The Beautiful Thread (19 page)

In utter silence the two men in the checker heard this description. William, so white his skin seemed almost green, swallowed convulsively and pressed the back of his trembling hand firmly against his mouth. Cormac's eyes swam with tears; then his horror crystallized into concentrated fury.

“
Smile!
” urged the equerry, looking from one to the other of them. “Trust me, it is the greatest delicacy – once you try it you'll thank me!”

William tore his gaze from the smiling man and looked to St Alcuin's new cellarer – then despite the waves of dizzy nausea threatening to engulf him, he lurched forward with alacrity, alarm writ large across his face, into the space between the two men.

“Oh, for mercy's sake – he's not worth –
nay!
Cormac!
Brother Cormac!
No!
Don't hit him, man! Great Queen of Heaven, have you taken leave of your –”

His presence of mind served its purpose inasmuch as Brother Cormac's fist slammed into the side of William's nose and not its intended target. The combination of trying to move too quickly while he was overcome with nausea, the sudden blow, and cracking his head against the table as he fell, left William in a crumpled heap at Cormac's feet, momentarily completely unconscious.

The equerry stepped back, his mouth dropped open in astonishment. As Cormac's adamantine blue gaze fixed him, he stepped back again, into the wall this time, turned and fled into the sunshine, bumping against the doorpost in his flight, throwing one startled glance of apprehension back over his shoulder as he hastened away, no longer smiling.

“Roast alive? By my soul, I'll roast
him
alive if he darkens my door again,” muttered Cormac, dropping down on one knee to see what could be done for the collateral beneficiary of his ire.

Why in the name of all holy am I lying on the floor?
was William's first thought on opening his eyes. Gathering his wits with an effort, finding Brother Cormac squatting in penitent concern at his side, he relocated himself into present reality. Dizzy and sick, he struggled to a sitting position, halted for a moment by the room still whirling around him. He focused hard on quelling the insistent waves of nausea. In his experience vomiting improved few situations. It took him a full minute to get his bearings properly, but once he had, he began to struggle groggily to his feet, shaking his head free of lingering giddiness. He clutched the table, swaying, willing himself back into clarity.

Cormac rose to his feet as William did, anxious for his wellbeing. “I am
so
sorry,” he said. “I never intended…”

Ignoring the throbbing pain now asserting itself, and the rapidly diminishing vision in his left eye as it began to swell shut, William raised his head with a final shake and looked at Brother Cormac. “It's all right,” he said. “I've had worse. But I suspect I had better apprise your abbot of this. LePrique will have run to his master and all hell will break loose here any minute now. What you must do – and quickly; go right now – is find Francis and make him stop whatever he's doing, without exception, to come here. Run through with him all we have in hand and make quite certain he has grasped at least the basics. Be sure, now. My guess is that within the hour neither you nor I will be free to work on it any more. Hop to it, Cormac. His Lordship will be here breathing fire once this comes to light.”

He was right. The equerry, boiling over with outrage and indignation, intercepted his reverend mentor in the act of sitting down to a light snack required to fortify him across the distance stretching between his breakfast and the midday meal.

That prelate heard with astonished displeasure LePrique's excited narrative of barbarism and irrational, unwonted – entirely unpredictable – violence. His full lips parted in perplexity as he contemplated the recountal that St Alcuin's cellarer had lunged at his manservant in a rage, intending to knock him unconscious, just because that harmless and well-meaning peon had faithfully represented his Lordship's requested preference for a poultry supper. A dull purple flush suffused his jowls above the tucked-in linen napkin. His brows knitted in stupefaction.
What?

“By the grace of God,” burbled on the incensed equerry, “that man who keeps hanging about was on the scene – he stepped in and took the blow, or by my estimation I –”

“What man?” cut in the angry bishop.

“Why, that – you must have seen him, your Lordship, he crops up everywhere – that bearded fellow. Dresses like a merchant. Lanky. Pads about like a fox. Unnerving, somehow. Long, sallow face. Late middle age. White hair. And the most disquieting blue – no, green – no, grey – very penetrating – eyes.”

