‘Describe him.’ It sounded very curt, and I shot Sibert an apologetic smile.
He grinned in return. ‘He’s quite slight, slimly built and not very tall,’ he began, ‘and he looks sort of insubstantial, as if he might float away. He was sweeping quite slowly and rhythmically, as if he were moving in a trance.’
Interesting. ‘What did he look like? His face, I mean?’
‘His skin is very fine and very white – more like a girl than a boy, really. His eyes are . . . I’m not sure. Grey, I think, and very light, without much colour at all. His hair is white.’
‘
White?
What, like an old person’s?’
Sibert thought. ‘No, not exactly. Old people’s hair goes dry and straw-like. The boy’s hair is glossy, and it swings when he moves his head.’
‘But it’s white?’ I insisted. I had never heard of a young person with white hair.
Again, Sibert paused to think, this time screwing up his face as he tried to describe what he had seen. ‘White’s wrong,’ he said eventually. ‘The young monk’s hair is cream.’
Cream hair, white skin, eyes with barely any colour at all; what on earth
was
this boy?
I turned to Sibert to find his eyes – his lovely, familiar, blue-green eyes – on mine. The moment felt heavy with menace. Trying to break the mood, I said flippantly, ‘He sounds more like a ghost than a living person.’
And Sibert gave a shudder so powerful that I saw him tremble.
I felt his fear like a living thing, and it seemed to leap from him to me so that suddenly I, too, was shaking. ‘What is it?’ I managed, my voice barely audible.
‘A ghost,’ Sibert whispered, eyes wide with dread. ‘Oh, dear God, supposing he
was
a ghost? And I was right beside him. I could have reached out and touched him!’
For a moment we were both frozen with horror. Then I said, forcing a grin, ‘Sibert, whatever else ghosts may or may not do, I don’t think they sweep corridors.’
After several heartbeats, Sibert laughed. An uneasy, nervous laugh, yes, but still a laugh.
I wondered why the very mention of the word
ghost
should have provoked such a reaction, for I knew from personal experience that Sibert could be brave when danger faced him. There was obviously something he hadn’t told me, and I reckoned there was only one way to find out. ‘Sibert, is the abbey haunted?’
He paled again and, hand like iron on my wrist, said urgently, ‘
Shhhhhhh!
’ Then, recovering, with an attempt at nonchalance that touched me to my core, ‘Yes. They do say so.’
He was obviously so very reluctant to say more, but we both knew he must. I twisted my wrist out from his grasp – I’m sure he didn’t realize it but his fingers were hurting me – and held his hand. ‘Tell me,’ I said simply.
He drew a deep breath, then another. Then: ‘The monks are scared and their superiors try to pretend that it is not so. They say the men are merely unsettled because the building work is so disruptive to their normally tranquil life. They cannot easily hear God’s voice amid the uproar, and this is disturbing them.’
I was quite surprised at the idea of God not being able to make himself heard to one who tried to listen, even above the tumult of a construction site. What were the senior monks trying to cover up? ‘You spoke to some of them?’ I asked.
Sibert nodded. ‘Yes. They are quite approachable, really, or anyway the younger ones are. They’re just like anyone else and they seemed eager to come and chat to me, although I noticed that they kept looking over their shoulders in case the men in charge noticed.’
‘What did they say about the . . . the ghost?’
Sibert swallowed nervously. ‘The rumours say that something’s been seen in the area where the old Saxon church stood.’
‘Something—?’ I began, but Sibert shook his head and I stopped. My curiosity burned me, but I would have to let him tell his story in his own way.
‘The new cathedral is much bigger than the old church,’ he went on, ‘but it’s being built on the same spot, so they’re having to demolish most of the church. The shingle roof and the outer walls went ages ago, and the tower was the first thing to be knocked down. The most sacred part was the little chapel in the south aisle, because its walls are full of bones.’
‘Bones?’
‘It’s a place of honour, Lassair, reserved for the remains of people like old abbesses and Saxon lords. They told me that St Etheldreda’s bones are in there.’
