The Butcher of Avignon (3 page)

Then, after this minor excitement, to her dismay a sleeping patience seemed to descend again. What was Clement doing? He must be in his bed, she decided, or maybe breaking his fast in as lavish a manner as her prioress had mentioned. One thing he was probably not doing and that was praying for the souls he had condemned to death at the siege of Cesena or, more recently, by burning here in the town of Avignon. She had passed the site of the public burnings in the market place and couldn’t get it out of her mind. It made her think acidly of the men who commanded such punishment of their fellow beings.

She pictured Cesena again with all the old feeling of horror.

**

The final cresset was dowsed. The vast, crowded space of the audience chamber was by now a blaze of sunlight. Still everyone hung on. Patience is a virtue. Hildegard was almost asleep on her feet when there was a sea-change among those nearest the dais.

Nothing much seemed to have happened. A cardinal appeared unobtrusively through the door at the back where Clement was expected. As they pinned their hopes on him he moved to the edge of the dais. Diffidently he began to address them. When he spoke it was in Latin so that everyone could understand.

The gist was that his holiness had been detained by an unholy event. He begged and prayed for their understanding. Soon he would appear before them when he would impart to them what had befallen.

Hildegard sighed with impatience and earned a look of reproof from the monk standing beside her. Suppositions cascaded through her mind. Was he sick? Had the war between England and France broken out again? Was that perhaps the message Fitzjohn had brought last night?

A glance across the bowed heads, already mouthing prayers, showed him say something to one of his pages with a scowl of annoyance. He bent his head to say something more and the page forced a path through the press towards the doors. One of the Cistercians also thought it a waste of time to hang about and followed in his wake.

Hildegard closed her eyes. The prioress, content in Swyne, had no idea what her nun had to endure in her service. The Alps had been nothing to the tedium of waiting for someone who could not or would not deign to appear.

**

It was almost on tierce, the third hour, when a piercing fanfare cut through the mumblings of people too devout to leave their places to go to
mixtum
now being served in the refectory. The horn players looked delighted at having something to do at last. Hildegard craned her neck to see over the heads in front of her towards the door at the back of the dais.

After another screech of the horns, the door inched open in the silence that followed. Then a dazzling, bejewelled figure appeared on the threshold. The silence lengthened.

The guards, squaring their shoulders, gazed more ferociously at the invisible enemy in front of them. A sound like the wind rising echoed around the auditorium as people began to cross themselves and fall to their knees in a cloud of fabric.

Clement, dark visaged, hook nosed, face as expressionless as a stump of wood, took several tottering paces towards his throne. His garments glittered in the sun light. Two silvery acolytes fussed in his wake and when he came to the steps leading up to his gilded throne they took an arm each to guide him onto it in his cumbersome robes. Before sitting, he turned and made a perfunctory sign over the heads of his flock.

Everyone, Hildegard realised, was on their knees. Even the Cistercians near the door. As unobtrusively as possible she slid down the pillar she had been leaning against until she was kneeling, albeit in a cramped and crouching posture, at its foot. A glance backwards showed that the Cistercian who had followed Fitzjohn’s page outside had returned and followed him back in. For a moment he glanced out over the bent heads towards the dais, then he too, sank down among the rest.

Clement’s voice carried easily into the corners of the vast hall. Latin, of course.

‘My faithful friends, my dearly beloved. Please rise to your feet.’ A sound of dull thunder followed. He began speaking only when all was quiet again. ‘I humbly beseech your pardon for this unwonted delay in starting our daily business. May your patience be rewarded here on earth as in heaven.’ He paused and clasped his hands helplessly, eyes darting from one corner of the chamber to the other. ‘I bear evil tidings, my friends. This day, sometime after matins, a most dreadful fate befell one of my beloved flock.’

He paused again and Hildegard silently applauded his sense of the theatrical. His eyes were focussed on something in the roof beams. His guardian angel, maybe, although to look downwards to the pit of hell, she thought, might be more appropriate.

