The Brothers of Glastonbury

Chapter Ten

The muttering of the congregation faltered and died. The great west door was flung wide, and the candle-buds blossomed in a thousand draughts. Abbot Selwood led the procession of monks and novices from the Lady Chapel, up the steps of the Galilee into the crowded nave and all the glitter and colour of the abbey church. The sun, filtering through the stained-glass windows, traced jewel-like patterns on the rush-strewn floor and washed in ripples of rainbow hue over the intent and straining faces of the congregation. And because of my height, I could just see over the heads of the people in front of me the black marble tomb in the middle of the choir, which housed the remains said to be those of Arthur and Guinevere.

Dame Joan and Cicely stood either side of me, having arranged themselves thus as we had entered through the north door, as though I were the man of the household. To begin with it had made me a little uncomfortable; but when I noticed the way in which some of their fellow townsmen and women shrank from them as they passed, the whispering behind raised hands, I was glad if my presence afforded them some measure of comfort. The two apprentices and Lydia had followed behind, and Mark’s absence could not fail to be noticed. I had seen people nudge one another, staring hard, first at us and then at the open doorway, waiting for him to appear. And when it became apparent that he was not coming, expectation gave place to dismay and then to fear, as suspicion festered into speculation that he had met the same strange fate as his elder brother.

It was not surprising, therefore, that none of us paid as much attention to the Mass as we should have done; we were too busy brooding on other things. Cicely and her aunt stood with downcast eyes, but I could see by their faces that their thoughts were elsewhere. At last however, after the paeans of praise had been raised to God, the Three in One, and to all the hierarchy of Heaven, and after Abbot Selwood’s sermon and the Mass itself, the service was nearly over.

It felt strange to be standing once more in the abbey, not among the novices, but as a member of the laity. I wondered if discipline among the monks had improved at all since my departure. John Selwood, Abbot here for almost twenty years, had not, in my day, been noted for the strictness of his rule; and in spite of several official inquiries into this lack of authority over his flock I doubted if improvements had been made or steps taken to remove him from office. He was too well liked by both his peers and subordinates for any serious complaint to be lodged against him.

And, of course, it was he who had taken in the body of the Earl of Devon six years earlier, when, on the orders of the Earls of Warwick and Clarence, Humphrey Stafford had been executed after the battle of Banbury. (If I glanced over my shoulder, I could see the tomb on the south side of the nave.) King Edward would always vigorously defend anyone who had been loyal to his cause during those difficult days when his own brother and cousin had tried to reinstate King Henry on the throne and take Edward prisoner. I had been still a member of the abbey fraternity then, and I can recall even now the arrival of the bloody and mutilated corpse, the way we novices crowded around the cart, repelled but at the same time fascinated. Abbot Selwood had not hesitated to accept it for burial.

As we streamed out of the abbey into the mid-morning heat, I was again aware of that edging away of our fellow worshippers, the twitching aside of the women’s skirts, until Dame Joan, Cicely and I were walking in isolation, a path opening up for us as we made our way towards the north gatehouse. Rob Undershaft and John Longbones had prudently slipped away into the crowd, and only the faithful Lydia still followed in our wake. I wondered how long it would be before the two apprentices quit the Gildersleeve household for good, and I prayed that when we reached the shop we should discover Mark waiting for us with an explanation of his overnight absence.

My hostess made several attempts to speak to friends and neighbours, but there was a general reluctance to return her greetings, and the reason was not hard to find. The burly figure of John Jarrold, accompanied by his wife and daughter, was moving purposefully among the dispersing congregation, whispering in the ear of this one, exchanging a few muttered words with that. Heads turned briefly in our direction, eyes met ours only to turn hurriedly away, and worried frowns replaced the first natural inclination to smile. The story of the paper with its mysterious signs was spreading rapidly, and causing consternation wherever it was heard. If the townspeople of Glastonbury had at first dismissed the rumour of Peter Gildersleeve’s disappearance as being attributable to the Devil’s work, subsequent events, and now this tale of Maud’s, were making them change their minds.

Fortunately, the Gildersleeves’ house was close to the gatehouse, on the opposite side of the street, and on leaving the abbey precincts, a very few steps brought the four of us safely to the door. Dame Joan, having unlocked it and carefully replaced the key on its customary nail in the passageway, hastened from room to room, upstairs and down, hopefully calling ‘Mark! Mark!’ But there was no answering cry. Mark Gildersleeve, like his brother, had still not come home.

* * *

The two apprentices reappeared at four o’clock, just in time for supper, and crept into the kitchen, where the rest of us were seated round the table looking both shamefaced and defiant.

