With thoughts on what lay ahead at Westminster uppermost, she hoisted her bag onto one hip and started for the door.
She was no further than the top of the steps down into the main yard when Thomas materialised like a ghost at the bottom.
He was barefoot, his broken sandals nowhere to be seen, his face, as white as his robe, stark with horror.
‘Hildegard! Quickly!’ he croaked. ‘Come at once! Something terrible has happened!’
He led at a brisk run across the puddled yard towards the stables. Instead of leading her inside he quickened his pace until they reached the end of the building, where he veered off into a smaller yard enclosed on three sides by a high stone wall. He ran in through an open door at the far end of this cul-de-sac and when she followed she found they were in the mews.
It was dark. Against two, long, shadowy walls were fixed the perches where, chained, sat maybe twenty birds of prey.
They were impassive. Silent. Eyes fixed steadily on the intruders.
Thomas hurried barefoot to the very end of the passage
to the lodge where the falconer kept his equipment.
It was a cramped chamber with no windows and only one door.
Hildegard could make nothing out at first.
‘Brace yourself,’ he whispered. ‘Look!’
He pointed to a shape on the flagstones. She peered down trying to make out what it was and then she guessed. It was a body. She thought of it as a body first because of the way it was sprawled. But then she saw a movement. As she peered she thought her eyes were deceived. He had to be dead because a puddle of something pooled round his head. She knelt beside him.
He was lying curled on one side, hands across his face. From between his fingers more blood was seeping.
When she bent closer she could hear breath, rapid and shallow, as after a shock. Carefully she touched his wrists. ‘If you can bear it, permit me to have a look.’
The man shuddered and cried out. For a moment she glimpsed what had been done to him and then his hands came back as if he could hold in the blood and lessen the pain.
‘It’s his eyes,’ breathed Thomas, crouching down beside her. ‘Has one of the falcons attacked him?’
Hildegard rose to her feet. She was shaking too.
‘They say they go for the eyes,’ Thomas went on. ‘Is he blinded?’
‘First we have to staunch the blood or he won’t live either.’
She tugged at one of the sleeves of her habit to rip away sufficient cloth, and cursing the lack of light, persuaded the man to take his hands away from his
eyes long enough to allow her to staunch his wounds. Thomas bent to help.
After a moment he took over while she opened her scrip and it was then, as she bent to pick up her bag from where it had fallen, that she caught sight of something lying on the ground. It was a bundle of feathers.
As if everything was being refocused she realised that there was a presence detaching itself from the shadows. A man stepped out into the grey light coming in from the doorway. She saw the leather gauntlet strapped to his forearm.
He muttered, ‘This is a disaster, a total disaster. I’d give an entire city for that bird.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Domina, I’m chief falconer here. This is one of your men from York. He brought the archbishop’s hawks in here and he’s been tending them ever since you arrived. There’s no sense to it!’
The man seemed desperate. Something like a sob forced its way from him. He bent to pick something up from the ground and she saw that it was a dead falcon. Cradling it in his arms like a baby, his shoulders began to heave with grief.
‘It was one of yours, was it?’
He nodded. ‘She’s new to us. Only just come over from Norway. Not fully trained. Cost the abbot over five hundred pounds. Docile as a lamb. I can’t understand it. A beautiful creature, beautiful.’
The falcon’s speckled feathers were crushed with blood. Her head hung at an awkward angle, the neck broken. The man stroked her feathers over and over,
oblivious to the blood staining his jerkin.
In a gruff voice he told her what had happened. ‘I had to club her to get her off him.’ Another sob heaved from out of him. ‘She was clinging on to his face. She would not let go. Oh God, oh God,’ he muttered, bending his face to the soft feathers and starting to pray under his breath.
Hildegard’s immediate concern was to get the wounded man to the infirmary, but Thomas had called for help from that quarter before he ran to fetch her, and a couple of burly monks showed up carrying two long poles with a canvas slung between them. With Thomas’s help they managed to lift the York man onto it despite his howls of pain.
Thomas, still barefoot, was silent as he accompanied Hildegard outside.
‘His blood’s beginning to clot,’ she remarked.
They followed in the wake of the stretcher-bearers, neither of them saying anything more until they reached the door of the infirmary. By that time they had a troop of anxious-looking followers.
Hildegard rested her hand briefly on Thomas’s sleeve. ‘How could it have happened?’
The wounded man had become a familiar face on the journey. As the archbishop’s chief falconer, he had kept up a regular supply of fresh meat. ‘He’s called John of Willerby,’ Thomas remarked. He looked ashen.
‘I know him. I saw him in Lincoln Cathedral, lining up with everybody else to send prayers to St Hugh.’
The St Alban’s falconer was clearly a man rarely given to tears and especially not in front of a woman. After
they had got the man into the infirmary he came up to Hildegard and made his apologies. Barrel-chested, with an air of calmness about him like most of his trade, he was still grief-stricken by what had happened.
He kept saying, ‘I had to do it with my own bare hands.’ The violence he had done to the abbot’s falcon by breaking her neck was worse than knives in his gut, he told her. He paced back and forth across the well-swept tiles of the infirmary muttering about how he had been forced to kill the bird and now he was done for.
‘What’s the price of a man?’ he asked at large. ‘Compare it to a falcon, whatever its pedigree. Wick though they are, they do not have human souls. Surely the abbot will see it that way?’
Realising that he was horrified at the amount of money the abbot had invested, and consequently frightened for the loss of his livelihood and the future welfare of his family, if he had one, Hildegard spoke to reassure him. He had obviously done the only thing possible.
