Belladonna at Belstone (15 page)

“Explain,” Baldwin ordered.

“We are a poor institution. Ten, maybe twenty years ago, we had some wealth, but then the rich families stopped sending their daughters to us, and how else can we get money? No patron will give us funds, for what would be the point? Any man would give his donations to the larger places, where it is obvious that there will be people for many years to come, to say prayers for his soul; and then he would only give money to male convents. Monasteries get the chantry money, not nunneries; nuns can’t hold services.”

“What has this to do with the girl’s death?”

“Sir Rodney of Oakhampton has seen the dire condition of the priory, and wishes to confer upon our convent the parish church of Belstone, in order that the priory can build a new Lady Chapel, providing the prioress will allow him to have his tomb erected within it, and providing that she will also pay for a priest to celebrate Mass each day within the chapel and pray for Sir Rodney and his family.”

“I presume that a parish church like Belstone would allow the convent to afford this?” Baldwin probed. In truth he had never had much understanding of finance, and had no idea how much a little church like Belstone’s would generate.

“Oh, yes, Sir Baldwin. It’s a generous offer. He wishes nothing that need be overly expensive to the priory. Four candles to burn each day, and the priory’s own chaplain to celebrate a daily Mass for the Blessed Virgin. That was about all his demand. Oh, and he expects us to accept any young girl whom he desires us to take as a nun, or when he has died, any girl nominated by his heirs.”

“I see no reason why you should thus assume the prioress to have been involved in the novice’s death.“

“Sir, as a gesture of good faith the noble knight gave the priory the first instalment to help us in the short period while the church is being made over to us. That money has gone straight to the new priest.” She held Baldwin’s eye a moment, then looked at Bertrand, speaking primly. “It was intended for the roofs. Instead it has gone to this man.”

“Who has seen her with the priest?” Simon demanded.

“Sir Bailiff, the man has been seen here before. The evening Moll died wasn’t the first time. Just two nights earlier I couldn’t sleep, and went to fetch water. As I returned, I saw a figure ahead of me, entering the door and climbing the stairs to our dormitory. I hurried after but lost sight of him.”

“You don’t sleep very well, do you?” Simon observed.

“Is your dorter so vast a man could hide in an instant?” Baldwin asked.

“Our prioress has a partitioned room near the staircase. The man must have entered it to satisfy his lust - and hers.”

“That is a strong allegation.”

Margherita drew a deep breath. “I am not fanciful; I saw someone. The night Moll died I was convinced I had seen a man. If he wasn’t a ghost, where could he have gone? Before I went to my bed, I… I must confess, I allowed myself to succumb to curiosity. I listened at the wall to the prioress’s chamber. That was where I heard heavy breathing - it wasn’t a woman’s breathing, my Lord. And—‘

“Do other nuns sleep so poorly?” Simon interrupted.

Bertrand held up his hand and nodded for her to continue.

She drew herself up to her full height. “My Lord, I also heard kissing and the prioress’s voice, moaning, and calling very quietly to her ”love“. That was when I left and went to my bed. I couldn’t listen to any more.”

“You did not actually see her with this man?” Baldwin asked.

“No, sir. But the next day I overheard Agnes, another novice, saying that she had heard odd noises. And that’s a great problem: Agnes is the girl Sir Rodney wishes us to look after. If she should tell her master what has happened here, I fear his reaction. He is a godfearing man, devout and honourable. If he were to come to believe that our priory was tainted, he would refuse to give us the church, and then we would be in worse financial trouble.

“So no one has seen your prioress in flagrant or promiscuous congress with this priest?” Bertrand demanded severely.

Margherita hesitated. “No, sir.”

“And you saw nothing to indicate that your prioress so much as visited Moll that night, let alone killed her?”

“No, sir.”

“And yet you accuse her of murdering Moll, even though you have no evidence to show that she had any motive?” Baldwin asked with disbelief. “Sister, if this were an ordinary investigation, you could be jailed for making such a malicious accusation without evidence.”

“Moll saw him.”

Baldwin turned upon her a suspicious look. “ She saw whom -and when?”

