Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake Mysteries) (6 page)

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Authors: C J Sansom

BOOK: Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake Mysteries)
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‘You’ll have bad luck now, Edwin,’ one of the others said loudly. ‘You’ll need to touch a dwarf to bring your luck back.’
 
They cackled with laughter. I felt Mark turn and laid my arm on his.
 
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘No trouble here. Go up!’ I half-pushed him up a rickety wooden staircase to where our bags were set out on truckle beds in a room under the thatch, whose population of rats could be heard scurrying away as we entered. We sat down and pulled off our boots.
 
Mark was angry. ‘Why should we suffer the insults of these hinds?’
 
‘We are in hostile country. The Weald people are still papists, the priest in that church probably tells them to pray for the death of the king and the pope’s return every Sunday.’
 
‘I thought you hadn’t been in these parts before.’ Mark stretched out his feet to the broad iron chimney pipe, which ran up through the centre of the room to the roof, providing the only warmth.
 
‘Careful of chilblains. I haven’t, but Lord Cromwell’s intelligencers send back reports from every shire since the rebellion. I have copies in my bag.’
 
He turned to me. ‘Do you not find it wearying sometimes? Always having to think when one talks to a stranger, lest something slips an enemy could turn to treason. It did not used to be like this.’
 
‘This is the worst time. Things will improve.’
 
‘When the monasteries are down?’
 
‘Yes. Because Reform will finally be safe. And because then Lord Cromwell will have enough money to make the realm secure from invasion and do much for the people. He has great plans.’
 
‘By the time the Augmentations men have had their cut, will there be enough left even to buy those churls downstairs new cloaks?’
 
‘There will, Mark.’ I spoke earnestly. ‘The large monasteries have untold wealth. And what do they give to the poor, despite their duty of charity? I used to see the destitute crowding round the gates on dole days at Lichfield, children in rags pushing and kicking for the few farthings handed through the bars in the gate. I felt ashamed going into school on those days. Such a school as it was. Well, now there’ll be proper schools in every parish, paid for by the king’s Exchequer.’
 
He said nothing, only raised his eyebrows quizzically.
 
‘God’s death, Mark,’ I snapped, suddenly irritated by his scepticism. ‘Take your feet away from that chimney. They stink worse than that sheep.’
 
He clambered into bed and lay looking up at the thatched vault of the roof. ‘I pray you are right, sir. But Augmentations has made me doubt men’s charity.’
 
‘There is godly leaven in the unregenerate lump. It works its way, slowly. And Lord Cromwell is part of it, for all his hardness. Have faith,’ I added gently. Yet even as I spoke I remembered Lord Cromwell’s grim pleasure as he talked of burning a priest with his own images, saw him again shaking the casket containing the child’s skull.
 
‘Faith will move mountains?’ Mark said after a moment.
 
‘God’s nails,’ I snapped, ‘in my day it was the young who were idealistic and the old cynical. I’m too tired to argue further. Goodnight. ’ I began to undress; hesitantly, for I do not like people to see my disability. But Mark, sensitively, turned his back as we took off our clothes and donned our nightshifts. Wearily, I climbed into my sagging bed and pinched out the candle.
 
I said my prayers. But for a long time I lay awake in the darkness, listening to Mark’s even breathing and the renewed scrabblings of the rats in the thatch as they crept back to the centre of the room, near the chimney where it was warmest.
 
 
I HAD MADE light of it, as I always did, but the looks the villagers gave my hump, and the abbey-lubber’s remark, had sent a familiar stab of pain through me. It had settled miserably in my guts, crushing my earlier enthusiasm. All my life I had tried to shrug off such insults, though when I was younger I often felt like raging and screaming. I had seen enough cripples whose minds had been made as twisted as their bodies by the weight of insult and mockery they suffered; glowering at the world from beneath knitted brows and turning to swear foul abuse at the children who called after them in the streets. It was better to try and ignore it, get on with such life as God allowed.
 
I remembered one occasion, though, when that had been impossible. It was a moment that had defined my life. I was fifteen, a pupil at the cathedral school in Lichfield. As a senior scholar it was my duty to attend and sometimes serve at Sunday Mass. That seemed a wonderful thing after a long week at my books, struggling with the Greek and Latin poorly taught by Brother Andrew, a fat cathedral monk with a fondness for the bottle.
 
The cathedral would be brightly lit, candles flickering before the altar, the statues and the gloriously painted rood screen. I preferred those days when I did not serve the priest but sat with the congregation. Beyond the screen the priest would intone Mass in the Latin I was coming to understand, his words echoing as the congregation made their responses.
 
Now that the old Mass is long gone it is hard to convey the sense of mystery it communicated: the incense, the rising Latin cadences, then the ringing of the censing bell as the bread and wine were elevated and, everyone believed, transformed into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ in the priest’s mouth.
 
In the last year my head had become increasingly filled with godly fervour. Watching the faces of the congregation, quiet and respectful, I had come to see the Church as a great community binding the living and the dead, transforming people if only for a few hours into the obedient flock of the Great Shepherd. I felt called to serve this flock; and as a priest I could be a guide to my fellows, earn their respect.
 
Brother Andrew soon disabused me of that when, trembling with the import of what I had to say, I sought an interview with him in his little office behind the schoolroom. It was the end of the day and he was red-eyed as he studied a parchment on his desk, his black habit stained with ink and food. Haltingly I told him I believed I had a vocation and I wished to be considered as a trainee for ordination.
 
I expected him to question me about my faith, but he only raised a pudgy hand dismissively.
 
