The Tintern Treasure

FIVE

The abbot frowned and lowered the glass he had been raising to his lips.

‘Are you sure, Brother Mark?’ he asked. ‘No one uses those rooms now unless we have an important guest.’ (Presumably none of those present rated this distinction.)

The brother nodded vigorously. ‘I saw the light between the slats of the shutters as I passed, Father. And I could hear someone moving about inside.’

‘You didn’t go to investigate?’ Gilbert Foliot queried, raising his eyebrows.

The brother gave a shamefaced gulp. ‘No, sir.’ He added in extenuation, ‘There were other noises.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh. . I don’t know how to describe them, sir.’ Brother Mark turned back to his superior. ‘Please come, Father!’

The abbot heaved a sigh and got to his feet, glancing round the table as he did so.

‘Master Chapman,’ he said, ‘you look a sturdy, broad-shouldered fellow. Perhaps you would accompany me. Meanwhile, Brother Mark, rouse some of the other brothers and come after us, although I feel certain you’re starting at shadows. If there is anyone there, there will be a perfectly sound explanation for it.’

‘I’ll come as well,’ the goldsmith offered, rising briskly from his seat. He looked enquiringly at the others. ‘Anyone else?’

No one volunteered. I couldn’t blame them. We could all hear the rain hammering down outside.

Gilbert Foliot shrugged. ‘Lead the way, then, Lord Abbot. Master Chapman and I will be right behind you.’

We followed the abbot out of doors, leaving the warmth of candle- and firelight to be soaked in the first two minutes by sharp spears of rain falling from a storm-riven sky. Fortunately it was only a short walk across a patch of muddy ground, past a couple of outhouses, before the abbot paused in front of a two-storey building, listened for a moment, then motioned us to accompany him round to the front. Here, there were two rows of three windows apiece, all being closed and silent except for one on the ground floor, which did indeed show chinks of light between the slats of the shutters. We moved closer.

‘Brother Mark is right,’ the abbot said. ‘There is someone in there. One of the novices, no doubt, up to some mischief.’

He squared his shoulders, marching back around the corner to a side door which he pushed open with a resounding crack, before leading the way along a short passage to another door on the left. But just as he was about to fling this wide, words of reprimand on his lips, it was jerked open from inside and a figure stood framed in the doorway.

The abbot gasped and we all fell back a pace, startled by this sudden apparition, but that momentary hesitation was our undoing. The young man — for, despite the hood pulled well forward to obscure his face, there was no doubting either his youth or sex — simply charged between us and out into the night. I was the first to recover and, pushing Master Foliot unceremoniously aside, rushed after him. By this time, however, reinforcements had arrived in the shape of Brother Mark and an intrepid band of his fellow monks who, on sighting their quarry, gave an excited whoop and set off in pursuit. Confident that the intruder would soon be caught, I returned to the abbot’s old lodging to discover what had been going on there.

This was immediately apparent. Several tiles had been prised loose from around the hearthstone, revealing a gaping hole beneath. The abbot and Gilbert Foliot were standing over it, regarding the empty space, but the latter turned his head sharply at my entrance. ‘Did you catch him?’

‘No. But don’t worry. Brother Mark and his posse are hard on his heels.’ I, too, stared into the hole. ‘Is this the. . er. .?’

The goldsmith nodded. ‘Yes, this is the secret hiding place that was accidentally found fourteen years ago.’

The abbot chewed a thumbnail. ‘But why would anybody want to open it up again? Everything that was in there was removed when it was discovered. Everyone knows that.’

‘I wonder,’ I mused. ‘Is what we can see of the hole all that there is, Father?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m wondering if the hiding place is perhaps bigger than was thought at the time. If it was properly explored back then.’

The abbot looked bewildered, but Gilbert Foliot nodded excitedly. ‘I see what you’re getting at, Chapman. You mean that when the account books and scraps of old diary were found, nothing else was searched for. It was assumed that that was all there was.’

‘Yes.’ I dropped to my knees and, leaning forward, thrust my arm into the aperture, bending lower so that I could probe sideways. Sure enough, there was a far larger space than was obvious at first sight. My arm disappeared almost up to the shoulder. I could also feel loose crumbs of cement as though some kind of barrier had been broken down.

