Fortune Like the Moon

Chapter Three

The dead nun was named Gunnora. Her body had been taken back to Hawkenlye Abbey, and the infirmarer had done her best to disguise how she had died. With the wimple back in place, the dreadful slit throat was no longer visible, but it would have taken greater skill than the infirmarer possessed to do anything about the dead woman’s terrified expression.

Abbess Helewise, emerging from the abbey church after her third session of kneeling in vigil beside the cadaver, wished the dead girl’s family would hurry up and send word as to what should be done with the body. The coffin lid had been sealed now — thankfully — but, in this hot weather, the whole church, indeed the whole abbey, seemed to be corrupted with the stench of death.

It is not, Helewise said firmly to herself as she crossed the courtyard with brisk steps, good for morale. I shall have to do something about it.

It was all very well treating a grieving family with sympathetic tact — always assuming they were grieving, which was, Helewise had concluded, by no means certain. She had detected some strange attitudes there, in her dealings with them over Gunnora’s admission to the convent. I have refrained from pressing them for a decision, Helewise thought, for possibly they themselves, in shock at this sudden death, do not yet know what they want to do. Whether it would be best to take their daughter home or leave her here with her sisters in God.

But there were others to consider. Helewise had a convent of living nuns in her charge, not to mention the monks in their nearby establishment and all those unfortunates of various stations who, for whatever reason, were temporarily accommodated at Hawkenlye, and she could not go on indefinitely allowing the very air they all breathed to be corrupted by the dead. And, when one looked at it practically — Helewise was very good at looking at things practically — the sooner Gunnora was decently buried, the sooner everyone could get over the horror of her murder and proceed with ordinary life.

Helewise ducked her head and left the bright sunshine of the courtyard, crossing the shady cloister and entering through the door in the corner that led to the small room where she conducted the business of the convent. Of Hawkenlye Abbey in its entirety, for she was not only the superior of her nuns, but also of the small group of monks who lived beside the holy spring a quarter of a mile away, down in the little valley beneath the convent.

She had held the post now for five years. She knew she suited the Abbey — false modesty was not one of Helewise’s character traits — and she also knew that the Abbey suited her.

Frowning, she sat down at the long oak table which, at considerable effort and cost, she had brought with her from her former life, and, focusing her mind, began to go logically through the whole disturbing question of the life and death of the late Gunnora of Winnowlands.

* * *

The foundation at Hawkenlye was new, in terms of the construction of a major abbey, so new that it was still a blessed relief to be rid of the carpenters, stonemasons, and the endless crowd of workmen who, so it had seemed, were set on becoming as permanent a feature as the nuns and the monks. Building had begun in 1153, under the direct order of the new Queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and it had been because of a genuine miracle which had happened, right there on the very spot.

For time out of mind, there had been nothing more to Hawkenlye than a huddle of huts among the thinner tree growth at the edge of the great Wealden Forest. The forest was a lonely place, and many believed it to be haunted; there were tales of strange noises from the ancient iron workings, where men had laboured before history began, and more than one traveller lost down some long-forgotten track spoke of a phantom group of Roman soldiers who appeared to march off right through the trunks of a copse of birch trees …

Since the Romans had abandoned the old iron workings, little use had been made of the forest other than for the fattening of swine, on the abundant acorns and beech mast which littered the forest floor in autumn. The only time of year that the area could be called busy was the seven-week period between the autumn equinox and the feast of St Martin, when the woodlands were uncharacteristically crowded with people fattening their livestock before slaughtering them for winter provisions.

Into this strange and deserted place, on a hot day early one summer, came a band of French merchants, who had been on their way from Hastings to London when they were overcome by a mysterious sickness. They had been ill during the crossing from France, but, believing it to be nothing more than mal de mer, had proceeded towards London. By the time the group reached the ridge about the Medway Vale, however, all five were incapable of going any further. Delirious with fever, they were suffering excruciating pains in the limbs, and two of them had developed swellings in the groin. Their companions, terrified of contagion, found them what shelter there was in the primitive settlement at Hawkenlye, then abandoned them.

