The False Virgin (36 page)

Mark turned up his palms in an almost French gesture, perhaps learned from Pierre or Louis.

‘There was one lay brother in the precinct, of course: the night porter, Alfred, who rings the service bell. But he is almost as old and feeble as John, and has spent almost all his life
here. Surely we can discard him as a suspect?’

The prior nodded his agreement. ‘And there are two others we can discard as well.’ The secretary raised his eyebrows in query as Paul continued, ‘Ourselves, I trust! I
certainly know that I am innocent and I am sure that you feel the same.’

Mark flushed a little at the implied compliment. ‘Thank you for your confidence in me, Prior. But, of course, an episcopal or even papal enquiry, to say nothing of the secular authorities,
could not eliminate us from suspicion any more than the rest of our brothers.’

Paul shook his head. ‘There will be no enquiry outside the ecclesiastical fraternity. In these fraught times, with an enemy advancing on Hereford and Worcester, no coroner or sheriff will
concern himself with an internal matter in a religious house. I doubt any bishop will be interested, either, for like us they will be too concerned with defending their brethren and their
treasures.’

He sat down again and rested his chin on his clasped hands. ‘So we now have fifteen suspects to consider.’

‘I think we have one more to eliminate,’ Mark said, ‘and that is our brother Louis. He was the one who detected the murderous nature of the death and rejected any notion of an
accidental – or miraculous – collapse of Beorwyn’s statue upon old John.’

The prior saw the logic of this at once. ‘Ah, you mean that if he was the killer, he would have gone along with the obvious conclusion that John had drowned under the statue? He certainly
would not have demonstrated the two blows to the skull to us.’

There was a silence as each man digested this.

‘That still leaves us with a considerable number of names to consider,’ said Paul ruminatively. ‘And no clear idea of how to proceed. I can hardly take each brother aside and
demand to know if he killed old John!’

Mark pulled the top of his black robe away from his neck, as it was very hot in the chamber, even with the two glazed casements open.

‘Can you not give them a stern warning at chapter about the peril to their souls and the prospect of hellfire if they do not confess – or even fail to offer you any information they
have about this evil tragedy?’

Prior Paul sighed as he rejected this suggestion. ‘I can do it, certainly, but I know it will be useless, unless we have a potential martyr amongst us, who is willing to sacrifice himself
for having saved the reputation of our saintly Beornwyn.’

‘What would happen to a brother who was found to be a murderer?’ asked the secretary.

‘I have never heard of such case, thank God,’ Paul replied, crossing himself. ‘As you well know, thanks to St Thomas the Martyr, who refused to submit the Church to the will of
the second King Henry, we still have “benefit of clergy”, so that we can avoid the lethal punishments of the secular law. But no doubt some very severe penance would be levied by
archbishops or even the Pope, such as banishment for life to some remote cell.’

Mark was still not satisfied that the miscreant could not be persuaded to admit his crime.

‘I find it hard to believe that a man devoted to God, as we all are here, could live with himself knowing that he had taken the life of another. Surely he would be bound to unburden
himself to his confessor? Each one of us, even you, has one of the priests amongst us as his confessor.’

As was usual in any abbey or priory, most monks were not priests, but St Oswald’s had four brothers who had been ordained, so could administer the sacraments and take confessions.

Paul’s smile returned briefly at his secretary’s youthful naïvety and unworldliness. ‘Mark, you will learn that monks, like any other mortal men, will not tell their
confessor everything. In fact they are more likely to keep major sins to themselves and be content to offer the smaller ones. In any event, you know as well as I do that all confessions are
inviolate and even an admission of murder could not be divulged.’

He stood up to indicate that their discussion was over.

‘I did not hope that we could solve the mystery today, but wanted to clear our minds about what we know and do not know. Let us both sleep on it and especially pray for guidance, then
speak of it again after chapter tomorrow. Meanwhile, we have to see John laid reverently in the ground, in spite of Brother Matthew’s doubts about his being possessed by the devil! And the
other urgent matter is preparing this house against the advance of Glendower’s horde.’

