Veil of Lies (29 page)

29

When Crispin returned from Newgate, he was grateful to find Jack waiting for him at his lodgings with a decent fire and a bowl of wine.

Crispin took the bowl and settled in the chair. Jack shrieked and fussed at Crispin’s wound. He peeled the coat off and pulled back the shirt to dress the angry gash as best he could before he knelt at Crispin’s feet and pulled off the muddy boots. Crispin wiggled his toes toward the hearth, luxuriating in the feel of the warmth on his feet and the wine in his belly. He closed his eyes and leaned back. His shoulder throbbed, but the pressure of the dressing minimized the pain.

“What happened at the bridge? How about that John Hoode being an Italian! Did you get him, Master Crispin?”

“Yes, Jack. I got him. Whether he is poisoned by Lombardy spies or executed by English justice, his fate is sealed.”

“What about Master Lionel? Did the sheriff arrest him?”

“Indeed. All in all, Wynchecombe was pleased by the night’s proceedings. Not only did he foil a foreign conspiracy but he caught the killer of a rich merchant.”

“Him? He didn’t do nought. It was you!”

Crispin waved his hand. “I care not. I have my freedom and that is enough.”

Jack settled on the floor by the fire and rubbed his upraised knees. “Blind me! They’ll hang him, won’t they? That will make Master Clarence the master of Walcote manor, then.”

They sat for a time listening to the timbers creak and the fire whisper in the hearth.

“In the morning,” Crispin said softly, “I shall see how Philippa fares. You brought her to Master Clarence safely, I trust.”

“Oh aye, Master. But it is already morning.” He rose and cracked open a shutter and looked out at a misty dawn. He shivered and closed it again and returned to the fire. “What of that cloth? Who’s got it now?”

“‘An offering made to the Lord by fire.’” Crispin smiled. “It’s been offered back to God. I burned it.”

Jack stopped rubbing his hands and stared at Crispin. “’Slud! Master! What made you do such a thing?”

Crispin stared down into his empty bowl. The wet wood gleamed, seeming to ask for more. “You know I don’t believe in such things, Jack.” Though even as he said it he remembered with a shiver his hours in the cell. He shook it off and stared into the flames. “So many have died trying to possess the Mandyllon. It seemed more hazardous than holy.” He positioned the bowl on his upraised fingers and turned the object, toying with it. “Besides, if there was the least possibility that it did have some power, I couldn’t let it fall to the hands of anyone who coveted it.”

“Was there no priest, no church you trusted? What of the abbot of Westminster? Or the Archbishop of Canterbury?”

“Not even them. Power corrupts. ‘We must as second best take the least of the evils.’ So said Aristotle. I made the choice. I stand by it.”

Jack took the bowl from Crispin’s fingers and refilled it with wine. He shook his head. “I suppose that’s the difference between the likes of you and me, Master. I’d never be able to take such responsibility.”

Crispin took the bowl and sipped its contents. “You forget. I was trained for many years to be a leader. I led many into battle, after all. And I ran my own estates and oversaw Lancaster’s affairs.”

“Aye. Far from my like, to be sure. Lords and servants. Miles apart.”

Crispin frowned at Jack’s words and silently drank, immersing his thoughts and his nose in the wine’s tangy aroma.

A knock on the door made them both turn. Jack rose, straightened his frayed tunic, and opened the door.

Philippa stood on the threshold clutching her hood to her face.

Crispin snapped to his feet and pulled his chemise to cover his bandaged shoulder. He felt a little vulnerable in his stocking feet.

“May I come in?” she asked, her voice husky.

Jack looked at Crispin and Crispin nodded. The boy motioned her in and slipped through the door behind her, closing it, but not before Crispin caught sight of his smile in the crack between door and jamb.

Crispin stared at the back of Philippa’s head when she’d lowered her hood. The golden hair glimmered with rusty streaks. A tantalizing curl sat at the base of her neck where the hair parted. Crispin thought long and hard about pressing his lips there.

She stared into the fire. Their last awkward meeting when he left her at the Boar’s Tusk rose in his mind, and he tingled with the same discomfort.

“Philippa, why are you here? Did Master Clarence tell you to leave?”

“No. He did not. He was most gracious, in fact.”

He took a step closer. Her nearness felt like heat on his face. “What’s happened?”

“I had to come as soon as I could. The whole house was in an uproar with Lionel being taken away. Maude is having a fit.” She said it with a certain satisfied slant to her mouth. “Clarence is ready to cast her out.”

“I see. These are quieter surroundings, then. Peaceful.”

She turned. The satisfied smile left her and the usual slope of her lids was not there. “There’s nothing peaceful about your lodgings.”

He moved to stand before the fire but not quite next to her. Smoke rolled over the hearthstone and trembled up his thighs. He smelled the aroma of burnt dreams. “Then why are you here? I intended to come to you this morning.”

“This can’t wait, I fear.” She raised her chin. “You see, Clarence has asked me to marry him.”