‘Where have you been?’ Cicely demanded angrily before her aunt could question them.

John Longbones, after some hesitation, admitted having paid a visit to his mother, an absence which he well knew would not have been tolerated in normal circumstances. Rob Undershaft, on the other hand, countered truculently with, ‘Where’s Master Mark, then? Not back yet?’ And when Dame Joan shook her head, he added, ‘My father says if he’s not returned by tomorrow, I’m to go home. He’ll not have me stay here any longer.’

‘You can’t break your articles of indenture!’ Dame Joan exclaimed, finally roused from the apathy which had cloaked her like a shroud for the past few hours.

‘We’re indentured to Master Peter, and he ain’t here,’ Rob pointed out triumphantly — and not, I felt, without some justification. ‘We can’t go on working, Mistress, without someone telling us what to do. It wouldn’t be right. Besides…’

‘Besides what?’ Cicely asked, raising her chin belligerently.

Rob and John exchanged a quick sidelong glance before their eyes fell once again to their still empty plates.

‘Besides…?’ I prompted, adding my mite, and they both wriggled uncomfortably.

Rob Undershaft took a deep breath. ‘My father says he’ll not have me stay in a house where there’s devil’s work afoot. He … He’s been talking to Goodman Jarrold,’ he added by way of excuse.

‘And you, John?’ Dame Joan’s gentle voice held a note of pleading. ‘What does Widow Longbones have to say?’

The carroty head hung even lower. ‘The same,’ he mumbled.

Dame Joan bit her lip in desperation. Unless the riddle of Peter’s and Mark’s disappearance could be resolved soon, she faced the prospect of being ostracised by her God-fearing neighbours, if nothing worse. To calm her overwrought nerves she sipped an infusion of basil and rosemary which Cicely had thoughtfully prepared for her.

Lydia got up and went to the pot over the fire, ladling generous portions of frumenty on to the apprentices’ plates, which she banged down on the table. ‘It’s more than you deserve,’ she hissed at Rob and John. ‘I’d let you starve.’

Her mistress reproached her with quiet dignity. ‘That will do, Lyddie. While they remain under my roof, I shall honour Peter’s side of the bargain to provide them with three good meals a day.’ She turned to me. ‘Chapman, what are we to do?’

‘Yes, what are we to do?’ Cicely added waspishly. ‘If you can’t help my aunt, I suggest the sooner you’re on your way, the better. She can’t afford to keep feeding you and your great appetite with no money being made in the shop.’

Dame Joan turned a scandalized face towards her niece and bade her hold her tongue. ‘You really must learn to show more civility, my dear,’ she scolded, almost angrily for her, ‘to anyone to whom you have offered hospitality.’

I smiled understandingly at Cicely. I had met many young girls like her, just blossoming into womanhood, blowing first hot then cold, fancying themselves in and out of love with any and every reasonably good-looking man who crossed their path, confused by previously unknown emotions and trying hard to cope. In reply she stuck her tongue out at me when her aunt wasn’t looking, and stirred the half-eaten mixture of vegetables and oats around her plate.

I addressed Dame Joan. ‘Mistress, give me a day or two longer to try to solve this puzzle. But if I haven’t done so by then, your niece is right, and I should be on my way.’ All three women, including Cicely, gave a little cry of protest, but I held up my hand to hush them. ‘What else can I do? My family are expecting me in Bristol. My duty is first to my mother-in-law and child. If it proves that I can truly be of no assistance to you, then I can no longer delay my return home.’

‘And desert us in our hour of need!’ Cicely spat at me across the table.

Her aunt sent her a bewildered glance before shrugging her shoulders, evidently abandoning all attempts to understand these violent swings of opinion.

‘You must do as you see fit, Chapman,’ she told me quietly. ‘Whatever you decide, it will be with my thanks and blessing. Meanwhile, do you have any idea at all as to what can have happened to my sons?’

I glanced across the table at the maid, who had just sat down again to resume her own interrupted meal.

‘Lydia,’ I said, ‘it’s time to tell your mistress what you told me this morning.’

Before Lydia could protest, Dame Joan’s head jerked round. ‘My child,’ she asked reproachfully, ‘what have you been keeping from me?’

‘How could you?’ Lydia demanded tearfully of me. ‘You promised you’d keep it secret! You promised! You know I told you Mark would have me dismissed if I betrayed him to the Mistress!’

Dame Joan said firmly, ‘Whatever this is about, you are my maid, Lyddie, not Mark’s. How could you believe that I should let myself be influenced by him in such a matter? You know I promised your mother I’d look after you. Do you really think I would go back on my word?’