‘Boy,’ he said, ‘you can never be a priest. Do you not realize that? You should not be taking up my time with this.’ His white eyebrows creased together in annoyance. He had not shaved; white stubble stood out like frost on his fat red chaps.
 
‘I don’t understand, Brother. Why not?’
 
He sighed, filling my face with his alcoholic breath. ‘Master Shardlake, you know from the Book of Genesis that God made us in his own image, do you not?’
 
‘Of course, Brother.’
 
‘To serve his Church you must conform to that image. Anyone with a visible affliction, even a withered limb, let alone a great crooked humpback like yours, can never be a priest. How could you show yourself as an intercessor between ordinary sinful humanity and the majesty of God, when your form is so much less than theirs?’
 
I felt as though suddenly encased in ice. ‘That cannot be right. That is cruel.’
 
Brother Andrew’s face went puce. ‘Boy,’ he shouted, ‘do you question the teachings of Holy Church, time out of mind? You that come here asking to be ordained as a priest! What sort of priest, a Lollard heretic?’
 
I looked at him sitting in his dirty food-stained robe, his stubbly face red and frowning. ‘So I should look like
you
, should I?’ I burst out before I had time to think.
 
With a roar he got up, landing me a great clout on the ear. ‘You little crookback churl, get out!’
 
I ran from the room, my head singing. He was too fat to pursue (he died of a great seizure the next year) and I fled from the cathedral and limped home through the darkening lanes, bereft. In sight of home I sat on a stile, watching a spring sunset whose green fecundity seemed to mock me. I felt that if the Church would not have me I had nowhere to go, I was alone.
 
And then, as I sat there in the dusk, Christ spoke to me. That is what happened, so there is no other way to put it. I heard a voice inside my head, it came from inside me but was not mine. ‘You are not alone,’ it said and suddenly a great warmth, a sense of love and peace, infused my being. I do not know how long I sat there, breathing deeply, but that moment transformed my life. Christ himself had comforted me against the words of the Church that was supposed to be his. I had never heard that voice before, and though I hoped, as I knelt praying that night and in later weeks and years, that I would hear it again, I never have. But perhaps once in a lifetime is all we are given. Many are not given even that.
 
 
WE LEFT AT first light, before the village woke. I was still in sombre mood and we said little. There had been a hard frost, turning the road and trees white, but mercifully there was still no snow as we made our way out of the village, back into the narrow lane between the high tree-lined banks.
 
We rode all morning and into the early afternoon, until at last the woodland thinned and we came to a country of tilled fields with, a little way ahead, the slope of the South Downs. We followed a pathway up the hillside, where stringy looking sheep grazed. At the top we saw, below us, the sea, rolling in slow grey waves. To our right a tidal river cut through the low hills, reaching the sea through a great swathe of marshland. Bordering the marsh was a small town, and a mile off stood a great complex of buildings in ancient yellow stone, dominated by a great Norman church almost as large as a cathedral and surrounded by a high enclosing wall.
 
‘The monastery of Scarnsea,’ I said.
 
‘ “The Lord has brought us safe through our tribulations,” ’ Mark quoted.
 
‘I think we have more of those ahead,’ I replied. We led the tired horses down the hill, just as a light snow began to blow in from the sea.
 
Chapter Four
 
WE GUIDED THE HORSES carefully down the hill to where a road led into the town. They were nervous, shying away from the snowflakes brushing their faces. Happily, the snow stopped as we arrived.
 
‘Shall we call on the Justice?’ Mark asked.
 
‘No, we must reach the monastery today; if the snow starts again we could have to stay the night here.’
 
We made our way down Scarnsea’s cobbled main street, where the top storeys of ancient houses overhung the road, keeping to one side to avoid the emptying of pisspots. We noticed that the plaster and timbers of many houses were decayed, and the shops seemed poor places. The few people about gave us incurious glances.
 
We reached the town square. On three sides more dilapidated-looking houses stood, but the fourth consisted of a wide stone wharf. Once no doubt it had fronted the sea, but now it faced the mud and reeds of the marsh, sullen and desolate under the grey sky and giving off a mingled smell of salt and rot. A canal, large enough only for a small boat, had been cut through the mud and stretched in a long ribbon to the sea, a steely band a mile off. Out on the marsh we saw a train of donkeys roped together while a group of men shored up the canal bank with stones from panniers on the animals’ backs.
 
There had evidently been recent entertainment, for on the far side of the square a little knot of women stood conversing by the town stocks, round which lay a mess of rotten fruit and vegetables. Sitting on a stool with her feet clamped in the stocks was a plump middle-aged woman of the poorer sort, her clothing a mess of burst eggs and pears. She wore a triangular cap with ‘S’ for ‘scold’ daubed on it. She looked cheerful enough now, as she took a cup of ale from one of the women, but her face was bruised and swollen and her blackened eyes half-shut. Seeing us, she raised her tankard and essayed a grin. A little group of giggling children ran into the square, carrying old rotten cabbages, but one of the women waved them off.
 
‘Go away,’ she called in an accent as thick and guttural as the villagers’ had been. ‘Goodwife Thomas has learnt her lesson and will give her husband peace. She’ll be let out in an hour. Enough!’
 
The children retreated, calling insults from a safe distance.
 
‘They have mild enough ways down here, it seems,’ Mark observed. I nodded. In the London stocks it is common enough for sharp stones to be thrown, taking out teeth and eyes.
 
We rode out of town towards the monastery. The road ran alongside the reeds and stagnant pools of the marsh. I marvelled that there were pathways through such a foul mire, but there must be or the men and animals we had seen could not have found their way.

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