Something seemed to rush past him. He wasn’t entirely certain what it was. He felt it like a blizzard of ice crystals stinging his face or the slap of a woman’s hand. “These are…sudden tidings.”

“He’ll inherit all the family wealth, you see. And he—well, he says he trusts me to help him run the house and the business, since I knew it so well. I think also he took a fancy to me.”

“I see. It makes sense.” His chest was tight. He forgot to breathe. “It’s practical. You will retain your riches and your home. You will not do better than Clarence Walcote.”

She faced him squarely. “I haven’t had any other offers.”

He didn’t mean to, but he looked at her. Her face was harder than before. He owed it to all her recent experiences.

She opened her mouth and her red lips snapped down on the words. “Why don’t you tell me not to marry Clarence?”

“Why would I do that?”

“You could make an offer yourself.”

He turned his face away.

“Have you no feelings about me at all?”

He felt her glare on his cheek. He stiffened. “Is it not enough I confessed that I loved you?”

She shook her head. “The Mandyllon made you say it. But it can’t make you act on it.”

“Women,” he grumbled under his breath. “They want it all and only on their terms.”

“What other terms are there?” She smiled briefly. “Why did you not kiss me when I first came in?” He said nothing. She turned her back on the fire to look at him. She stood that way a long time. “Of course,” she said, sobering, “the true reason you will not make an offer to me is because knights don’t marry chambermaids. Ain’t that it?”

“I’m not a knight.”

“Oh aye, you are. In here,” and she tapped her chest. “Always. It is your true self and you can’t shake it. I saw it when you took me to the Boar’s Tusk. You couldn’t stand for people to see you hold me. What would they think, after all?”

“That’s not true.”

“You call that man Gilbert Langton your friend, but you can barely stand to be there. Oh, it’s a fine place to drink, because that is the purpose of such a place. But it’s not because of Master Gilbert. It’s because you can hide there.”

He turned assassin’s eyes on her. “Are you finished?”

“I thought
my
life was wretched. But yours is far worse. You’ve chosen a lonely life, Crispin.”

His frown deepened. “Not chosen.”

“I’m not so certain.”

He made a furious sound and walked in a circle, holding out his arms. “Look around you!” he burst out. “This is no great manor, no palace.”

“I didn’t ask for one.”

“No? Then why consider Clarence?”

“Because he asked me.” Her blunt answer stilled his tongue. “If you don’t want me to marry Clarence, then say so now.”

“Or forever hold my peace? I’ve already told you. This is no fit place to bring a wife.”

She made a defeated nod. “It’s a shame,” she said. “You might have been happy. But truth to tell, I don’t think you want to be.”

She turned to go and almost reached the door when she stopped. She pulled a small pouch from her scrip and placed it with care on the table. “It’s your payment. What the sheriff took and what Nicholas owed you. It’s only fair. You did find the Mandyllon and you saved me from Mahmoud. That makes you paid in full now, doesn’t it?” Her fingers lingered on the little pouch and then drew away. Her hand slid across the table till it fell flat against her thigh. “I don’t need palaces,” she whispered, not looking at him. “Neither do you.”

She hesitated, waiting for him, but his lips pressed grimly together.

With a sigh, she pulled open the door and walked across the threshold. Crispin lifted his head in time to see the tail end of her train ripple over the floorboards.

The door hung open and he stared at the empty hole for a long time, not thinking, not feeling, until Jack’s head poked in. “Master, may I come in?”

Crispin answered by dropping heavily into the chair and laying his arm on the table. He stared past the little pouch.

Jack slid into the room and closed the door. He stood for a moment at the doorway before he moved toward the fire. Toying with a folded parchment, he looked up at Crispin and handed it to him. “A messenger came and delivered this for you.”

Crispin turned it over to look at the wax seal, but it bore no arms. He let it rest on his thigh.

“I couldn’t help but hear through the door—”

Crispin stared at the pouch on the table with jaw clenched.

“Master. Why don’t you go after her?”

Crispin’s jaw relaxed and he sighed, feeling the years on his shoulders. He reached forward and touched the pouch. “Because I can’t dispute anything she said.”

“You ain’t a mighty lord now. What difference does it make who you marry?”

“Because it matters, Jack. She was right. It matters to me and it always will. The veil has been drawn aside and I was forced to look into myself. I’m not certain I liked what I saw.”

“Can’t a body change?”

“No. At least—it may take a very long time.” They both fell silent. Crispin remembered the parchment in his hand. He rose, strode to the fire, and flicked his thumbnail under the wax seal. He unfolded it and read:

His Majesty was pleased that his taxes are safe again. Rest assured he knows to whom the credit truly falls. Perhaps the king will not stay angry forever. I counsel patience, Crispin. But in the meantime, I caution you from coming to court again.
God keep you.

The letter was unsigned but Crispin recognized Lancaster’s hand. He read it over once more and lowered the paper.

