The Midsummer Crown (18 page)

Was it possible then that Amphillis suffered from such trouble? Was that why she came here, to pray to the saint for a cure? And yet I found it hard to believe. The little seamstress was surely too full of life to be suffering from any kind of illness. But why else would she come so far? For what purpose?

Perhaps she just favoured the saint. Perhaps Amphillis herself was no friend to matrimony. And if so, was she naturally celibate by nature or did she prefer her own sex? That there are such women – and of course men – we know from the ancient Greeks, although the law and the Church forbid such love on pain of death.

I wandered around the church, scuffing up more dust, turning the matter over in my mind and finally reaching the conclusion that it was not my concern. I felt reasonably certain that it was St Etheldreda's that Amphillis had been visiting, and not one of the neighbouring houses, although why this conviction was so strong I couldn't really say. It was just my instinct guiding me again.

I suspected that my morning had been wasted on a wild goose chase, and that this place, that Amphillis herself, had nothing to do with either the murder of the tutor or the disappearance of young Gideon Fitzalan. I cursed silently before recollecting that I was in God's house and, with a sigh, turned back for one last look at the altar.

It was then I noticed for the first time that someone had put a garland of meadow flowers around the statue's neck, and remembered suddenly that her feast day was June the twenty-third, Midsummer Eve. And Midsummer Eve was fast approaching. It was exactly a week away. Someone had thought it worthwhile to deck the saint for her coming festival.

Amphillis? But the flowers looked too faded to have been placed there this morning. Judging by appearances, they had been there several days, but I stepped closer to make certain.

‘What you doing here then, my young master?' queried a voice behind me.

I whirled about to find myself confronting an old woman in a rusty black gown and none too clean apron and coif, with a few wisps of grey hair escaping from beneath the latter. Several of her front teeth were missing, so that when she spoke, she made a kind of whistling sound, but her blue eyes were still as bright and sharp as a young girl's. She was carrying a garland of wild flowers, similar to the one already gracing the saint's slender neck

‘I . . . er . . . I was paying my respects to the saint,' I answered, feeling like a schoolboy who had been caught in some suspicious act.

‘Know who she is, do you?'

‘Yes. Saint Etheldreda.'

The woman gave a cackle of laughter that turned into a whistle as it died away. ‘Any fool could tell that. It says so underneath.'

‘Also known as Saint Audrey,' I retorted, and went on to give the saint's history.

My interlocutor looked impressed. ‘You don't look like an educated man. Not in them clothes,' she added frankly.

‘I was once a novice at Glastonbury Abbey.' I bowed. ‘May I have the honour of knowing to whom I'm speaking?'

That made her cackle even louder. ‘My, my! Quite the gen'leman. My name's Etheldreda, too. Etheldreda Simpkins. She's my name saint.' The woman nodded towards the altar. ‘That's why I keeps her decked with flowers. “Ethel” means “good” in the old language, you know. And what are you called, my fine young cockalorum?'

‘Roger.'

My new acquaintance eyed me up and down. ‘That's a Norman name for a Saxon boy like you.'

I laughed. ‘Surely after four hundred years we're pretty much one and the same.'

My companion snorted contemptuously and whistled even louder. ‘If you believe that, young man, you're a bigger fool than you look. How many of our lords and masters do you know called Smith or Wright or Carter?' She answered her own question. ‘None, I'll be bound. They all have danged Frenchified names – Neville or Beauchamp or de Vere.' She spat the words out like a mouthful of cherry stones.

‘Very true,' I answered with a grin. ‘You're an astute woman, Goody Simpkins.'

‘Dunno about that.' She regarded me cautiously. ‘But I know what I know,' she added fiercely.

‘This church doesn't look as if it's much used,' I said, indicating the dust. ‘But I don't suppose many people outside this alley know that it's here. I nearly missed it myself, it's so narrow and so hemmed in by the houses on either side. Does it have many worshippers?'

‘More'n you'd think. But mostly women, those that aren't happy with their menfolk or their marriages, I reck'n. There've been a few strangers around here lately.'

