Nine Men Dancing

Fifteen

Sir Anselm was sitting up in bed, looking very pale and obviously feeling extremely sorry for himself.

Mistress Bush, who let me in, was busy in the kitchen, making soup – chicken and lentil if my nose was any judge – and anxious to return to it before it stuck to the bottom of the pot.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, none too pleased at being disturbed.

‘A word with Sir Anselm,’ I said.

She pursed her mouth and eyed me up and down in that infuriating, considering way women have when the power of decision rests in their hands.

‘Very well,’ she conceded at last. ‘As long as it is just a word. I won’t have you tiring him out. He’s still very weak. And don’t bully him.’

‘Who? Me?’ I was the picture of injured innocence.

She sniffed. ‘I’ve had experience of your hectoring ways.’

‘You’re thinking of somebody else,’ I assured her, obtaining and gallantly kissing one of her hands. I inhaled the mouthwatering aroma of chicken soup. ‘And your eel pies are sheer ambrosia, too,’ I added, with apparent irrelevance.

She gave another sniff and snatched her hand away.

‘That’s quite enough of that, Master Chapman. I know your sort. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m just sorry for your poor wife, that’s all.’

‘I make her the happiest woman in Bristol,’ I protested.

‘Between the sheets, no doubt. But where does that lead? Only to more children. You said you have three, I believe. Any girls?’

‘Just the one.’

‘Then I’m sorry for you.’ Dame Winifred sighed. ‘Girls are the very devil to bring up. At least, modern girls are. It wasn’t so in my day, of course. We were much better behaved.’

‘As every generation of mothers has no doubt said from time immemorial,’ I laughed, and headed for the staircase.

‘What do you want?’ Sir Anselm demanded as I entered his bedchamber.

I ignored the peremptory tone and sat down, uninvited, on the edge of his bed. I didn’t beat around the bush.

‘Who did this to you and the miller?’ I asked. ‘And don’t tell me you don’t know. Or can’t guess.’

‘Well, I don’t know. I didn’t see his face. Go away!’

I put a hand over one of his which was lying, hot and dry as an autumn leaf, on the patchwork coverlet.

‘Father,’ I urged, ‘this man, whoever he may be, is dangerous. He’s most probably the murderer of Eris Lilywhite. If you know anything – anything at all – you must tell me. Or tell someone. Was it Tom Rawbone who attacked you?’

‘How many more times do I have to repeat myself?’ His voice rose peevishly. ‘I know nothing. I saw nothing. Now, will you please go away? Preferably,’ he added waspishly, ‘back where you came from.’ He turned his face to the wall. ‘I’ve no more to say.’

His protests carried no weight with me. Indeed, their very repetition made me more suspicious.

‘Father, you’re being extremely foolish,’ I chided him. ‘I suspected, when I talked to you yesterday, that there was something you were concealing; some knowledge gleaned, most probably, from things told, or hinted at, in the confessional. Was this beating a warning to you to keep your mouth shut?’

‘And if it were, I’d be a fool to ignore it, wouldn’t I?’ was the sharp retort. His head jerked round again to look at me face to face.

‘So you do know something,’ I said, seizing on his question as an admission of the truth.

He removed his hand from under mine. ‘I didn’t say that-’

‘In so many words,’ I interrupted.

‘-but if you wish to interpret it in that way,’ he continued as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘I can’t prevent you. But you’re forgetting Lambert Miller. Does such an argument apply to him?’

‘No, not as far as I know. But I think there might have been a different motive there.’

‘Might have been?’ He eyed me shrewdly. ‘I understood from Dame Winifred that the miller and Tom Rawbone had quarrelled over Rosamund. Lambert had attacked and beaten Tom severely.’

I nodded. ‘True! I was present when it happened. And Tom has fled the village. But suppose that someone wanted to throw blame on to Tom, hoping that amid the general condemnation, he’d panic and flee, then breaking into the mill and assaulting Lambert would be the way to do it. The attack on you would be for a different reason; a warning, as I’ve said already. But no one would stop to consider that. The thinking would be that if Tom assaulted the miller, then he also assaulted the priest. The “why” of it wouldn’t be considered. Most people, in my experience, can reason from one to two, but very few continue reasoning from two to three. Don’t you agree?’

Sir Anselm regarded me sullenly.