Next day, the monks assembled in their places in the quire for the solemn Requiem Mass that prepared Brother John’s body for eternal rest in the small cemetery outside
the church. The nave held all the lay brothers and many of the villagers who depended on the priory for their livelihood. For all his eccentricity, old John had been popular with the rest of the
community until his fits became worse and his mind began to fail. The plain wooden coffin stood before the altar as Prior Paul officiated, ignoring the disapproving scowls of Brother Matthew, who
still muttered that perhaps the devil had entered his soul. As the litany and chanting saw the old monk off to Heaven, some of the brethren suspected that when he arrived there, John would seek out
St Oswald and berate him for cutting short his life.

The coffin was buried with all due reverence in the red Herefordshire soil and a simple wooden cross planted at the end of the grave. A final dirge was sung around it before the monks and lay
brothers filed away to their normal duties.

The formalities were over, but an hour later a message from a shepherd tending priory flocks at the furthest limit of their land sent the prior into a flurry of agitation. The man had spoken to
a party of refugees coming up from the west, who reported that Glendower’s host, now strengthened by hundreds more French knights and foot soldiers, appeared to be making ready to move out of
their camp near Monmouth.

Paul gathered the monks together in the warming room and urgently gave them instructions to hide the priory’s valuables.

‘The treasure chest in my parlour, the sacramental cups and plates from the aumbry in the chancel and, of course, the relic of Beornwyn, must be hidden securely. We cannot tell how long it
will be before this ravaging host arrives from the edge of Wales, but we must be ready for them.’

As always, the sub-prior raised an objection.

‘All that will not fit into a stone coffin in the crypt. The treasure chest alone would be too large.’

This provoked an immediate discussion, but it was a suggestion from the ever-practical cellarer that was soon accepted.

‘Where the spring comes out of the earth beneath the chancel, there is a small chamber where the top end of the conduit that feeds Beornwyn’s fountain is placed,’ Brother Jude
said. ‘One of the stone slabs in the chancel floor is removable and there is sufficient space beneath to hide all we wish.’

The precentor, Brother Patrice, had a different question. ‘With our relic hidden away, we will be unable to administer any sacred water to pilgrims,’ he pointed out.

Arnulf, the hospitaller, answered this scornfully. ‘There’ll be no pilgrims for as long as the Welsh are advancing on us. I have had no lodgers in the guest-house since
yesterday.’

Soon the inner ward was bustling with activity. All the lay brothers were kept out and the centre gate firmly closed, with one brother set to guard it against intrusion. Although all the rest of
the community knew what was going on, the prior wanted to keep the actual hiding place of the valuables as secret as possible.

Although it was unmarked, Jude, who seemed to be best informed about such matters, identified the slab in front of the altar that covered the spring – virtually where old John’s
coffin had rested shortly before. With no strong labourers to help them, the brothers had to struggle with the heavy stone themselves, but when it was prised out and slid aside, they saw that the
cellarer was right about the masonry-lined cavity beneath. It surrounded the small pool from which clear water bubbled out and then vanished down a conduit to the basin of St Beornwyn. There was
sufficient room around the margins of the pool for the wooden chest that contained the mass of silver coins collected from pilgrims, as well as for the calvarium of their beloved saint. The silver
chalices, patens and other precious items used in their religious observances, were fetched from the aumbry, a locked cupboard built into the wall of the chancel. All these were carefully wrapped
in blankets and laid on the raised stones around the spring.

When the slab was replaced, dirt was rubbed into the cracks, then dust carefully brushed over all the slabs before the altar, to obliterate any signs of disturbance. When it was finished, Prior
Paul stood in front of his brothers to contemplate the result.

‘That is all we can do now,’ he said sombrely, his famous smile having almost vanished in the turmoil of recent days. ‘We can only commend the safety of our holy objects to
God.’

As he led prayers on the spot, his secretary could not help wondering how that chestful of silver pennies could be considered as ‘holy objects’.

