The Wicked Winter

Chapter Nineteen

Fulk Disney continued, 'He has been searching for you for the past hour or more, but you seem to have been in hiding.'

'I've passed through the house on at least two occasions,' I answered, 'and made no attempt at concealment. If the friar had cared to bestir himself and leave the warmth of the kitchen fire, he might have found me easily enough. What is his message'?'

'That he has gone to the Saxon tower and wishes you to join him there with all speed.'

My heart gave a great lurch in my chest, but I managed to ask calmly, 'Did he offer any reason for his visit?'

Fulk's eyes were little slits of curiosity in his pallid face. 'When I inquired why he was going to the tower, he refused to tell me, mumbling something to the effect that you would understand.' He cocked his head to one side. 'Do you, Chapman? Do you understand?'

'Perhaps,' was my guarded reply, and I made to push past him.

Fulk barred my way. 'Not so fast. You and that friar have been poking your noses in where they're not wanted for the past two days, and now I hear from Martha Grindcobb that you think Lady Cederwell didn't die an accidental death.' He lowered his voice to an envenomed hiss. 'Get out of here, Chapman! Go at once, today! Don't wait for tomorrow, or you may live to regret it.'

I said quietly, Are you threatening me, Master Disney.

As always, that flicked him on the raw. 'D'lsigny. How many times do I have to tell you?' Then he recollected that there were more pressing matters in hand. 'Leave Cederwell this afternoon! And take that hedge priest with you!'

'What's going on here?' demanded Maurice Cederwell, as he emerged from the passage leading to the great hall and came towards us.

'Master Disney has ordered me to quit the manor immediately,' I said. 'But I take my marching orders only from Sir Hugh. Perhaps you will explain that to your friend.' I saw Maurice's eyelids flicker and he looked at me intently before switching his attention to Fulk. His arm jerked involuntarily, as if he longed to reach out and touch the other man, but he forced himself to refrain.

'What is the argument between you'?' he asked. 'Fulk? What is your quarrel with the chapman?'

Fulk said nothing for a moment, then shrugged. 'Only that he and Brother Simeon have been here too long. It's high time they departed, and the snow is melting sufficiently for them to go at once.'

Maurice's eyes swivelled round to fix themselves on my face. Then he said slowly, 'That is for my father to decide. He will not tolerate anyone else giving the orders. He is master here and we must accept it.'

'Then speak to him on the subject,' Fulk demanded peremptorily. 'Tell him that these two, the pedlar and the friar, are troublemakers. They know too much, and the sooner we are shot of them the better.'

'How dare you speak to me like that!' Maurice protested feebly, and solely, I suspected, for my benefit. He sent a warning glance in his friend's direction. Nevertheless, Fulk's last words had frightened him. 'My father's in the solar. I'll … I'll go and see what can be done.'

'You'll probably find Mistress Lynom with him. He won't thank you for being disturbed,' I advised his departing back, but he took no notice and hurried up the stairs. I turned to Fulk. 'Well, I must find Brother Simeon.'

But he had grown uneasy and moreover his curiosity remained unsatisfied. 'You stay here,' he spat, and again tried to prevent me from passing.

I sighed. I had not wanted to pit my strength against his, for there was no doubt as to the outcome, but his actions left me no choice. Before he had time to realise what was happening, I had picked him up bodily, swung him around and placed him behind me. Then I walked rapidly towards the back door. Fulk let out an infuriated howl and began to run after me, but I turned about and held up my fists.

'Let me be,' I warned, 'unless you want a bloody nose.' To his credit, my threat did not immediately deter him and he advanced several more paces before deciding that the game was not worth the candle.

'I know where you're going,' he shouted. 'I know where to find you and the friar. Don't forget that! Maurice and I will be after you as soon as Sir Hugh gives his permission to speed you hence.'

I smiled. 'I shall look forward to your company,' I promised, and meant it.

I went into the kitchen and picked up my cloak from the comer where I had dropped it, along with my cudgel and pack.

'The wanderer returns,' Martha commented sourly. 'You and that friar are like a couple of fleas on a griddle. Why can't you both sit still and give us the pleasure of your company while we're working, eh girls? Strangers here are a rare treat at any time of the year, but in the depths of winter..' She did not finish her sentence, leaving the rest of it to my imagination, but went on, 'Brother Simeon has gone to the tower and said that, if we saw you, we were to tell you to follow him.'

'I know. He left a similar message with Fulk Disney. Did he…? Did the friar happen to mention why he needed my presence there?'

The cook shook her head and began looking for something on her kitchen table, moving basins and pans, spoons and ladles in growing irritation.