Lydia looked uncertain. ‘I … I don’t know,’ she muttered.

‘Then it grieves me very much to hear you say so. Now, what is it that you have to tell me?’

The story was haltingly repeated, and when Lydia had finished, I jogged her memory about the open door.

‘So you see,’ I concluded for her, ‘someone aided and abetted Mark that night. Mark knew he was going to be late, in spite of telling Lydia that he’d unintentionally drunk too much and had had to spend the night at the house of a friend.’

Dame Joan regarded me straitly. ‘This is the reason you were asking all those questions at breakfast this morning, wanting to know if there was any other way into the house without having to rouse a member of the household.’ I nodded. ‘So!’ She drew a deep breath. ‘You obviously don’t believe, Roger, that this was the first occasion Mark had stayed out all night.’

‘To be honest, Mistress, no. I think it had probably happened before, and maybe since. No man anticipates getting so drunk that he cannot ride home, unless he does it regularly.’

Dame Joan nodded her agreement and turned to look at the two apprentices. ‘Which one of you unlocked the door at nights for Mark?’

Neither boy seemed inclined to speak first, but it was obvious that both had lost their appetites. The speed with which they were shovelling the frumenty into their mouths began to slacken, then stopped altogether. After a protracted silence, Rob laid down his spoon and raised his head.

‘We were doing nothing wrong, Mistress. We were only following orders. If Master Mark chose to stay out all night and not let on to you, then that was his business. And if he told us to hold our tongues — well, it was natural that we obeyed him. He’s a grown man, after all, and no harm was done to you or anyone.’

This was unanswerable, and I could see that Dame Joan was nonplussed. She felt she had been betrayed by their silence, but knew also that she had no good reason to feel so. It was true that Mark was a grown man, and that she had no jurisdiction over him, but like most mothers she found it hard to accept that her sons were no longer children. Women will let their daughters go, treat them as equals and companions, but in a mother’s eyes her son is for ever in leading strings, the little boy she dandled on her knee.

‘And where did he go when he stayed out all night?’ she asked. ‘Did he tell you?’

Once again, the two apprentices exchanged sidelong glances. John Longbones raised his sandy brows, and Rob Undershaft gave an infinitesimal shrug of his shoulders. Both were obviously calculating what their chances of escaping a beating would be if Mark were suddenly to reappear in our midst, and realizing that they were slender. But after a few moments’ deliberation, Rob, who seemed to me to be the stronger character of the pair, decided to speak out and brave the possible consequences.

‘He went drinking and gambling. You know, the way men do.’

Dame Joan wrinkled her little nose fastidiously. The washed-out violet eyes held a spark of contempt.

‘Drinking and gambling don’t normally keep a man out all night,’ she said. ‘What else was Mark up to?’

For a third time the two boys silently consulted one another, then Rob unwillingly admitted, ‘He used to visit places.’

‘What places?’ Dame Joan was as close to real anger as I had ever seen her.

Rob fiddled with the spoon on his plate. ‘You know, Mistress, places … women,’ he muttered indistinctly.

The silence stretched like a thin, bright thread, which snapped suddenly when the outraged Dame asked furiously, ‘Whore-houses? Are you telling me, Rob Undershaft, that my son frequented whore-houses?’

‘That’s what he said, didn’t he, Jack?’

John Longbones nodded unhappily.

Dame Joan’s cheeks were scarlet with mortification and embarrassment. It was a second or two before she could catch her breath. ‘No wonder he didn’t want me to know anything about it,’ she said at last. ‘And Master Peter … did he know what was going on?’

‘Couldn’t say, Mistress. Master Mark never said one way or the other.’

My hostess considered the probability, avoiding both Cicely’s eyes and mine. ‘How often did Mark stay out all night?’ she asked.

‘Once a month maybe. Sometimes twice, sometimes not at all.’ It was John Longbones who answered this time.

‘And how long has this … this depravity been going on?’

John wrinkled his forehead. ‘A while now, I reckon, wouldn’t you say, Rob?’

‘A fair while, yes. I’d say so.’

Dame Joan now looked as pale as she had previously looked red. ‘Then unless Peter slept as soundly as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, I don’t see how he could possibly have remained ignorant of these nocturnal excursions. In short, he encouraged his brother by his silence.’ There was a pause before she added tearfully, ‘I am deeply disappointed in both my sons.’

I caught Lydia’s eye and she grimaced, as much as to say ‘I told you so’.

‘Dame Joan,’ I said, carefully picking my words, ‘your sons are men, and men do these things. Otherwise there would be no need for such places. And it’s only natural that one brother should keep the confidences and secrets of the other, especially if Peter understood how much the truth would upset you.’