‘You’re making my head ache,’ he complained, ‘with all your arguments. Go away. Please.’

I sighed and got to my feet. ‘You’re a stubborn old man,’ I told him. ‘And a foolish one.’

‘Chapman!’ Mistress Bush bustled into the room, carrying a tray on which reposed a bowl of chicken and lentil broth and a heel of bread, torn from a newly baked loaf. ‘I warned you not to bully my patient. Do as Father Anselm asks, and leave.’

I shrugged. I could see that I was getting nowhere, and now that his temporary housekeeper and nurse had arrived to join forces with the priest, I might as well accept defeat gracefully and go. I wished Sir Anselm a speedy recovery and made for the door, followed by Hercules. (Having shared my eel pie, the dog was still fairly somnolent and had been lying quietly at my feet, patiently waiting for me to make a move.)

I was about to lift the latch when, to my surprise, Sir Anselm called me back. He fumbled under his pillow and produced a bunch of keys, which he handed to me.

‘I’m not absolutely sure that I locked the aumbry yesterday evening before I came to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night, worrying about it, and intended going down to the church to make certain. But then, I must have dozed again. And, of course, the next thing I knew …’ He broke off, trembling, but controlled it with an effort. ‘Since when,’ he continued gamely, determined not to give in to his weakness, ‘I’ve forgotten all about it. When you leave here, would you step into the church and see whether or not the cupboard is fastened? If it isn’t, would you do it for me? It’s the small silver key on the end. You can leave it and the others on the kitchen table. Dame Winifred will return them to me later.’

I readily agreed, only too glad to be of service, and took the keys from him while Mistress Bush settled the tray on his lap. I wished her the time of day and left, clattering downstairs, Hercules racing ahead of me, delighted to be on his feet at last.

He was disgusted, however, when, instead of heading for the open country on the opposite side of the stream, I turned to my right and entered the church. He demonstrated his disapproval in the usual way, by trying to nip my ankles, but, fortunately, my boots were of tough and seasoned leather, doing more damage to his teeth than he could do to my legs. All the same, it was a habit of which I had to cure him, and soon.

I made my obeisance before the High Altar and then to the Virgin. But it was to the Christ of the Trades that my eyes were inevitably drawn; to that contorted, tortured figure that had proved the inspiration for the low-born and oppressed, giving them the courage to rebel against the injustice of the infamous Statute of Labourers that had been fashioned in order to keep them in subjection and deprive them of their rights. The peasants hadn’t won, of course. How could they ever have expected to, when all the forces of law and order were ranged against them? They had been betrayed in the end – inevitably I felt – by a king who had posed as their friend until the trap was sprung and they were crushed between its iron jaws.

‘And betrayed by You, too,’ I whispered, staring up at the writhing Christ, His bleeding head encircled by His carpenter’s tools. ‘Sometimes, I wonder whose side You’re really on. Are you truly the defender of the poor and the subjugated? Or, as Lord of Creation, are you the friend of the High and the Mighty? Is it like calling to like?’

He didn’t reply. He knew, as I knew, that I should have to work out the answers to those questions for myself. He also knew that I was trouble, that I always had been, but I felt, nevertheless, a sudden rush of warmth along my veins. He was there somewhere in that cold, dank church. It was reassuring.

I tested the door of the aumbry, but Sir Anselm had been worrying himself unnecessarily. It was locked. I turned to leave the church, then hesitated, pricked by an unaccountable spur of curiosity that made me retrace my steps and unlock the cupboard to inspect the treasures within. There were the pair of silver candlesticks, the silver-gilt pyx, the ivory and gold crucifix. And there, also, were the two silver chalices, side by side, the fragile light gleaming on the elaborate chasing around their bowls. I was at once reminded of my dream; of the little satyrs dancing in and out of the trailing vine leaves and branches of olive, picking the silver fruit and gathering the grapes into baskets, no doubt to make wine for the great god, Bacchus …

Bacchus? What was he doing in this holy place? What was I thinking of? I must be seeing things … Mustn’t I? Carefully, I lifted out one of the chalices, carried it to the open church door and examined it in the better light thus afforded me. But I had not been mistaken. I was looking at the little boys with their tails and horns and goats’ legs, the vines and the olive trees. Without even realizing it, I must have made a mental note of its decoration when I had watched Ned Rawbone twisting it between his hands the previous morning, exactly as I was doing now.