As he enlarged on his description, a new dawn of insight began to clear in the bishop's expression. For a moment the incomprehensible brawling LePrique had just depicted was dislodged from his thoughts as the question began to form – “This man… His name, LePrique? What is his name?”

“I… ooh… er… I don't think I know, your Lordship. He hasn't been introduced. He's not one of the brothers. He's just… sort of… there. Here. Around. I don't know who he is.”

The bishop ripped the napkin from his neck. “Really?” he said. “Well, I think I do. The character you just delineated fits one man and one man only that I ever knew. That's William de Bulmer. The very devil! What's he doing here? Maggot! Where is he? In the checker, you say? Well? What are you waiting for?”

Brother Dominic, bringing honey cakes and a dish of hot milk as instructed, was not a little nonplussed to find himself bearing them in just as his Lordship was impatiently hustling his equerry out of the guesthouse door.

The bishop surged across the abbey court to the checker, Brainard trotting alongside. They steamed in with all haste, but to their chagrin found only Father What's-his-name – the prior – at the cellarer's post.

“What's the meaning of this?” The bishop did not beat about the bush. “Where's your cellarer? Unless – LePrique – was this the man who tried to hit you?”

Francis's eyebrows rose in astonishment. He'd had but the sketchiest outline from Cormac, but had the wit to discern an emergency when it was presented to him, and got himself to the checker with all haste. “My lord?” he said, convincingly taken aback.

“Not you?” With a gesture of exasperation the bishop dismissed this particular line of enquiry – for now. It was, in any case, merely a sideshow, until he had caught up with his principal target.

“Are you harbouring here William de Bulmer?” His eyes, narrowed into gimlet points of light, bored into Father Francis with an inquisitorial intensity that would evidently have no truck with any equivocation.

“H-h-here?” Francis scanned the modest room in apparent mystification.

“In. This. Monastery.” Through gritted teeth.

“But… Well, yes, we did…” Francis played for time. “We – I thought you knew, my lord. He was with us a whole year. He… It was after the great fire at St Dunstan's. He begged admittance – we took him in – but he –”

“Don't you play the fool with me!” The bishop glared, irate, at St Alcuin's prior. “Of course I know he was here. Of course I know he left. I know all about him. It's high time the consequences of his actions caught up with that man. He was a crooked, poisonous good-for-nothing since the roots of forever. But I gather he's contracted a marriage and attempted a suicide since last I clapped eyes on him. Before he's hanged for the felony of the second he wants excommunicating on account of the first. And, by God, if you're hiding him here I shall track him down because I mean to do business with him. Well?
Is
he here?”

At these words, something in Father Francis appeared to withdraw. Where a moment before he had seemed flustered, calm came over him now. He looked steadily at his interlocutor.

“Father William left us in the winter,” he responded quietly. “Where he went, I cannot say. His whereabouts at the present time, I do not know. I cannot imagine who could have spread such a rumour of suicide. I am so sorry, your Lordship. I'm afraid I cannot help you.”

For a long, roiling moment the bishop fixed Francis with his furious, silent glare.

“No?” he said then. “Well no doubt you will be happy for me to take a poke around for myself. Snap to it, LePrique. Let's run this fox to earth.”

Out in the abbey court, his equerry close at his heels, the bishop paused and looked slowly about him in the sunshine.

“Well, well, well…” He spoke with soft satisfaction as his gaze fell upon the white hair of a thin man dressed in merchant's garb, but walking with the distinctive quiet tread of a monk, along the front of the west range that faced onto the greensward, towards the abbot's door. With the instinct of the watched, the man turned his head and glanced back over his shoulder. Realizing himself to be under keenest surveillance, he changed course, retracing a pace or two, ducking in through the door that led into the frater.

“
Taille haut!
” murmured the bishop; and set off in pursuit with a celerity LePrique would have estimated entirely beyond him.

The two men hurried across the court and into the refectory, deserted at the present time. They wove through the gaps between tables to cross the room and take the door into the cloister. There they paused, looking to right and left; which was when the equerry, glancing up the day stairs, caught a glimpse of their quarry disappearing.

