The Dragon of Handale (11 page)

She thought of King Richard. His attempts to rouse an army in his own defence. And the dukes, his uncles, determined to stop him.

Back to Fulke.
The strong man is bound so that his lands may be plundered.
Why had he chosen that psalm in particular?

The weedy-looking priest lifted the chalice above his head so that everyone could witness the miracle. Hildegard waited for something to happen. Nothing did. Not then. The priest lowered the chalice and took a sip. His eyes widened.

He glanced up towards the cruck-beamed roof.

Something had alarmed him.

Then his face twisted into a grimace.

He bent double.

One hand stretched forward, the chalice tipped from his grasp, and the consecrated wine spilled in a bloody flow over the altar cloth. He lurched and fell with a terrible shriek.

For a moment, he writhed in pain, half-lying across the altar; then he gave another convulsion and slowly slipped to the floor, dragging the embroidered cloth with him.

Everyone gaped in silence. Then the cellarer staggered forward. She fell to her knees beside the priest and lifted his head, let it loll in her lap. She pushed up his eyelids, sniffed his breath. She opened his mouth and pulled out his tongue. A horrified glance upwards as the prioress loomed from her chair.

Gripping onto the wooden arms, she bent forward. “Dead?” Her tone was aghast.

The cellarer nodded. “So it seems.” She got up from beside the inert body of the priest and reached for the chalice. Nothing remained in it, its contents now seeping into the altar cloth like blood. Worse than blood. It was plain what she suspected.

Hildegard stepped forward. But the priest was clearly dead. She could do nothing by revealing her own small knowledge of such matters. No antidote would restore him. She stepped back.

She watched to see what Master Fulke would do. He was standing in a bull-like pose, his face reddening, his fists bunched. His glance flickered over the circle of faces staring from under their black cowls. He turned towards the prioress. Moved like a man in a nightmare towards her.

“Come away, my lady. The shock. Do not upset yourself. Come away to your chamber. Let your nuns deal with this.”

He took her by the arm, ushered her from the scene. They plodded together towards the prioress’s own private door behind the altar. Hildegard slipped after them in time to catch the end of a phrase.

“… today of all days.” Fulke continued: “I must leave at vespers.”

Reassessing her plan to rescue little Alys from Fulke’s clutches, Hildegard decided she could not wait in her chamber for the girl’s knock on the door. If Fulke was leaving while everyone was at prayer, she would have to act now. Suddenly, everything had changed.

C
HAPTER
10

“There are nettles hereabouts. We must get some boots for you. Maybe the masons will have a spare pair.”

“I have some pattens.”

“No time to fetch them now. We must hurry.”

“They said tomorrow. They told me he was coming for me tomorrow. Why has he come now? What was wrong with the priest? I don’t understand.”

Hildegard had rushed the girl from out of the back of the church while everyone else was milling round the body. She hurried her across the garth just as Fulke and two henchmen appeared outside the door to the prioress’s chamber. When someone called to him from inside, it enabled Hildegard and Alys to get away before he saw them.

Her plans had gone awry. The hunt had started sooner than she’d expected. As soon as the girl’s absence was noticed, the nuns were encouraged to ransack the priory in an attempt to find her.

Luckily, the ones on vigil at the mortuary had gone to see what the commotion was about. Like two wraiths, Hildegard and Alys fled to the door in the wall and pushed through. The lodge lay in silence.

“Dakin!”

Under the wide eaves, a half-finished gargoyle leered at them from its stone block. It was a grey afternoon already drawing to its wintry close. At her call, a light flared within.

“Who is it?” Dakin, knife in hand, stumbled from the shadowed depths of the lodge.

“We are in great danger, Dakin. I beg you, help me. I would have asked you, begged your help before now, but was unable to approach earlier without being seen—”

“Come in.” He ushered her inside, then gave a hiss of astonishment when he saw the novice. “Should she be out of her enclosure?”

“Her prison, you mean.” Hurriedly, she explained about Fulke’s unexpectedly early arrival and the death of the priest. “And now at this very moment, they’re searching the precinct for her.”