Hercules barked impatiently. I hushed him. The metal felt very old and thin, and when I studied the base more closely, I could see that a double band of chasing depicted tiny, delicately wrought scenes of everyday life: a man ploughing, a shopkeeper (a seller of wine by the look of him), a smith in his forge. But this was not everyday life as I and my contemporaries knew it. These men wore tunics and sandals. They were … Yes, surely they were Romans!

I drew a sharp breath. This pair of cups had never been made for Holy Church. They were pagan relics of our Roman past, lost, or more likely buried, centuries before when the inhabitants of Cirencester – Corinium Dobunnorum – had spread out across the surrounding countryside to farm the rich and fertile soil. (Hadn’t Rosamund Bush told me that the alehouse was named after an old Roman sandal dug up from beneath its cellar floor?) But the question was, of course, how on earth had they come to be among Saint Walburga’s ceremonial plate?

I went back into the church and returned the chalice to the aumbry, placing it beside its fellow on the top shelf. A quick glance at the other pieces, before I relocked the cupboard, convinced me that there was nothing strange or odd about any of them. So, how had the Roman bowls been acquired by the village? I dredged around in my memory.

The answer suddenly hit me like a bolt of lightning.

‘It was that priest you told me about, wasn’t it? What did you call him? “Light-fingered” Lightfoot. Was that his name?’

Having slipped back into the priest’s house, leaving Hercules tied up outside, and having satisfied myself that Mistress Bush had once more returned to the kitchen, I had run upstairs and, without compunction, roused Sir Anselm from his postprandial doze. I dropped the bunch of keys on the coverlet and told him bluntly of my discovery. I also explained my theory as to how the bowls had been acquired.

Sir Anselm, still sore and badly shaken, had used up his fragile store of energy on our previous encounter, and was in no fit state to prevaricate further. He admitted wearily that he had always suspected that the chalices were Roman, but had consecrated them both to the glory of God, just in case any of his predecessors had failed to do so. He, also, had guessed that ‘Light-fingered’ Lightfoot had probably ‘donated’ them to Saint Walburga’s, although how he might have come by them in the first place, Sir Anselm had no idea.

‘Perhaps he just dug them up somewhere,’ the priest hazarded as an afterthought.

‘Unlikely,’ I answered. ‘Not impossible, but unlikely. Articles like the cups were usually buried pretty deeply to begin with, in order to preserve them from some natural or man-made disaster. Then you have to allow for accretion to the earth’s surface during the intervening centuries. A Roman sandal was found in the cellar of the alehouse, I believe, and that’s something that would only have been lost or mislaid by its owner … Has no one else ever noticed that the decoration on the cups is pagan?’

‘Not in my time.’ Sir Anselm yawned involuntarily. ‘At least, no one has ever mentioned the fact. In any case-’ he yawned again, this time suggestively – ‘I don’t suppose it would have worried anyone very much in this village. We live our own lives here. Some members of my flock, as you know, pay homage to the old gods of the trees and the stones, as well as to the living Christ. There are more ways of worshipping God, as I told you before, than that laid down by Holy Church.’

I was attending to him with only half an ear, busy pursuing thoughts of my own.

‘Do you know when this “Light-fingered” Lightfoot was priest in Lower Brockhurst?’ I asked. ‘Was it much before your time?’

My companion had to rouse himself with a conscious effort to consider my question. He looked ill: I felt guilty.

‘He wasn’t my predecessor here,’ he said at last, ‘nor either of the two incumbents prior to that. I think you might have to go back quite a long time. The stories about him always struck me as having a mythical quality to them. You know, tales that have been repeated down through the generations until people aren’t quite certain whether they’re true or not. Or whether Father Lightfoot’s reported exploits were real or imagined.’

‘Oh, I suspect they were true all right,’ I said. ‘I should think those two cups testify to that. But if we rule out the likelihood of him digging them up, where else could he have found them?’

A troubled moan, however, indicated that Sir Anselm had at last fallen into an uneasy slumber, his fingers plucking unconsciously at the bedclothes, his shifting body a sure sign of his discomfort even while he slept. I could also hear faint yelps from Hercules, tied up outside, and decided that it was time to leave before Mistress Bush went to investigate them. I tiptoed from the bedchamber and down the stairs, gaining the street undetected by the landlord’s wife.