The Frenchmen were on the point of giving themselves up into the Almighty’s hands when, to their amazement, they began to recover. They had been drinking from a little spring in a shallow valley near to where they had been left, a spring whose water was reddish, slightly brackish. And the least sick of the merchants, who had undertaken the arduous task of bringing water back to his companions, had a vision. Still burning with fever, head throbbing and sight blurred, he thought he saw a woman standing over him, on the bank out of which the spring flowed. She was dressed in blue, and in her long white hands she carried lilies. She smiled at the merchant, and he seemed to hear her praise him for his devoted care of his friends; giving them the spring water, she said, was the best cure.

The merchants, naturally, told their story far and wide. The more entrepreneurial of those who heard it set out for Hawkenlye, and soon a brisk trade sprang up in phials of the miracle water. The Church, alarmed both at the lack of reverence being shown in the face of a true miracle, and at the loss of potential revenue to themselves, stepped in and built a shrine over the spring, with a small dwelling nearby to accommodate the monks who were to tend it.

Rumour of the wonderful appearance of the Virgin Mary, in an obscure glade in the faraway Wealden Forest, reached the great Abbey of Fontevraud, on the Loire close to Queen Eleanor’s home town of Poitiers. The Queen’s strong links with Fontevraud stimulated her ambition to create similar communities elsewhere, and, at her coronation in May 1152, she was already planning the first English abbey on the Fontevraud model.

Synchronism is a strange phenomenon, with an intrinsic power which often leads to the irresistible belief that certain things are meant. Thus it was for Eleanor, who first received pressure from Fontevraud to adopt this fledgling community at Hawkenlye in the name of the mother house — for was this not most suitable, Fontevraud also being dedicated to the Blessed Virgin? — at the very time when, just crowned Henry II’s Queen, she had the power to do so.

Hawkenlye Abbey was spectacular; both Eleanor and the Fontevraud community saw to that. The abbey church and the nuns’ house, up on top of the ridge, were designed by a French architect and built by French stonemasons; the piece de resistance of the master mason was the tympanum over the church’s main doors. In common with many of his fellow craftsmen, he requested, and was granted, permission to adopt the theme of the Last Judgement; few who gazed upon his creation remained unmoved by its power.

In the centre of the domed space sat Christ in majesty, pierced hand raised, expression a combination of sorrow and severity. The blessed ones advanced towards him on his right, the Holy Virgin Mary leading them, St Peter ushering them gently along from the rear, sun, moon and stars above them bathing them in the heavenly light of righteousness. Angels blowing trumpets played a fanfare, as if welcoming the good to the eternal reward of being in the presence of God.

On Christ’s left were the damned.

If the promised joys of heaven were not sufficient to persuade the sinful to mend their ways, then surely the picture of hell as depicted in the Hawkenlye tympanum would have done the trick. Satan’s kingdom, in the eye of the master mason, was a place of unbelievable torment, with a particular torture, chosen for its appropriateness, reserved for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride was personified by a king, naked but for his crown, being forced to walk on burning coals by two demons with pitchforks; Lust by a curvaceous woman whose breasts were being gnawed by rats whilst serpents slithered into her groin. Gluttony, rotund and fat-buttocked, was upturned into a barrel of excrement; Anger, face contorted with rage and agony, had his skull prised open and his brains sucked out by hunchbacked devils. Envy and Avarice, too busy coveting the worthless riches of others to look behind them, were on the point of being flayed alive by a quartet of demons with ropes and sharp knives in their long-taloned hands. Sloth, fast asleep on a pile of faggots, was bound by a fanged devil while another put flames to his pyre.

Tactfully, the Abbey’s founders also employed local workmen alongside the imported Frenchmen. English woodcarvers, working with sound English oak, beautified the abbey church interior with their craft, and, kept under lock and key in the Treasury, was an English-made carving in walrus ivory of the dead Christ supported by Joseph of Arimathea, said to have been a secret gift from Eleanor herself. The shrine down in the vale also received loving attention, and even the simple lodgings of the nuns and monks were made adequately comfortable.

The new abbey was to be headed by an abbess.