“Moll saw a man only the night before she was sent to the infirmary. She told me so, although I confess I hardly paid any attention at the time. I don’t listen to the novices’ gossip.”

“I see. What exactly did the girl say?”

“That she had seen a man walking up the stairs, just as I did on the night she died. He was dressed in a priest’s or canon’s robes; she couldn’t tell which because it was dark and the two are so similar.”

“What was
she
doing? From what you say, your entire sisterhood seems unable to sleep,” Simon commented drily. He hadn’t taken to the treasurer.

It was mutual and she gave him a cold look. “Some of us, when we are concerned for the future of our convent, will waken. I daresay Moll was of that temperament. Perhaps she went to pray for the security of our nunnery.”

“I see. So what else did she have to say?” Baldwin asked.

Margherita took a long breath as if to control her impatience. “Sir Baldwin, she told me that she saw a man going up the stairs, and yet when she followed, there was no man in the dorter. Where else could he have gone, but into the prioress’s private room?”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with the death of the girl,“ Bertrand put in.

“Moll liked confronting her sisters with their failings. I think she told the prioress what she had seen, and Lady Elizabeth killed Moll to hide her guilty secret.”

Chapter Ten

Luke walked slowly across the grass of the cloister-garth, and at the middle, he turned to look back the way he had come. He always enjoyed this view. From here, within the quadrangle of the southern, canonical side, the church rose upwards majestically. It had no great tower, but it was rather wonderful in its simplicity.

He stepped sideways to avoid a pile of dog’s turds on the ground -
damn
the prioress’s terrier! - and surveyed the eastern side. The first little block was that of the chapterhouse, where the canons held their morning meetings; next was the calefactory, in which a fire was kept roaring all through the day; then the dorter block at the cloister’s south-eastern corner, with storerooms beneath and latrines behind, their chutes dropping down into the pit which was washed by the stream flowing from the kitchen’s leat.

Southwards was the frater and more storerooms; the kitchen hidden beyond, far enough away to ensure that stray sparks couldn’t set light to other buildings. Last, on the western edge, was the lay brothers’ dorter and storerooms.

All was enclosed and secure from the outside world, and was practically a mirror image of the nuns’ precincts. It gave Luke a sense of belonging, seeing all these buildings designed simply to protect the inhabitants from the brutal realities of the world outside - not that anywhere was overly safe any more. The news of war brewing on the Welsh March had reached Belstone, and Luke knew only too well that when armies began to move, they would often invade nunneries for their pleasure - being places holding both women and stores of food; in the mind of the common man-at-arms they could hardly be surpassed.

Luke shook his head. He knew how even modern men could become brutes when there was money or when there were women to be had, and warfare meant that all the usual rules were discarded. If that were to happen, if it looked likely that an army could come here, he would leave, he promised himself. He wasn’t going to run the risk of being murdered just to protect a bunch of nuns.

But for now there was no need to worry. And his life here was supremely comfortable. He had services to hold, but they weren’t a burden, and there was always the compensation of the younger nuns and novices.

He had not come to this benighted spot through choice. If he’d had
his
way, he’d have taken a position as priest in a little church somewhere, so that he could get the benefit of the annual income, and then pay a pittance to some impoverished fool to actually see to the souls within that parish while he went back to Oxford to study.

Oxford. A great city - he’d loved it there, he recalled glumly. He’d enjoyed a flirtation with a merchant’s daughter, but the silly wench had allowed herself to be caught while trying to meet Luke. Her father was a patron of the college, so Luke had been thrown out. The bishop, Walter Stapledon of Exeter, was unimpressed by what he heard of Luke’s behaviour, and removed him from Oxford, writing to Bertrand suggesting Luke should be sent far away.

Luke had expected to be pushed off into the wilds, and indeed that was what Stapledon had intended; but the clerk who supervised such postings was a friend of Luke’s who, even if he didn’t approve of Luke’s whoring, was happy to alter the instructions dictated to him by Stapledon’s suffragan in exchange for a small barrel of wine. There were many similar areas of confusion which the good Bishop of Exeter would have to sort out when he retired from his position as Treasurer of England; cases where the bishop’s clear instructions became muddled and were interpreted wrongly.