Hercules went half-mad with joy at the sight of me, and hurled himself towards me with such force that he pulled over the post to which his rope was attached. I stooped to untie him.

‘I agree, you’ve been very patient and forbearing,’ I said, patting his head. ‘Now we’ll go for that walk I promised you.’

We crossed the bridge over the stream, climbing the Draco’s bank to the woods above and leaving Lower Brockhurst far behind us. I supposed I ought to return to the Lilywhites’ smallholding to inform the women of the current state of the village’s two invalids, but decided it would be folly to try Hercules’s patience any further. Besides, I told myself, there were plenty of neighbours to keep Maud and Theresa informed of events, even if they had not, by now, paid a visit to Lower Brockhurst to find out for themselves. So the dog and I continued our ascent.

As we crested the final rise, I turned and looked at the view behind me. The surrounding hills lay grey and misty on both sides of the valley that clove a deep purple shadow between them. The encroaching forest mantled their tops and flanks, making them seem remote and magical in the thinning light that was already waning towards dusk, as the short February afternoon drew towards its close. A primaeval landscape that had stood here for aeons, long, long before the coming of Saint Augustine and Christianity, when men had worshipped the Tree and the Stone and made blood sacrifice to their insatiable gods. I shivered. These hills and valleys, these forests held echoes of those ancient rites as a curved shell will hold the sound of the sea.

I was suddenly very cold, and turned to find the well-trodden path that led to the ruins of Upper Brockhurst Hall, a path that now seemed so familiar to me that I might have been walking it all my life instead of just for the past three days. The silence was intense. If I stood still, I could almost touch it. Only the dog’s unconcerned snufflings amongst the undergrowth and gently waving grasses reassured me that I hadn’t strayed into the middle of some enchanted woodland where I was the only living thing. Well, I’d wanted solitude, and here I had it in abundance.

Before I knew it, I found myself in the clearing where the old Hall and its courtyard had once stood. I wrapped my cloak tightly around me and sat down on the low rim of the well, first of all stretching out my legs and feet in front of me, then drawing my knees up to my chest and locking my arms around them.

It was not a comfortable position, but comfort was not conducive to serious thinking, which was what I had come here to do. It had been my intention to sort my thoughts and put in order such scraps of information concerning Eris Lilywhite’s disappearance as had come my way. Instead, I was unable to concentrate on anything but the discovery I had made that afternoon; the Roman bowls locked in Saint Walburga’s aumbry. How had they got there, among the church plate? Who had put them there? Sir Anselm and I both thought that we knew the answer to what was really a single question. And perhaps that answer could also solve a 130-year-old mystery to my satisfaction.

But my theory hinged on one as yet unverified fact: the period when the priest known as ‘Light-fingered’ Lightfoot had been the incumbent of Saint Walburga’s church. But who could I ask? Dame Jacquetta was old enough for her memory to reach back into the past, to recall something perhaps that she had been told by her grandmother, or even her great-grandmother, when she was a child. But it was not a good time to approach a member of the Rawbone family, with Tom a hunted fugitive, suspected of attacking the priest and Lambert Miller, and the rest of them tainted by association. They would have other worries on their minds and would be impatient, to say the least, with queries about a long-dead priest.

That Father Lightfoot was long-dead, I was very nearly certain; as nearly certain as I was that he had discovered the Roman chalices in the deserted Upper Brockhurst Hall after the great plague, when it was at last safe to enter and dispose of the bodies. Maybe his subsequent reputation and soubriquet had hinged solely on this one incident; the sudden appearance of the silver bowls among the rest of Saint Walburga’s small store of treasure.

I thought it doubtful, however, that any of the then inhabitants of Lower Brockhurst would have commented on the fact. Those fortunate survivors of the worst pestilence ever experienced so far by man must surely have been too busy themselves, thanking God for their survival and picking over the contents of the Upper Brockhurst houses, to care much about what their priest was up to. And who could blame them? Pots and pans, chairs and stools, knives and blankets are of no use to the dead. And when finally, the goods and chattels of their deceased neighbours had been removed and shared amongst them, there were the empty houses themselves to provide extra building material for many years to come, and the Draco to be diverted in order to improve the lower village’s water supply. And when all was said and done, the chalices benefited all of Lower Brockhurst, their beauty enhancing every service, their silver bowls a pleasure to drink from, their graceful lines a feast for beauty-starved eyes.