“Leave her with us. I have a hiding place should they dare to come to us. Go. You can trust us.”

Hildegard played hide-and-seek on her way back to her chamber. The nuns, like hounds searching for a scent, were hallooing back and forth across the garth with little purpose other than to look busy. What alarmed her was what she heard as they swept back and forth. It seemed they had already chosen their culprit without the inconvenience of a trial.

“A poisoner!” she heard. “How could she learn such devilish arts!”

“To think we’ve been harbouring a witch in our midst!”

“They burn witches. And rightly so.”

Praying that Dakin’s hiding place would be as safe as he claimed should the search spread outside the enclosure, Hildegard took off her boots and pretended to be asleep in her bed when they eventually came knocking at her door.

“What?” she asked sleepily.

“The novice, have you seen her?”

A light shone in her eyes.

“Who? What? Which one?”

They opened the aumbry, peered under the bed, knocked on the walls in hope of finding a secret cavity, then left.

She heard them do the same in the empty chamber across the hall. Lights bobbed back and forth in the garth. Eventually, the bell tolled, beckoning them all for the next office. What was it? Blearily, she realised it must be no later than compline. Silence fell.

A little while after this, she heard men’s voices and the sound of footsteps as someone entered the building; next came the clank of a sword, a curse or two, and complaints about being stuck here in a priory all night when there was his woman’s bed waiting for him, followed by some coarseness about nuns.

Two voices.

Fulke’s henchmen. Bedding down for the night in the chamber opposite. So where was Fulke?

At least it meant they were taking a rest from the hunt and Alys was safe for now. Did it mean the search would continue the next day? It looked like it. Maybe it would only cease when they found her. But how long could the masons keep her hidden?

More bells. Hildegard lost count. It was pitch-black outside. She remained sleepless through the hours. Lauds came. She dragged herself out to see what she could glean.

A hurried service, no more than a prayer, a psalm, a hymn. The sacristan, unused to authority, stood in for the priest. Fulke and the prioress were absent.

Sister Mariana came brushing close as she filed out after the others, a hectic flush adding to the swelling wound Hildegard had inflicted, her eyes darting, dilating in terror in the trembling candlelight. Or was it triumph? It could look much the same. Was it possible that in her febrile state of mind she had poisoned the priest for some twisted purpose of her own? It was certainly true someone here must have done it. Her glance rested blankly on Hildegard as she passed.

The rest of the night was furtive with shadows, doors slyly opening and closing on voices echoing from hollow rooms, dawn bringing with it no relief from the passion of the hunt.

Emerging with pretended innocence at prime, Hildegard, a knife now on her belt underneath the townswoman’s shawl, the second cloak pinned, asked, “What was the disturbance last night? People came to my chamber, asking questions. Is the priest really dead? How did it happen?”

Downcast eyes. More singing and garbled prayers. Rain. Daylight slowly seeping inside the enclosure. Like water, greying everything.

The night’s rain will have washed away any trace of our footprints in the mud, she thought as she followed a fluttering group headed by Fulke in his blue cloak as they crossed the grass to the mortuary. He went inside ahead of everybody else.

Four lay sisters came up, staggering under the weight of a stretcher on which lay the body of the priest, shrouded, a rosary twined between his lifeless fingers.

Prioress Basilda was carried in her chair across the wet grass by Fulke’s two roughneck henchmen. A servant ran alongside, holding a waxed canopy above her sacred head.

The thickset lay sister Hildegard had seen guarding the entrance to the kitchens followed with a handful of conversi. More singing round the body in the echoing, windowless house of death.

Then Fulke, poised in the doorway, gazed outside with a wrinkled forehead, trying to work something out.

The cellarer appeared behind him and pointed to the barricade of bushes growing at the foot of the wall. Fulke and his followers swarmed in the direction she pointed out. They found the wall door behind the bushes. When Fulke raised his hand, they came to a stop and milled about like a small pack of hounds.

Hildegard took the opportunity to mingle on the fringes of the group, suspecting that the presence of this door into the dragon-infested wood held something of horror for most of the nuns by now.

