The Butcher of Avignon (12 page)

With nothing to grasp hold of, no clues, no obvious beneficiary, no sense of a motive, it was as shifting shadows, like the echoing fortress-palace itself, shrouded in darkness, with its secret chambers and ill-lit corridors. Worst of all, there was no-one she could trust to help shed light.

**

The tower. The sentry. The same deferral to somebody inside.

‘That English nun again, captain.’

‘Let her in.’ Then came something barely audible about her wasting her time.

The sentry returned. ‘Trying to turn them into priests, domina?’

‘My greatest hope, captain.’ To deter him from thinking otherwise.

She climbed the same dank staircase.

‘Well, boys,’ she said when she opened the door and saw them playing dice again. Shackled. Throwing quite deftly now, after practice.

‘Are we out of here then?’

‘Patience is a virtue.’

‘So we’re told, domina, but we are less than virtuous, us, praise St Benet.’

‘I’ve had a look at the sumpter yard and feel that is not the way. But despair not. We refuse to be daunted.’

‘This John Fitzjohn,’ asked Peter. ‘Should we know him?’

‘Not especially. He’s a northerner born but bred in one of the houses given over to Gaunt’s mistresses somewhere down in Lincolnshire. He has a younger brother you’d not want to meet on a dark night. A fellow by the name of Escrick Fitzjohn. I’ve been unfortunate to encounter him twice before.’

‘To your triumph?’

‘I’m pleased to say so, otherwise I doubt whether I’d be able to say anything.’

‘Lethal, then?’

‘Very. He has the advantage of being extremely plausible such that even with a knife at your throat you can feel you’re in the wrong and he, with his mortal ambitions, has right on his side.’

‘I can’t see any smooth talker pulling the wool over your eyes, domina.’

‘He didn’t, but I felt a gobbet of compassion every time I met him.’

‘Compassion?’

‘At how life, or the devil, has made him so desperate he can willingly and defiantly put his soul in jeopardy by his actions. I was gullible when we first met. Softer. Younger. Now, however - ’

‘Hard as nails? Battle-hardened?’

‘You might say so.’

He chuckled. ‘For our sake I hope it’s true.’

‘Well, that’s Escrick. His brother may be the same for all I know, or he might well be a saint. I’ve never met him before now. He’s had more worldly success, I believe, a fact which may have added to Escrick’s ill-wishing on anyone and everyone.’

‘Where is this lethal fellow now, did you say?’

‘I didn’t because I don’t know. I imagine he’s far away. He was outlawed but did not stay the three tides. He absconded to join one of the white companies under Hawkwood, got bested in Florence then went I know not where.’

A chill came over her. His was a name she had not allowed into her thoughts for some time.

‘I brought you something to cheer you up,’ she shook off her feeling of foreboding that always returned at the mention of Escrick’s name and placed a flagon of very passable Rhenish on the floor beside them. ‘And this meat. Enjoy it. It’s the last you’ll get before Lent, I expect.’

‘Angels do exist. I always hoped they did.’

**

As she walked away her thoughts returned to the problem of Maurice’s murderer and she wondered how much Clement himself really knew about the matter. The story seemed simple enough: after lauds he found the treasury broken open and called his guards.

Did he at that point venture into the stronghold to view the body for himself? Or had he taken the advice of his advisors and left it for them to deal with? If he had seen and recognised Maurice that would be sufficient for Cardinal Grizac to be fearful. Very fearful indeed. But then, why the delay in taking him into custody?

She remembered how Athanasius had consoled him with the thought that the inquisitors had not yet sent the palace guards for him.

Grizac’s prime concern seemed to be to save his own skin. Above all he expressed a palpable fear of being implicated in a plot against the pope. He seemed to imagine he would be accused as the mastermind behind the attempted theft. But why would a man as obviously wealthy as Grizac be suspected of stealing, despite the involvement of one of his acolytes? It was preposterous.

Hildegard frowned. Could his greed be so unbridled as to lead him to such an act? Every instinct made her doubt it.