But if all these conjectures of mine were correct – and they were only conjectures I reminded myself severely – there still remained the question of how the Martin brothers had come by their treasure trove in the first place. Had they, or one of their forefathers, come across the bowls accidentally while digging somewhere? For truffles in the woods, maybe? Beneath their cellar floor, like the Roman sandal in the alehouse? Or – and here my imagination really did catch fire with the utter certainty of having hit upon the truth – had the two wellers from Tetbury dug them up while excavating the new well for the courtyard?

But if that were indeed the case, to whom had the right of ownership belonged? To the men who had found them? Or to the men on whose land they had been discovered? I could imagine only too well the dispute that might have arisen, the Martin brothers claiming the bowls as theirs, the wellers, seeing a potential fortune in silver slipping through their fingers, adducing the old law of ‘finders keepers’.

So stalemate would have ensued. Perhaps one bowl each would have been the answer; but men confronted by the prospect of sudden wealth are not that reasonable. Probably the Martins would have won the day. They were on home ground, after all, always an advantage. But perhaps the wellers, having finished the job and been paid for their labours, had started for home, only to return by stealth, purloin the Roman bowls and set out once more for Tetbury, hoping against hope that the theft would go undetected until they had put enough distance between themselves and Upper Brockhurst Hall to make successful pursuit impossible.

But, unluckily for them, the Martin brothers had discovered their loss in plenty of time to go after their former employees, whom they ambushed and bludgeoned to death in the forest. They had then carried the silver bowls home again with a triumph that had proved shortlived. Within days, a week at the most, they had both died of the bubonic plague that had spread like wildfire throughout Upper Brockhurst, leaving not a single soul alive.

And many months later, scavenging with his pastoral flock through the possessions of their dead neighbours, the Lower Brockhurst priest, Father Lightfoot, had come across two magnificent silver chalices that would not only grace Saint Walburga’s altar, but also greatly enhance and augment her insignificant store of plate. It would have been an opportunity too good to miss. The bowls would be used to the greater glory of God, and I doubted if the priest would even have thought of his actions as a sin.

Had ‘Light-fingered’ Lightfoot realized that the bowls were Roman? If so, would he have cared? As I had discovered on occasions in the past, in remote, isolated communities such as this, the people made their own rules, judged by their own standards and, while they were aware of the wider world beyond their boundaries, nevertheless considered themselves exempt from its laws. In times of trouble, they closed ranks against the outsider who would have imposed the King’s justice upon them and theirs, and, when necessary, meted out their own punishments. Tom Rawbone had fled from the wrath of his fellow villagers, not from the threat of trial and imprisonment in Gloucester.

I stood up, stretching my cramped limbs, slowly looking around me. I felt sure, in my own mind, that I had solved the mystery of the wellers’ murder, although I should never be able to prove it. Nor would my solution arouse much interest if I could. Most likely, it would only inspire incredulity and derision. The story was a part of the folklore of the district, and if there is one thing that people dislike more than another, it is having a good mystery ruined with a rational explanation. It is no longer any fun.

Instead, I reconsidered the totally groundless, but intuitive feeling that I had entertained since the very beginning of this case: that the disappearance of Eris Lilywhite was somehow linked to the 130-year-old murder of the wellers. So, now that I had, or thought I had, a solution to that particular problem, how were the two events connected? There was, of course, only one answer, provided that my instincts were correct, and that was the well. But I had climbed down the shaft and inspected it closely. There was nothing there. Nor, according to those who had helped in the search for Eris, had there ever been. This had to mean that the two were unconnected. My much-vaunted intuition had played me false …

Hercules came hurtling out of the undergrowth, whining and climbing up my leg in palpable distress. I picked him up.

‘What’s the matter, boy?’ I asked.

But even as I spoke, I could smell burning on the air and saw smoke curling up amongst the distant trees. I made my way towards it, the dog gibbering and struggling in my arms. Then I saw the flames.

A small wicker cage had been hung from a branch and set alight. Inside, on the bottom, was a charred shape, black and still. What it was I could not tell. But one fact was certain. If it had once been a living creature, it had met a horrible death.