I was beginning to suspect what the nature of this rumour might be. ‘And one of these worthies is resenting the disturbance?’ I suggested.
Sibert clearly disliked my light tone. ‘It’s nothing to joke about,’ he said sharply. ‘You didn’t talk to them. You didn’t sense the terror they’re feeling in there.’ He jerked his head towards the abbey.
‘No, that’s true,’ I acknowledged meekly. ‘What have they seen?’
Again, Sibert drew a steadying breath. ‘It’s a shape, clad in white,’ he said, ‘like a corpse in its shroud. Its face is deadly, ashen, and its hair is pale as snow.’ He, too, was pale, and I heard him suppress a couple of wrenching, retching sounds.
Fear, I suddenly understood, was making him physically ill . . .
‘And it’s got pale eyes too?’ I asked, trying to bring his attention back to me.
He turned to stare at me, horror all over his face. His mouth worked, but no words emerged. He tried again, this time successfully, and instantly I wished he hadn’t.
Because he said, ‘It hasn’t got any eyes.’
NINE
W
e sat there on the straw, clutching each other’s hands, as the fear flowed around us like a dense, dark cloud. A ghost with no eyes . . . Dear Lord, what sort of a creature could it be? What had been done to it, and how terrible would be its wrath now that its uneasy peace had been so violently disrupted? Was it even now plotting its unspeakable vengeance?
I squeezed Sibert’s hand. It was warm, human, living, and it squeezed back. I sensed the fear retreat a little. ‘Sibert, we must leave the island,’ I said. ‘It’s not safe, we—’
‘The ghost has only been seen within the abbey or, at the worse, just outside the walls,’ he said quickly. ‘We’re not in danger out here, or at least I don’t think so.’ He looked uneasily around the little room.
‘It’s not the ghost I’m afraid of.’ It was – of course it was – but I wasn’t going to admit it. ‘There’s something else.’ Briefly, I explained to Sibert what I had realized while he was in the abbey. ‘The killers must surely suspect that Morcar told us what he saw, and they’ll come for us. Morcar’s safe now, but you and I will be as helpless as chicks when the fox breaks into the henhouse.’
‘I can fight!’ Sibert protested, stung.
‘Four, maybe five of them?’ That was what Morcar had said.
Sibert frowned. ‘Hmm.’
Sensing a breach in his defences, I pushed on. ‘We needed to pretend I was still here looking after Morcar only for as long as it took you to get him to safety,’ I pointed out. ‘You managed that, and now he’s tucked up snugly in Aelf Fen, and you must admit it’s very unlikely the killers will find him.’
‘I went over the water,’ Sibert said musingly. ‘I left no trail for even the most expert tracker to pick up.’
‘There you are then!’ I exclaimed. ‘Morcar’s perfectly safe. It’s you and I who are in danger now.’
‘Yes,’ he said, still in that thoughtful way. Then he spun round, looked straight into my eyes and said, ‘You can go if you want. I’m staying here.’
I sighed in exasperation. ‘Sibert,
why
? It’s dangerous, you’ve just admitted that, and you said yourself that the pale monk hasn’t been harmed, so maybe Morcar was wrong and the boy isn’t—’
‘It’s nothing to do with the pale boy.’
Surprised, I said, ‘What then?’
A half-smile twitched at his mouth. ‘Don’t you know? You touched on it when we were on our way here.’
Then I understood.
I tried to recall exactly what he had said.
I’ve always wanted to go to the island. There’s something strange about the story of what happened to my father
.
His father, poor Edmer, fatally wounded in the Ely rebellion. Yes, of course. There had always been another, deeper motive behind Sibert’s eagerness to accompany me on my mercy mission. I let my shoulders slump. Against the huge attraction of delving into a mystery from the past, what chance did my fears for our safety have?
I straightened up and turned to him. ‘Come on then.’
He was already smiling. ‘Where are we going?’