She returned to the question of what Clement himself knew of the matter. He made his announcement to the packed Audience Chamber just before prime. Yet the body was apparently discovered shortly after lauds. The delay in making the announcement suggested confusion. And later, was he present when the body was brought out of the narrow space of the treasury and up into his bedchamber? He would know then, at the latest, that the dead youth was Grizac’s acolyte so why the lies, or more charitably, the rumours surrounding the identity of the victim?

I’m going round in circles, she thought, but she could not stop herself. None of it made sense.

How, for instance, had the cardinal managed to evade the inquisitors if Clement knew who the boy was? Did Grizac have an even more powerful protector than that afforded by his own eminence? The guards must have recognised Maurice and informed him as soon as the body was discovered. And yet no-one had formally identified Maurice before Athanasius conducted Grizac to the treasury. If his identity had been known by others lower down the pecking order the information would have been impossible to keep secret and would have spread like wild fire round the palace. It was only now that the details were beginning to seep out. So who had kept a cap on things, and why?

She couldn’t escape the feeling that Grizac and Athanasius knew more than they admitted. She felt they saw her as just a useful fool. Someone to go about asking questions so that it appeared as if something was being done. The secret, whatever it was, shared between the two men, remained. Except that now something had gone wrong. Someone had stolen the dagger and they didn’t know who…and one of them, at least, was worried.

Again and again she came back to the same questions. Why? Who? Who gains?

When she reached her guest chamber she halted before opening the door. From within came the sound of a high Scottish voice at prayer. With a sudden change of mind she set off for the Chapel of St Martial instead, slipping into an empty place against the wall just as the priest began his oration.

**

The Holy Office of nones. She knew it backwards, made the expected responses on cue, knelt, prayed, stood, sang, chanted the words learned by rote many years ago in the haven of goodness at Swyne.

On leaving she found Abbot Hubert de Courcy by her side. He paced along for a moment or two then, apparently thinking better of it, and without exchanging a single word, increased his pace and disappeared up a flight of stairs to the consistory.

Had he wanted to say something? If so it was an odd experience to find him at a loss for words. It was more likely he was waiting for her to make some sign of contrition. She had probably spoken out of turn as usual the last time they met. She sighed, thinking, I’m wearied by all this - the currents and cross-currents of the place - then as she glanced up she saw him leaning over one of the window arches on the staircase of honour. He was looking down at her. When he saw her glance up he hesitated then moved back without acknowledging her and she saw a flash of white as he rapidly ascended the staircase. His intention, whatever it was, only added to her irritation. What, she asked herself, does this place have to do with me? I can’t be drawn into other people’s plots and contrivances to no purpose. I have my own interests to consider and they’re not dependent on the favour of anyone here.

She considered leaving Avignon altogether. Why not? Only the disapproving look of the prioress and her own sense of failure as she trailed home with only the barest information about Fitzjohn made her hesitate.

She thought of Westminster again and the momentous events that were taking place there. The fate of the king and his allies was far more important than the death, nasty though it was, of one unknown young man and the theft of an unimportant little dagger.

Transcending everything was the threat to King Richard. The security of the Plantagenet dynasty determined the fate of England. If King Richard fell, England fell.

For the first time she began to believe that the Prioress had made a grave mistake in sending her here. She must have lost her grip on events. It was obvious that she had been unaware of the great calamity about to befall her brother, the Archbishop of York, and his fellow advisors to the king. Usually so astute, and sitting at the centre of a network of informers, she had for once, it seemed, made a huge error of judgement.

Resigned for the moment to the futility of her sojourn here, Hildegard dutifully made her way to Athanasius’s cell to find out if his apothecary’s cure was taking effect.

**

The weather, fairly mild until now, changed abruptly when a strong wind brought great, bruising clouds rolling in from the north, with a deluge of rain that dropped indiscriminately onto the Great Courtyard. It cleared it in an instant the prelates, servants, and everyone in between, as they hurried to find shelter. Lightning flashed over the purple hills and thunder rolled around the valley, fading only in a series of distant reverberations.

