New Blood From Old Bones

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• Sheila Radley
  
• Dedication
  
• Author's note
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Ninteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty One
  
• Chapter Twenty Two
  
• Chapter Twenty Three
  
• Chapter Twenty Four
  
• Chapter Twenty Five
  
• Chapter Twenty Six
  

Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women's Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.

To our friends Kay, Alan and Kim, with special thanks to Kim, who drew the map

Castle Acre, a Norfolk village with the ruins of a Norman castle on one side and a Cluniac priory on the other, has provided the setting for this book. But I have taken liberties with its history and topography, and the resulting Castleacre is a place of fiction.

On a yellow day in September in the year 1530, when fields were in stubble after harvest and crab-apples hung deceitfully ripe from hedgerows along the dusty way, Will Ackland came riding home from the foreign wars.

It had taken him a long time to make this homecoming. The high-spirited young man who had left his law books and his new wife to volunteer for the sport of war had been changed by the experience. Pain and fear of death had matured him, and so had grief. Now, at the age of thirty-one, he was lean and quietly spoken, with a dry wit and watchful grey-green eyes under thick dark brows.

Like other folk on the road – pilgrims and pedlars, vagabonds, messengers, carters, rent-collectors, packhorse carriers, drovers with their cattle, wayfarers of every rank, and those who went silently about the King's business – he was stained by the sweat and dust of travel. His sturdy young servant, who rode laggardly behind him, had more than his share of the grime but none of Will's patience.

‘Shall we never be at Castleacre?' complained Ned Pye. ‘I've seen more than enough of your dull Norfolk already,' he added, knowing he was safely out of reach of a box on the ear.

His master paid no heed. Ned had been in his service from the age of eighteen, in the King's army and out of it, and Will allowed him an occasional sauciness. He had good reason to be thankful for Ned's loyalty and strength.

Will Ackland had lain wounded in a Normandy priory, likely to die from loss of blood, when King Henry VIII's second French war ended in dishonour. Instead of enforcing his claim to the French throne, the King had been obliged by lack of funds to sue for peace without having gained one yard of land beyond Calais. But the deep arrow wounds in Will's thigh took so long to heal that it was many weeks before he and Ned could return to England.

There, in Dover, he had found letters from Castleacre awaiting him with tragic news. While he was away, his wife Anne had died giving birth to their child. Believing in his anguish that there was nothing for him in England, Will had immediately taken ship again for France.

At Calais he had fallen in with an esquire he had known in London, where they were students of the law at Gray's Inn. The esquire was now on his way to Paris in the service of a royal envoy, an English nobleman. With one of his attendants sick of a fever, and finding that Will spoke fluent French after his stay in the priory, the nobleman had offered him a place in his service.

In the following years Will Ackland and his servant had travelled between the English court and those of France, the Emperor and the Pope. It was those years of being in silent attendance when great men conferred, serving his noble master by assessing what lay concealed behind the smooth words of foreign ministers of state, that had taught Will patience and watchfulness. But after four years he had had enough of it.

Though he had kept his distance from Castleacre, letters from his sister who had charge of the child told him how Anne's daughter grew. And now that his grief for his wife had lessened to a permanent ache, sharpening whenever something recalled her to his mind – just as the pain of his wounds, though far less grievous than bereavement, still flared up every now and then – he no longer thought ill of the child for having taken her mother's life.

Elizabeth, that was his daughter's name. Betsy, they called her. Suddenly anxious to see her, he had given up the salary and perquisites of service, taken sail for England, bought horses at Dover and set out for home. Even so, he had spent two weeks over the ride to Norfolk, lingering in London and in Cambridge while he accustomed himself to being his own man again.

Behind him, as they rode the last few miles, Ned Pye was still grumbling.

A bold young man, with plump cheeks and thatch the colour of new straw, Ned had been sorry to relinquish their former way of life. He had enjoyed travelling to foreign cities, boasting to foreign women, riding sound horses and eating and drinking well at his master's master's expense. On the other hand, being London-born, he would have settled happily enough in that city. But the countryside appealed to him not at all, and he had spent much of the journey singing a tuneless lament for everything he was leaving behind.

‘What is it
now
?' demanded Will, out of patience at last, turning in his saddle as he heard Ned trying to stir his unwilling horse to a canter.

‘Even in Norfolk they know a nag when they see one!' complained his servant as he came near. ‘That woman selling fruit at the wayside –' He tried to bite a pear he had snatched from her basket, found it rock-hard and hurled it away indignantly. ‘She mocked me for riding such a poor mount.'

‘She mocked you for not knowing a keeping pear from an eater, more like,' said Will. They were about to overtake a husbandman and his wife, both tottering under the weight of the laden panniers that hung from their shoulder yokes. ‘If the horse isn't good enough for you, you must journey on foot. And if it's London you hanker for, you have my leave to turn round and trudge back.'

Ned's eyes rounded at the affront. ‘There's small thanks for the man who carried you off the battlefield on his shoulders!'

‘You've had my thanks these four years. If you'd sought a rich man's gratitude you should have saved a knight, not a poor student.'

‘If only I had,' mourned Ned with a gusty sigh. ‘But my tender heart always gets the better of my head … Promise me, though, Master Will, that I shall have a good horse when we reach the castle?'

‘Ah, the castle,' said Will dryly. ‘There'll be a choice of horses for you there – and fountains flowing with wine, and dancing girls, and roasted swan for your dinner too. Have done, you knave, and ride with reverence, for we're now in Norfolk's holy land.'

They were riding north on an ancient road, the Peddars'Way, that was said to have been made by the old Romans. Straight as a rule for the most part, it ran direct through the town of Castleacre on its way to the sea coast at the Wash. And hereabouts, near the valley of the river Nar, there were so many religious houses – abbeys, priories, nunneries, friaries, as well as chantries and parish churches – that the volume of prayer, so it was said, was enough to keep the saints in permanent attendance upon Norfolk. The strongest sound of the countryside was the call of their bells, echoing and re-echoing far and near.

Hereabouts too, there was a converging of the roads that led pilgrims from all parts of the kingdom towards the great shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. The Cluniac priory of Castleacre, one of the largest and finest and best-endowed in the entire eastern part of England, provided both a rest for pilgrims before the last day's journey to Walsingham, and a place of pilgrimage on its own account.

On that September day the great bells of the priory were drawing pilgrims to the shrine of St Matthew at Castleacre. At the forthcoming feast of St Matthew, those crowding into the priory church to repent of their sins and ask for the prayers of the monks could obtain a special indulgence, a remission of the suffering they feared to endure as souls in purgatory after they died.

The priory church, with its richly glazed windows and intricately sculpted stone, had long been a place of great splendour. Gifts of money or valuables had been made not only by penitents, but by those who came to invoke the aid of the saints, or to return thanks for favours received. The wealthy had also made bequests, often of land or property, in return for the saying of masses for the salvation of their souls. In the light of countless votive candles, the many carved and painted images of the saints shone all over with jewels and gold and silver.

The church possessed many saintly relics, but none was more venerated than the relic of St Matthew. Resting within a magnificent shrine, in a glass-sided reliquary adorned with rubies and sapphires, lay two of the bones of the apostle's hand.

This relic had miraculous powers of healing. For two hundred years and more, as chronicled in the reign of King Henry VI by one of the monks of Castleacre, many of the pilgrims who flocked to pray at the shrine had been cured of grievous ailments. But it was on the feast day of St Matthew that pilgrims could hope to witness an even greater miracle.