more noble but painstaking route of via their worth.