There was considerable opposition to this novel concept, not least from the monks in the vale. But the precedent had been set, and set, moreover, in the community at Fontevraud. Founded by the Breton reformer Robert d’Arbrissel, who, among other revolutionary ideas, believed in the supremacy of women, Fontevraud had fought for and won its right to appoint an abbess almost a hundred years previously. And d’Arbrissel had been proved right; were not women, because of their experience in raising children and running homes, far better organisers than men? Should it, then, have surprised anyone that the same skills required for a noblewoman in charge of her husband’s great estates adapted perfectly to running an abbey?

The Hawkenlye opposition did not stand much of a chance, and even that evaporated when Queen Eleanor herself paid a visit. A handful of senior nuns with the temperament and the experience to run her new abbey had been suggested to her, and she had made her choice with customary decisiveness and speed. Her first appointee was a success, so was her second. By 1184, when the need arose to select a fourth abbess, the precedent was established; Eleanor spared time from her busy schedule to return to Hawkenlye and view the shortlisted nuns, and she made her selection within minutes of meeting the successful candidate.

Helewise Warin, thirty-two years old, was as enchanted by Queen Eleanor as Eleanor was by her. From the moment of her appointment onwards, Helewise made up her mind that she would be the most efficient, most effective abbess that Hawkenlye had ever had.

This determination arose, to a large extent, from a laudable desire not to let the Queen down, not to make her, even for a moment, regret her choice.

But it also arose from Helewise’s pride.

Pride had no place in a nun, she was well aware. And was she not reminded of the penalty, every time she entered the church and looked up at the Last Judgement tympanum? But, reasoned her intellect — another quality which a nun ought to suppress, especially when it was at war with obedience and humility — I am no longer merely a nun. I am an abbess, with an immediate community of nearly a hundred sisters, fifteen monks and twenty lay brothers dependent on me, and, in addition to them, the secular population of this small but thriving little place.

If pride led to her doing the job well, Helewise concluded, then proud she would be. The good of the community would undoubtedly benefit from her resolve not to let either the Queen or herself down. And if that pride was a dirty stain on her soul which earned her prolonged aeons naked and walking on flames in purgatory, then that was a price she would just have to pay.

Perhaps some kind soul would remember her in their prayers or have a Mass or two said for her.

* * *

Josse obtained directions for Hawkenlye Abbey. They were fairly vague, but he realised as he reached the summit of the rise that they had been quite adequate; from there, he could see the tall sloping roof of the Abbey church, and from then on, it was easy.

Nearing the entrance, he looked about him. The forest crept almost up to the road on his left-hand side, but on the right, the trees and undergrowth had been cleared. Some of the land was under cultivation, some was pasture. A small flock of sheep raised nervous heads as he rode by, and he noticed a nanny goat tethered to a post, a well-grown kid running around her. In the distance, where the cleared land gave way once more to the surrounding forest, he caught sight of a huddle of dwellings, from one of which a thin spire of smoke rose up into the still morning air.

The pasture land fell away into a narrow valley, in which Josse could see the roof of a small building with a large cross rising from one end. Beside the building was another one, longer and lower. From what he had been told of the Hawkenlye community, he guessed these must be the shrine of Our Lady’s spring and the monks’ house.

He was nearing the imposing gates of the Abbey. As he drew level with the enclosing wall, a nun emerged from a small room let into a corner tower, and demanded to know his name and his business.

He was prepared for this. Nobody required to know your identity or your bona fides when you checked into an inn in a market town, but riding into a convent was different. Reaching inside his tunic, he took out the papers which King Richard’s secretary had issued. One of them bore Richard’s personal seal.

It was enough for the porteress, who bobbed a sort of curtsey and said, ‘You’ll be wanting Abbess Helewise, I shouldn’t wonder,’ at the same time pointing towards a cloistered courtyard adjacent to the great Abbey church. ‘You’ll find her in there. Get one of them to show you the way.’

Them, he realised, meant a group of three nuns gliding from the cloister in the direction of the church. Nodding his thanks to the porteress, he dismounted, and, leading his horse, approached the nuns, one of whom took his horse’s reins in a tentative and evidently reluctant hand, while another undertook to show him to the Abbess’s room.

Looking all about him while trying not to make it obvious, he followed.

His guide whispered, ‘Who shall I say?’

He told her.