I stood up and reported my findings. Once again, the goldsmith was the first to grasp the implications. ‘You’re thinking,’ he said, ‘that a century and a half ago, something was concealed in that hole and then sealed up with a wall of cement? The old accounts books and the pages of diary were put in to fill the remaining space and act as a decoy if anyone — for some unknown reason — should go searching for the secret hiding place?’

I nodded. ‘And the other noises which Brother Mark heard, and was unable to identify, was our young friend either chiselling up the hearth tiles or else breaking through the cement wall into the inner compartment.’ I added, ‘I don’t fancy the wall was very strong, and in any case, it may well have begun to crumble after a hundred and fifty odd years.’

‘But who would know about this inner compartment?’ the abbot demanded fretfully. ‘I didn’t know about it, and as far as I know, no one has talked or even thought about that secret hiding place for years. Well, certainly not within my hearing.’

‘We shall only have the answer to that,’ I pointed out, ‘when we interrogate our prisoner.’

‘Do you think he found anything?’ Gilbert Foliot asked me.

‘Yes.’ I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the man as he had charged between us. ‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘I feel almost certain that he was holding something. Oh, not his bag of tools. That was in his right hand. But I would stake my life he was also clutching something in his left. Something small because his fist was clenched around it.’

The goldsmith nodded slowly.

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ the abbot complained even more fretfully than before. ‘So let’s go and demand an explanation of this young man. Brother Mark and the others should surely have him in custody by now.’

But he was to be disappointed. Barely were the words out of his mouth than Brother Mark appeared in the doorway very much out of breath and wearing a distinctly hangdog expression. It didn’t need his stumbling apology to know that our quarry had eluded us.

‘We. . We thought we had him cornered, Father. We did indeed! He was about half a furlong ahead of us — maybe a little more — when he ran into the infirmary. .’

‘Ah!’ I exclaimed. ‘Of course! The unknown traveller who, according to the gatekeeper arrived here earlier today, but had kept to his bed with the curtains drawn, pleading a sick headache. He had to go back to the infirmary to collect the rest of his gear.’

‘Yes! You’ve got it, Master Chapman!’ Gilbert Foliot clapped me on the shoulder.

‘Never mind that,’ the abbot said impatiently. He turned back to Brother Mark. ‘Well? What happened then?’

The young monk shuffled his feet. ‘We. . we all rushed into the infirmary, Father, thinking he couldn’t possibly get away, but. . but he’d gone.’ The boy swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fisherman’s float. ‘We. . we forgot about the latrine drain. He must have followed it down to the cesspit, then climbed over the wall.’

The abbot closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the picture of frustration. But he was a fair-minded man and at last forced himself to say, ‘I suppose that wasn’t your fault.’

‘He can’t have got far,’ the goldsmith said. ‘I’m going out after him. See if I can track him down.’

I laid a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Don’t be a fool, man!’ For the moment, I had forgotten the difference in our stations. ‘Listen to that rain! You’ll be soaked to the skin in less than a minute. It’s worse than it was quarter of an hour ago. You’ve only to look at Brother Mark, here. He’s like a drowned rat.’

The boy nodded, shivering miserably, and the abbot added his voice to mine.

‘I beg you not to think of it, my son. We’re not even sure the abbey’s been robbed of anything yet. It’s all speculation. It’s certainly not something worth the risk of catching your death of cold.’

But Gilbert Foliot was not in the mood to listen to either of us. He shook off my hand and plunged out into the darkness.

It was at least half an hour before he returned, wet, furious and more than a little dishevelled. His hair was plastered flat to his head and his hands were covered in scratches where he had searched the scrubland on the slopes above the abbey. He was also limping, having, he said, badly twisted his ankle. There was a rent about three inches long in his fur-trimmed tunic.

The abbot and I had by this time rejoined the others in the dining parlour of the former’s lodgings and given them a graphic account of the happenings so far.

‘We thought there was a lot of noise,’ Henry Callowhill remarked comfortably.

‘We did look out,’ Geoffrey Heathersett added, ‘but it was too dark and too wet to see anything clearly.’

