Wine of Violence

Chapter Seventeen

Ralf the Crowner had been the first to leave, shaking his head with frustration over this additional complication and at the unexpectedly slow pace of his investigation into Brother Rupert’s murder. As he marched down the length of the hospital, he had muttered curses at himself, and the young lay sister accompanying him must surely have blushed at some of the things she overheard.

Soon after, Anne returned to her treatment of the earthly pains of mortal bodies while Sister Christina soothed whatever ailed the trembling souls of those seeking to be healed at Tyndal. Thomas was left under strict orders to do nothing more strenuous than wander in the safety of the monks’ cloister gardens.

Eleanor went back to her chambers and was grateful to be alone at last. Picking up the orange cat, she sat staring at the tapestry of Mary Magdalene with Jesus.

“I am furious with myself,” she muttered. “I was harsh to the wounded brother, not because of his lies, although I might have had the right in that, but out of fear of my own frailty. In that, I was wrong.” Tears stung her eyes. To keep herself from one sin, she had committed another. Indeed, she had longed to reach out to soothe his pain with gentle caress, not only to comfort him but also to satisfy her own hunger to touch him.

The previous night she had slept little, and, when she had, the dreams were so violent she had awakened, sweating in terror. Some of her night horrors were about Thomas. The attack on him had frightened her, and not beyond reason, but it were not the sole cause.

“There is a brutal and twisted wickedness loose, not just in the world outside Tyndal’s walls but, I fear, within the priory itself,” she said aloud, looking down at the contented bundle of fur on her lap. “Evil in some form has invaded this house dedicated to peace and to God.”

And that house was her house. Ultimately, it was her responsibility to protect everyone within these walls, and she was failing.

“Against my better judgement, I have allowed myself the same easy comfort I have encouraged amongst the brothers and sisters here. For cert, I may hope Brother Rupert’s murder was a chance thing and the murderer some common outlaw, but for the safety of us all, I may not assume it.”

She shifted. Arthur, the cat, looked up at her and expressed a mild complaint. “Hush, sweet one. I have recovered my wits.” She smiled as he resettled in her lap. “When I awoke from my nightmares in the harsh green moonlight of the midnight hour, a manly reason did prevail over my weaker self.”

Eleanor looked away from the tapestry and toward the window that looked down on the priory grounds. “No purposeless killer would drag a body, not only into the outer court of the priory grounds but further into the walled nuns’ quarters. That had to have been a deliberate act, meant to send a specific message, and thus most likely the murderer has a close connection with Tyndal.”

Was the slayer a monk? Was he a lay brother? Could it have even been a woman? Perhaps one of the village people who used the mill or had other commerce with the priory and knew their habits well? The idea that any religious would do such a thing to another was not beyond her comprehension, but she prayed it would not be so. Besides, what could an old man like Brother Rupert do to anyone in this priory, or what would he know, for that matter, that would make that person choose murder to quiet him? A murder, moreover, committed in such a horrible way? There were few sins so abhorrent that confession would not remove both the shame and the sin. Monks knew that best of all. Or should. Surely the killer was from outside the priory, perhaps the village. Surely from the village.

“Then there is the attack on Brother Thomas,” she said, rubbing the cat’s forehead. “The crowner suggested that the killer of one monk might be the attacker of yet another. Thus the reasons for the more heinous crime become twisted and complex. No, this is no easily caught, ordinary malefactor. This is someone with the cleverness of Satan himself.” She hesitated. “However, even the Prince of Darkness did not escape punishment for his defiance of God’s supremacy. Neither will the killer of Brother Rupert,” she said emphatically. Like her nuns and monks, she, too, had to believe that God would render justice, whatever form it might take. To believe otherwise was heresy. And madness.

“The crowner continues to be thwarted by lack of evidence, however, and Brother Thomas is still not telling the truth.” She had no good reason for thinking the latter, none that any man would find reasonable, but her instincts knew well what those little twitches in his face meant after his long pause and the quick glance to the side before he began his new tale. Some of his most recent story might be true. He had been found in a clearing near where the large stream ran toward the priory, and most certainly he had been struck from behind.

“Nay, I do not believe his tale of the need for a walk any more than the call of nature story, but for whatever reason he left the priory, he must have seen something he wasn’t meant to see. Did he accidentally walk to a place he shouldn’t have been, at a time he shouldn’t have been there? Could the reason he left the priory grounds be related to why he was attacked? In that case, who or what was he protecting?” She shook her head in puzzlement. Surely a man so new to Tyndal could not have formed such strong bonds of loyalty so soon with anyone.