But Dame Joan refused to be comforted, and continued to sniff and mop at her eyes until Cicely, who had tried to appear unmoved by the revelations, lost patience with her.

‘Oh, Aunt,’ she begged, ‘please stop snivelling. If you’d seen as much of the world as I have in the service of the Duchess, you’d realize that it’s fashionable to visit whorehouses. The brothels of Southwark are all owned by the Bishop of Winchester.’

I hastily covered my mouth with one hand so that Cicely should not suspect that my lips were twitching. The part she was playing at the moment was that of the woman experienced in the ways of the world, and I had to admit that she did it very well. But underneath, I suspected, she was as shocked as Dame Joan. These were her cousins, the chief culprit her future brother-in-law; and, like everyone else, she did not expect members of her own family to be tainted with the same vices as the rest of mankind.

At her niece’s unfeeling words, Dame Joan burst into a flood of tears and announced her intention of taking to her bed. ‘I shall be in my chamber if anything should happen,’ she sniffed, ‘if Mark should come home. Not that I ever want to clap eyes on that reprobate again! And you can tell him so, before you send him up to see me! Lyddie, be a good girl and make me another infusion of rosemary and basil. My head feels as if it’s going to split in two.’

With her departure, calm descended on the kitchen. The apprentices finished their supper and slunk away to the workshop, presumably to beguile the hours until bedtime with a few games of hazard. Lydia began washing up the supper things and Cicely offered to dry the dishes. So, left to my own devices, I went into the garden and sat on the stone bench under the workshop window. The casement, was open, and I could hear Rob and John whispering and, occasionally, giggling together, but their voices were subdued. For them, as for the rest of us, it had not been a pleasant day.

Where, I wondered, was I to go from here? How was I going to make good my boast to solve this puzzle? I went back over the apprentices’ revelations concerning Mark Gildersleeve, but could see no way in which they shed any light on his or his brother’s disappearance. It was a common enough story of a young man keeping his youthful sins from his mother in order to be spared her reproaches, and of a brother who kept his own counsel so as not to get drawn in. Mark’s dismay and anger on the morning he encountered Lydia were now easily understood, as was his hurriedly concocted tale of having got drunk and spent the night with a friend.

I sighed, and suddenly realized how tired I felt. The inactivity of the afternoon — those dragging hours when the women had begged me not to leave them because they feared that the hostility of their neighbours might result in some form of physical attack — had fatigued me far more than being up and doing would have done. But up and doing what? I seemed to be in the centre of a maze where all the exits led only to dead ends. There was no way out. Every path was closed. I thought perhaps sleep would help clear my brain, but it was far too early to go to bed. The sun continued to shine and the heat was still intense; Mark’s bedchamber would be even hotter. But I knew that at any moment Cicely and Lydia would finish their chores and most likely join me on the bench. Solitude was suddenly inviting.

I was along the passageway and mounting the stairs almost before I was aware of my actions. Dame Joan’s door was closed, but I could hear her muffled sobs. Lydia had guessed correctly why Mark and Peter kept secrets from their mother: her reproaches would, in the end, wear down even the most heartless of sons.

I entered Mark and Peter’s room and shut the door behind me. Somewhere in here, Mark had chanced upon the mysterious paper belonging to his brother. I had almost come to believe that he had lied when he told Father Boniface that he had not taken it with him to Beckery — but suppose, after all, he had been telling the truth … Where then had he hidden it?

Common sense argued that he would have left it where he had found it, if the original hiding place had been a good one. I stared once more around the room but could see nowhere more likely than the little drawers and cupboards of that fantastic bed-head. Yet I had thoroughly searched every one of them the previous evening. Nothing could be lost, however, by trying once again. If I still did not find it, I should know that any further search would be a waste of time. I pulled off my boots, knelt up on the bed and began, slowly and methodically, to open the tiny cupboards and drawers.

I explored each cavity in turn, some of them no wider than half the span of my hand, and eventually arrived at the centre drawer at the top of the bed-head. I had noticed before that it appeared larger than its fellows, yet when I examined it more closely, it seemed shallower than it should be. My heart began to beat a little faster and I groped around feverishly, feeling for … feeling for what?

But when I found it, I knew at once that this was what I sought. There was a small metal catch at the back of the drawer, on the right-hand side, and how I had come to miss it last night I could not imagine. My fingers were trembling as I pressed it …

Immediately the floor of the drawer slid back to reveal a secret compartment in the base and, more importantly, what it contained. Carefully, as though it were a rare and precious jewel, I lifted out a piece of folded parchment.