Hildegard had chosen that morning to venture outside the palace to see if a walk by the river would reconcile her to a few more days here. When the rain started to fall in slanting arrows, kicking up the mud around her feet, she was standing on the bank looking at the swollen river where it had burst its banks. The water meadows were flooded, leaving animals stranded on little mounds of grass. The rain must have been torrential upstream to burst the banks of the river overnight. It had changed colour. Instead of the usual dark green it had become a swift-moving, murky yellow.

A little to her left it sluiced with an endless roar between the twenty or so arches of the bridge of St Benezet, the bridge of Avignon, hurling broken branches and other debris down river at great speed and where the water swirled past the wooden landing stage below it shook its supports, snatched at them and turned and eddied back on itself. In mid-river frothing shoals covered the sandbanks that had been visible only the day before.

I wouldn’t give much for the chances of anyone who fell in there, she thought, keeping safely to the higher ground at the top of the bank. The first drops of rain had begun to give way to a torrent. She pulled up her hood.

A small ferry boat was tied to a post below where she stood and the force of the current was making it buck and turn on its painter, almost tearing it free. She watched it crash again and again against the wooden pilings. The ferryman must have thought it best to risk losing his boat and keep himself dry inside his house because a stream of smoke flew above the thatch although there was no sign of him.

It was too late to run back to the palace. She would be soaked before she reached it. Tightening her grasp of her hood and looking for somewhere to shelter along the path, she resigned herself to a thorough drenching by the time she was half way back. Then a shout came from the depths of a thicket beside the track.

‘Here, sister!’

When she turned, a gloved hand beckoned from a hide of evergreens and she saw a flash of red and gold. Guessing it was someone from the palace she changed direction, skittering round the puddles that lay in the way, and lifting her hood just enough to make out several figures huddled out of the rain under a thick canopy of laurels. With a feeling of relief she hurried into this unexpected refuge.

A group of pages were huddled inside.

‘My thanks, masters. I wouldn’t have noticed this if you hadn’t called out.’

‘We aim to please, sister.’ To her surprise a tall youth, no more than fifteen or sixteen, standing eye to eye, rose up out of the bushes. She realised he was scarcely old enough to shave, nor were the others, as a swift glance showed. They wore the colours she had recognised the other night when Fitzjohn arrived from England, the red, blue and gold worn by Woodstock’s retainers. She had already noticed them about the palace.

‘English, God be thanked!’ The boys gaped as she threw back her hood. She had pulled off her coif earlier and her damp hair fell in a blonde sheen to her shoulders.

‘Forgive me,’ she murmured at their astonishment. ‘I expected to be alone when I set off just now and I get so sick of wearing this on my head.’ She pulled out the damp linen coif from her sleeve, put it on and stuffed her hair out of sight.

The tall youth said, ‘And so are you, sister. English, I mean. We guessed you were. Well met.’ He gave a cramped bow in the crowded den. ‘I am Edmund, squire to Sir Jack Fitzjohn. This is Peterkin,’ he indicated a sandy-haired Saxon youth with a thin, intelligent face covered in freckles. ‘And this miscreant is Bertram of Stowe.’ A thickset, dependable looking boy ducked his head in a bow. He was dark haired, confident, and might be a merchant’s son.

‘And I’m Simon Lorimer,’ piped up the youngest of the boys, no more than ten or so, and already growing out of his tunic.

‘Greetings. I’m Hildegard of Meaux.’

‘Of the Abbey there?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Should we know where it is?’ asked Edmund.

‘Only if you’re Yorkshire born,’ she replied. ‘It’s close to Beverley and only a day’s ride from York.’

They asked what she was doing so far from home. She explained her presence at Avignon as ‘being on church business.’ It was as far as she could go. They told her about themselves with, she suspected, equivalent reticence.

‘The only one of us who’s missing is Elfric. He’s from your part of the world, a place called Pocklington. It’s near York, he tells us. At present he’s running errands in the dry.’

‘I saw you arrive,’ she told them. ‘I guessed you were English by the blazons on your tunics. I’m pleased to find I’m not alone here.’ Except for Hubert de Courcy and his brother monks, she added to herself. ‘Do you know why you’ve been sent so far south?’