William swore in silent fluency as he heard the first footfall on the wooden staircase. Fleet as a deer he slipped by the novitiate and the scriptorium, into the dorter. Now where? He noted without pausing, a second heavy set of feet added to the treading and squeak of the stairs. He passed the first three doors in the long corridor. Then, judging his time had run out, he made himself go slowly enough to lift the latch of the fourth door in silence. Slipping round the door into the cell, closing it noiselessly behind him, he turned to behold Father Chad, kneeling at his prie-dieu, gaping up at him in utter astonishment.

“Wh – ? What have you done to your eye?”

William raised his finger to his lips in warning, entreaty in his eyes, and Father Chad rose to his feet in bewildered silence, the question dying before he uttered it.

“I beg you, for God's sake, hide me,” said William in swift undertone.

Father Chad closed his dropped jaw to frame the word “Where?”

But William, reaching down to whip the scourge out from under the low wooden bed – and Father Chad took a hasty step back – got down onto the floor and began to ease himself with all speed into the impossibly narrow space beneath the bed. Father Chad boggled.

“One of the many benefits of being skeletally thin,” murmured William as he disappeared from view, pulling the scourge back under the bed after him. His face, grim and pale but for the livid purple of his bruised eye, glaring with its feral stare at Father Chad, was the last thing the monk beheld as, “Chad! Back to your prayers!” the spectre breathed in desperate urgency before disappearing entirely from view as the latch rattled and the door opened again – this time with considerable éclat.

“Where is he?” demanded the equerry, the bishop puffing in his wake, his face red-swollen with rage.

“Wh-who, my lord?” quavered the mild-faced monk, rising once more from his knees to face the invasion. “Me?”

He wondered whether he was supposed to be smiling, but somehow this didn't seem to be the moment.

“Where have you hidden him?”

Father Chad was a simple, honest man, not given to subterfuge or guile. His genuine stupefaction at unfolding events still registered in his shocked face as he gave the best performance he could muster.

“Where could I… who?...” He stared at them as the equerry pressed his point. “Under the bed? Is he under the bed?”

The bishop dismissed the suggestion with a snort of derision, but he did nonetheless stoop down to see. The floor was a long way down and kneeling uncomfortable for a man of some
avoir du poids
, so he made do with leaning one hand on the scratchy blanket covering the hard mattress, groping with the other into the dark space below the bed. He pulled out the scourge as it offered itself to him, and flung it to one side, pushing upright. In the baffled, angry silence that followed, no sound was heard but the two men breathing hard. A bishop does not like to be made to look foolish.

“It seems you were wrong.” His chill tone added to the equerry's frustration.

“He went along here! He
did
,” he insisted. “I saw him as I came to the top of the stair!” He pushed past Father Chad to the narrow casement window, latched open on this warm summer afternoon. “Did he get out this way? Did he?”

“Oh, don't be ridiculous!” expostulated his Lordship, getting irritable now. “You've made a mistake, Brainard. Just face it. We're wasting time. He's probably halfway to the stables by now.”

Father Chad, looking from one to the other, his hands clasped at chest level, his face wan with anxiety and all thoughts of smiling forgotten, ventured: “If – if you could tell me who you were looking for, I might be able to help.”

The bishop looked with calculating penetration at this timid monk. Was he capable of deception? Probably not. “William de Bulmer,” he said heavily. “Is he here? In this abbey, I mean. Obviously not in this cell.”

“He…” Chad's features puckered into a small, worried frown. Lying was wrong. How could he do this? “William de Bulmer was certainly a member of our community, my lords. But he left us.”

Father Chad visibly quailed as Bishop Eric fixed upon him full attention.

“We have reason to believe,” the bishop said slowly and deliberately, “that he is back. The rumour has reached me that he is married – to a woman.” His equerry nodded in agreement at this, also fixing his eyes on Father Chad. And he wasn't smiling either. “I have also heard a whisper that during his time here, he tried to take his own life. Such a man should be first excommunicated, then publicly flogged, then hanged. He is an execrable, repulsive transgressor, saturated with sin, and it is high time somebody caught up with him and brought his reprehensible career to an end. Don't you think?”