'Not a word. He suddenly got the fidgets and went searching for you. When you were not to be found, he grew even more restless and said he was going to the tower. He charged us most earnestly to ask you to join him there as soon as we saw you again… Which of you hussies has taken my meat knife…? It sounds important,' she concluded, 'if he also told Fulk.'

Once more my stomach muscles knotted together in excitement. Or was it fear, because I knew that the summons from Friar Simeon meant that this particular mystery was nearing its solution? I put my cloak around my shoulders and stooped for my cudgel, but it was no longer there.

'Brother Simeon took it,' Jenny Tonge volunteered, noting my puzzled frown and guessing its reason. 'He said you wouldn't mind, and that as the snow is still deep in places, it would help keep him on his feet.'

'Ye-es,' I answered slowly, 'I suppose it might. And youth must give way to infirmity.'

'He's not that old,' Martha said tartly, the colour mounting her cheeks. Obviously, at some time, she had discovered the friar's age to be less than her own. But I had no inclination to tease her on the subject as I might have done, a day or so earlier. I had too much else to think about. I fastened my cloak at the throat and went out into the winter's aftemoon.

Sunshine still lit the scene and promised that the better weather was indeed here to stay, for a while at least. As I left the manor behind me, a gull swooped low over the estuary, heading for the open sea, and I noticed that the swineherd had turned his pigs loose again to rootle among the debris washed up along the water's edge; both signs that life was gradually regaining its customary rhythm after being brought almost to a standstill for the past two days. The Saxon tower rose up before me, clear and sharply outlined against the bright blue sky. There was something sinister about it, and I thought of that Eadred Eadrichsson who had been dispossessed of his home and land by Sir Guy de Sourdeval after this country's conquest by the Normans. Had he put a curse on the place before he departed? Maybe.

As I approached, I could see that the door to the tower was standing ajar. Brother Simeon was waiting for me, and my heart began to pound uneasily. The evening before yesterevening — was it only such a short time ago? It seemed much longer — it was the friar who had fearlessly pushed wide the door. Now it was my turn. I flung it open and went inside.

The silence engulfed me. Only the soughing of the wind, as it searched out cracks and crannies between the ancient stones, disturbed the quiet. I paused, straining my ears for the slightest sound. Surely Brother Simeon must have been watching out for me, marking my progress along the snowy path which led from the gate in the manor wall, relieved that I had come at last and that the waiting was over. But why then did he not make his presence known?

I called out, 'Brother Simeon!' but my voice echoed hollowly up the empty stairs. Foolishly, I released my fingerhold on the edge of the door and advanced a step or two within the lower room. Immediately, the door slammed shut behind me, and before I could gather my wits sufficiently to avoid it altogether, my own cudgel, aimed for the back of my head, missed its target by inches and landed full across my shoulders. I staggered forward several paces, my hands reaching for the small table which supported candlestick and tinder-box, and brought it crashing to the floor beneath my weight. Although momentarily dazed by my fall, a sense of danger sharpened my instinct for survival, and I rolled clear of the stick's second murderous descent just in time. Almost without knowing what I was doing, I scrambled to my feet and turned to face my assailant. Brother Simeon, cursing volubly, wrenched the cudgel free from the splintered shards of wood and raised it for a third attempt on my life.

As it whistled towards me, I managed to catch the free end and hung on to it grimly, shaken to and fro like a straw man at a harvest gathering. I had not believed it possible that the friar possessed so much strength, and perhaps in normal circumstances he did not. But he was fighting for his survival and to prevent me from telling what I guessed. He had watched me, for the past two days, edging closer and closer to the truth, and now intended to silence me for ever, just as he had silenced Lady Cederwell, Gerard Empryngham and Ulnoth.

His eyes were full of hatred as we tried to wrest the stick from one another, and then, by a stroke of ill-fortune, I stumbled and was forced to release my hold in order to keep my balance. With a snarl of triumph, Brother Simeon attempted to lift the cudgel yet again, but during the struggle his hands had slipped too far back along the shaft to make such an action possible without first readjusting his grip. In the second or so's grace which this gave me, I leapt for the stairs and bounded up them two and three at a time.

l did not stop to consider the futility of what I was doing, but was impelled by the simple need of the pursued to elude its pursuer. The friar was between me and the tower's only door, so the stairs offered the sole means of escape. But I was also heading into a trap from which nothing but my superior strength could deliver me. Brother Simeon, however, had one great advantage: he had the murderer's instinct to kill, which had been honed, rather than blunted, by his recent activities. With three deaths already on his conscience, he would not hesitate to add a fourth. And he had already tried to kill me once when he, not Fulk, had pushed me from the stairs.