‘There was a young girl in here awhile ago,' I said. ‘Short, plump.' Although as a description it didn't really do Amphillis Hill justice. ‘It was because she came out of the church that I noticed it, and came inside myself to have a look around. And offer up a prayer, of course,' I added hastily.

I received a deservedly sceptical look, but the old dame made no comment. ‘I don't recall seeing her today,' she said. ‘But I know who you'm talking about. I've seed her once or twice lately. Don't know who she is, mind. Ain't from this part o' the city. I was born here and I knows most folk from Candlewick Street and the hill. Dowgate, that is.'

I nodded, but absently. I had been vaguely aware for some minutes of a sound, faint and far off, that I couldn't quite identify. Finally, as Goody Simpkins was speaking, I recognized what it was.

‘I can hear running water somewhere,' I said. ‘At least, I think that's what it is. It's hard to tell.'

My companion once again gave her ear-splitting cackle. Her paroxysms of mirth were doing serious damage to my ears.

‘You got sharp hearing, young master. I can't make it out nowadays, although I could once, plain as plain. But now I'm nigh on sixty. My time'll soon be up and my ears ain't what they used t' be. It's only natural. What you c'n hear is the Wallbrook gurgling away deep underground. Centuries ago it were built over. They do say as it flows out of a pipe somewhere along the banks o' the Thames.' She reverted to our previous topic of conversation. ‘Mind you, I did glance in here earlier this morning, and there weren't nobody here then. O' course, it don't mean that girl weren't here. She could've been down in the crypt.'

‘The crypt?' I questioned sharply, staring around. ‘I don't see any entrance to a crypt.'

‘Not from where you're standing, you wouldn't.' The old woman advanced and, reaching up, removed the garland of dead flowers from about the saint's neck, replacing it with the fresh one. ‘It's behind the altar. Here, I'll show you.'

Between the back of the altar and the inner wall of the apse was a narrow space just wide enough to allow one person at a time to squeeze into the gap, and set in the floor was a heavy slab of stone which plainly could be lifted by a length of rope tied at one end to an iron ring.

‘Pull it up, then,' said the crone over my shoulder.

I stooped and heaved on the rope with a force that sent me staggering back, so that both Etheldreda Simpkins and myself ended up in a tangled heap on the dusty floor. Etheldreda swore with a fluency that commanded my admiration. I knew few men, including myself, who could have equalled her vocabulary.

‘You didn't have t' pull on it like that,' she reprimanded me when once she had caught her breath. ‘It do come up easy.'

‘I realize that now,' I snapped. ‘I didn't expect it to. I thought it would be difficult to move.'

I picked myself up and helped my companion to her feet. Cautiously she felt herself all over to ensure that nothing was damaged.

‘You can't be thrown around like that at my age, young master,' she complained, whistling louder than ever. ‘It ain't right nor seemly.'

I apologized before again turning my attention to the trapdoor. This now lay inner side up, flat on the floor. I crouched down and examined the enormous iron hinges. They gleamed with oil fairly recently applied and I glanced up at the old woman.

‘The crypt must be in fairly frequent use,' I said. ‘So what's it used for?'

She shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘I think the priest do let people store their rubbish down there.'

I nodded. There was a church, St Giles, not far from where I lived in Bristol, where the crypt was similarly rented out by the local incumbent to supplement his starvation wages.

‘If you want t' ask him,' Etheldreda went on, ‘he'm about somewhere. We do share him with St Mary Bothaw, St Swithin and St John Wallbrook.'

‘That won't be necessary.' I could see a flight of steps descending into the darkness. ‘Where are the candles and tinderbox kept?'

‘You going down, then?' When I nodded in affirmation, she sniffed. ‘What you do need's a lantern. It be draughty down there. A candle'll blow out easy. Stay here. I'll go and fetch one. My house is just across the street. I won't be two shakes o' a lamb's tail.'

She was as good as her word, moving with a celerity that belied her years. And if she took a little longer than the promised ‘two shakes' I barely noticed it as I crouched on my haunches staring into the chasm below me, trying to identify the smell which rose from its depths. Must and decay and damp made up the greater part of it, but there was something else; something I could not place and yet was oddly familiar; something that made me strangely uneasy.