They both roundly condemned the goldsmith’s folly in continuing the pursuit and gave it as their considered opinion that he would be laid up tomorrow and unable to resume his journey. In the event, none of us could do so, the storm of the previous evening having worsened and there being rumours, brought by one of the lay brothers, of there being rebel forces in the surrounding hills. It was therefore reluctantly agreed by all of us that, for another twenty-four hours at least, we must stay where we were.

In the presence of the abbot and the infirmarian, I made a close search of the infirmary, particularly the bay occupied by the stranger, but to no avail. He had left no trace of himself. The porter confirmed that he had arrived on foot so there was no horse left behind in the stables which might have yielded up a clue to his identity.

‘A mystery,’ the abbot said with dissatisfaction, but concluded in a resigned tone, ‘and a mystery I’m afraid it will have to remain. If he got what he came for — and if our friend the chapman is correct in what he thinks he saw, he probably did so — then he won’t be visiting us again.’

And that was his last word on the subject, the daily running of a great abbey making too many demands on his time for him to waste any on a problem he was unable and unlikely to solve. But that didn’t prevent the rest of us discussing the subject ad nauseum and propagating the wildest theories as to what the unknown might have found and how he knew of its existence in the first place. Only Gilbert Foliot seemed a little reluctant to take part, but that was because he was very tired and somewhat feverish. His stupidity of the evening before was taking its inevitable toll and he was eventually forced to admit that was feeling unwell. At his friends’ insistence, he finally agreed to pay a visit to Brother Infirmarian and swallow one of his potions.

By dinnertime, the rest of us, cooped up together in the infirmary, unable to ease our cramped limbs with exercise and finding nothing new to say concerning the subject uppermost in all our minds, were beginning to get on one another’s nerves. Oliver Tockney’s north country speech, which I had at first found so fascinating, was now starting to irritate me beyond measure. And I could tell that my flat West Country vowels and Saxon diphthongs were annoying him equally. So, after dinner, between the services of Nones and Vespers, I took myself off to the abbey library and introduced myself to Brother Librarian. ‘Father Abbot told me that if I asked, you would be pleased to show me what was originally found in the secret hiding place,’ I said, investing a somewhat loose remark of the abbot’s with an authority it did not really warrant. ‘And I should very much like to see the diary, if nothing else.’

Brother Librarian was a sour-faced little man who, like so many others of his calling whom I have encountered from time to time, regarded the books and documents in his charge as his personal property, to be handed over to outsiders only with the greatest reluctance.

He began by claiming that he didn’t know where the papers were: no one had asked to look at them for as long as he could remember and he had no idea where they were filed. I stared him down and repeated, mendaciously, that the lord abbot had promised me a sight of them, managing to convey that his superior would be extremely displeased if my desire were thwarted. So finally, after much grumbling under his breath and a token search, Brother Librarian produced the necessary papers with comparative ease from one of the lower shelves. They were enclosed in a cover bound with purple silk which he dropped on to one of the reading stalls, standing in a line along one wall.

‘There you are, then,’ he snapped ungraciously. ‘Just be careful how you handle them, that’s all I can say. They’re over a century and a half old, and fragile.’ He advanced his tight, weasel-like little face to within an inch of mine. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Richard de Bury?’ he sneered.

Not for the first time in my life, I blessed the teaching and knowledge of Brother Hilarion, our Novice Master at Glastonbury, and the endless trouble he had taken to hammer that knowledge into our unreceptive heads. ‘Bishop of Durham, sometime Chancellor and close friend of King Edward III in the last century,’ I answered with a smirk.

‘Oh.’ For a moment my interlocutor was nonplussed, but he soon made a recovery. ‘He was also,’ he went on, ‘one of the greatest bibliophiles this country has ever known, and he wrote a treatise on the disgusting way in which people handle books. Ever read it?’

‘No,’ I said foolishly — but consoled myself with the reflection that even had I answered, ‘Yes,’ he would still have told me what it said. He was one of those who, once he was riding his hobby-horse, there was no way of stopping.

‘Richard de Bury complains’ — and the little man spoke as one who had learned the passage by heart — ‘about the abuser of books who underlines favourite passages with his dirty nails, who marks his place with straws because his memory is poor, who stains the parchment with fruit and wine, who drops into the open pages crumbs of bread and cheese and other such victuals, who falls asleep over his book and in so doing creases the leaves, who turns back the corners of pages and presses wild flowers between them with his sweaty hands, who marks the vellum with soiled gloves and who, finally, flings aside the sacred object so that its leaves are splayed and will no more shut.’ Brother Librarian finished, breathless, on a triumphant shout, an admonitory finger waggling beneath my nose. ‘I trust,’ he added, a gleam of hatred for the despised reader in his eye, ‘that you are not one of those!’