As I reached the first-storey room, I heard him blundering after me, the cudgel rattling against the edges of the steps as he dragged it with him. Once it sounded as if he tripped, probably over the hem of his habit, and he let rip with a string of oaths which would not have shamed a waterman. But he was on his feet again in less time than it takes to tell, and his head appeared clear of the stairwell. I glanced desperately around me only to confirm what I already knew; that there was no hiding place, and nothing in the way of a weapon.

Brother Simeon paused, baring his teeth in an unpleasant grin.

'I'll get you, Chapman. You can't escape. I'm going to have to kill you, you know that, don't you? I'm really very sorry because I've enjoyed your company, but I think you've guessed the truth about me. You're a clever lad, and you would persist in asking questions. And even if you haven't quite managed yet to piece everything together, I shall be forced to dispose of you anyway, now that I've shown my hand.' He sighed gustily and proceeded up the remaining few stairs.

I climbed the second flight of steps to the chapel.

Somewhere below me I heard him laugh, a soft whinny of mirth that rose to a great neigh of joyous pleasure as he contemplated the deed before him. The scales of his poor, fired mind had finally tipped him over into madness, and that madness would imbue him with even greater strength than he had shown hitherto. The Devil now had possession of Simeon and would fight on his behalf.

In two strides, I was across the room and trying to lift the ebony crucifix down from the wall, but its weight defeated me. I cast a frantic glance around and my eyes lit on the silver candlesticks gracing Lady Cederwell's altar. I seized one in either hand, intending to use them as weapons with which to defend myself; but, at the sight of Brother Simeon as he mounted the last few stairs, I held them before me in the shape of a cross in order to ward off evil. For his expression, no longer recognisable, was that of some monstrous gargoyle, leering at me and rejoicing in his wickedness. The eyes in the parchment-coloured face were devoid of all humanity and burned only with the lust to kill.

He had dropped my cudgel somewhere on the stairs — the clatter I had heard, but barely registered until now, as it rolled off the steps into the room below — and had drawn from the breast of his habit Martha's missing black-handled, long-bladed knife, which she used for slicing meat. He advanced towards me, arm raised, gripping it like a dagger, but suddenly he faltered as his gaze came to rest on my makeshift cross. The custom of years, those years since he had first assumed, and then absorbed, the character of Brother Simeon, conquered, if only temporarily, the devil which had him in thrall. He took a deep, shuddering breath and lowered his arm a little, but without slackening his hold on the haft of the knife.

Carefully, without turning my head to look behind me, I moved a couple of paces to my rear until my back was against the wall and my head on a level with the transverse bar of the crucifix. Out of the comer of one eye, I could see the white, contorted legs of the ivory Christ, with the nail driven cruelly through the arches of the feet, and I edged a step or two sideways, forcing the man in front of me to gaze upon the agony of his Lord and Maker each time he looked in my direction. I still held the candlesticks in their cruciform shape, but was ready, at any second, to use them in my defence.

'Raymond,' I said gently. 'Raymond Shepherd, listen to me! Put down that knife. It can do you no good to kill me.

Martha, the girls, Fulk Disney, Maurice Cederwell all know that I've come to meet you here. You yourself foolishly saw to that. A fourth death, even if you could make it seem like yet another accident, would be too suspicious to be accepted by Sir Hugh'.

I had made a mistake, however, in addressing him by his proper name, for he had listened to nothing I had said after that. The eyes had clouded over, the face gone blank.

'I am Brother Simeon,' he answered coldly, drawing himself up to his full, imposing height. 'A friar of the Dominican Order'.

'No,' I replied, keeping my voice as quiet and as reasonable as possible.'Brother Simeon was the man you met up with while you were running away after raping your master's daughter; a man of much the same age and build as yourself. You killed him, dressed him in your clothes, mutilated the body and crushed the head until it was uurecognisable, making his death look like the work of outlaws. You then donned his habit, shaved the crown of your head and took his place. But you took more than that. Over the years you began to assume his character. You came to believe that you were indeed Brother Simeon from Northumbria, although you must have been careful never to return to your parent House. But there was no need. You were doing good work here, in the south. You were bringing souls back into a state of grace and you loved your work. You must have discovered, almost from the first, that you had a talent for preaching, something you had never suspected in yourself until circumstances forced you to it. A simple shepherd, of no account for all of his life until then, was suddenly transformed into a person who was listened to and looked up to with awe and reverence. But one unlucky day you were summoned to Cederwell Manor by Lady Cederwell.. who turned out to be that unfortunate Jeanette Empryngham despoiled by you all those years before. If she hadn't recognised you, it would have been all right. But she did recognise you, as did her half-brother, Gerard. They had to be silenced or you would lose everything.'