Moving ahead of him with a small gesture of apology, the nun entered the courtyard under an archway, crossed the cloister and opened a door. She murmured something to the sole occupant of the room, but her voice was too quiet for Josse to make out the words. She beckoned Josse inside, then, her task completed, sidled past him and closed the door.

Abbess Helewise had looked up as the nun spoke. Now, as Josse stood before her, she sat perfectly still, studying him. Her face, framed in starched white beneath the black veil, was strong-featured, with well-marked eyebrows, large grey eyes, and a wide mouth which looked as if it smiled readily.

But she was not smiling now.

If he hadn’t known it was impossible, he’d almost have said she was waiting for him; there was no suprise in the calm face, no expression of enquiry in the eyes.

‘Josse d’Acquin,’ she said, presumably repeating what her nun had said. ‘And what, Josse d’Acquin, do you wish of us?’

He presented his papers and allowed them to speak for him. If Abbess Helewise was as impressed by the royal seal as her porteress, she gave no indication, but, opening up the letter which it secured, read right through it.

Then, folding it and smoothing it with a surprisingly square and strong-looking hand — somehow Josse had imagined nuns’ hands to be invariably pale and long, more suitable to prayer than to cracking walnuts — she looked up at him.

And said, ‘I had imagined someone like you would arrive, sooner or later. You wish, I have no doubt, that I tell you what I know of Gunnora of Winnowlands?’

‘I do, madam.’ Was that the right form of address for an abbess? If it wasn’t, she didn’t seem to mind.

Her face, tense with some inner strain, suddenly relaxed, and for an instant she almost smiled. ‘Please, my lord knight, sit. May I offer you refreshment?’ She reached for a small brass bell. ‘It is’ — now the smile was unmistakable — ‘a long way from the court of King Richard.’

‘I have not come direct from there.’ He returned the smile, pulling up the indicated chair and seating himself. ‘But, aye, refreshment would be welcome.’ Another of Josse’s soldierly habits was never to refuse food or drink when it was offered, on the grounds that you never knew when it was going to be offered again.

Abbess Helewise rang her bell, and asked the nun who responded to bring ale and bread. When these had been served — the bread was warm and unexpectedly delicious, and there was a sliver of some strong cheese with it which Josse guessed was goat — the Abbess began to speak.

‘Gunnora had been with us a little under a year,’ she said, ‘and I cannot say that her admission to our community was entirely a success. She appeared to be devout, spoke with fervour, at our first meeting, of the certainty of her vocation. But-’ The dark eyebrows drew together. ‘But something was lacking. Something did not ring true.’ She glanced at Josse, and, again, there was the faint smile. ‘You will no doubt ask me to elaborate, and I fear I cannot. Except to say that, in general, Gunnora had the wrong character for convent life. She said the right things, but they did not come from the heart. As a consequence, she did not really fit in with us, and, knowing this, naturally, she was not happy.’ Instantly correcting herself, she said, ‘Did not appear to be happy, rather, for she confided neither in me nor, as far as I know, in any of her sisters.’

‘I see.’ He tried to absorb the rapid thumbnail sketch of the dead nun, and failed. He was having a problem of adjustment: until this moment, she had been just that, a dead nun. Now, suddenly, she was a person. Not a very happy person. ‘Did she have any particular friends?’ he asked, more for something to say than any real desire to know. Was it relevant if she did have?

‘No.’ Abbess Helewise didn’t hesitate. ‘Well, not, that is, until-’

She was interrupted by a knock on the door, followed almost instantly by the arrival of a plump nun of about fifty. ‘Abbess Helewise, I’m so sorry to barge in on you, but — oh. Sorry.’

Blushing a hot, embarrassed red, the nun backed out of the room.

‘May I present my infirmarer, Sister Euphemia,’ the Abbess said calmly. ‘Euphemia, come back in. This is Josse d’Acquin.’ Josse stood up and bowed. ‘He has come from the Plantagenet court. He wishes to hear what we may be able to tell him of poor Gunnora.’

‘He does?’ The infirmarer’s eyes rounded ‘Why?’