‘
You
won’t leave till you’ve done all you can to unearth what you need to know, and
I
won’t leave without you, so the sooner we start, the sooner we can go home.’
It was past noon, however, and I was very hungry; Sibert was too, and he needed more than the heel of bread I’d thrust at him when I’d returned to find him waiting. I set about preparing a meal, and while I worked I recalled all that I knew of Sibert’s recent family history.
His father Edmer, Hrype’s brother, had fought with Sibert’s grandfather under King Harold at Hastings. After the defeat, in which the grandfather had died, the family had lost their estate of Drakelow, on the coast near Dunwich. Hrype had taken his and Edmer’s mother, Fritha, and fled to the Black Fen, where eventually Edmer found them. Old men spoke with pride of the network of spies and informers that had operated all over the fens after Harold’s defeat as men loyal to him tried to regroup after the disaster; it was thrilling to think of how such secretive men had strived so hard to protect each other. Edmer, Hrype and Fritha had then made their way to the Isle of Ely, where Edmer wished to join the Saxon resistance under Hereward – although Hrype warned him repeatedly that this act would cost him dear.
Edmer, however, would not – and did not – listen. Not only was he suffering from the profound mental wound of having fought and lost, and from being forced to watch his father die in the battle, but in addition he had a new wife: Froya. She had been Hrype’s pupil, and Edmer had fallen in love with her the moment he set eyes on her. Edmer fought for revenge, for the pride of the Saxons and for the future, for now that he had a wife he knew that he might also have a son. The rebellion was the first step to the recovery of Drakelow, the family estate, and Edmer did not hesitate.
He took a Norman arrow in the thigh, and the wound became infected. Hrype did his best, with Froya right beside him fighting for her man, but they had to watch helplessly as Edmer’s life force began to fade. It was too much for his poor mother; Fritha had been gravely traumatized by the defeat and the loss of her home, and in the course of the flight across the fens she had suffered a seizure that left her partly paralysed. Her son’s wound was too much. She turned her face to the wall and quietly died.
Hrype amputated his brother’s leg. As soon as he was well enough to travel, they found a mount and got him away, leaving Hrype behind pretending that he was still nursing his sick brother. Froya fled to Aelf Fen, but the safety of its sanctuary came too late for Edmer; he succumbed to his hurts and died in his wife’s arms. Her son, my friend Sibert, was born a few months later. The only kin he had ever known were his mother and his father’s brother.
It was no surprise, really, that he was so very keen to find out more.
We set out in the early afternoon. Once again Sibert arranged his scarf so that it hid his head and brow. I fastened my white cap over my braided hair and, for good measure, pulled up the hood of my dark cloak to cover it. Without actually saying so, both Sibert and I realized that if we were going to go about asking possibly awkward questions about the recent past, when Saxons had rebelled against the Norman invaders, then it would be best to do so as anonymously as we could. If it were to be discovered that two young people had been too curious, we did not want the trail to lead back to us.
‘Where do you plan to go first?’ I said softly to Sibert as we hurried up the alleyway.
He grinned briefly. ‘Where do the gossips gather?’
‘In the alehouse,’ I answered promptly.
‘Quite so. There’s an alehouse on the marketplace, and it’s usually busy. We’ll start there.’
I was content to follow his lead. It appeared that he had given some thought to his investigation, and I agreed with him that this was a good initial step. As we emerged from the alley into the market square we were all at once in a crowd, and I kept close behind Sibert as he shouldered a way through the throng. The alehouse was over in a far corner, the bundle of branches that marked it out now ragged and almost bare of leaves. It was a long, low building that occupied the entire corner of the square. A wide entrance opened on to a short corridor with rooms opening off on either side. It was clear from the noise which was the tap room.
Sibert got mugs of weak beer for us and then stood looking around, a slight frown making a crease between his eyebrows. Then he nodded over to the left and, following the line of his gaze, I noticed a group of half a dozen old men sitting on crude benches on either side of an upturned barrel. Old they might be but several pairs of keen eyes looked out with lively interest on the comings and goings all around them.