Brother Simeon — for in spite of all I had said, I could not, and cannot to this day, think of him by any other name curled his lip. He had listened to me with surprising patience, but now made an angry gesture which commanded my attention: it was his turn to speak. His mood had changed yet again and he was for the moment calm, his eyes as blank as pebbles, soulless, without feeling, showing not even the faintest glimmer of remorse. His grip on the knife was as relentless as ever.

'I did not kill the friar;' he said. 'He died in his sleep, that night we spent together in the barn between Campden and Mickleton. God sent him to me in the last stages of exhaustion, to be my salvation. God had need of me. It was all a part of His plan.'

'What about the rape of Jeanette Empryngham?' I asked, trying to keep my voice as level and emotionless as his.

'That, too,' Simeon answered. 'Over the years, I have come to realise that it was also a part of God's plan.'

'How —?' I was beginning hotly, but at my change of tone his head reared up and I hurriedly lowered my voice. 'How can you say that?'

'She was a harlot. She deserved what she got, roaming around her father's fields with never a maid to accompany her, often barefoot, her skirts tucked into her girdle, and all the time pretending to be so pious. She was a whited sepulchre,' he hissed, 'and when God put it into my head to defile her in order to free me from my lowly position, He chose an unworthy vessel for His purpose.'

I wondered how long this madness had lain dormant within him. Probably for many years. A steadily increasing belief in his mission to save souls had demanded self-justification for what had happened. So when he thought of the past at all, when, with greater and greater infrequency, he remembered that he was really Raymond Shepherd and not Brother Simeon, he had created his own version of events to cover all the facts, and then buried it deep inside his mind.

And now, when at last it was needed, he was able to dredge it up into the light of day. But the rankness of its smell had turned his brain.

Trying to imbue him with a sense of guilt was useless. I was wasting my breath. Nor was he any longer possessed by a sense of self-preservation. He believed that he could kill me with impunity and still walk free; free of suspicion and of the consequences of his crimes, because he was incapable of reason. Any moment now his present, precarious calm would desert him and he would return to the attack.

Hard upon the thought, I saw his expression alter; the spark of insanity was rekindled in his eyes, and his docile, almost friendly smile was replaced by a wolfish grin. Neither the crucifix nor my candlestick cross could offer me any further protection. His fingers tightened around the handle of the knife and he seemed to grow in stature until I had the oddest impression that his head was touching the ceiling.

He was between me and the final short flight of stairs which led to the tower's look-out platform, and I could not have reached them even had I wished to try. But my feet seemed to be rooted to the spot where I was standing. My arms felt as heavy as lead and the silver candlesticks had doubled in weight, dragging my hands down to hang at my sides.

I have never, either before or since, felt the presence of pure evil as potently as I did that day, nor have I ever been so transfixed with terror. I was young, I was very tall and strong. I should have been able to overpower Simeon, even armed as he was, without too much difficulty. But I watched him advance towards me and could do nothing to protect myself.

Far away, as in a dream, I heard a door open and shut, the slap of leather-shod feet against the stone treads of the stairs, the sound of raised voices. But the noises meant little to me; they did not whisper the word 'salvation'. I watched the knife rise higher and higher above my head, gleaming in a shaft of light from one of the window slits, and then begin its slow descent. Behind it, Simeon's face spread wide to fill my vision, and all the while, the constriction in my chest grew ever tighter until I could scarcely breathe…

And then, suddenly, Simeon was not there any more. He was on the floor, a sorry heap of emaciated flesh and bones clad in a rusty black habit, while Fulk Disney and Maurice Cederwell sat on him, pinning him to the ground, encouraged from the top of the stairs by Sir Hugh himself. The knife had fallen from his grasp a few inches from me, and a horrible whimpering, like a wounded animal, issued from his bloodied mouth.

'Chapman, are you all right? Are you injured?' demanded Sir Hugh, and a moment later his arm was supporting my waist, urging me away from the wall and lowering me as best he could to sit on the unpadded rail of Lady Cederwell's prie-dieu.

For a second or two, the attention of Maurice and Fulk was distracted from their prisoner, and the former had half risen from his knees to help his father. It was enough for the friar who, with more than human strength, rolled clear of their restraining hands, heaved himself to his feet and made for the stairs which led to the look-out platform. There was a brief, stupefied silence before we all went scrambling after him in a concerted rush which hampered our ascent, as we all tried to squeeze past one another, becoming wedged together in the process. And when we finally emerged on to the roof of the tower, we were just in time to see Brother Simeon climb on to the snowy parapet.

He gave one last desperate glance over his shoulder and then, with a scream which would have opened graves, hurled himself over the edge, to his death.