I was still puzzling over it, but still without an answer, when Etheldreda returned carrying a lighted lantern which she handed to me.

‘You go first,' she said.

I was taken aback. ‘You're coming down with me?'

‘Why not?' She cackled again, this time full in my left ear, making it sing. ‘Never been down there, so here's my chance. And with a handsome young fellow like you, as well! Mus' be my lucky day!'

‘Mind you don't slip,' I warned her, holding the lantern higher.

To my surprise, there were at least a dozen steps: the chamber was deep underground. And the old woman was right. It was devoid of any tomb, so the priest allowed his parishioners to use it as a repository for unwanted odds and ends. The feeble rays of my raised lantern showed the same jumble of broken furniture as could be found in St Giles's crypt. Here and there were more useful items, such as a pile of wooden planks and a stack of undamaged tiles, but in general there was little of value and certainly nothing worth stealing. No thief would find it worth his while to risk the steep descent for such rubbish. And the church itself offered nothing to tempt the light-fingered. The door could be left unlocked with perfect safety.

The noise of running water was louder down here. I noticed that the walls glistened with damp and were patched with mould. The Wallbrook must be very close. The smell, too, was slightly more pungent, but my nose was growing used to it, and after a very few minutes failed to be irritated by it any longer.

‘They do say,' Etheldreda volunteered, peering about her, ‘that there did used t' be a Roman what-d'you-call-it hereabouts. Wouldn't be a church, now would it? Not with them worshipping all them heathen gods.'

‘Temple?' I suggested

‘That'd be it.' She whistled again through the gap in her front teeth. ‘Old John Marchant, him what lives in one o' the end houses, reck'ns it had summat to do with a bull. Sounds a rum do t' me, but you c'n never tell with them folks from ancient times.'

‘Mithras,' I said. ‘Your friend reckons that this – or near here – was the site of the Temple of Mithras?'

I knew all about Mithras, the soldier's god; the god of the Roman legions. His story had been told in one of the forbidden books in the Glastonbury library whose locked clasps had been picked by my fellow novice, Nicholas Fletcher. And having read it, I could see why, in many ways, it was far more disturbing than the lascivious tales of the daughters of Albion and their ilk, and why Brother Hilarion had been far more upset by our reading it than all the rest put together.

A thousand years ago, Mithras had been born in a cave in Persia in midwinter, while shepherds watched nearby and a star shone in the heavens. He was represented with a torch in one hand and a knife in the other, and with the knife he had single-handedly killed a great white bull, cutting its throat so that its shed blood should bring fertility to the earth. And then, after a last meal of bread and wine, he had been taken up to heaven. His name meant ‘friend' because he was the protector of mankind in this life and guarded him from evil spirits after death.

‘What d'you say he was called?' Etheldreda's voice cut into my thoughts and made me jump.

‘Mithras,' I said, and told her the legend.

She frowned, sucking her bottom lip. ‘Sounds blaspheemious t' me,' she opined at length as she puzzled over the familiar elements of the story. ‘Didn't ought to be taught to young folk like you.'

‘It wasn't.' And I regaled her with the circumstances which had attended my first reading of the tale. This amused her greatly and diverted her attention, as I had hoped it would. She was too old to be bothering her head over questions of religious belief. And anyway, such questions were dangerous.

‘There don't seem t' be much down here worth looking at,' she finally remarked. ‘And I'm getting cold. 'T ain't good for we old 'uns t' get shivery. I'm going now. You c'n poke about a bit more if you want. You c'n return the lantern when you'm finished. It's the house opposite the church door.'

I thanked her and lighted her progress up the steps until she disappeared through the trapdoor at the top before returning to my survey of the crypt. At first glance – or, in this case, at a second and third glance – it seemed as though Goody Simpkins was correct; there was nothing more to see than we had already discovered. But my natural stubbornness made me prowl around yet again, the lantern's pale rays fitfully illuminating the broken or unloved bits of old furniture that had been stored down there: a three-legged stool, a chair with an awkward back, a hideous pot which had probably been someone's wedding gift and hated on sight. And certainly there was nothing to have tempted Amphillis Hill down there. I decided that the old woman must have peeped into the church before Amphillis arrived.