After a sufficiently long pause he spoke in a soft voice. ‘Sometime after lauds a young thief was found in that most secret of places where our fortune is stored.’ A whisper of speculation arose but he stalled it with one raised hand. ‘I mean this as no reference to the soul of souls where each man’s fate is coiled but in that place where our wealth is stored, I mean where that gold belonging to all of us, is for safety kept, the better to further our ministry among the ungodly.’

His black glance swept the crowd like a passing storm cloud.

‘Our treasury, of which many of you will be unaware, has been breached! To our sorrow we are not birds of the air. We cannot live on the crumbs of fortune. We must show prudence in the management of base, worldly affairs. This necessary wealth is such that vile men, driven by cupidity, are attracted to it, are drawn to it, are tempted to break into the holy place and to steal from it for their own devilish designs.’ He waited until this news had sunk in.

Clement gave an odd kind of smile as he held the last morsel of the outrage under his control. And then he let them know it. ‘So was the thief discovered this day in our treasury and I may tell you, friends, so he received his just reward. Blessed be the humble. God go with you. Amen.’

Almost before anyone could respond to his astonishing words he exited on the arms of his acolytes. The door closed with finality behind him. The guards stared at nothing, blank as wooden effigies.

At once a confused whisper of speculation broke out. Who had dared? What did his just reward mean? How much did he get away with? What treasure?

The monk beside Hildegard cried out, ‘God preserve us. Such brazenness. Here, in the palace of our blessed pope.’ He turned to Hildegard, ‘Did you ever hear of such a thing, sister? What is the world coming to?’

‘We live in troubled times, brother.’

‘The enemy is verily within the gates. The end days are nigh!’

‘How could anyone penetrate the secret treasury? There are guards everywhere. How is it possible?’ she asked.

‘With the help of the devil and his minions, surely. How else?’ The monk shook his head in mystification. Someone touched him on the sleeve and he bent his head to listen.

Everyone was leaving now. Litigants, lawmen, scribes, clerks. All those with a petition to present. Thwarted now. Pouring out through the great doors, pages jostling to force a pathway for their masters, sharp elbows being used to effect. Soon, flooding into the Great Tinel, the refectory, their voices rose from a murmur to an excited rumble as soon as they were able. Those who were vowed to silence looked with chagrin at their companions. One or two risked penitential punishment by speaking aloud their astonishment. Questions were asked about the treasury, about what was meant by the thief’s just reward. The devil was mentioned with prayers to assorted saints for belated protection. St Martial, the palace’s patronal saint, was called upon.

Hildegard allowed herself to be drifted into the Tinel with everyone else until she found an empty place at the long table reserved for nuns, lay sisters, and female guests. A storm of gossip soon took over making one or two high up in the chain of authority look down their noses at the avid interest others were showing in such material affairs. One of them, an abbess by the look of it, chose to make a comment.

‘We cannot know anything at this stage, dear sisters. We must leave it for his holiness to scry forth the identity of this thief. Eschew gossip, I beg you. The thief is apprehended. There let the matter rest.’

‘And his just reward?’ murmured Hildegard. ‘What do you imagine that can be?’

‘Our Holy Father decides how sinners shall be rewarded,’ the nun replied with complaisant finality.

Preserve me.
Hildegard bent her head, hiding her contempt as best she could and as soon as her morsel of bread was eaten and the watered wine was swallowed, she got up and made her way to the guest hall.

**

It was no different here. The buzz of excitement where townspeople, secular petitioners as well as clergy mixed was feverish. Rumours flew. One thing everyone seemed agreed on. By just reward, Clement meant one thing: death.

‘Blood everywhere,’ opined a merchant who could not have had first-hand knowledge of such a thing unless he’d been present and wished to incriminate himself. Nobody pulled him up. Everyone could predict death from Clement’s words and with death came blood. Lots of it.

‘They say an angel struck the thief down at the very moment he touched one of the blessed gold crucifixes his holiness keeps in there,’ said another.

‘I heard there was a fight with the devil and out of malice he killed the thief by sucking his blood,’ said another.

‘Who was this thief?’

