The child, with the suppleness of being six, kept sitting on the ground and bringing her foot up close to her nose. She didn’t think she had ever smelt anything so lovely as the herbalist’s flowery paste.
Watching the little girl now, hands tucked away inside the opposite sleeves of her black habit, was Abbess Helewise.
‘She is over the shock, do you think?’ she quietly asked Sister Euphemia.
‘Aye, I reckon so,’ the infirmarer replied. ‘The resilience of youth, you know, Abbess.’
Helewise glanced away up the track that led alongside the pond and, ultimately, out of the Vale. It was beside this track that the body had lain.
Earlier, two of the lay brothers had performed the ghastly duty of shovelling the rotting body on to a hurdle and bringing it out of the bracken. It now lay a short distance further down the track — where its penetrating odour could not drift back to disturb the living — still on its hurdle and covered by a piece of sacking.
‘We must look at the body, Sister,’ the Abbess said firmly to the infirmarer. ‘If there is any means by which we may identify that poor soul, we must find it. We cannot rest easy if we merely do as we wish to do and bundle him — her — into a hasty grave and try to forget him. Her.’
‘A man, they say, Abbess.’ The infirmarer kept her voice low.
‘A man? How so?’
‘Young Augustus went with Brother Saul to bring out the remains. And he-’
‘Yes.’ Helewise remembered all about young Augustus’s talents. He had been her valued and trusted companion on a mission that she had had to make earlier in the year, and she knew from personal experience that he possessed the knowledge to tell the gender of a dead body. In the course of that mission, the puzzle presented to the young lay brother had been a burned skeleton. He had explained, with a modest and reassuring confidence, how the shape of the pelvis and the quality of the bones themselves — sturdy and robust for a man, lighter and finer for a woman — usually gave away a dead person’s sex.
Now, if Augustus had declared a putrid corpse to be male, then the Abbess was prepared to believe that he was right.
‘A man, then,’ she repeated, in the same low voice. ‘Did they discover anything else? His age, perhaps, or any article of clothing or personal possession to reveal who he was?’
Sister Euphemia hesitated. Then said: ‘He was mother-naked, Abbess. And nothing was found near him, although Brother Saul and Augustus are still searching through the bracken.’
Yes, so they were. Helewise could see one of them — Saul, she thought — as he stood up and, head raised, took a breath of the purer air above the thick bracken. Poor Saul. Poor Augustus. What a terrible task. She could only hope that, with the body now removed, the smell was decreasing in intensity.
‘They do think he was a young man,’ Sister Euphemia ventured, her eyes, like Helewise’s, on the distant figure of Saul, who, as they watched, bent down to resume his search and disappeared from view. ‘They have asked me to look at him, to see if I agree.’ She sounded less than enthusiastic.
‘How will you be able to tell?’ Perhaps, Helewise thought, the poor infirmarer’s professional curiosity would engage her and make the task slightly less repellent.
‘Oh — a youngster will show none of the bent and deformed bones that give to the ageing such pain,’ Sister Euphemia said. ‘The teeth, too, will be in better condition, with less wear and fewer gaps.’
‘Mm, I see,’ Helewise said encouragingly. ‘Anything else that you will look for?’
Sister Euphemia turned to her, faint amusement in her eyes. ‘I thank you for your kind interest, Abbess, but I am sure you do not really want to know.’ She cut off Helewise’s half-hearted protest with a smile and a gesture of her hand. ‘I think, with your permission, that it is time I stopped putting off the moment and went to study that poor fellow lying by the track down there. Then, as soon as it can be arranged, we can say our prayers for his soul and put him in the ground.’
Helewise, as eager for that ultimate step as her infirmarer, merely nodded and said, ‘Yes, Sister Euphemia. Thank you.’
In the wake of Prince John’s departure, it had occurred to Josse that the one place in the area where they might have heard of a stranger by the name of Galbertius Sidonius was Hawkenlye Abbey.
The Abbey, with its healing spring of Holy Water dedicated to the Virgin Mary, drew folk from near and far. The miracle of the cure of the fever-ridden French merchants who had first discovered the spring was now widely known; even the very poor would try to scrape together the funds for what was often a long journey, in the hope of curing injury and sicknesses of both body and mind in themselves or their loved ones.
Aye. Strangers a-plenty, at Hawkenlye. Maybe this Galbertius himself had visited — might even be there right now — and, provided he had revealed his identity, Josse could find out who and what he was simply by travelling the half-day’s journey over to the Abbey.
So it was that he rose one morning, dressed, and summoned Ella to prepare a quick breakfast and Will to prepare Horace, his horse.
Then, in the golden sun of a fine autumn day, he rode off to Hawkenlye.
The porteress, Sister Ursel, was standing in the road outside the Abbey gates when Josse rode up. Shading her eyes against the bright noon light, she was peering down the track, almost as if she were waiting for someone.
For him?
Her greeting — ‘Ah, Sir Josse, there you are, now! How glad I am to see you!’ seemed to underline this impression, if not to confirm it.
‘I am expected?’ he asked, slipping down from Horace’s back and returning the porteress’s welcoming smile.
‘Expected?’ She seemed to think about it. ‘Nay. But she will be highly relieved to see you, none the more for that.’
She. The Abbess? He wondered what might be the source of her relief at his presence. And whether, indeed, it would prove to be justified.
Leading Horace across to the stables — where, as both he and the horse knew from long experience, Sister Martha would care for the animal with a particular devotion that reflected the esteem in which she held its master — he said to Sister Ursel, ‘Any service that I may perform for the Abbess is for her to command of me, naturally. But-?’ He left the query hanging in the air, hoping the porteress would enlighten him.
She didn’t. Instead, turning to go back inside her little lodge by the gates, she said, ‘The Abbess is down in the Vale.’
A short time later, he was on his way to find her.
The main gates through which he had entered the Abbey lay to the east of the imposing Abbey church. Its great west door, with the magnificent tympanum of the Last Judgement above it, faced a second entrance, from which a path led down to the Vale. Here, a small and simple chapel had been built over the Holy Water spring. Beside it was a short range of wooden-framed, wattle-and-daub buildings where the monks who tended the spring and cared for the pilgrims were housed. There was also basic accommodation — clean, even if none too comfortable — for those pilgrims who lived too far away to make the journey to Hawkenlye and back in a day.
Old Brother Firmin was the most senior of the professed monks. Deeply spiritual, with a pure and sincere faith in the blessed Holy Water that he distributed with such love to the needy, he was inclined to keep his thoughts in Heaven and his hands in his sleeves. Although he had never admitted as much, the general view was that he considered practical work to be the realm of women — in this case, the nuns — while the monks devoted themselves to matters of the spirit.