“Perhaps he strayed into something similar to what Brother Rupert encountered? Not quite the same thing or he would have been killed, of course, but near enough to merit a warning?” Eleanor mused aloud as she looked down at the curled creature now sleeping in her lap. “He was struck in a clearing in the forest at night. Might he have ventured too near the meeting place of evil spirits?” She rubbed her weary eyes. Although she had no doubt that evil spirits existed and often lurked at night, she had never personally known any that did not come in a very earthly form. No, if Thomas had trespassed on land claimed by agents of evil, they were human ones.

She stood up and gently lowered the cat to the ground. Arthur had left a fine layer of orange hair on the skirt of her habit. Briefly, she brushed at it. What little she dislodged floated down and reattached to her hem.

“Well, my good friend, it seems I must carry some of you with me as long as my gown lasts! Perhaps it will keep me warmer come winter and I shall be most grateful.”

The cat sat at her feet, rumbling softly, his green eyes round and his gaze intense.

Eleanor reached down and scratched him behind the ears. “It is time for you to go to work in the kitchen, fine sir. And it is time for me to take a walk, in the manner of our good Brother Thomas, to see what lies outside our priory.”

***

It was a warm day, mellow as late summer days could be, a day that lulled mortals into forgetting the sharp sleet and chill sea winds which came with punishing force as the life-giving seasons slipped into the long months of damp gloom. As she walked into the grove to the clearing where Thomas had been found, Eleanor thought about the dark time ahead and could understand why her pagan ancestors had woven such vivid and often cruel tales to explain the changing of the seasons. It was easy enough to see how they could interpret the end of spring and the harvest season as a time of cruel devastation, hopelessness and, aye, even murder. What amazed her was their ability to rebound and find hope in the renewal of life long before they had ever heard of Christianity. Giving His man creature such resilience of spirit, even in the benighted days, spoke volumes about God’s love. The thought gave her comfort as she walked through the trees where a man of violence had stalked not so very long ago. Such love would surely bring this person to justice in some way and soon.

Eleanor caught herself wanting to talk to her aunt about all that had happened; then she felt a quick pain. “Now it is up to me to answer my own questions, is it not?” she asked aloud in a quiet voice. “And it is certainly up to me to keep my mind to the mark and my eyes open for whatever there is to find,” she added as she walked into the clearing.

The birds twittered as they flew in search of insects. The insects hummed as they went about their business in spite of the birds. And Eleanor stood with her hands tucked into her sleeves, looking about her.

The clearing looked innocent enough in the daylight. There were no signs of midnight fires or foul, rotting holes from which Satan’s creatures might have burst forth upon the earth during the night. No, the evil that had skulked here so recently had had a mortal form.

Yet the crowner and his men still found nothing. If Lucifer’s most monstrous deeds had been imperfect, and he had been one of God’s highest-ranking angels, then surely no mortal man could commit a crime without leaving behind evidence of some kind. There must be something…

Eleanor turned slowly around. What might the crowner and his men have failed to notice? They were, after all, men. She smiled with both love and gentle amusement. The image of her solemn-faced but sweetly earnest brother Hugh came to mind. A warrior in the mold of his hero, King Richard, Hugh could always see where a castle’s defense was weakest, but he would then trip over a sharp stone on the way to scale it.

The eyes of most men are more used to looking at the grander plans of intrigue and battle, she thought, and, in so doing, they often miss some small thing, perchance a commonplace thing that an eye impatient with tiny detail would pass over. A woman’s eye might be more useful here, an eye trained to the domestic and the mundane, and therefore more likely to note a simple object out of place. Indeed her own training had hardly been domestic, but, in learning to joust with the finer points of philosophers’ arguments and in the minute study of her mortal fellows, she had found great pleasure in details of a sort. Hers was still a woman’s mind trained to minutiae, she argued to herself, albeit somewhat different concerns than occupied most of her gentle sex.

As she walked passed the place, she looked down and saw the bloodstains in the grass where Thomas had lain. She recoiled slightly. Her feelings for him were still too tender and uncontrolled. Then she pressed her hand flat against her chest as if binding her heart with a bandage and walked away, up the slight hill toward the trees and the rushing sound of the nearby stream.

***

The brook was pretty in this season, the bubbling water flashing bursts of light where it flowed into the sun. After a storm, the stream might become a dangerous torrent, but now the water was low, although running swiftly. As it entered the priory grounds, it served to give Tyndal fresh fish and clean water for watering gardens, bathing, washing, and making ale, although few drank the water, knowing how dangerous it could be to their health. As it left the priory, it washed away the refuse from the latrines, and the kitchens, and carried all into the sea. Truly one of many gifts from God, Eleanor thought, as she started down the slope toward the banks.