Then she went cold.

Fulke was bending forward to peer at something. He reached out and plucked a woollen thread from between the wood of the door and the rough brick surrounding it. “This—” He held it up.

The answer came from one of the nuns. “I’ll warrant it’s a thread from that witch’s shift!”

Murmurs of agreement followed. The cellarer glanced at this infringement of the rule of silence, but the prioress, transported in her chair to the centre of the group, was by now less concerned with rules. “Let me see it!”

Fulke placed the wisp of fabric into her outstretched fingers.

“So she condemns herself by flight! The little witch must have come this way. But we’ve caught her. She won’t get far in Handale Woods!”

To gasps of horror, everyone watched as Fulke pulled open the door.

Despite their fear, they craned to see what lay beyond. He and his two henchmen, burdened by the prioress, closely followed by the cellarer and the kitchen guard, stepped through. The rest of the nuns drew back.

“My lady prioress—beware of the dragon!” one of them called.

The nuns clustered at the door, but none dare step through.

Hildegard felt her breath stop. Dakin, she thought. She crossed herself.

C
HAPTER
11

The rain stopped as abruptly as a pump switching off. It struck everyone as magical. The wood must be enchanted. It lay mist-wreathed and glittering in the dawn light.

The two men struggled with the chaired prioress across the stretch of wet grass in front of the masons’ lodge. They dropped it down as soon as they got a chance. Dakin and Matt were so intent on their work that at first they did not look up, not even when Fulke strode up to the entrance and poked his head under the eaves.

His shadow must have fallen over the stone block Dakin was working. Only then did he raise his head. “Master!” he exclaimed, smiling pleasantly, “Have you come to see how well we’re getting on with the embellishments for the prioress’s new house?”

Instructions shouted from the unfinished structure echoed across the grove. “Down a bit, Will. No, up a bit. That’s it. Hold it!”

Fulke looked towards the sound. Will, working the windlass, was on top of the building, looking down. He was raising a block of stone to the top of the wall while Hamo stood patiently below guiding the holding rope. At his feet was a bucket of mortar, already mixed and quite contrary to what Dakin had told Hildegard about their procedure.

Fulke turned his head to look back at Dakin. “What’s that?” He indicated the stone on the bench in front of the mason. It had only just begun to be worked, by the look of it.

“This,” announced Dakin with apparent pride, “is a rendition of the dragon of Handale.”

“You’ve seen it, then, have you?” Fulke queried, glancing over his shoulder into the woods.

Dakin said nothing but resumed his work with the chisel.

Fulke went over to Prioress Basilda.

Furious, red-faced, and helpless in the prison of her chair, she was peering impatiently into the lodge. “Ask him about the girl, Fulke.”

There was a crunch from above as the stone block was dropped into place on top of the outer wall, and she glanced up as if fearing the whole edifice, the dream house befitting her grandeur, should come toppling down on top of them. Then she turned back to Fulke. “Go on, ask him! What are you waiting for?”

Fulke gave a disparaging look at Dakin. “Well?”

“Well what, master?”

“Have you seen a novice from the priory?”

“I’ve seen several about the place.”

“You have?”

“When I came in yesterday to pay my respects to my workmate, Giles of—”

“Not then. Now. Last night.” Fulke looked exasperated. He gestured to his two men. “Go in and search.”

When he heard this, Dakin rose to his feet. The claw chisel in his hands took on a more menacing appearance.

“I mean”—Fulke smiled, showing his teeth in the nest of his beard—“when we have most humbly begged your permission … master,” he added, as if to make less of the noise of rapidly drawn swords behind him.

Dakin smiled most affably. “By all means. It will be an honour to show you and the lady prioress our workplace.” He made a wide gesture of welcome and stepped to one side.

The prioress grunted irritably. “You go, Fulke. Give it a good going-over.”

Dakin moved forward to bar the way to Fulke and the two men at his shoulder. He addressed the prioress directly. ‘Of course, should any damage occur, it will be charged to your ladyship’s account.”