‘No, no!’ I assured him hastily and sat down in the reading stall, spreading out the pages of the account books and diary in front of me.

At last he seemed to take the hint that I wished to be left alone and, still muttering under his breath, moved away to busy himself elsewhere.

The pages I had before me were written on neither vellum nor parchment, but on a cheap paper made of rags. Those belonging to the two account books were the most numerous and, as Father Abbot had warned me, of very little interest except, perhaps, to the abbey’s present manciple as an indication of what was being ordered a hundred and fifty years ago, and for the date. This latter was repeated twice, in Roman numerals, as 1326, which suggested that the pages of the diary were possibly written about the same time. Not necessarily, I reminded myself, but probably.

I turned to them eagerly and was disappointed to see that there really was little more than a page and a half of black, spidery, very upright writing, very difficult to read. This was not the fault of the ink which had retained its colour after all those years and was still beautifully vivid. I wondered if it had been made from blackthorn bark or oak galls, or to one of the abbey’s secret recipes. (Most religious establishments had their own, which they zealously guarded.) It certainly wasn’t thickened blackberry juice mixed with blood, which faded early.

I applied my mind to deciphering the narrative. This wasn’t easy, the writing being extremely uneven and the style discursive. Almost all the first page was devoted, as the abbot had said, to squabbles amongst the brothers, with particular attention being paid to the disagreement between a certain Brother Barnabas and another named Philip. What it was about, I couldn’t have told you even ten minutes later, so rapidly did I skip the lines, searching eagerly for the incident of the strangers’ arrival.

I came to it at last at the top of the second page. ‘“They came last night as we had feared they might, having had warning that they were close by. Two others were with them; Reading, I think, and Baldock were the names, but I cannot be sure. We had begged Father Abbot not to give them sanctuary; their crime is too great, but he ignored our wishes. Perhaps he was afraid to do otherwise. It seems they will stay here again tonight, but after that Father Abbot has assured us they will be gone. God have mercy on their souls. They will need it.”’

This, disappointingly, was all on that head, and for the next twenty or so lines, the writer returned to the feud between Brothers Philip and Barnabas until breaking off mid-sentence and leaving the rest of the page blank. What had happened to make him stop writing so abruptly it was impossible to say with any certainty after a century and a half; but if I was forced to hazard a guess it would be that someone had snatched the paper from him to stuff into the abbot’s secret hiding place, along with pages torn from the account books. He had probably protested violently, but if his fellow monks suspected that he wrote about them in his diary, someone must have borne him a grudge and taken malicious pleasure in frustrating him.

But that was just idle speculation and not the riddle that was teasing me. I stared down at the black lettering thoughtfully. The longer I considered the problem, the more I felt convinced that whatever our thief had stolen tonight, whatever it was that had lain concealed in the hiding place for so long, had been brought by the strangers that night a hundred and fifty-odd years ago. It had been hidden for them by the abbot and walled in, the papers then being placed in the remaining space and the tiles of the hearth replaced. Had the strangers intended to return for what they had left? I thought it more than likely, but something had prevented them. Imprisonment? Death? The diarist had spoken of them and their crimes with revulsion, so either was probable if the law had eventually caught up with them and exacted reparation. Their treasure, whatever it was, had lain buried and forgotten as the long progression of years went by and those who had placed it there had died. Indeed, knowledge of the hiding place itself had been lost until its accidental discovery fourteen years earlier.

So far, so good. Exactly why the abbot of the time had agreed, not only to give sanctuary to four criminals for two nights but also to keep their treasure for them was beyond my comprehension, but indisputable. And it was impossible that I should discover the reason now, so there was little point in agonizing over it. What did exercise my mind was the fact that this treasure had suddenly been rediscovered and stolen at the very time that Gilbert Foliot had been talking to the abbot on the subject of its hiding place. Coincidence, one might say. But I have never liked coincidences. All right, so they do happen or, as I have remarked somewhere else in these chronicles, there wouldn’t be a word for them. I still don’t like them.