Her foot slipped in the moist brown earth of the embankment, and she caught herself by grabbing an exposed tree root. A reminder that she was doing something she shouldn’t, perhaps? Of course, she should not be here alone. Even a prioress was required to have proper and prudent companionship wherever she went.

“Indeed, that is true, but I am still too new at Tyndal to know whom I can fully trust and whom I cannot,” she sighed. With a murderer possibly in their midst, she felt safer by herself than with someone who might be of danger to her, especially as she wandered around, looking for something to uncover that very culprit. Even the seemingly open and pragmatic Sister Anne had shadowy corners in her soul, although Eleanor felt increasing comfort in the company of the nun.

“No, I am safer alone,” she said aloud to nothing in particular.

As she walked along the edge of the stream, she knew she hadn’t the vaguest idea what she was looking for. She stopped and glanced around, in part to mark her path back to the priory and in part to look for something out of the ordinary.

The ground was rocky near the stream. No footprints surely.

As she looked up at the high banks, she imagined this charming little stream as it turned into a raging river and gouged this deep channel into the earth. Indeed, several of the trees, not just the one at her descent, extended tangled and naked roots into the space above her head. She would have to check whether the stream’s course through the priory was sufficiently constrained when she got back.

With her mind distracted and her gaze turned upward, Eleanor stumbled and fell on the uneven, rocky ground. She cried out when her ankle turned and her hands scraped against the gravelly surface as she broke her fall. For just a moment, she shut her eyes tight against the sharpness of the pain; then she twisted herself around into a sitting position and concentrated on feeling her throbbing ankle.

“Not broken,” she said with relief and considerable gratitude. It would be difficult enough to get back to the priory by herself with a sprain, let alone with a cracked or shattered bone.

She looked around for a broken branch close by that would be sturdy enough to support her. Nearer to the bank, there were a couple of promising limbs. She half-crawled, half-pulled herself toward the branches.

The first one was rotten and broke in half as soon as she put pressure on it; however, the second held, and she began to pull herself up. As she did, an intermittent breeze rose and fell, and she noticed the movement of something against the bank.

She eased herself back into a sitting position. Close against the bank lay a huge boulder, over which a netting of roots lay, attached to a large tree. The tree sat precariously balanced between rock and bank, some of its roots still bound deep into the earth. From one of the largest roots a woven grass mat hung down between rock and cliff. One edge of the mat was weighed down with a heavy stone, but the other, the one that moved in the breeze, had lost its weight.

Eleanor once again pulled herself up with her strong branch, and, grabbing the broken one as she did so, limped closer. The breeze moved the matting again. Behind it, there seemed to be a small gap.

“Is anyone there?” she asked.

Silence.

Cautiously, she extended the point of the broken branch and pushed the mat aside.

No one was there.

She pulled the mat away. It covered a narrow entrance between rock and bank to a cave, presumably gouged out by the stream and deep enough to provide shelter for two or three people. Had the boulder not been there to brace it, she thought, looking up at the huge trunk above her head, the tree would have fallen and the remaining roots would have ripped away the roof of the small cave, destroying the shelter entirely.

As she looked further into the enclosure, she could see marks in the walls where nature’s results had been deliberately enlarged. There was no sign of a fire or utensils for cooking, but there was a narrow, raised, and sturdy wooden bed frame with a clean straw mat and some pegs jammed into the earthen wall. Over one peg was hung what appeared to be a small whip.

Eleanor hopped awkwardly up to the peg and looked with care at the object in the dim light. There was no question that it was a crude whip made of twigs bundled together. It was darkly stained. Was this blood?

“Whatever is this all for?” she asked quietly as she fingered the stiff switches and looked around the small space.

She shuddered, then spoke aloud to calm herself with the sound of a human voice. “This is something for the crowner to look at, not me. And, methinks, I would be wise to leave!”

She pushed the mat aside and hobbled into the feathered sunlight, but the shadows playing on the sparkling water were no longer beautiful and the utter silence of the birds was ominous.

Eleanor looked around quickly. There was no one and nothing to be seen. Bracing herself with her makeshift crutch, she bent and replaced the rock that had held the mat down. With the mat securely anchored and pushed into the shadows of the narrow opening, she realized that the cave entrance was barely visible.

As she straightened, adjusting the branch to support her weight, she heard a rustling sound just above her and looked up.

Standing on the bank above her, a bearded and unkempt man stared at her for what seemed a very long time, a knife glinting in his hand. His left hand, Eleanor observed with the icy precision of fear.

Then he turned and ran. Eleanor stood frozen in place until the sound of his escape, crashing through the brush, had faded into the sound of the stream flowing beside her.

And in that instant, she understood what it meant to meet Death face to face.