Abbess Helewise glanced at Josse, as if to say, shall I tell her or will you? Receiving no response, she said, ‘Because, Euphemia, King Richard has doubly a need to understand what lies behind her murder. For one thing, she was of our community here at Hawkenlye, and his mother the Queen Eleanor has close contacts with our house. For another, it was in order to perpetrate the good and clement reputation of our new sovereign that a number of prisoners were released from jail, one of whom, it seems likely, committed this outrage on our sister.’

Josse could not recall either reason having been expressed in the papers from Richard’s court. His opinion of Abbess Helewise rose.

The infirmarer was looking increasingly distressed. ‘Abbess, it’s about the poor lass that I need to speak to you! Only…’ She looked pointedly at Josse.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ he said.

‘No,’ Abbess Helewise said, in a tone that suggested she was used to people doing what she said. ‘Whatever Euphemia has to say, I shall only have to repeat to you. You had better hear it from her own lips. Euphemia?’

Josse felt sorry for the infirmarer, who had clearly neither expected nor wanted an audience of more than the Abbess. ‘It’s not easy,’ she hedged.

‘I am sure it is not.’ The Abbess was relentless. ‘Please, try.’

‘I know I shouldn’t have done it,’ the infirmarer burst out, ‘and it’s been on my conscience ever since. I can bear it no longer, truly I can’t, believe me! I’ve just got to tell someone. I’ll confess and do penance, I don’t mind, it’ll be such a relief. Whatever I’m told to do, I’ll do it, with a good grace, no matter how harsh it is!’

‘Quite,’ the Abbess said when the infirmarer at last paused for breath. ‘Now, what shouldn’t you have done?’

‘Shouldn’t have gone looking at her, examining her. Only I meant well, really I did, and anyway, I let my curiosity get the better of me.’

‘How?’ asked the Abbess patiently. ‘I think you had better explain, Euphemia. You speak of Gunnora?’

‘Of course! I said, didn’t I? I was laying her out — oh! Terrible it was, that great wound in her poor throat, made me fair weep, I can tell you.’

‘You did well,’ the Abbess said, more warmly. ‘It cannot have been a pleasant task.’

‘That it wasn’t! Anyway, when I’d tidied her up at the top end, I thought I ought to-’ she paused delicately.

‘Go on, Euphemia,’ the Abbess said. ‘Our visitor is aware, I’m sure, of the other outrage perpetrated on our late sister. You were saying, you went on to wash the cuts and abrasions caused by the rape, and-’

‘That’s just it! There wasn’t any rape!’ interrupted the infirmarer.

‘What?’ The Abbess and Josse spoke the word together. ‘There must have been,’ the Abbess went on, ‘the thighs and the groin were drenched in blood.’

‘You must be mistaken,’ Josse said gently. ‘It’s quite understandable, Sister Euphemia, after all, it must have been an appalling job.’

‘I’m not mistaken.’ Euphemia spoke with dignity. ‘Sir, I may not know much, but I do know the female genitalia. I was a midwife, afore I entered the cloister, and I’ve seen more vaginas than you’ve had hot suppers. Oh!’ Belatedly remembering where she was, she blushed again, a hand to her mouth. ‘Forgive me, Abbess Helewise,’ she muttered from behind it, ‘I didn’t mean to sound coarse.’

‘I am sure you didn’t,’ Abbess Helewise said graciously. ‘Continue. You were explaining to us your familiarity with the private parts of the female anatomy.’

‘Yes, that I was. Well, see, the hymen was still there. In full, like.’ Euphemia paused, but nobody spoke. ‘She was virgo intacta when she died, Abbess. Nobody’d raped her, not then, not ever.’

‘But the blood?’ Josse said. ‘What about the blood?’

‘It came from her throat, I reckon,’ Euphemia said quietly. ‘Whoever did for her, he scooped up the blood from her cut neck and smeared it on her — smeared it down there. Left her there, skirts up over her belly, legs all open, covered in blood.’

There was silence in the room as they all thought about that.

Then the Abbess said, ‘Someone killed her, and made it seem as though he had also raped her.’

‘Because,’ Josse added, ‘murder and murder plus rape are two different crimes.’

The Abbess looked up and met his eye. Nodding slowly, she said, ‘Two very different crimes.’