And when he was calmer she asked, ‘But what caused the bird to attack?’
The man ran his hand through his hair. ‘It beats me, Domina. I’ve never known anything like it. There wasn’t a sign of trouble. I would never have let your fella near our birds if I’d thought it would lead to this. He must have done something to rile her.’
‘That’s most unlikely,’ observed Thomas, ‘he was the most patient of men.’
The brothers in the infirmary were busy tending the injured man and he was howling in pain at what they
were doing to clean him up. Hildegard forced herself to go over to take a closer look.
As well as the gouging to his eyes deep gashes ran down his face, opening the flesh to the bone where the bird’s talons had ripped into him. Used to bringing down prey at speed, a falcon like this one had phenomenal strength in its claws. It could tear through the hide of a deer. The softer skin of a man was nothing. The scars on his face might heal with skilful stitching but their ugly tracks would be visible for as long as the man had breath. As for his eyes, it was best not to think about them.
He was in no fit state to explain what had happened but after a while it began to look as if the skill of the monks would save his life, so she left him in their care and returned to where Thomas and the falconer were watching. The latter was still going over things, protesting that it was an attack without precedent, without reason.
‘It can only be the work of the Devil. We are all sinners and now we must pay.’
‘Tell me,’ Hildegard broke in when she could, ‘what was he doing in the mews at that time?’
‘That’s another thing,’ the man said. ‘They’d had their feed. At least they should have. They were resting. There was no reason for him to be there then.’
‘What was their mood while they were being fed?’
The man looked at the ground. ‘Same as always. You’ve seen crows round a carcass?’
Something made her ask, ‘Were you there?’
His mouth tightened. ‘To be honest, I was there at the
start – but I was called away.’ He lifted his head with a puzzled frown. ‘One of your little servant lads told me I was wanted by Master Fulford about some game I was supposed to have promised him.’ He frowned again. ‘The thing is, I never promised any such thing. I went over to try to sort it out. But he told me he’d sent no message. He had no idea what I was talking about.’
‘So somebody lured you away at feeding time.’
He looked shocked but then considered the idea. ‘It looks like it. But why the hell would anybody do that?’ The answer dawned. ‘To get at my hawks?’ He thought it over. ‘Why? For what purpose?’ Again an answer came. ‘To set her onto this poor fellow?’ He stared, aghast.
Hildegard moved closer. ‘Could somebody do that? Is it possible?’
The falconer frowned. ‘She’d be in a rare rage if she hadn’t been fed. She’d attack anything. Prey, that is.’
‘So had she not been fed?’ asked Thomas, sounding puzzled.
‘She should have been—’
He swivelled round with an oath and called to one of the apprentices hovering nearby. ‘Did you see to them at feed time?’
‘Only till that fellow came in and took over.’
‘Fellow?’
The apprentice glanced round the circle of hostile faces. ‘I thought he was from York. He wore a leather gauntlet on his wrist.’
‘You slack devil! Do you realise you’ve nearly got a man killed?’ He struck him a hard blow on the head. The youth
was dragged off to examine the face of everybody from York who still remained, half the company having already set out, but he failed to recognise the interloper. Snivelling, he was let go with the promise of a good beating.
When things were calmer Hildegard asked how it was possible to make a bird attack a human being.
The falconer slowly shook his head. ‘It’s not very likely, especially as how she already knew him as a friend. If she thought there was prey to be had, mebbe, and she was trying to get at it …’ His voice trailed away. The facts spoke for themselves.
Archbishop Neville was standing beside his char with a scattering of servants, waiting to leave. Many of the household had set out before Willerby’s accident and even Swynford had left. He had told the archbishop that he wanted to check over one of his mother’s properties along the road and would rejoin the convoy wherever they caught up with it later. Neville had sent several of his trusted men with him, either to keep an eye on him or out of courtesy. Now he turned when Hildegard and Thomas appeared and his expression was perplexed. ‘Don’t give me any nonsense about coincidence,’ he greeted. ‘Is the man talking yet?’
Hildegard replied in the negative. ‘Does it make sense to you, Your Grace?’
Neville’s eyes narrowed. ‘One of my kitcheners murdered. And now a deliberate and planned attack on my head falconer.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Somebody’s trying to send me a warning.’
He didn’t mention the cross, not with Thomas present,
but Hildegard suspected that was uppermost in his mind. With a sudden gasp she realised she had left her bag in the mews. With a hasty excuse she fled.
The bag was where she had let it fall. She fumbled around inside the linen sleeve to make sure the little leather-bound chest was still there. The threat against the cross loomed larger than ever now.
She was just about to go back outside when she nearly tripped over something on the ground. Bending she recoiled with revulsion. It was a dead rat. Then she had a closer look. It had a string round its neck.
It was with much relief that the stragglers finally left the Abbey of St Alban. Hildegard and Thomas were the last to leave. They had been forced to leave the patient too. He was in good hands, however. One of the brothers had trained with the renowned royal surgeon, John of Arderne, and if he did not know what to do for the best to save his sight then nobody did.
Before following the others Hildegard paid a final visit to the infirmary. The monks had applied clean bandages to Willerby’s eyes and he was sleeping peacefully after a draft of white poppy.
‘Has he spoken yet?’ she asked the monk in charge.
‘Only to tell us that someone came up behind him and hit him on the head. He remembers nothing more.’
‘There is something,’ she said before leaving.
‘What is it?’
‘A dead rat. It was near to where he was lying when he was found.’