Opinions came thick and fast: it was the pope’s own chaplain, turned mad, or, it was a stable lad, thieving, or no, said others, it was the pope’s food-taster, disgruntled because of his poor pay, and on. Stories, embroidered and plain, passed rapidly about the crowded chamber.

The sooner the pope’s inner circle announce a few facts the better, Hildegard thought. Glad to leave them to their speculations she made her way to the exit.

**

Her duties in return for her bed and board in the palace were light. They involved presence at prayers in the visitors’ chapel to lend piety to the lay members’ devotions, a few domestic tasks quickly done, and attendance on an old monk who had so far slept most of the time in his small cell and had only asked her to prop a heavy book or two onto his reading stand.

So far she knew little about him. It was the house steward who had assigned her to him and he pretended a difficulty in the language that prevented him telling her more.

Now she made her way to the monk’s cell where he was still, no doubt, sleeping away his final years.

She was wrong.

He was sitting upright at his reading stand and glanced up with an alert expression when she appeared in the doorway.

‘I have heard the news, domina.’

For a moment she was confused. ‘Already? You’ve heard about the theft?’

‘Theft? No, I’ve heard nothing of any theft. I mean about the arrivals from England. I understand a retainer to Prince Thomas of Woodstock arrived shortly before dawn?’

‘Indeed. A Sir John Fitzjohn.’

‘After a hard ride through enemy territory?’ The old man gave her a piercing glance. ‘What can bring him to face such dangers, might one ask?’

Hildegard had scant idea where his sympathies lay. He would be a Clementist, obviously, but did he regard Clement’s warmongering with sympathy? Until she knew more she would remain non-committal.

‘This Thomas of Woodstock, we are led to believe, is familiar with the rivalries between the French King and his dukes. I understand he campaigned on behalf of the duke of Brittany not long ago. What do you imagine his representative is doing here?’

Hildegard shook her head. ‘I was surprised to see him arrive. I have no idea what he wants.’

‘He wants something. We agree on that?’

‘Such is the way of things, magister.’

He gave a thin smile. ‘Maybe he seeks to further an alliance with his holiness Pope Clement on behalf of his old companion in arms, the duke of Brittany?’

Hildegard showed no emotion. Was that all it meant? Woodstock in alliance with Brittany? A feeling of relief seeped through her. That was old news and the alliance had led nowhere. Could it be as the old monk suggested and be no plot against King Richard after all?

‘Ha!’ He exclaimed with satisfaction. ‘No surprise, domina? What other reason can he have of presenting himself to Our Holy Father?’

‘I can’t think of anything, magister.’

Athanasius gave her a sceptical glance. ‘Really? You can’t think of anything? Well, well.’

Hildegard waited but the old man said nothing more and she was left in as much uncertainty as before.

‘Tell me then about this theft. What was stolen and from whom?’

‘I’ve no idea what was stolen. The news concerns an interloper inside the pope’s treasury.’

He managed to look mildly astonished. ‘Inside? What was he doing there? Did he give an account of himself?’

‘I hasten to say this is only rumour, but when pope Clement announced that the thief had received his just desserts, it was assumed that he was killed, probably by the guards.’

‘Did he kill to get inside?’

‘Was killed, before getting outside, so the story goes.’

The monk crossed himself. ‘Is there more?’ Sharp eyes scrutinising her face.

‘Wild rumours but nothing known for certain yet.’

‘Then, domina, make it your business to know. I’m too ancient and infirm to traipse about the palace listening to gossip and unfounded speculation. By the way have the Cistercians arrived from England?’

‘From England?’

Head on one side he regarded her steadily. ‘Come now.’

‘There are many Cistercians attending His Holiness. Our Order is widespread. Are there some expected from England?’

‘Three of them. Englishmen are quite distinctive are they not? Three tall men together?’

‘Maybe so.’ She recalled the three who had entered the papal chamber just before Fitzjohn and his page came in. She mentioned them.

The old man sank his chin into the folds at the neck of his robe and appeared to fall asleep and while Hildegard waited to make sure, she wondered who he was - just a holy innocent with an insatiable curiosity? Something about his manner made her feel wrong-footed.