Later that day, a lay brother and a pair of men from the village were sent out westwards to give early warning of the approach of the advancing army. As disciples of the
priory, they would get lodging with any cottager or forest-dweller who had not yet run away. When either the Welsh host or their scouts were spotted, they would ride back to Broomhill with the
news. The prior, who had thought up this plan, was not really sure it achieved anything, but he felt that any warning was better than none.

In the meanwhile, Paul kept up the pressure on his brethren to reveal the killer of Brother John. At every chapter meeting and at prayers before each dinner and supper, he exhorted them to study
their consciences and to safeguard their immortal souls. His normally mild manner had hardened in past days, and even Matthew could not carp about his laxity of discipline.

‘For how long can you live a lie like this!’ barked the prior at chapter one day. ‘One of you has the mark of Cain upon himself, invisible though it be to all except the
culprit.’

His voice gathered strength as he looked over the bowed heads of the abashed community. ‘I will never understand why you, whoever you are, could not recognise that John had a disordered
mind and that he could never be able to carry out his threat of informing the world of his morbid fantasy! You may have done this wicked deed in the honest, but mistaken belief that you were
safeguarding the reputation of this house. That could be taken into consideration when you face the consequences of your action,’ he cried, swinging a pointed finger around the assembled
brothers. ‘God and the bishops he has appointed as his agents on earth, are full of mercy and compassion. The secular law has no control over your punishment and anything that the Church can
mete out to you is as nothing compared to the abyss you face without confession, contrition and absolution!’

He worked himself up to the finale. ‘Repent and confess, or you will burn in hell and your miserable soul will suffer torments until the end of time! Confess to me and lift what must be an
intolerable burden lying across your shoulders every minute of the day and night. Repent and confess!’

Paul continued in this vein for the next week, without any visible effect upon his reluctant listeners. He even began to wonder if his infirmarian’s diagnosis of murder could have been
wrong, though the facts seemed to speak for themselves.

The scouts he had sent out to spy on the Welsh had not returned, but on the fourth day, they sent a message with a shepherd to say that so far, there were no signs of even the advance guard of
the Welsh.

‘No doubt they are taking their time in destroying and plundering everything in their path,’ muttered Arnulf glumly, as he sat sharing a cup of wine in the cellarer’s room.

Brother Jude shrugged. ‘Certainly this Glendower has wrecked almost every castle in Wales and the Marches. I have not heard that he has been slaughtering or pillaging religious houses,
thank God.’

‘We shall soon find out, Brother!’ grunted Arnulf, gloomily.

But it was almost a week before the scouts returned, trotting up to the main gate of St Oswald’s and breathlessly delivering their news to Prior Paul, who came to the steps of his house to
meet them.

‘They are but five miles away by now,’ reported the lay brother, who normally was one of the millers. ‘They delayed for several days to sack Ledbury, but the day before
yesterday, moved on to Eastnor where they camped again.’

Ledbury was a small market town and Eastnor was a village with nothing between it and the priory, other than woods and open country. Pale with anxiety, Paul ordered his monks to call in the
villagers from outside the walls and within the hour, about fifty men, women and children were camping in the outer courtyard.

‘The women and children can stay in the guest-house,’ ordered Brother Matthew, now striding around officiously, organising the influx. ‘The men can remain out here, until we
see what the situation is by nightfall.’

Several of the younger men had volunteered to stay outside to drive some of their best cattle, hogs and sheep up into the dense woods on the hills behind, hoping to keep them out of the clutches
of the invaders.

‘The rest of them, and all the fowls, will have to stay where they are,’ said Jude sorrowfully. ‘I doubt we’ll see any of them again after this horde has
passed.’

‘If they
do
pass!’ added Arnulf, looking askance at the ragged children running in and out of his tidy guest-house. ‘This place will never be the same
again.’

There followed an uneasy couple of hours when the priory seemed to be holding its breath. The birds still sang and the remaining sheep still bleated outside the walls, but there was still no
sign of the dreaded Welsh.