With his free hand he drew Philippa’s portrait from his purse. He cradled it in his hand and gazed at it. He looked toward the fire. For a moment he thought about tossing the painting in. Let the flames consume it as they had the Mandyllon. He had thought that burning the cloth would remove the truth. But it was never easy escaping the truth for long.

He glanced at the letter and then the miniature portrait, ran his finger along its gold-leafed frame, and slowly slipped it back in his purse.

Afterword

Why “Medieval
Noir
”?

There is something about the dark, the seamier side of things that attracts me. This is realized in the precise prose and staccato dialogue of such specialists as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Dorothy B. Hughes. Their fiction centered on a different slice of reality, one of starkness, harsh lighting, deep shadows, manly men with their own code of honor. And of course the women. Always in danger or always dangerous.

It seemed to me a perfect fit to drop a hard-boiled detective in the middle ages, even though the notion of a “private detective” was still centuries away. While there seemed to be a plethora of monks and nuns in the field of medieval mystery, my goal was to offer something different. I wanted to bring something darker and edgier to the genre. Here is a period rife with intrigue, codes of honor, mysterious doings, and dim, shadowy light. It screamed for a detective more like Sam Spade than Brother Cadfael.

A note on some details: Sheriff Simon Wynchecombe was in reality one of two sheriffs of London at that time (who could make up a name like that?). I also embroiled poor Crispin in all the fractured politics of Richard II’s reign. Though there were historical instances—very few—of degraded and disseised (forcibly dispossessed) knights, they were either executed or banished and generally not thrown into the degree of poverty that Crispin was. The fact that he is so depleted from what defined him—his wealth and status—makes for an interesting and sympathetic character: King Richard murders him without actually killing him. The irony—for those students of English history—is that the same fate eventually befalls King Richard himself when, seventeen years later, he is forced to abdicate and is subsequently murdered.

Was Richard really all that bad at the beginning of his reign? History tells us “no,” that he was, in fact, looked on as a shrewd young man and handled the Wat Tyler peasant revolt with aplomb. It was only later in his career that he allowed vanity and his many favorites to woo him to poor choices. Crispin, of course, sees the world through the eyes of Lancaster, the father figure in his life. And not unlike other recent political events where those in power are followed blindly—never mind the law or morality—we see how extreme loyalty can make even a discerning man like Crispin a little stupid. I have no doubt that as the series progresses, Crispin will see the error of his ways, but by then, Richard will begin to prove Crispin right.

Now about this story. Of course there was no “mob” as such in the fourteenth century, but the city states of Italy and the dukes and princes who ran them certainly could be considered “mob bosses.” Bernabò Visconti was a ruthless man, as ruthless as any Godfather, constantly at war with the pope and the city states of Florence, Venice, and Savoy. But ruthless men usually get their comeuppance, and Visconti got his…by his own family. He was captured and imprisoned by his nephew, whereupon he died in prison. Of
natural
causes? Who can say?

But I digress. Wasn’t this story about the cloth?

The Mandyllon or Mandillon or the Sudarium (facecloth) is an obscure relic, one that can never quite be distinguished from the present relics said to have the image of Christ. First mention of any kind of “veronica” came from apocryphal gospels and manuscripts, most notably
Curia Sanitatis Tiberii
and
Acta Pilati
. A veronica was mentioned as early as the second century, but the Veronica’s Veil legend associated with the Passion that we know today emerged out of the medieval need to connect legend and artifact.

Most of the Mandyllon’s saga was recounted in this novel and comes from an ecclesiastical history written in the fourth century by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea and a later sixth century tale told by Evagrius Scholasticus, an ecclesiastical historian. Many relic scholars believe it is the same cloth known as the “Veronica” that used to be housed in the Vatican in a shrine to St. Veronica. However, historians report that the “Veronica” might have been stolen from the St. Veronica chapel in 1600 when St. Peter’s was rebuilt, or that it somehow got “mislaid.” In 1608, the chapel in which the veil was housed was destroyed. Was it stolen at that time? In 1616, Pope Paul V forbade copies of the “Veronica” to be made. Was it because the original was gone? The eyes on the veil prior to this were opened, but after the events of 1608, all other copies show the figure with eyes closed. However, there is a “Veronica” that is displayed at St. Peter’s Basilica on Passion Sunday, the fifth Sunday of Lent. Is this the original or another copy? Some veil scholars believe the original veil from the Vatican ended up in a Capuchin friary in Manoppello, Italy, where, indeed, a veil arrived there at about the same time the veil was said to be mislaid. Pope Benedict XVI recently made a visit to the friary and viewed what many Catholics hold to be the Veronica’s Veil. Yet some even think the one in Manoppello is itself a copy. And still others believe the Mandyllon was the folded Shroud of Turin. Was this the Mandyllon? Was there
ever
a Mandyllon? Who knows?

Could the Mandyllon force you to tell the truth? Playing on the theme of
vera icona
—“true image”—it was my fiction that the veil would force you to reveal
your
true self.

In the meantime, Crispin and friends will return in another mystery of court intrigue and assassination plots in
Serpent in the Thorns
.