But if there was a connection between the two events, I had to admit that I had no inkling what it was.

My travelling companions must have found me rather taciturn for the rest of the day, but as I refused to say what was bothering me, they soon shrugged and left me alone with my thoughts. And I can’t say that those did me much good. In fact by evening, with an incipient pain nagging behind my eyes, I was thoroughly sick of the whole subject. So when, next morning, the weather was found to be greatly improved, with a watery sun struggling to show its face between the clouds, and when news was brought that rumours of rebels in the vicinity had yet again proved to be a false alarm, I was as happy as the others to set out for home.

It was my intention to walk back to Gloucester in order to cross the Severn there, and Oliver Tockney said he would accompany me. We both needed to refill our packs, which we could do either from the ships anchored in the town’s docks or from its market. I didn’t say so, but I had another, more cogent, reason for wishing to visit the place, having arrived quite suddenly at the decision to seek out Juliette Gerrish and demand an explanation for her unpardonable conduct earlier in the year.

Gilbert Foliot, Lawyer Heathersett and Master Callowhill would follow the same route, but on horseback and would no doubt be home in Bristol some days ahead of us.

‘The horse ferry won’t be running after all this rain,’ Gilbert Foliot wisely remarked, ‘so, my friends, we have no choice but to retrace our steps and cross the Severn higher up.’ He smiled graciously at me across the table in the lay brothers’ refectory, where we were having breakfast. ‘I’m sorry I can’t offer to take you up behind me, Master Chapman, but you and your pack together are too weighty, I’m afraid.’

I inclined my head with a graciousness equal to his own. ‘I thank you for the thought, Master Foliot, but I should prefer to walk. I’m used to it and, like Master Tockney, I’m not easy on horseback. He and I have kept one another company from Hereford. We shall do so still.’

He had the decency to look uncomfortable, knowing full well that he preferred to overlook Oliver’s presence as much as possible. (As, indeed, he would have overlooked mine had he not had this erroneous idea that I was some sort of spy for the king.)

We were just finishing our meal and preparing to return to the infirmary in order to gather our belongings together, when the abbot entered to wish us all a safe journey and give us his blessing.

‘You may travel safely,’ he announced. ‘I have it on good authority’ — people always have it on good authority but never tell you exactly how good that authority really is — ‘that the roads this side of Severn are clear of rebels. Presumably they have gone to join up with their fellow insurgents in the south and west. The last rumour concerning the royal forces is that the king is moving south and is probably at Coventry by now. So-’

He was interrupted by one of the lay brothers rushing in, obviously in a state of suppressed excitement. ‘Father!’ he gasped. ‘Come quickly!’

The abbot frowned, annoyed. ‘What is it?’ he snapped.

The man flapped an ineffective hand. ‘A — a body! Washed up on the river bank! A young man!’

The goldsmith and I exchanged startled glances, sharing the same thought. The same certainty. Then, in the wake of the lay brother and with the others following, we both made a dash for the refectory door.

‘This way!’ the layman panted, urging us on across the soggy, rain-soaked ground.

A few rays of sun were filtering through the clouds to glimmer palely on wet grass and gleam corpse-like on the surface of the river. A flock of birds rose suddenly in a ragged line, screaming and cawing against the darker shapes of the surrounding hills. Crouched around something lying at the water’s edge were several of the brothers, their white habits looking a dirty grey in the early morning light.

Gilbert Foliot and I reached them first, unceremoniously pushing our way between them to stare down at the ashen-faced body at their feet. The lad had been young, not more than about eighteen, I reckoned, with a snub nose in a roundish, freckled face and hair, now plastered tightly to his scalp, that was probably sandy-coloured when dry. Caught among the reeds, standing sentinel along the bank, was his travelling satchel and cloak. In his headlong flight to escape last night, he had fallen into the river and drowned.

I stared at the smooth, beardless young face, the eyes now closed in death. The features were vaguely familiar, and I realized that I had seen them at some time or another around the Bristol streets.

I turned to Gilbert Foliot, who was looking as pale as the corpse. ‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

‘I should do,’ he answered in a shaking voice. ‘It’s Peter Noakes, the young ne’er-do-well who’s been courting my daughter.’