Luke wondered how Stapledon would react when he found out that Luke had been given the position of priest in a nunnery. The thought that he, who had been driven from college for his womanising, should be placed in charge of young and impressionable girls in a convent, would make the good bishop furious. And the beauty of it was that the clerk who took dictation would blame Bertrand; it was Bertrand, he would say, who gave dictation. If the visitor had intended Luke to be sent to a small monastery on the wild, wretched coast of Cornwall, surely the name of the place would have been in the document which was sent to Luke? And because the document read ‘Belstone’, and the document was signed by Bertrand, Bertrand himself must surely have said that Belstone was the place to which Luke should be sent.

Luke sighed and made his way to the frater, feeling the need for a drink before he went to conduct Compline, the last service of the day.

If he was to meet Agnes as he had promised, he would need to keep his strength up, he thought, and grinned to himself.

The door lay in the eastern side of the cloister. The sleeping hall was a two-storeyed building separated from the church by a narrow alley which led to a dead end, and which had once been roofed to create a small storage area. Now the little lean-to had lost its roof, which had been deposited on the floor to form a mess of broken spars and slates.

Baldwin gazed at the dorter. The nuns slept on the first floor; the entire ground area was given over to a large storage room. Inside were barrels of wine, salted meat and fish, haunches of meat and sacks and boxes. The smell was wholesome and spiced, not at all musty, although there was a slight tang in the air -probably rats. A solitary cat stood and arched its back at him from its vantage point on a tun of wine. From the look of this place, no matter what privations the nuns suffered, with the loss of roofs, the damp and so on, at least they wouldn’t starve.

Simon suppressed a grin when he saw Baldwin graciously motion the visitor towards the dorter’s entrance. Bertrand glowered, but jerked the door wide and stepped inside. From his expression Simon felt sure that he was beginning to regret having asked Peter Clifford to advise him on whom he could bring to Belstone.

When Simon trailed after them, he found that just inside the doorway was a staircase, roughly formed of square-hewn blocks of wood which had been sawn on the diagonal to give a triangular section, then fitted to planks at either side to produce uneven steps. It was the sort of arrangement Simon had been thinking of putting into his home for some time - for he and his wife still depended upon a ladder to reach the bedchamber in their little house.

At the top of the stairs, Simon found Baldwin staring at a heavily built partition. Simon himself had eyes only for the ceiling and the hole in it. While outside in the cloister, Simon had thought the breezes almost unnoticeable, here within the sleeping quarters there was a constant low moaning as if the souls of the damned were filing through in an unending procession.

It was only with difficulty that he dragged his attention away and studied the room. The dorter was perhaps sixty or seventy feet long, and all along it, on either side, were wooden screens, each open to the hallway, which separated the sleeping cubicles one from the other. He took a few paces forward and peered into one. It contained a rough mattress and pillow, covered with a blanket and some sort of coverlet, and a three-legged stool at the side. By the wall stood a large chest, its lid down and apparently locked. Certainly the hasp was firmly shut.

Idly he wandered along the corridor formed by the outflung partitions. Some beds were made, but equally many were not; some had chests, and those with the more ornate ones had chairs. A few of the beds appeared not to have been slept in, and when he looked up he could see why. Directly above was the hole. Beyond, several of the partitioned areas seemed more heavily used, and Simon rightly guessed that here nuns and novices shared beds to keep away from the rain or snow that fell in.

At the far end was a billowing curtain, and he was about to haul it aside and glance behind it when Bertrand coughed. “No! You don’t want to… That’s the rere-dorter, Bailiff!”

Simon quickly drew his hand from the curtain. Thank God Bertrand had warned him. It would have been appallingly embarrassing to have entered the nuns’ toilet and encountered one of them in a - in a compromised position. He turned and made his slow and thoughtful progress back along the dorter to join the others. They were still standing at the partitioned area near the door. “What is it?”